Colin B. Bailey, Chief Curator of The Frick Collection, Authors a New Book About Art Patronage in Eighteenth-Century France

During the final decades of the ancien régime, prominent collectors in Paris commissioned and collected French paintings of the period, works by Greuze, Fragonard, David, and others that together comprised “l’École Française”—the French School.  On October 3, 2002, Yale University Press released PATRIOTIC TASTE: Collecting Art in PreRevolutionary Paris, by Colin B. Bailey.  In this book, eminent art historian Colin B. Bailey discusses six of these figures and the collections they assembled, showing that private patronage in this period was revitalized by this patriotic desire to collect contemporary art.