The fall of Napoleon and the rise of Romanticism.

• Position: Museums Today - "Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism"

WHEREAS TRADITIONAL views tend to stress the impact of early 19th-century French painters on their British counterparts, it also is true that English innovations--notably a new emphasis on pure landscape painting, the experimental, impressionistic techniques of watercolorists, and the works of Romantic writers--exerted an important influence on French art at this time.

With the defeat of France's emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1815, and the restoration of peace, French and English civilians could, for the first time in almost 20 years, cross the English Channel in safety. Among them were artists, connoisseurs, and collectors eager to rediscover and explore the culture of their erstwhile enemies. Following the end of the Napoleonic regime, however, a conviction also grew that the 18th-century Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, confidence, and order--given artistic expression in the smooth perfection of the Neoclassical style--no longer were valid. A new array of attitudes and aesthetic sensibilities, which came to be called Romanticism, now celebrated extremes of emotion, the irrational, and the power of nature to awe and inspire.

This need to break with the past and create new modes of expression was felt keenly on both sides of the Channel. While French artists--led by the twin titans of Eugene Delacroix and Theodore Gericault--became the supreme exponents of Romantic painting, their achievement crucially depended on the example of contemporary English art and culture. The exhibition "Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism" highlights the affinities and exchanges between these artists in terms of subject matter, sources of inspiration, and technical innovations. It also examines the cultural, commercial, and political events that fostered this artistic dialogue, focusing especially on the crucial period from 1820-1840.

For example, visitors will have the opportunity to see John Constable's "The White Horse" (1819), as well as key works reunited for first time in almost two centuries from the Paris Salons of 1824 and 1827--nicknamed the "English Salons" because of the preponderance of British pictures on display. Prominent among them is Constable's "View on the Stout near Dedham" (1822)--one of the artist's famous "six-footers"-- whose majestic scale and bold naturalism caused a sensation at the Salon of 1824. Moreover, there is Sir Thomas Lawrence's "Portrait of Master Charles William Lambton"...