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THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
Museum of Art
The William Hayes Ackland
Memorial Art Center

The University of North Carolina at Chapel hill
Ackland 003 A
Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514

December 13, 1977

Mr. and Mrs. Germain Seligman
5 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Seligman:
This letter requests the loan of your Retreat From Russia by Boissard de Boisdenier, to an exhibition we are organizing entitled French Nineteenth Century Oil Sketches: David to Degas. The exhibition will open on March 5 and close on April 16, 1978. For safety's sake it will not travel. We will have twenty-four hour a day Pinkerton guards during its run. Our registrar will send a loan form. 

The exhibition has been a substantial project for us and two seminars of graduate students have worked on biographies and tentative catalogue entries. It is in honor of Joseph C. Sloane who retires this year as Director of the Ackland Museum and as Distinguished Alumni Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

The theme is appropriate in view of Dr. Sloane's books on French Nineteenth Century painting. It was selected because the importance of the pre-impressionist oil sketch in the development of modernist painting has only been recognized in the last few years. Albert Biome's monograph, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1971, is of course the first major scholarly attempt to situate the role of the oil sketch in academic practice. The nineteenth century's sketch-finish conflict has been important to me because Théodore Rousseau, on whom I have been working, was very much its victim. Rosseau's early finished works were characterized by a fine sense of matière. Too often his later finished pictures were over-labored perhaps as a result of sensitivity to conservative critics who found them "mere sketches." From time to time Rousseau's friends even begged him to cease work on a painting telling him that it was finished enough. 

Surprisingly little attention, at least insofar as museum exhibitions are concerned, has thus far been paid to oil sketches. One exception was Masters of the Loaded Brush Oil Sketches from Rubens to Tiepolo, organized by Columbia University and held in New York in 1967. Another exception was French Oil Sketches from an English Collection, organized by J. Patrice Marandel for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and circulated 1973-1975. The New York exhibition stopped with Greuze. The other was basically a seventeenth and eighteenth century show though five or six early nineteenth century works were included. Our exhibition will be a sequel to both these shows. It will be limited to French oil sketches in order to present fuller coverage of the school where the freedom and spontaneity of modernist painting first took root. It will begin with works by the