America Collects Eighteenth- Century French Painting an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 21–August 20, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Yuriko Jackall and others. National Gallery of Art/Lund Humphries, 332 pp., $69.99
In the latter part of the 1820s, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper was in Paris, observing French society and meditating on the lessons to be learned from it by the United States. In one surprising segue from his book Gleanings in Europe: France (1837), he recommends the expenditure of thirty or forty million dollars on a navy to secure “our national rights” and, in the same sentence, to appropriate, at once, a million to the formation of a National Gallery, in which copies of the antique, antiques themselves, pictures, bronzes, arabesques, and other…