EXHIBITION RECORD

Legacy: A Tradition Lives On

Saturday December 3, 2005 through Sunday February 26, 2006

This exhibit tells the story of an artistic legacy handed down through four generations. The creator of this legacy was the French artist Louis Anqetin (1861-1932); the leader of a group of students studying under Fernand Cormon in Paris. Anquetin realized that the artistic training and contemporary materials of his day were much inferior to those of the old masters. He spent the rest of his life trying to find the lost secrets of their techniques and formulas by studying anatomy and making several chemical experiments to find the masters’ mediums. The second generation to enter this legacy was Jaques Maroger (1884-1962) who came to study with Anquetin and eventually became his assistant. After years with Anquetin, Maroger went into restoration in order to become closer to the old masters’ work and he became the technical director of the Laboratory of the Louvre Museum.

Maroger arrived in America just before World War II and was asked to set up a European-style atelier at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, where he would teach his old masters technique. One member of the Maroger group was Joseph Sheppard (b.1930), who is the third link in this legacy. Maroger retired from the Maryland Institute, and, a few years later, Sheppard took on teaching the Maroger method. Sheppard taught at the Institute for 15 years, but that was over 25 years ago. Some of his former students of painting, sculpture, and lithography stay in touch. This fourth generation includes Nina Akamu, Nilda Maria Comas, Daniel Graves, Malcom Harlow, Douglas Hofmann, Michael Molnar, James Earl Reid, Robert Seyffert, Mark Tennant, Evan Wilson, and David Zuccarini.