Woman of Flowers Still-Life Paintings of Vallayer-Coster Display Rich, Fragrant Quality by Gary Tischler Size is a big deal at the National Gallery of Art. The buildingsóI.M. Peiís modernistic East Building and the classic West Buildingóare big. The collection is big. The exhibitions tend to be big, and the idea and reality of blockbuster exhibitions was nurtured and fine-tuned here, under the aegis of former director J. Carter Brown. So it might seem that the late-arriving and seemingly modest exhibition ìAnne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinetteî looks almost like an afterthought. Itís tucked away quietly in a corner of the West Building and showed up with little fanfare, almost lost amid the clamor of the arrival of the big Egyptian antiquity exhibition ìThe Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egyptî occupying a big chunk of space in the East Building. Then there was the death of Brown, who was instrumental in bringing the King Tut exhibition to the gallery in the 1970s, which laid the groundwork for blockbusters to come. Yet, if you went to see the exhibition of some 40 works by Vallayer-Coster, you might be excused i f thoughts of Brown just crop up. Rich, almost fragrant paintings of flowers were Vallayer-Costerís oeuvreóstill lifes of a certain kind that have long since stopped being talked about by critics who tend to dismiss such efforts as lacking a certain seriousness once the impressionists got done with them. Her paintings are modest and civilized, the kind of paintings that were in their time commissioned and bought by the ruling class, and so they have that quality of a lost civilization to them. Civilized is exactly what the stylish, elegant, Anglo- and Francophile Brown was, and in his conversation and erudition as well as his humor, he was a kind of American aristocrat who not only spoke French fluently, but perfectly and musically. He, too, had the quality of a vanishing species at times, an exemplar of cultural and social values practiced by fewer and fewer people and certainly not with the kind of Èlan possessed by Brown. Vallayer-Costerís reputation is not huge in the art history pantheon, and her output would appear to be modest, but the work itself has a precious value that is quite affecting. In many ways, except for the fact that she was a woman who attained fame as a working artist, her career was emblematic, being admitted to the Royal Academy in France in 1770 when she was only 26 years old. She was acclaimed, not for any revolutionary or groundbreaking qualities but for a near perfection to what she did compared to her peers, who included Jean SimÈon Chardin and Henri-Horace Roland Delaporte. One critic of the time wrote, ìThe disadvantages of her sex notwithstanding, she has taken the difficult art of rendering nature to a degree of perfection that enchants and surprises us.î She assayed portraits: The one of Joseph-Charles Roettiers, who resembles images of Voltaire, is particularly hypnotic, while the ìPortrait of a Woman Writing and Her Daughterî is truly enchanting. But it is Vallayer-Costerís still lifes and those flowers that have the same enthralling effect as a particularly soothing and seductive chamber music concert. Itís obvious that food and game play a large part in the still life painterís repertoire, and they figure in here as wellóin portraits of dead game among the odd assemblage of two rabbits and a pheasant with a Seville orange. But there is something perfunctory about this sort of thing. The more she gets away from fowl and food, and closer to foliage, the more something close to small perfection comes out. For instance, take the combination of red and green grapes and peaches with a rustic melon. Deftly executed, thereís a sweet casualness in this work, or in ìStill Life with Ham, Bottles and Radishes,î reminiscent of a good evening at the table. She gives an almost succulent texture to this type of painting, but itís still a genre execution. The flowers are all song and musicómuted notes and colors that are about pure pleasure. Vallayer-Coster had the eye of someone who loves and arranges flowers, who knows them intimately for every bit of color that they provide, the mixing and matching. This is a quiet passion, but in the big bouquets of roses and tulips and their companions, things threaten to get a little gaudy. The flowery sonata is about to burst into an immodest fanfare. You canít write too many treatises on this sort of thing. The pleasure her paintings give, which you can see by watching other people at the exhibition, is almost a secretive, private thing. Itís something you can share without talking about it or comparing notes. It becomes a quiet place of flowers, the flowers of Anne Vallayer-Coster, painter to the court of Marie-Antoinette, muted star of a lost world. ìAnne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinetteî runs through Sept. 22 at the National Gallery of Art, 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue, NW. For more information, please call (202) 737-4215 or visit www.nga.gov. Gary Tischler is a contributing writer to The Washington Diplomat.