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This Light Delicate Style of Art Called Was Common During the Rule of Louis Xv

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18th-Century France — The Rococo and Watteau

Overview

In 1715 the French greeted a new rex for the outset time in seventy-ii years. Louis Fifteen, a boy but v years onetime, succeeded his bang-up-granddaddy Louis XIV, the Sunday Rex, who had made France the preeminent power in Europe. For the side by side 8 years the late king's nephew, the duc d'Orléans, governed as regent. His appetite for beauty and vivaciousness was well known, and he prepare aside the piety enforced by Louis 14 at Versailles. French republic turned abroad from imperial aspirations to focus on more than personal—and pleasurable—pursuits. As political life and private morals relaxed, the change was mirrored by a new style in art, i that was intimate, decorative, and often erotic.

The Rococo Manner

Louis XIV'south desire to glorify his nobility and the magnificence of France had been well served by the awe-inspiring and formal qualities of most seventeenth-century French art. Merely members of the succeeding court began to decorate their elegant homes in a lighter, more than fragile manner. This new way has been known since the final century as "rococo," from the French word, rocaille, for rock and shell garden ornament. First emerging in the decorative arts, the rococo emphasized pastel colors, sinuous curves, and patterns based on flowers, vines, and shells. Painters turned from grandiloquence to the sensual surface delights of colour and lite, and from weighty religious and historical subjects—though these were never ignored completely—to more intimate mythological scenes, views of daily life, and portraiture. Similarly, sculptors increasingly applied their skills to pocket-sized works for the appreciation of private patrons.

After Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Louis 14, c. 1700, bronze, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1943.4.87

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Antoine Watteau and the Fête Galante

Though several painters of the preceding generation had experimented with the ingredients of rococo—emphasizing color, a lighthearted approach, and shut ascertainment—Antoine Watteau merged them into something new.

Built-in near the Flemish border, Watteau was influenced by the carefully described scenes of everyday life popular in Holland and Flemish region. Arriving in Paris in 1702, he first made his living past copying these genre paintings, which contained moralizing messages not e'er fully understood past French collectors. He worked for a painter of theatrical scenes and encountered the Italian commedia dell'arte and its French imitators. The stock characters of these broadly fatigued, improvised comedies appear oftentimes in Watteau's paintings, and the globe of the theater inspired him to mingle the real and imagined in enigmatic scenes. Through work with a fashionable rococo decorator, Watteau came eventually to the attention of patrons and established artists. He began studies at the official Purple Academy of Painting and Sculpture—membership in which was necessary for important commissions—and gained access to new fine art collections being amassed by aristocrats and members of the expanding bourgeoisie. Influenced past his study of Rubens and Venetian Renaissance artists, Watteau developed a free, delicate painting technique and a gustation for warm, shimmering colors.

In 1717 Watteau's "masterpiece" submitted for admission to the University was accepted every bit a "fête galante." With this new category, the Academy recognized the novelty of his work. The immediate popularity of these garden scenes, in which aristocratic young couples meet in dotty pursuits, suggests how well the fête galante matched the pleasure-seeking spirit of the early eighteenth century. Engravings made Watteau's subjects and manner widely known. Though the lyrical mystery of his own work remained unique, other painters who specialized in the fête galante, notably Pater and Lancret, also enjoyed international popularity.

Antoine Watteau, French, 1684 - 1721, A Fête Galante with Falconers, c. 1711-1712, cherry chalk over graphite on laid paper, Gift of Neil and Ivan Phillips, 1988.ane.1

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Ceres, Roman goddess of the harvest, is surrounded by signs of the summer zodiac: Gemini, Cancer, and Leo. This is one of iv paintings of the seasons in mythological garb that Watteau painted for the home of Pierre Crozat. None of the others survive.

Watteau lived briefly in the Crozat household, studying the wealthy banker'south impressive art collection, particularly works by Veronese. The shimmering effulgence and lively pastel colors in Ceres reverberate the influence of the Venetian painter and soften her big effigy and formal pose.

Watteau was probably introduced to Crozat by Charles de La Fosse, a well-known painter and established member of the Academy, and it is likely that Watteau painted Ceres afterward sketches made by the older artist. Their collaboration stands at the transition betwixt the monumental forms of the preceding century and the rococo.

Antoine Watteau, French, 1684 - 1721, Ceres (Summertime), c. 1717/1718, oil on canvass, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.50

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A troupe of the pop Italian one-act (commedia dell'arte) is gathered on stage, perhaps at mantle phone call. Continuing awkwardly in the heart is the vulnerable effigy of Pierrot, the simple-minded valet and unlucky lover who was the most human of the commedia's stock characters. Scaramouche, the braggart, introduces him while the other characters collaborate around the strangely still Pierrot.

A brilliant draftsman, Watteau frequently sketched friends posed in theatrical costumes. Perchance their faces, not those of actors, are painted hither. It has been suggested that the figures illustrate the passage from youth on the left to erstwhile age on the right, or that the melancholic Watteau saw himself in the pitiful Pierrot. Watteau'due south intention was to evoke a mood, not simply describe a scene, and his greatest paintings, similar this i, remain puzzling and oddly poignant.

Italian Comedians was among Watteau'south concluding works. Ill most of his life, he traveled to England in 1719 for handling by the fashionable physician Robert Mead. This painting was probably the doctor'southward payment. Unfortunately, Watteau died of tuberculosis before long afterwards, non however xxx-vii years former.

Antoine Watteau, French, 1684 - 1721, The Italian Comedians, probably 1720, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.7.9

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In this lush park elegant young aristocrats flirt, dance, and engage in intimate conversation, each couple an "episode" in the progress of courtship. Their anecdotal graphic symbol makes Pater'southward paintings less ambiguous than Watteau'due south enigmatic works, which a contemporary criticized as having "no subject."

Pater studied nether Watteau—who admitted to existence an impatient principal—and took over his commissions afterward he died. Haunted past fear of poverty, Pater worked incessantly but also rather mechanically, reusing figure groups and motifs from 1 painting to the adjacent. He was received past the Academy every bit a painter of "mod subjects," and more than half dozen hundred of his fêtes galantes survive today.

Several of the poses in this painting and Pater'due south unfinished On the Terrace can be traced to seventeenth-century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, whose works could be seen in Paris during the 1700s. The dark dress of the woman on the right, fashionable in the preceding century, and the garden sculpture of Venus, which underscores the painting'south focus on beloved, also reverberate his influence. Only Pater, in keeping with rococo tastes, has refined Rubens' robust figures. They are composed in graceful groups, their fine silks painted with cool, powdery colors, applied in feathery brushstrokes.

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater, French, 1695 - 1736, Fête Champêtre, c. 1730, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.7.19

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A young woman with pale skin standing in a garden setting, wears a voluminous, full-length, shimmering, silvery gown in this vertical portrait painting. Her body faces the viewer, as she looks into the distance to her right, our left. She has rosy cheeks, gray-green eyes under gently arched, light brown brows, and her coral-pink, thin, closed lips curve in a slight smile. Her powdery light brown hair is pulled back and adorned with tiny shell-pink and forget-me-not-blue flowers along the left side top of head, to our right. A pleated lace ruffle encircles her smooth, ivory-colored neck. Her gown is parchment white where the light glints off the stiff fabric and silvery-gray in the shadows, creating a silk-like sheen. The dress is cut low across the chest, fits tightly around her narrow waist, and has puffy sleeves tied at the elbows with topaz-blue bows. A blue bow is tied at her chest and the ends wrap around her back along her waist. A corsage at her left shoulder, to our right, is a profusion of white flowers around a pale, shell-pink rose. In her right hand, to our left, she holds a straw hat with a shallow crown and a wide brim, trimmed with sky-blue ribbon. The arm holding the hat is nearly engulfed in the deep folds of her full skirt. She holds a pink rose in her other hand, which rests on the lip of a shiny, copper-colored urn filled with pink flowers and delicate green leaves. On that wrist she wears a bracelet with four strands of white pearls holding a cameo. She stands on a pale ochre, dirt ground. A blue-green bench in the lower left corner of the painting is tucked into sage-green shrubbery. Sprigs of pink roses are strewn across the seat and on the ground. She is framed to either side with olive and celery-green trees and vegetation, which blend into the hazy distance beyond her head.

As a young creative person, Boucher engraved the works of Watteau for publication. Engravings like his, ofttimes with verses added, spread the rococo style across Europe. Boucher himself became the virtually fashionable artist in France under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's powerful mistress, whose refined tastes influenced French art for two decades. It may take been either the husband or the brother of the woman in this painting who introduced the immature artist to his future patron.

Of the more than one thousand paintings Boucher produced, only about twenty are portraits. Contemporaries noted that the artist had difficulty capturing a likeness, a handicap thought in the 1700s to exist less severe for women's portraits than men's, since flattery could substitute for veracity. The pale colors, rich fabrics, and rustic touch on of the straw hat are typical of Boucher'due south way. Information technology captured the grace of a pampered mode of life, in which, as a contemporary noted, "nosotros actually have zip else to do just to seek pleasant sensations and feelings."

François Boucher, French, 1703 - 1770, Madame Bergeret, possibly 1766, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Drove, 1946.seven.iii

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Of the artists who followed Watteau's lead, Lancret was the well-nigh talented and inventive. More a rival than an imitator, he was admitted to the Academy as a painter of fêtes galantes but also produced historical and religious paintings—and portraits, especially of actors and dancers.

In this inspired hybrid Lancret set such a portrait inside the elegant garden of a fête galante. Equally if spotlit, the famous dancer La Camargo shares a pas de deux with her partner Laval. They are framed by lush foliage, which seems to echo their movements. Marie-Cuppi de Camargo (1710–1770) was widely praised for her sensitive ear for music, her airiness, and her strength. Voltaire likened her leaps to those of nymphs. Fashions and hairstyles were named afterward her, and her real contributions to dance were substantial. She was the first to shorten her skirts and then that complicated steps could exist fully appreciated, and some think she invented toe shoes.

Nicolas Lancret, French, 1690 - 1743, La Camargo Dancing, c. 1730, oil on canvas, Andrew West. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.89

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Two pale-skinned women sit together surrounded by five sheep and a dog in a lush forest in this vertical painting. The woman to our right sits slightly above the other, with her arm draped around the shoulders of her companion. The woman to our right wears a low-cut, rose-pink dress with a full skirt and voluminous, gossamer sleeves. The curls of her vanilla-blonde hair are pulled back behind a headband adorned over one ear with three large, pink flowers and smaller yellow and blue flowers. She tips her head to our right as she gazes down to her left at her friend. She has blue eyes, flushed cheeks, a delicate nose, and her grapefruit-pink lips curl in a gentle smile. She crosses one knee over the other and leans toward the other woman. Tucked into her side, the second woman looks up at the first in profile facing our right. Her low-cut, lavender-purple dress has a gold shimmer that suggests silk. Her fawn-brown curls are pulled back and decorated with small sea-blue flowers. One toe peeks out from her long skirt, and both women are barefoot. The woman in purple holds a white dove on her friend's lap, and the woman in pink holds a small envelope closed with a shell-pink seal next to the bird. The dove's wings are slightly outspread, and a robin's egg-blue ribbon is tied around its neck. Just behind the pair, a towering tree with a silvery, ash-brown trunk grows up and off the top edge of the painting. It angles to our left and green leaves and growth hangs down into the picture. To our right of the tree, a rectangular sand-brown stone structure is topped with a male lion carved from the same stone, near the upper right corner. The ground beneath the women is covered with moss-green growth and the space around them filled with verdant bushes and plants. A single, cream-colored sheep stands to our right, facing the women, near a basket of flowers near the lower right corner. Four more sheep stand and lie together beyond the women to our left, while a black-bodied hound with a white muzzle sits attentively watching the women. A pile of broken branches, perhaps forming a fence, lies behind the sheep. Grassy hills and trees become hazy in the distance beyond, and the sky above is slate blue with a few white and pale pink clouds. The upper and lower right corners and the lower left corner are deep in shade, contrasting sharply with the glowing skin and clothing of the women. The artist signed and dated the painting as if he had inscribed the stone in the shadow just below the lion,

The Dear Letter was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour herself. The king's mistress ordered it and a companion painting for her chateau at Bellevue, where they probably hung over doorways, built into curving oval frames. Pieces of canvas were later added at the corners to make this painting rectangular.

The scene is a pastoral idyll. The immature "shepherdesses" wear fine silks, and a contemporary audience would understand an erotic promise in the display of pinkish toes. Idealized visions of country life were common on the stage and in real-life masquerades. Denis Diderot, disdainful of the frivolity of Boucher'southward scenes, complained, "Shall I never be rid of these damned pastorals?" Yet the encyclopedist, who was an influential critic, too appreciated the luminescence of Boucher's painting, which captures the luminous colors of shells, collywobbles, and polished stones—objects the artist nerveless so he could copy their fragile iridescence.

François Boucher, French, 1703 - 1770, The Dearest Letter of the alphabet, 1750, oil on canvas, Timken Collection, 1960.6.3

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In this scene Diana, virgin goddess of the chase, steals forth through the moonlight to kiss the sleeping shepherd Endymion, whom the gods granted eternal slumber to preserve his beauty and youth. Diana and Endymion was painted when Fragonard was still a pupil at the Academy and heavily influenced by Boucher, who was his instructor. It was i of several mythological vignettes prepare at unlike times of the day; another depicts Aurora (Dawn) rising. Both compositions, painted as over-door decorations, were based on designs Boucher had done for the Beauvais tapestry works. Despite similarities to the older artist'due south work, Diana and Endymion already displays important elements of what would get Fragonard'due south own way: rich colors and a fluid handling of paint.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, French, 1732 - 1806, Diana and Endymion, c. 1753/1756, oil on canvas, Timken Collection, 1960.6.ii

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The costumes and setting here suggest a masquerade, mayhap in Venice. Like the elegant and enigmatic trio depicted, still, the painting remains mysterious. It has been attributed to many different artists, nigh recently Le Lorrain, a little-known artist who spent nine years in Italian republic and was recognized primarily every bit a "painter of ruins." Le Lorrain also designed interiors, piece of furniture (including a neoclassical suite in a portrait by Greuze in the Gallery's drove), and sets for public spectacles (like Louis XV'southward coronation). The frosty colors and common cold, difficult light in this painting announced like to those in another work by Le Lorrain, but few of his works exist for comparison. Eventually he accepted an invitation from Catherine the Great to head the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, dying in that location only a few months after he arrived.

Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, French, 1715 - 1759, Three Figures Dressed for a Masquerade, c. 1740s, oil on sail, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.92

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Sweeping drapery and a taut twist of the head create movement and energy in this portrait bust. The slightly parted lips, drilled pupils, and carefully detailed features—the lines etched around optics and rima oris—animate the personality of the subject field, who was a counselor to Louis XV and whose son fought in the American State of war of Independence. Both painted and sculpted portraits of the menstruation sought to capture more than a sitter's likeness, and Lemoyne has conveyed a sense of Cromot's strong graphic symbol and lively intelligence. His voluminous robes are a convention from ancient sculpture and partly embrace his breezy mod dress.

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne II, French, 1704 - 1778, Jules-David Cromot, Baron du Bourg, c. 1757, marble, Gift of Camille de Nucheze, direct descendant, and her hubby, John Hadley Cox, 1985.39.1

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Source: https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/18th-century-france-the-rococo-and-watteau.html

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