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UNIT NINE: Late Baroque and Rococo STUDY GUIDE K Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Marie Antoinette and her Children, 1787, oil on canvas Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun/ Marie Antoinette/ emphasis on / motherhood/ Rococo love of sentiment 1. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842) “painted several portraits of Marie Antoinette, the Austrian-born queen of Louis XVI… Vigée-Lebrun befriended monarchs and their families, and benefited from their patronage. Her 1788 portrait of Marie Antoinette and her Children depicts the Queen of France in an elegant, regal setting, oblivious to the social, political, and economic unrest among her subjects that would erupt the following year and culminate in the French Revolution. The variety of rich textures- silks, laces, and brocades, and Marie Antoinette‟s enormous feathered hat- emphasize the wealth and position of the sitters. At the same time, the Queen shows her ease with motherhood. One daughter nestles against her shoulder and the toddler squirms on her lap. The boy introduces a somber note as he pulls aside the crib cover to reveal the empty bed, denoting the death of one of Marie Antoinette‟s children” (Adams, Art Across Time 684). “In 1783, Vigée- Lebrun was elected to one of the four places in the French Academy available to women. As the favorite painter to the queen, Vigée-Lebrun escaped from Paris with her daughter on the eve of the Revolution of 1789 and fled to Rome. After a very successful self-exile working in Italy, Austria, Russia, and England, the artist finally resettled in Paris in 1804 at the invitation of Napoleon I and again became popular with Parisian art patrons. Over her long career, she painted around 800 portraits in a vibrant style that changed very little over the decades” (Stokstad, Art History 935). 2. “Her portrait of Marie-Antoinette en chemise raised a few eyebrows at the Salon in 1783; indeed, under pressure she withdrew the painting from the exhibition. Because this expensive, casual clothing- known as a chemise en robe- was associated by many with lingerie, the artist was perceived as having broken rules of decorum. But we know that the Queen loved this relaxed, even intimate, portrait of herself. With the cult of sensibility has done, perhaps without either the Queen or her artist being very conscious of the fact, was to undermine, or compromise, the power of the monarchical portrait” (Minor 232). “Vigee-Lebrun did not cast her subjects as goddesses, but she imparted to them a chic sweetness and artless simplicity. These talents earned her the equivalent of over $200,000 a year and allowed her an independence uncommon among eighteenth-century women” (Fiero, Faith, Reason, and Power 145). L Jean-Simeon Chardin. Grace at Table, 1740, oil on canvas Jean-Simeon Chardin/ environment free of corrupt society/ discarded toys vs. properly set table/ art of instruction and moral uplift in a middle class home 1. “The son of a furniture maker, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) probably originally intended to work in his father‟s trade. In 1718, however, he was apprenticed to a painter, and being quite gifted, soon acquired the basics of this craft. At age twenty-eight he presented two paintings to the Royal Academy hoping to gain admission. The academicians were so dazzled by these works- especially The Ray Fish, which represents an enormous, glistening, disemboweled ray fish suspended from a hook and a cat tiptoeing toward the foreground over open oysters- that Chardin was immediately accepted as a full member” (Govignon 195). “Chardin specialized first in small still lifes of kitchen utensils and food laid out for the cook. Around 1733 he began to paint genre subjects- scenes from everyday life- starting with the charming Lady Sealing a Letter, hoping to widen his repertory and win new clients. Thereafter he produced many such scenes showing, for example, maids doing the laundry or a governess helping children dress for school. His paintings of children are especially poetic, showing them as rather grave young adults, completely absorbed in their games” (195). 2. “A gentle sentiment prevails in all of his pictures, an emotion not contrived and artificial but born of the painter‟s honesty, insight, and sympathy. (It is interesting that this picture was owned by King Louis XV, the royal personification of the Rococo in his life and tastes.)” (Kleiner, Mamiya, and Tansey 842). “Everyone knows the story-or legend?- of how he was prodded into painting human forms. One day he heard his friend Aved refuse a commission of four hundred livres to paint a portrait; Chardin, accustomed to small fees, marveled at the refusal; Avel answered, „You think a portrait is as easy to paint as a sausage?‟ It was a cruel jibe, but useful; Chardin had confined his subjects too narrowly, and would soon have satiated his clients with dishes and food. He resolved to paint figures, and discovered in himself a genius of sympathetic portrayal that he had allowed to sleep” (Durant, Age of Voltaire 318). 3. “In Saying Grace (at the Salon it was called Bénédicité, which is the first word of Grace, from the Latin benedicite), a mother pauses in the process of ladling out the meal of her two young children, as the smaller of these falters over the simple prayer, glancing up to her for assistance. His sister looks on, not without malice, at his difficulty. The legend on Lepicie‟s engraving of 1744 suggests that the little boy is garbling his prayer as fast as possible, because his mind is more on his food. Again the setting is a simple bourgeois, living-room, comfortable with its damask tablecloth and a pair of good upholstered chairs; the brazier at the right „answers‟ the pug and work-box in the companion picture” The Industrious Mother (Conisbee 162-163). “Although he was unsurpassed as a still-life painter, he always regretted that his father lacked the means to provide him with a humanistic education and therefore prepare him for history painting, the most prestigious of all forms of art in the Baroque and Rococo periods” (Minor 252). “The values of simplicity, truth, and naturalness were much promoted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an antidote to the corruption of the court and the city. The disasters of the final years of Louis XIV‟s reign, followed shortly by a catastrophic stock market crash in Paris in 1720, encouraged many to seek modest values and personal virtue. The work ethic promoted by the middle class went hand in hand with a strong attachment to family and the pursuit of prosperity” (262-263). 26
UNIT NINE: Late Baroque and Rococo STUDY GUIDE M Jean Simeon Chardin. The Copper Water Urn, c. 1734, oil on panel still life of solemn domesticity 1. “These now universally acclaimed pictures found a very limited market and brought Chardin just enough francs to maintain him in contented simplicity. He could not haggle with customers; he let his pictures go for almost any offered fee; and as he worked slowly and laboriously, he wore himself out in relative poverty, while Boucher used himself up in affluence. When his first wife died, after only four years of marriage, he let his rooms and affairs fall into a baccalaureate disorder. His friends prevailed upon him to remarry, if only to have a woman‟s deft and patient hand restore some order to his ménage. He hesitated for nine years, then took to wife the widow Marguerite Pouget, in literally a marriage of convenience. She brought him a moderate dowry, including a house that she owned at 13 Rue Princesse. He moved into it, and his poverty ended. She was a good woman and a solicitous wife. He learned to love her gratefully” (Durant, Age of Voltaire 318-9). 2. “To further finance him the King gave him (1752) a pension of five hundred livres, and the Academy (1754) appointed him treasurer. Soon afterward it engaged him to place the pictures submitted to its Salons; he was thoroughly un-suited to this task, but his wife helped him. In 1756 a friendly engraver, Charles Nicolas Cochin II, persuaded Marigny to give Chardin a comfortable apartment in the Louvre” (319). “Chardin tended to work on a small scale, meticulously and slowly. His still lifes consisted of a few simple objects that were to be enjoyed for their subtle differences of shape and texture, not for any virtuoso performance, complexity of composition, or moralizing content” (Stokstad, Art History 932-3). 3. “For all that Chardin‟s signature is like a graffito on the wall, this is not illusionistic painting; the brown thong on the handle of the pan is suggested, not defined, an angular and twisting gesture of the paint-loaded brush. Placed firmly as these solidly painted objects are on the floor at the end of their kitchen, they take on a presence even more immediate that the utensils we have seen artfully arranged at eye level on their stone ledges. Somehow the spectator can identify with this space, could walk in on this small area of floor. It seems to require but one step for a maidservant to enter Chardin‟s pictorial world, and to confirm the already vivid existence of these vessels with use” (Conisbee 105). 4. Chardin “arranged his shadows carefully and had a strong discernment and awareness of tactile values- of the apparent touchability of the objects that he painted. There is nothing unusually beautiful about the specimens that he selects, but there is a strong sense of substance and geometry, as if he were aware that lying beneath these humble forms were the principles of the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere- the basic geometries of nature. Just the same, for all their careful structure, Chardin‟s still lifes appear unstudied and natural” (Minor 253). “His technique was to prime his canvases with a priming, which was then covered by some dense paint, such as a mixture of white lead with reddish brown… Thus he painted from dark to light, adding the lightest part toward the end. His final pass over the painting would be with a varnish that would „pull it together‟ ” (253). 27 N Denis Diderot 1. “Chardin‟s work was praised by Denis Diderot, a leading Enlightenment figure whom many consider the father of modern art criticism. Diderot‟s most notable contribution was editing the Encyclopedie (1751-1765), a seventeen-volume compendium of knowledge and opinion to which many of the major Enlightenment thinkers contributed. In 1759, Diderot began to write reviews of the official Salon for a periodic newsletter for wealthy subscribers. Diderot believed that it was art‟s proper function to „inspire virtue and purify manners.‟ He therefore praised artists such as Chardin and criticized the adherents of the Rococo” (Stokstad 933). 2. “Diderot‟s highest praise went to Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805)- which is hardly surprising, because Grueze‟s major source of inspiration came from the kind of drame bourgeois („middle-class drama‟) that Diderot had inaugurated in France in 1757. In addition to comedy and tragedy, Diderot felt there should be a „middle tragedy‟ that taught useful lessons to the public with clear, simple stories of ordinary life” (933). O Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1. “The primacy of reason was challenged by the French philosopher and author Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau‟s thought ran counter to that of Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinks. To these thinkers, recent advances in science and technology were regarded as proof of the superiority of the rational intellect over instinct and emotion, while future advances in science and technology were expected to provide the basis for material progress. Material progress, in turn, was viewed by most Enlightenment thinkers as the means by which morality and happiness could be increased among individuals” (Wren 2: 197-8). 2. “Rousseau, in contrast, was skeptical about material progress, which he regarded as destructive of an individual‟s moral well-being and happiness. Rousseau, though never doubting the attainments of the human intellect, regarded science and technology as the products of complex civilizations. In Rousseau‟s view, complex civilizations corrupted, rather than improved, individuals, by introducing luxury, avarice, sloth, and decadence. Individuals, according to Rousseau, became the victims rather than the masters of machines; they became part of communities that promoted war to further their accumulation of wealth and their acquisition of territory; and they surrendered their independence to leaders who developed elaborate systems of government and law. Rousseau was convinced that, with the advent of complex civilizations, individuals had ceased to cherish their original sentiments of liberty and equality and had become alienated from their natural instincts of kindness, charity, and pity” (198). 3. “Rousseau expounded many of his major ideas in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1754). In this work, Rousseau defines the natural state of the individual prior to the establishment of political societies. Rousseau argues that people living according to purely natural impulses are motivated by the principle of self-preservation, moderated by natural pity or compassion, and are incapable of pride, hatred, falsehood, and vice. He further argues that society, because of its creation of inequalities in property, wealth, and education, has corrupted the natural good” (198).
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