French Genre Painting In The Eighteenth Century

"Fifteen international scholars present their latest research into the contexts and meanings of French genre painting of the eighteenth century, from Jean-Antoine Watteau to Louis-Leopold Boilly. The essays represent a wide range of critical and historical perspectives, from traditional archival research to postructuralist criticism."--Page 4 de la couverture

This inviting book offers the first comprehensive survey of French genre painting of the eighteenth century, from Watteau's fetes galantes to Boilly's paintings of modern Parisian life. Showcasing 113 works, the book illustrates the variety and the vitality of genre painting throughout the period. Leading English, German, French, and American scholars shed light on the development of genre painting, its interpretation, its collectors, and its enormous appeal. Here are gathered together masterpieces by such eminent artists as Watteau, Lancret, de Troy, Chardin, Boucher, Greuze, Fragonard, Robert, and Boilly. The wide range of their featured works encompasses military scenes, theatrical subjects, hunt pictures, pastorals, domestic life, moral pictures, fishwife subjects, paintings for the boudoir, and panoramas of the Enlightenment in landscapes and townscapes. Each work is thoroughly catalogued, and an appendix lists all genre paintings shown in the eighteenth-century Salons.

French eighteenth-century painting is characterized by its immense variety, ranging from the "grand manner" -- history painting -- to so-called minor genres such as still-life and portraiture. Artists such as Boucher and Fragonard drew inspiration from many different sources: famous biblical or mythological episodes, to flutes galantes, and bourgeois domestic scenes. Jarasse explains the key artists and movements within this turbulent century and charts with high-quality, full-color illustrations the progressive emancipation of painters that paralleled the spread of Enlightened thinking. Artists surveyed include Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, Greuze, Chardin and David as well as lesser-known but equally notable painters including Coypel, Le Moyne, Vernet, Oudry, Nattier and others.

Leading scholars shed light on the development of genre painting in this heavily illustrated volume.

Paintings by such celebrated eighteenth-century artists as Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, and Boilly have long been admired for their charming and intimate subjects--fêtes galantes, pastorals, tableaux de mode, middle-class domestic interiors, and scenes of family life and romantic love--and for their pleasing color schemes. In this lavishly illustrated and produced book, genre painting is explored for the first time within the broader cultural context of Enlightenment France. Through a series of innovative and lively essays dealing largely with aspects of art, gender, and politics in the decades preceding the French Revolution, Intimate Encounters enables us to appreciate genre paintings anew: although they are almost always attractive to the eye, sometimes to the point of appearing fanciful, the paintings also bear the intellectual imprint of turbulent times. the interactions of "ordinary" people--nonhistorical, nonmythic figures--within the family and in romantic encounters. We learn that genre painters tended to infuse their depictions of intimacy with moral and ideological significance. Their imagery coincided with fundamental debates over gender roles and relationships, the family, child-rearing, and illicit versus conjugal love, topics that were crucial to such writers and social commentators as Rousseau, Diderot, and Laclos. Published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition, Intimate Encounters contains five essays written by specialists from a variety of disciplines, which are followed by fifty-one full catalog entries on the paintings included in the show. The essays delve into such matters as art criticism and the presence of women in cultural life (Richard Rand), the family and the ideology of sentimentalism (Sarah Maza), the influence of innovative theater on genre painting (Mark Ledbury), the debate over women's rights (Virginia Swain), and the production and marketing of prints to a growing art audience (Anne L. Schroder).

"Since 2004, the Dallas Museum of Art has been the repository of the renowned collection of eighteenth-century French art assembled by the late Michael Rosenberg. The long-term loan of these masterpieces greatly enhances the collection of European art at the Museum, and the series of scholarly lectures funded by the Foundation, the Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series, gives a powerful boost to its European art program. Those lectures, presented by top scholars in the field of European art history, are re-presented in this volume"--

This publication catalogues The Met’s remarkable collection of eighteenth-century French paintings in the context of the powerful institutions that governed the visual arts of the time—the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Académie de France à Rome, and the Paris Salon. At the height of their authority during the eighteenth century, these institutions nurtured the talents of artists in all genres. The Met’s collection encompasses stunning examples of work by leading artists of the period, including Antoine Watteau (Mezzetin), Jean Siméon Chardin (The Silver Tureen), François Boucher (The Toilette of Venus), Joseph Siffred Duplessis (Benjamin Franklin), Jean-Baptiste Greuze (Broken Eggs), Hubert Robert (the Bagatelle decorations), Jacques Louis David (The Death of Socrates), the Van Blarenberghes (The Outer Port of Brest), and François Gérard (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord). In the book’s introduction, author Katharine Baetjer provides a history of the Académie, its establishment, principles, and regulations, along with a discussion of the beginnings of public art discourse in France, taking us through the reforms unleashed by the Revolution. The consequent democratizing of the Salon, brought about by radicals under the leadership of Jacques Louis David, encouraged the formation of new publics with new tastes in subject matter and genres. The catalogue features 126 paintings by 50 artists. Each section includes a short biography of the artist and in-depth discussions of individual paintings incorporating the most up-to-date scholarship.