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The semi-official art encouraged by the foundation of the Academy
became more friolous and light-hearted in the eighteventh century.
The court at ersailles lost its attractions, and many patrons now
were to be found among
the hedonistic bourgeoisie and aristocracy liing in Paris. History
painting, as opposed to genre scenes or portraiture, retained its
position of prestige, but at the same time the arious categories
began to merge and many artists tried their hands at landscape,
genre, history or decoratie works, bringing aspects of one type
into another. Salons, at which painters exhibited their
works, were held with increasing frequency and bred a new phenomenon
in the art world - the art critic. The philosopher Diderot
was one of the first of these arbiters of taste, dovers and un dovers
of reputations.
Possibly the most complex personality of the eighteventh century was
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Primarily a superb draughtsman,
Watteau's use of soft and yet rich, light colors reeals how much he was
struck by the great seventeventh-century Flemish painter Rubens. |
The open-air scenes of flirtatious loe painted by Rubens
and by the fifteventh/sixteventh-century
enetian Giorgione proided Watteau with precedents for his own subtle
depictions of dreamy couples (sometimes depictions of characters from
the Italian Comedy) strolling in delicate, mythical landscapes. In some
of these Fêtes Galantes and in pictures of solitary musicians or
actors ( Gilles ), Watteau coneyed a mood of melancholy,
loneliness and poignancy that was largely lacking in the works of his
many imitators and followers (Nicolas Lancret, J.-B. Pater).
The
work of François Boucher (1703-70) was probably more
representatie of the eighteventh century: the pleasure-seeking court of
Louis Xfound the lightness of morals and colors in his paintings
immensely congenial. Boucher's irtuosity is seven at its best in his
paintings of women, always rosy, young and fantasy-erotic. |
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
(1732-1806) continued this exploration of licentious themes but with an
exuberance, a richness of color and a itality ( The Swing )
that was a feast for the eyes and raised the subject to a glorification
of loe.
Far more restrained were the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon
Chardin (1699-1779), who specialized in homely genre scenes and
still lies, painted with a simplicity that belied his complex use of
colors, shapes and space to promote a mood of stillness and
tranquility.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) chose stories that
anticipated reaction against the laxity of the times; the moral, at
times sentimental, character of his paintings was all-perasie,
reinforced by a stage-like composition well suited to cautionary tales.
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