Rococo. Victoria Charles
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into this second group were the decorative artists. Amongst the most famous of these are Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (1693–1750), Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672–1742) and François de Cuvilliés (1698–1768), who had also been active in Munich. Their powers of invention and the richness of their imagination can be seen through their engravings and drawings. It also becomes clear here that Italian grotesque was the basis of French ornamentation. The ornamental artists also exerted a considerable influence on the other ornamentation of public buildings, particularly on the blacksmith’s work on balustrades, banisters and wrought iron gates.
The Architects
In French architecture in the 17th century, there was a counter-movement against the pompous, heavy Baroque style of Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), with a strict classicism that predominated in the extension of the Louvre by Claude Perrault (1613–1688). His main works as an architect are the eastern and southern external façades of the Louvre (the eastern side is the famous Colonnade). Perrault, in addition to his work as a doctor, was also a philologist and an art theoretician. He translated Vitruvius’s Ten Books about Architecture and wrote a system of column orders which lasted for many years.
However, an original French style of building was created only by the leading architect of the age, Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708), who at the young age of 30 was named Court Architect to his sovereign and invented the most effective decorative forms of the Baroque style with the structural rigidity of classicism. The sphere of his major work was in fact the Palace of Versailles with its chapel, royal chambers and the Grand Trianon, built for the last mistress and presumably secret wife of Louis XIV, the Marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719), and restored by Napoleon I (1769–1821), as well as the Orangerie. The most important of his artistic works is without a doubt the dome of Les Invalides (the former hospital in Paris for war veterans) completed in 1708, the cupola of which is a masterly combination of monumental effect and French elegance. Jules Hardouin-Mansart, in all of his works, created the foundations for the elegant decorative lines of the architecture and the ornamentation of the façades.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Orangerie, 1684–1686.
Domaine national du château de Versailles, Versailles.
Antoine Watteau, Fêtes Vénitiennes, 1718–1719.
Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 45.7 cm.
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Maurice-Quentin Delatour, Full-length Portrait of the Marquise of Pompadour, 1748–1755.
Pastel on gray-blue paper with gouache highlights, the face cut out and mounted on the paper, 177 × 130 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Madame de Sorquainville, 1749.
Oil on canvas, 101 × 81 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
But all was not purely restricted to Paris. For example in Strasbourg there was the Bishop’s Palace built by Joseph Massol (c. 1706–1771) from the plans of the “royal architect” Robert de Cotte (1656/57–1735), a brother-in-law of Hardouin-Mansart, the Hotel Rohan from Massol’s plans (1731–1742), the Hotel de Hanau-Lichtenberg (1730–1736), two houses for wealthy bourgeois families (1750–1751) and also the Jesuit College (1757–1759), planned by Le Mire and built by Massol. In Nancy the eye is taken by the wonderful Place Stanislas, named after a Polish king, the Place de la Carrière and the Place de l’Hermicycle, all built in the years between about 1750 and 1760. The complete entity of these three squares is preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Painting
In the 18th century, the cold representation of the pictures of 17th-century designs gradually began to give way to a warmer conception, which developed further and further, manifesting itself ultimately in a frivolity of expression. The era of Jeanne Bécu, better known as Madame du Barry (1743–1793), who bled to death on the guillotine to the howls of the rowdy population, of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, famous as Madame de Pompadour, yearned for different attractions from those of the age of the official royal mistress, Madame de Montespan (1640–1707). This marquise did have seven children with King Louis XIV, but was forced out of court by Madame de Maintenon, who then after a long battle against bankruptcy became the last mistress and later secret wife of the then-aged and tired Louis XIV.
French art in the 18th century finally discovered its own language, in which it could fully communicate its essence. Painting with oils was an extensive process. Pastel painting, developed as early as the 15th century, is painting with dry colour crayons, the rubbings of which settle onto the paper, which is then made wipe-proof with a fixative. The colours, particularly in portraits, seem to have been created for the representation of finely graduated, smoothly changing skin colours and the elegant clothing of this period. Pastel painting had been used earlier by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) and others, but with far less wealth of colour nuance than that which was displayed by the Rococo painters. These pastel artists were almost exclusively portrait painters, and only occasionally did they represent individual mythological or genre figures from their lives or times.
François Boucher, Reclining Girl, 1752.
Oil on canvas, 59 × 73 cm.
Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
Antoine Watteau, The Bath of Diana (detail), c. 1715–1716.
Oil on canvas, 80 × 101 cm.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Noël Nicolas Coypel, The Birth of Venus, 1732.
Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Antoine Watteau and His Successors
Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was one of the key figures in Rococo art. Of Flemish origin, he came to Paris around 1702, where his interest in genre painting and in the world of theatre (especially the commedia dell’arte) was aroused. Through the influence of Rubens (1577–1640), his style did not change so much as his subject matter – the “gay, wanton party”. After the pomp of Louis XIV, artists now concentrated on the pleasant, the private and the delicate. In the political sphere and aesthetic movements, there was a noticeable relaxation – art reacted to it with intimate, decorative and erotic motifs and mythological scenes. The pleasures of the flesh celebrated in his pastoral pieces were perhaps really a glorification of true love – at any rate, they portrayed the most hedonistic joys of life. Watteau possessed the rare gift of atmospheric colouration, which even in the brightest light still conveyed gentleness, mystery and a kind of musicality, combined with great artistic skill which put him on a par with the masters.
Watteau was the most brilliantly sophisticated painter of the 18th century who, despite his short life, dogged by problems of constant ill health, nevertheless created a series of masterpieces which have never lost their effectiveness that transcended the taste of the age. In his homeland he had made friends with Rubens and a series of other Dutchmen, whose style he adapted. In Paris, he found several friends and influential patrons who made it possible for him to freely exercise his art. At first he was a pupil and assistant of the painter, drawer and etcher Claude Gillot (1673–1722), who in particular acquainted him with the theatre, in which at the time there was a battle for supremacy on the stage between the French and Italian comedies. Watteau derived the Rococo style from the decorative style of the age of Louis XIV, in association with Chinese and Japanese forms of ornamentation characterised by the decorative painting in rooms, boudoirs and salons. From the pastoral