fajrdrako | Those foofy French artists....

Yesterday I went to the National Gallery of Canada, to see their special exhibit of 18th century French art, The Age of Watteau Chardin Fragonard Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, which

maboroshimaki so rightly calls "The foofy French exhibit".

My favourite of the artists in the exhibit was (and always has been) Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and I had his wonderful picture of a young card-player on my bedroom wall for years. He was only recently supplanted by large portraits of Bodie and Doyle.

Chardin said, "One uses colours but one paints with feeling." ("On se sert des couleurs mais on peint avec le sentiment.") Oddly enough, I'd have said his paintings were fairly passionless: very real, very evocative, but also quite objective.

Most of the paintings were 'genre painting', or pictures of families and individuals, which were the fashionable thing. Others were 'fetes galantes' or theatrical pieces, and there was a whole genre called "tableaux de mode" or fashion pictures. And what fashions they were. No wonder people made fortunes in cloth.

Seeing this exhibit with a thought to the costuming in "Pirates of the Caribbean" made my head spin. The paintings (each one assigned to a near-exact year) cover such a range of styles that I begin to think the cacophany of costuming in the movie isn't so much a thing of fantasy. One complication is that a lot of 18th century French art is of self-consciously theatrical scenes - particularly commedia dell'arte - and the people depicted are all or mostly in historical or theatrical fancy dress - from periods well before the artists' time. Even when he's putting his friends' faces on the bodies.

So what were they really wearing? Gorgeous stuff. This show was a textile-lover's dream. Many gleaming satins on the women and men in suedes so soft-looking you wanted to touch. Men with buttoned cuffs on their coat that turn back to the elbow.

The costumes in "Pirates" were extremely conservative, actually.

Lots of artists I never heard of. Many I had, not just Chardin. I always thought of Boucher as 'the guy who made everyone pink' but the skin tones he depicted were quite pale, it's the fabric and flowers that were pink. Lots and lots of flowers - I was reminded of shojo manga with the pictures of cascading roses.

There were two very interesting pictures of people playing billiards. One, fairly stark, was by Chardin, was from 1725: several men in a large room with a beautiful billiard table and an interesting array of candle-holders on a frame above the table. The other was by Louis-Leogpold Builly in 1807, was a crowd scene in a room full of people; several of them were playing billiards, about half of them women, and it was a woman taking the shot at the moment of the picture.

That room - the last room, which was material painted after the Revolution - I thought of as 'the feminist section', since most of the paintings depicted women as the main subject of the picture, usually in an active role - as artist, billiard-player, courtesan, or otherwise the actor in her own drama. I hadn't thought of the French Revolution as being a sort of watershed for perception of women, but my impression here was that it made a difference, if only by overturning all the entrenched conservatism of the old regime.

Most of the paintings did not have classical themes, but I did like Michel Garnier's picture of Alexander the Great having his mistress's picture painted by Apelles.

One fascinating picture was called "Constructing the Main Road", by Claude-Joseph Venet - probably about 1780. It's a fantasy landscape with a very practical subject: people building a road, showing the engineer with his fancy clothes on a horse making sure all is being done properly, with the various technological implements of the time, all being show in use. And two women in the left-hand corner, selling bread and wine to the workers.

Another interesting painting was "The Departure of the Poacher" by Nicolas-Bernard Lepicie, 1788. It showed a heroic-looking lower-middle-class man with a gun almost as tall as him, standing with his son. On first glance he made me think of Jean Valjean. On second glance, Oliver Mellors. If I'd come across the painting without attribution, I'd have been sure it was from 1888, not 1788, partly because of the depiction of the heroic-lower-class, partly because it had a hint of Victorian sentimentality on the subject. Victor Hugo way before his time.

Which should be a lesson to me in not making assumptions about people in any century. The more I study history the more I realize that people were not all alike in any age, and probably never will be.

A few other observations:

I'll swear most of the paintings had a dog, front and centre. Maybe seventy per cent of them. Sometimes more than one dog. Of the exceptions, in the whole exhibit, there were two cats. The dogs had disappeared from the post-revolutionary pictures.
Another favourite picture: The Young Draughtsman by Chardin. The same drawing implement has black chalk (or charcoal?) at one end and white chalk at the other, and you can see he is drawing a portrait in both white and black.
Fragonard had a fascinating career and because the first curator of the Louvre when it became an art gallery. Clearly the Revolution (and the Terror) marked a huge upheavel in everyone's lives and lifestyles, including artists. One picture shows an artist in prison, about to be transferred to anther prison - and the artist doing the painting was his fellow-prisoner.
The most bizarre picture by far was a painting of children playing dress-up - "Children's Games" by Charles-Antoine Coypel (1728). Dimply, lewdly half-naked kids in fancy wigs with make-up and bits and pieces of glamorous clothes it was, said the notice, a satire on the habits of the upper class. Coypel later wrote a novel about "the folly of fashion". This picture was certainly not p.c. to a modern eye; quite creepy.
On a similar vein, the note said that Chardin's Boy Blowing a Soap Bubble

is a 'vanitas' painting to indicate the brevity of life. I thought it was a charming picture of a boy blowing a bubble - indicating, if anything, the pleasure to be found in a moment. I'd rather continue to think that.
Chardin's father made billiard tables. Cool.
Many of the pictures, particularly of the working and servant class, clearly showed useful details of clothing - like how trousers fastened, how garters were tied, and so on.
In "Before the Ball" by Jean-Francois de Troy (1735), it is clear that the elegant woman in the amazingly beautiful dress has eight people to help her dress - and needs every one of them.
Several pictures showed country people playing bagpipes.
One picture (from 1733) showed a man and a woman playing a game called "pied-de-boeuf" but from the description given I had no idea how the game was played. Does anyone know?
Another picture I loved for its high Romanticism was "The Amorous Courtesan" by Pierre Subleyras (1735), apparently a famous story by LaFontaine about a courtesan who falls in love and wins her lover's heart. I see the story is online in many places; I must read it later. (Go here.)
There seems to have been a rule that all 18th century foofy French painters had to have double or triple first names. Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Jean-Francois de Troy, Charles-Antone Coypel, Michel-Francois Dandre-Bardon, Jean-Baptiste Greuze ("the moral painter", Diderot called him, what a condemnation!), Nicolas-Bernard Lepicie, Louis-Leopold Builly, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and so on. A few exceptions, like Noel Halle, Francois Boucher, and Etienne Jeaurat. I've never heard of most of these people before.
In "The Milliner (Morning)" by Francois Boucher (1748), the picture shows two nicely-dressed women, one of whom is showing her wares to another. One of them is holding a nice satin ribbon. We had to stare for a while, trying to guess which was the buyer (presumably an upper-class woman) and hwo is the seller (the tradeswoman). We weren't sure. We finally decided that the woman sitting on the floor with the open box was selling, the woman holding the ribbon was buying - but it was difficult to be sure. We could only guess from their relative postions to each other. This was one of the two paintings which showed a cat.
There were many beautiful teacups, coffee cups, teapots and coffee pots in the various pictures. One lovely picture showed a family having breakfast outdoors, and the mother was feeding a little girl aged five or so a spoonful of coffee. The little girl was making the kind of face five-year-olds generally make when given coffee.
in the painting by Carle Van Loo, "A Pasha Having his Mistress' Portrait Painted", the Pasha has a very north-European face but his clothes are delightful. The most interesting part of the picture is the artist himself.
The pictures were from all over Europe and North America - lots from France, of course, and lots from various galleries across the U.S. It was interesting to see some from the Hermitage, and the billiard painting by Builly had its title on the frame in Cyrillic letters.
Despite the occasional hint of 'vanitas' (more in the commenaries by the art historians than the pictures themselves), it was notable how so much of the art showed playful subjects. Theatricals, masques, dances, music. Games like blind-man's-bluff or pied-de-boeuf, billiards, or card games. Blowing bubbles. Other themes (paritcularly with Chardin) were people going about daily tasks - schoolboys reading (or sleeping on the book), a maid peeling turnips, laundresses at work. "The hunt" was described as a popular subject but this exhibit didn't reflect that much - more, picnics after the hunt, with elegant tables and many servants out of doors.
One amusing picture showed an upper-class picnic with an elegant table, that had turned into a drunken revel, with the men's wigs thrown around (or being worn by the equally-drunk women), broken bottles on the ground, one man getting onto the table to (I would guess) dance on it - and the servants standing around looking generally disapproving. I suspect another class-based moral-political commentary. But even though in most of the paintings people were shown on their better behaviour, there were plenty of reminders that the 18th century was not an inhibited time.
Speaking of uninhibited behaviour, Jean-Baptiste Pater (1695-1736) painted in a style remarkably similar to Hogarth.
Though most of the faces were more fashionable than individualized (at least to my eyes), some individuals stood out - like a servant in one of the paitnigns of Jean-Francois de Troy's paintings ("The Hunt Luncheon") with a striking black servant in a turban; and another painting that showed the artists' wife drawing a picture with the artist's son looking on, and they'd be recognizable if you met them on the street.
Boucher's father was a designer of lace. I guess it proves he came by his foofiness honestly and from a young age. Here's one of the pictures I saw, the one showing the lady's leg and garter:
One painting showed a performance of an opera by Lully, which brought to mind the beautiful movie "The Roi Danse", another display of wonderful 18th century French costume.
A historical note reminded us that there were only three rulers of France over more than a hundred years. No wonder the society was so conservative and unchanging for so long.