Rococo Art: Gender Roles and Relationships in the Art of Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard, Lecture notes of Painting

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GENDER ROLES and RELATIONSHIPS:

ROCOCO ART:

(Art of Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard)

ROCOCO ART

Online Links:

Rococo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antoine Watteau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

François Boucher - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean-Honoré Fragonard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Régence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Frick Collection: The Fragonard Room

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), a Flemish artist living in Paris, epitomizes the French Rococo style. He created a new type of painting when he submitted his official examination painting, The Departure from Cythera , for admission to membership in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1717. The academicians accepted the painting in a new category, the fête galante , or elegant outdoor entertainment. The Departure from Cythera depicts a dreamworld in which beautifully dressed couples, abetted by putti, take leave of the mythical island of love.

Watteau’s objective appears to be not to tell a story but to induce the poignant and wistful evocation of love. Watteau’s fragile forms and delicate colors, painted with feathery brushstrokes reminiscent of Rubens, evoke a mood of reverie and nostalgia. His doll-like men and women, however, provide sharp contrast with Rubens’ physically powerful figures.

Watteau’s art conveys no noble message; rather, it explores the world of familiar but transitory pleasures. Watteau’s objective appears to be not to tell a story but to induce the poignant and wistful evocation of love. Watteau leads the eye from right to left along the curving line, which rises and falls like a phrase of music.

The change within about eight years from inhibition to relaxation, from deliberation to excitement, is not due solely to Watteau’s greater artistic maturity and happy awareness of his own skill, but also to the general sense of liberation felt after the death of Louis XIV, when hopes were high for favorable political developments.

Watteau painted the embarkation for Cythera at least three times. The first, somewhat stilted version is dated 1710 and hangs in the Stadel Institute in Frankfurt. The present Berlin picture was executed in 1718 or 1719 for a private client (seen lower left).

It is a slight variation upon a second version, which Watteau submitted as his presentation piece to the Royal Academy of Arts in Paris, of which he became a member in 1717. The Academy version now hangs in the Louvre (seen upper left).

Antoine Watteau. The Pleasures of Life , c. 1718, oil on canvas

The sky and foliage act as a theatrical backdrop to a stage set- Watteau was actively involved in the theater and had many actor friends. Many of Watteau’s paintings center on the commedia dell’arte. His treatment of this Italian theme is all the more remarkable because the commedia dell’arte was officially banned in France from 1697 until 1716.

This work was probably done as a sign for a café owned by a friend of the artist who retired from the stage after achieving fame in the racy role of the clown. The performance has ended, and the actor has stepped forward to face the audience.

The other characters, all highly individualized, are probably likenesses of friends from the same circle. Yet the painting is more than a portrait or an advertisement.

Watteau approaches his subject with incomparable human understanding and artistic genius. Pierrot is lifesize, so that he confronts us as a full human being, not simply as a stock character. In the process, Watteau transforms him into Everyman, with whom he evidently identified himself- a merging of identity basic to the commedia dell’arte.

Right: Louis XIV in 1701

The Régence is the period in which Watteau lived and painted (between 1715 and 1723), when King Louis XV was a minor and the land was governed by a Regent, Phillipe d’Orleans, the nephew of Louis XIV of France.

In the twenty years prior to his death, Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, had kept France almost constantly at war. The Regent, by contrast, signed peace treaties, paid off crushing state debts and encouraged industry and commerce.

While 20 million French breathed a sigh of relief, no longer a victim to the worst deprivation- 1709 had been a year of starvation in Paris- a small, privileged minority scented the chance to live life to the full.

Francois Boucher. Breakfast , 1739, oil on canvas

Paintings such as The Breakfast of 1739, a family scene, show Boucher as a master of the genre scene, as he regularly used his own wife and family as models. These intimate family scenes are, however, in contrast to the 'licentious' style of his more well-known Rococo works.

Francois Boucher. Cupid a Captive , 1754, oil on canvas

Boucher’s brushwork is as abandoned as the mood of his paintings. He understood that painting can bewitch the spectator with its sheer audacity, its exuberant love of the act of fashioning paints into luxurious forms. Boucher is famous for saying that nature is "trop verte et mal éclairée." (too green and badly lit)

As a promoter of moral painting, the French critic Denis Diderot despised Boucher. In his Salon reviews of 1765 he wrote, “I don’t know what to say about this man. Degradation of taste, color, composition, character, expression, and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity.”

Francois Boucher. Madame Boucher , 1743, oil on canvas

Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The Swing , 1766, oil on canvas

Boucher encouraged a young boy Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) to enter a competition known as the Prix de Rome, which Fragonard won in 1752. This was a three-to-five year scholarship awarded to the top students in painting and sculpture graduating from the French Academy’s art school.

Fragonard returned to Paris in 1761, but not until 1765 was he finally accepted into the Royal Academy. Fragonard began catering to the tastes of an aristocratic clientele, and by 1770 he began to fill the vacuum left by Boucher’s death as a decorator of interiors.

This painting was commissioned by the libertine Baron de St. Julien. He initially gave the order to a painter of historical subjects, Doyen. Spelling out his requirements, the Baron said, “I should like you to paint Madame [his mistress] seated on a swing being pushed by a bishop.” Shocked by the request, Doyen refused the commission and Fragonard accepted the work enthusiastically, but replaced the bishop with the girl’s husband.

The stone statue of Cupid raises a finger to his lips as if warning us to keep the secret of the Baron hidden in the bushes. The girl’s coy gesture and the irreverent behavior create a mood of erotic intrigue similar to that found in the comic operas of this period, as well as in the pornographic novel, which developed as a genre in eighteenth-century France.

Left: Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Gardens of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli , 1766, oil on canvas

The fantastic trees owe more to the artist’s memories of his childhood and his student days that they do to observation from nature. Fragonard was raised in the lush, flower-filled region of Grasse- the center of the perfume industry. As a student in Italy, he was more excited by the luxurious pleasure gardens at Tivoli, where he spent the summer of 1760, than he was by antique sculpture.