The Rise Of French Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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While Watteau was laying the foundations for the romantic and impressionist painting of modern France, another group of French figure-painters were evolving a national ‘grand style’ for French portraiture. This new style first made its appearance when Largilliére began painting Louis XIV and his family, and a typical example of it may be found in the Wallace Collection.

Nicholas Largilliére (1656-1746), who was nearly thirty years older than Watteau, was born in Paris, but worked for many years in London, where he was an assistant to Sir Peter Lely and a great favorite with King Charles II. But unlike his master Lely—who rivalled the Vicar of Bray in keeping in with both sides—Largilliére was a Royalist through and through, and like the faller Stuarts he returned to France and made Paris his home during the latter part of his life. His drawing is accurate but rather hard, his color harmonious and lighter in hue than that of his predecessors Mignard and Le Brun, and his great canvas at the Wallace Collection of Louis XIV with the Dauphin, the Duc de Bourgogne, the infant Du ďAnjou (afterwards Louis XV), and Madame de Maintenon, shows how magnificently he could stage and present a royal group.

Among his contemporaries were Hyacinth Rigaud (1659-1743), and his pupil Jean Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755), who won much fame as superintendent of the royal tapestry manufactories of the Gobelins and Beauvais; but his most famous successor was Jean Marc Nattier (1685-1766), a Parisian-born, who became one of the favorite portrait-painters at the Court of Louis XV. Nattier commented his career as a historical painter, and only took up portraiture in 1720 after he had lost all his savings through the speculation of John Law, the Scottish financier and adventurer. His paintings are also little hard, but they are light and gay in color and remarkably stately in their grouping and arrangement.

Another Paris-born artist acquired still wider fame. This was Francois Boucher (1703-70), who gained the first prize at the Academy when he was only twenty years old and afterwards studied in Rome. ‘No one,’ wrote the late Lady Dilke of this artist, ‘ever attacked a greater variety of styles; his drawings—often extremely good—are to be met with in every important collection. Innumerable were his easel pictures, his mural decorations, his designs for tapestries at Beauvais or the Gobelins, his scene paintings for Versailles and the Opera.’

No artist more completely illustrates and represents French taste in the eighteenth century than Francois Boucher, who was indeed the leader of fashion in this direction, and by his creative genius brought a new note into European painting. He introduced a lighter and gayer scheme of color into tapestries and decorative paintings, pale blues and pinks being dominant in his color schemes. He designed many paintings and decorations for the famous Madame de Pompadour, and the sweet color now generally known as rose du Barry was invented by Boucher and was originally called Rose Pompadour.

To do justice to the French portraiture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we must remember the ornate gilt furniture of the period with which they were surrounded. Portraits like Nattier’s ‘Mademoiselle de Clermont’ and Boucher’s ‘Marquise de Pompadour’—both of which are in the Wallace Collection—must not be judged as easel paintings, but as items in an elaborate scheme of interior decoration. There is nothing like them in the history of portraiture, just as there never was a Court exactly like that of the ‘Grand Monarch’ or of his immediate successors. These portraits reconvey to us all the splendors of Versailles, its luxury and its heartlessness. They are the quintessence of aristocratic feeling, so full of culture that there is little room for humanity. The pride they express ends by alienating our sympathy, for they are the most pompous pictures the world has ever seen.

The Rise Of French Painting (continued)