Patrick Bade
From Watteau to Fragonard

Patrick Bade - From Watteau to Fragonard

- Well, if any artist could be said to have set the tone of the Ancien Regime, it must be Antoine Watteau, whose picture “La Gamme d'Amour” you see on the screen. He sets the tone for the first half of the 18th century, rather as Caravaggio had done for the first half of the 17th century. And, as you can see, they could hardly be more different from one another. Caravaggio, dark in more ways than one. Violent, bloody, melodramatic. Watteau, gentle, sweet, with a very pastel range of rather sugary colours. Charming subject matter. He’s born in Valenciennes in 1684, so that makes him an almost exact contemporary of three great 18th century composers, Bach, Handel, and, oh, who’s the third one? Scarlatti. But in fact, it’s Mozart that I’d really like to compare him with, because you have this elegant, charming silken surface, but with a depth of emotion and with an underlying melancholy. He, the town he was born in, Valenciennes, was, had only just been acquired by, well, seized, shall we say, by Louis XIV. He was constantly declaring war on his neighbours and nibbling bits off his neighbours’ countries, rather as Russia is trying to do at the moment. And so he was, we think of him as quintessentially French. Elegant, very concerned with the joys of love, and so on. But to his contemporaries, he seemed more Flemish than French. And there is certainly important Flemish and even Dutch origins to his art. Of course, Flanders, I think it’s probably the most fought over bit of Europe, constantly fought over over the centuries and all the way through the 17th century. And Watteau’s earliest paintings are of military subjects and very much in the Dutch manner.

Here’s a Dutch military painting on the left, Philip Wouwerman, and an engraving after a lost painting by Watteau on the right-hand side. Here is one of his military subjects that does survive. He never paints battles. He never paints the violent side of warfare. This looks more like a military picnic than a scene of warfare. He had initially a rather unconventional road into his career through decorative arts rather than training as a fine artist or a history painter. And I mentioned already that right at the end of Louis XIV’s reign, there was a yearning for a lighter, more playful style in interior design and the decorative arts. So this, here are designs for a screen by an artist called Audran. And Watteau does quite a lot of this kind of thing right at the beginning of his career. This also is a panel that might be for a screen or possibly for boiserie. You see very, this very open, decorative frame and a very charming, lighthearted feel. And he worked quite prolifically at the start of his career, producing decorative designs, many of which were engraved and continue to be very influential after his death. Here is a red chalk drawing, which already looks fully Rococo, although usually the Rococo style is not thought to have reached full maturity till around 1730. In other words, some years after Watteau’s death. But Watteau is really one of the main influences and creators of Rococo style. You see the sea scrolls here so characteristic of the Rococo and the very, the frilly decorative border and the strong element of asymmetry. He eventually did apprentice himself to quite a well-known artist called Claude Gillot. But Gillot himself was not a history painter.

He was an illustrator, he worked in the theatre, and in his paintings, he painted subjects that were derived from plays and the theatre, and this is one of them by Claude Gillot. So Watteau, we know, was apprenticed to him for five years, from 1703 to 1708. And the theatre is one of the most important elements, I’d say, one of the most important factors in the creation of his mature style. This is a print after a painting by Watteau, which shows the expulsion from France in 1697 of the Italian commedia dell'arte players. It was actually Madame de Maintenon who demanded this. She was a very puritanical lady, and she thought they were licentious, and she felt insulted by them, and she persuaded the king to have them expelled, and they were expelled from France for several years, coming back again after Louis’s death in the period of the Regence. So I’d like to make a comparison here between Watteau, who’s the first great French painter of the 18th century and Hogarth. He’s a little bit younger, half a generation younger, but he is the key figure in launching a golden age of English painting in the 18th century. And the comparison I’d like to make is the importance of theatre for both of these artists. This is a painting of 1728 by Hogarth, and it’s the first of what he called his modern moral subjects. It’s the “Beggar’s Opera.” So, and he said, “My paintings are my stage and my men and women are my players.” And Watteau could very much have said the same thing. A lot of his pictures look very much like theatrical scenes. Back to “La Gamme d'Amour.”

It’s what was later in his career defined as a fete galante. A fete galante is a scene of love where you have young lovers dressed in theatrical costume. This is not, the costume we see with these figures is not the kind of costume that people wore in real life in the 18th century. These kind of costumes belonged in theatre. And these scenes are always set in an idealised park landscape. And you have interactions, amorous interactions between men and women. So you may think, “Yes, lovely picture here. Sweet colours, young lovers, music,” but there is always with Watteau, as so often with Mozart, this vein of sadness and melancholy. A certain sense that, “Yes, this is wonderful, these young lovers, but it’s not, nothing lasts forever. Youth, love, it all ends eventually.” And it’s significant that the apex of this pyramidal composition, you can see, is a bust of an elderly philosopher figure. And I think that is making this point that youth, love, pleasure are ephemeral things and they eventually die. Now, this type of subject matter, which was novel in France with, Watteau is the one who really initiates it. But it has its origins in Venetian art, going right back to the 16th century. This is a very famous painting on the left-hand side. It’s now in the Louvre. It was in the French royal collection. It’s called the “Concert Champetre.” It used to be firmly attributed to Giorgione. Now in the Louvre, the label on the picture says Le Titien, Titian, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back to Giorgione. It’s one of those pictures that scholars argue about. So that’s, and it’s a very mysterious picture. What is going on in this picture with the two draughtsmen?

Again, there’s an element of music. So the music giving a sort of amorous atmosphere to the picture. You’ve got the young lovers in a natural setting, a rather wilder setting here than with the park landscapes of Watteau. And this kind of painting is poetic painting, but it doesn’t really have a clear narrative. It’s more of an evocation of a mood. This has a long tradition in Venice. And on the right-hand side is an early 18th century Venetian artist, a bit older than Watteau, called Piazzetta, with a similar kind of subject matter. So Watteau, although he never went to Italy, he was very familiar with Italian art and particularly with Venetian art, because his most important patron was a financier banker called Pierre Crozat. You see his portrait here by the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera. And he had one of the greatest art collections in Europe. He was immensely, immensely wealthy, and he specialised in Venetian painting. And he bought paintings from Watteau, and Watteau stayed in his country house, the Chateau Montmorency. And the painting, the main painting here is a fete galante that’s taking place in the park of the Chateau of Montmorency. So as well as Venetian origins, I mentioned that, of course, there are Flemish and Dutch influences on Watteau.

Top left here is a painting called “The Garden of Love” by Rubens, which, to all intents and purposes, is already in the 1630s, so nearly a century earlier, a fete galante with lovers in a park landscape. And a rather more earthy version, you could say, of a fete galante is this Dutch painting, Jan Steen, on the bottom right-hand corner. So we know that Watteau was very, very keen on Rubens. This is a drawing by Watteau. It’s after a detail from a painting by Rubens, also in the Louvre, of peasants dancing. And you can see this engraving after a painting by Watteau on the right-hand side, how he has almost directly quoted that copy of Rubens on the left-hand side. And a very important technique that Watteau learnt from Rubens was the technique of three-colored chalk on slightly tinted paper, slightly coloured paper, using charcoal, sanguine, and heightening with white chalk. And on the right-hand side, this is a drawing by Rubens of his second wife, Helena Fourment. And on the left is a copy made by Watteau of a portrait that Rubens made of his first wife, Isabella Brant. That’s actually an oil painting, but it’s rather interesting that Watteau makes the copy of the oil painting using the graphic technique of the three-colored chalks that he’s learnt from Rubens. The same subject painted by both artists. A mythological subject, the Judgement of Paris. Rubens on the left-hand side and Watteau on the right-hand side. You could say it’s quite literally a slimmed-down version of the Rubens take on the subject of the, of the Judgement of Paris. And just, again, reemphasizing the Venetian influence. This is a very important Venetian artist for the 18th century, Veronese.

I’d say in Venice itself and in much of Europe, Veronese was even more influential than Titian on 18th century painters. This is Veronese’s “Finding of Moses” on the right hand-side and a drawing of the same subject by Watteau on the left-hand side, in which you can see the obvious influence and even the way that Watteau, well, neither artist, of course, attempts to depict the Egyptian, the Pharaoh’s daughter in Egyptian clothing. In the Veronese, she’s wearing 16th century, they’re all wearing 16th century Venetian clothing, and so are they in the Watteau on the left-hand side. And Veronese on the left-hand side, an amorous scene with these slightly unstable poses with the male lover rather manhandling the female lover. And you can see Watteau doing something similar on the right-hand side. This is a painting dated 1709, and it has the same subject and the same title of Watteau’s most famous painting dating a few years later. It’s “The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera.” Island of Cythera is Venus’s island. It’s the island of love. And so in 18th century erotic literature, you would never have anything as crude as saying they had sex. No, they embarked for the Island of Cythera. Even that kind of language is used in the very earthy, erotic novel “Fanny Hill” dating from the mid-18th century. So here we have these, these are pilgrims setting forth on a pilgrimage to the island of love, and they’re holding their pilgrim’s staffs. Get this, this painting’s just called “Foursome.”

There’s always a musical element in these pictures. We’ve got a pair of lovers here. And again, very much wearing, these are rather commedia dell'arte costumes. Nobody was in real life wearing ruffs in the 18th century except in the theatre. This is a painting in the Wallace Collection. Wallace Collection in London has, I suppose, the finest collection of Watteaus of any museum in the world with the possible exception of the Louvre. There’s 17 paintings by Watteau in the Wallace Collection, and this is one of the loveliest ones. And it’s called the “Le Charmes de la Vie,” the “Charms of Life.” And you can see it’s a, again, it looks like it’s taking place on a stage. The architecture in the background looks like stage scenery. And we can see, oh, no, it’s called the “Les Plaisirs du Bal.” That’s right, that’s the title of this picture, “The Pleasures of the Ball,” of the dance. And it shows a man and a woman dancing together. And in Watteau’s paintings, music, making music, and dancing, you can say is a metaphor for making love. The leading Watteau scholar of the 20th century was a man called Donald Posner. He explains these very delicate and elusive pictures in rather earthy terms. So this is a man and a woman who are dancing together. This is the climax of their dance. And the climax is represented by the spurting fountain immediately behind the male dancer. So there is certainly a strongly erotic element in a lot of Watteau’s work. And he probably painted much more explicitly erotic pictures, even pornographic ones. Those kind of pictures tend not to survive. I mean, they’re painted for male collectors and often they were hidden away and only shown to male friends.

And it was a kind of sad but common story that when the collector dies and his widow sees what he’s hidden away in the back room, she’s none too pleased and gets rid of it one way or another. But, so, this is obviously quite a earthy erotic drawing by Watteau, top right-hand side. It’s a very popular subject in both Dutch art and 18th century French art, and it’s a woman having an enema. And clearly here it has very erotic connotations. And there are other, other paintings like this that do survive that, where we seem to have burst in upon a very beautiful, sexy young woman at her toilet, and she’s recoiling as the male viewer enters her boudoir. And this painting, sadly destroyed in the second World War, so not a very good reproduction, colour reproduction of this, of “Jupiter and Antiope.” And he is, you can see he’s unveiling and lusting after her, her beauties in rather a, this is a drawing for the figure of Jupiter. Again, in this three-colored chalk technique. Ah, now this is “Le Charmes de la Vie.” This is also in the Wallace Collection. And so, once again, we have these rusticated columns that look like coulisse on the either side of the stage. And we have what looks, the park landscape looks like a theatrical backdrop. And we have a young girl sitting on a chair with a guitar and a young man with a theorbo who’s tuning his instrument. And they, that young man and the woman, are about to make music together. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. In the Wallace Collection, this is hangs opposite this picture, which is much smaller. But you can see how Watteau quite often will reuse figures in different combinations to develop a different narrative. So here we have a man. He’s tuning his instrument. They’re about to make music together.

Different, slightly different version of the story here, because here is the young man still tuning his instrument. He’s not really getting it together. And there’s another young man on the left-hand side of this picture who’s coming up behind, and he’s going to steal a march while the hesitant or incompetent lover is tuning his instrument. And you can see the two little girls in the middle are in on this and very amused by what’s happening. So all these pictures of gallantry would’ve been, this is, these are galante scenes in the 18th century, scenes of flirtation. Flirtation, of course, is nowadays more likely to be interpreted as sexual harassment. But you could, that’s what you could say of these two scenes. It’s very clear in both cases that the man is attempting to grope the woman and she is maybe rather half-heartedly putting up some kind of defence against the male groping. This is Watteau’s masterpiece, his most famous picture. He was making a real reputation for himself in the second decade, beginning of the second decade of the 18th century with these scenes of gallantry. They’re immensely popular. He won very wealthy, important patrons, and he attracted the attention of the Academie Royale. Although, as I said, he was not at all the kind of artist that was normally represented in the Academie Royale with big, serious history paintings.

But in 1712, he was invited to become a member of the Academie Royale, which meant that, but in order to do this, you had to present a work of art to the Academie. It was called a morceau de reception, your reception piece. And Watteau was very tardy about this. There were several reminders had to be sent to him over a period of years that he had not yet presented his morceau de reception. And eventually there was, he was given a six-month ultimatum. “You’ve got to come up with it or you won’t become a member of, or we will retain your membership of the Academie Royale.” And this was the result, and this was certainly a picture worth waiting for. But when it was presented to the Academie Royale, they had a problem. Problem was, how do you categorise this picture? There was no, it didn’t fit into any of their normal categories. It’s not a history painting. A history painting would be a great scene from either mythology or Christian tradition or Roman history with monumental figures, nude or draped. No, it didn’t fit into that. It’s not a genre scene, ‘cause it’s certainly not a scene of everyday life. So what is it? And in fact, they had to invent a new category, and this is where the term fete galante comes from, that he was accepted as a member of the Academie as a specialist in fete galante. So the title of this picture, two versions of this picture, this is the initial one. There’s another very fine version, maybe not quite as fine as this, that’s in the National Gallery in Berlin. But this is in the Louvre, and the traditional title is, again, “The Departure for the Island of Cythera.” But is it? Art historians have actually disagreed about this. Is it “The Departure for the Island of Cythera,” or is it “The Departure from the Island of Cythera?”

Have these young people, are they about to make love or have they already made love? And is there a certain mood of post-coital sadness and regret that permeates this picture? That’s what some people think. Let’s look at this central pair of lovers with the woman turning back and looking sadly at the, you can see a sort of progression, can’t you? But actually, we’ve got the right-hand couple who is still very engrossed with one another, still really engrossed with the art of love, with the act of love. And then the next couple are just, he’s helping a young woman to get to her feet. And then, so I think at, there’s quite a good argument for suggesting that this painting is the departure from the Island of Cythera rather than for the Island of Cythera. Here is one of his drawings. I mean, Watteau, the drawings are absolutely ravishing in these coloured chalks, the charcoal, and the sanguine. He has an unequalled command of movement and gesture, and you really understand the body and the movement of the body underneath the clothes. And this is really what separates him from his many imitators and followers. None of them really had this ability to the same degree as Watteau. This is another one of these young ladies who’s protecting her cleavage, presumably from the unwanted gropings of a male admirer. And you could, here, you see, it’s almost like anticipating Degas in the way you have within this, on this one sheet of paper, successive movements, so of this young woman playing the guitar.

Towards the end of his relatively short life, his work takes on, certain works take on a more serious and a more monumental aspect, particularly this one, which is called is “Gilles.” Gilles is the French version of Pierrot. He’s the buffoon, the idiot in the commedia dell'arte tradition. But this painting has a really monumental character and a sadness, a melancholy, even maybe a tragic quality to it. And it’s rather strange with this. It’s a big picture, and you’ve got this frontal pose with the hands hanging loosely, but the figure is not quite central. It’s shifted slightly to the left-hand side. Here is a preliminary drawing for “Gilles” by Watteau on the left-hand side. And on the right, we see an etching by Rembrandt of “Christ Before the People.” And so this standing frontal pose, this sense of tragedy, many people have thought that there was either a conscious or unconscious reference to “Ecce Homo,” “Christ Before the People,” particularly in this version by Rembrandt, which I think would’ve been familiar to Watteau. This is his final masterpiece. He already knew he was dying. And, oh, incidentally, I mean, it’s usually assumed that he died of tuberculosis, but there has, of course, art historians have loved to come up with new theories. And a decade or so ago, one historian suggested that actually, his symptoms might have been caused by lead poisoning. The analysis of the white in this picture is lead white. A similar theory has been put forward about Goya’s illness. It’s usually assumed that Goya had syphilis, but some people have claimed that actually his illness was caused by being poisoned by the pigments that he used.

This is Watteau’s biggest painting. As you can see, it’s been cut in two, presumably for commercial reasons, but it was originally on one canvas. And he volunteered to paint this for a picture dealer called Gersaint. It’s always known as “L'Enseigne de Gersaint,” “The Sign of Gersaint.” Gersaint had a, well not really a gallery, it was more like a booth, on the Pont Notre-Dame in Paris. And this shows you what the booth looked like, or probably, it’s probably rather more spacious than the actuality as it was on the bridge. And it’s a very famous painting, and I’ve already used it, as so many historians have, to define that moment of change in French culture after the death of Louis XIV, and the shift from the rigours and the severity and the pomposity of Louis XIV towards a much more relaxed regime under the, of Regence, the Regence of the Duke d'Orleans. And on the left-hand side, we see the portrait of Louis XIV being happily packed away. Oh, this is the bridge, the Pont Notre-Dame, on which that gallery of Gersaint was housed. So you see the interior of the bridge here and what it looked like from the river on the bottom left-hand side. So Watteau’s influence was absolutely enormous and all-pervasive throughout much of Europe in the first half of the 18th century. In particular, he had an enormous influence on the decorative arts, on porcelain, either the decoration of plates or in porcelain figures. But there were many artists who imitated him.

But there was only one artist who actually studied with him, and that is the artist Pater, who we see here. Jean-Baptiste Pater, very prolific. And you see a lot of his work in country houses as well as museums. And it’s very charming. But it’s, he lacks, as I said, the drawing skills of Watteau. And the paintings are really just sweet, sugary, sentimental. There isn’t that pervasive sense of melancholy or even tragedy that we find in the works of Watteau. An artist who wasn’t a direct pupil of Watteau, but had actually been in this alongside him in the studio of Gillot is Nicolas Lancret. And he, there are works like this, which are clearly pretty directly imitating Watteau. This is a fete galante, all the trappings of the fete galante, the music, the landscape, and so on. But Lancret is more admired, really, for his genre scenes, like this one, the “La Tasse de Chocolat,” “The Cup of Chocolate,” which is in the National Gallery in London. But I’m moving on to an artist of a very different character, who, to me, is the greatest French artist of the 18th century, and this is Jean-Baptiste Chardin. And this description of him as a great artist would certainly have surprised Chardin himself. It would’ve surprised his contemporaries. Because although he was very popular, and his work sold well, and was bought by the king of Sweden, the king of Prussia, Louis XV, he had a lot of very distinguished, Catherine the Great. He had some very distinguished customers.

But in the 18th century, you have this hierarchy of the genres: history painting at the top, any kind of figurative painting, any genre painting below that, and types of painting like landscape, still life, and animal painting come, are at the bottom of the hierarchy. You may like them, you may collect them, but you don’t really think of them as great art. So a painting like this, which in reality, is tiny. It’s a tiny little picture. And even as far as still lives go, of course, it’s very humble. Humble, everyday kitchen objects. How can something like this be great art? But I think, well, from the 19th century onwards, these pictures have been enormously appreciated, especially, I suppose, in the second half of the 19th century, when you have a greater emphasis on the purely aesthetic side of art, the formal qualities, the painterly qualities. These pictures are so satisfying from that point of view. This is his, well, he had two morceaux de reception. This is one of them. It’s called “La Raie,” “The Skate,” and it’s a unusually big picture for Chardin. And as I said, his work was noticed by the leading academic artists of the day, such as Van Loo, and like Watteau, he was invited to become a member of the Academie Royale, which was a very great honour, particularly for a humble still life painter. And this work is truly spectacular and amazing. And this extraordinary painterly quality of the eviscerated fish.

He has that ability that only certain very great artists have to, Rembrandt has it, Velazquez has it, to, on the one hand, remind you that what you’re looking at is paint on a surface, when you get really close to this. And yet, on the other hand, he can use those, the texture of the paint and the way the paint is put on the surface to give you a quite extraordinary sensation. I mean, you can almost touch, you can almost smell the wet slipperiness of this fish. And it’s a painting that also, it has almost a sort of a tragic quality to it. I mean, a painting he certainly would’ve known, because it was in the French royal collection, was the “Flayed Ox” of Rembrandt. And so I think with both these pictures, there is a great sense of them being vanitas images. Again, reminding us of our mortality, that flesh is something transient. The great many pictures of dead animals, of trophies, not normally a kind of subject matter that would appeal to me, but these are so beautiful. There’s a, you can see several of them at a little museum in Paris, which I discovered quite recently for myself, which is Le Musee de la Chasse et Nature.

I recommend it to you when you are next in Paris. And the whole museum, really, is a kind of meditation on man’s relationship with nature and with the animal world. But I’d like to read you something that Chardin said about how he works, because I think it’s very interesting. He said, “I must forget everything I have seen, even the manner in which objects have been painted by others. I must place a distance where I no longer see the details. Above all, I must strive for proper and utterly faithful imitation of the general masses, the colour, tone, the roundness of shapes, the effects of light and shadows.” So it’s this separation, really, between the meaning of what he’s looking at. What he’s, he’s really trying to look at it in an almost kind of abstract way. And it reminds me of a statement that Monet made more than a century later when he said he sometimes wished that he’d been born blind and he’d had his eyes opened as an adult, and that he would just paint the visual sensations that his eye received without really understanding what it is that he’s painting. So these paintings are just so ravishing, little tiny ones like this, the harmony of the colour. And, I mean, there’s nothing flashy about his work. He’s not one of those artists who wields the brush with great brilliance and fluidity. It’s really quite a carefully built up paint surface. But it’s extraordinary, the poetry and magic he can get out of the most humble objects. This little pile of fraises des bois, those little wild strawberries that have a very short season and a very distinctive taste.

Again, another recommendation for your next Paris trip. You should go to the famous ice cream shop who can only do this in season, of course. It’d have to be in the summer. And to get their sorbet of fraises des bois, where this incredibly distinctive flavour of the wild strawberries is, seems to be heightened when it’s turned into a sorbet. If I had to choose one flower painting ever painted, it would have to be this, I think. And it’s the only one, actually, that survives by Chardin. It’s in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. You know, flower painting can be quite boring. You know, 17th, 18th century flower painting. More interesting, maybe, in later periods. But again, it’s the exquisite harmony of the colour and tone that elevates this into something quite magical. So Chardin seems to have been somebody who accepted his place in the hierarchy, but he had his ambitions and he wanted to move up step by step, maybe. And so in the 1730s, he begins to paint the human figure. This little painting of a young man making a copy of a drawing of a male nude is very interesting, because there are no nudes by Chardin. That was not in his repertoire. He never attempted to depict the nude human body apart from this work within a work. And he wasn’t really interested. He was interested in truth. He wasn’t interested in idealising reality. These two paintings in the Hunterian in Scotland show a kitchen boy and a scullery maid. And you can, so he’s not attempting to paint anybody important or anybody particularly beautiful.

These are very, very ordinary young people surrounded by their pots and pans. And this sense of sympathy or empathy with the humblest people in society I think is unusual in the 18th century, and any other artist who really comes to mind who had it sometimes is the English artist Hogarth. Two very famous paintings by Hogarth. This one on the left-hand side of a family who were his servants. Can’t really think of another 18th century painter who would’ve thought that his servants were worth painting and who, or who would’ve been able to paint them with such respect and dignity. And of course, the very famous “Shrimp Girl,” a street vendor, on the right-hand side, also by Hogarth. He does move up again a little bit the ladder of the hierarchy, the genres, by painting a number of pictures of wealthier, more bourgeois people. If not aristocrats, then princes and princesses. This must be a fairly wealthy woman with her pot of tea. Tea was a great luxury in the 18th century.

Oh, yes, I wanted to make a point about this. This painting was bought by Dr. Hunter. There were two famous Dr. Hunters. They were brothers. Dr. William Hunter, he was, and the interesting thing is, I mean, very wealthy, very successful Scottish doctor. He was the doctor to George III. And who bought several paintings by Chardin. And I find that particularly interesting because, I mean he certainly, he was interested in art and involved in the art world, because Dr. Hunter taught anatomy to artists at the Royal Academy. And so he’s very interested in the human body and the ideal body. So, in a way, an unexpected person to be, to like and want to buy the paintings of Chardin. But so, in 1776, he was responsible for commissioning this cast you see here of a hanged man who’s come down to us under the name of Smugglerius. He was a young man who was hanged for smuggling. You could be hanged for almost anything in the 18th century. And while his body was found dangling there, somebody thought, “What a great body. Pity to waste it.” And so he’s, apparently this young man had absolutely perfectly developed muscle structure, so Dr. Hunter ordered the body to be cut down. He’s propped up in the pose of the “Dying Gaul.” Flayed, of course, the skin taken off to expose the muscle structure. And this was used to, at the Royal Academy. It still exists. You can see it at the Royal Academy if you visit.

And it was used to teach anatomy for a couple of hundred years. But so, considering his involvement in that kind of art, as I said, I find it quite surprising that he was so keen on Chardin. So here, Chardin also, I mentioned last time, is, like many 18th century artists, likes to paint children. But it seems to me he’s one of the few artists who never slips into mawkishness. This is about as close as he ever gets to anything really mawkish or sentimentality. It’s called “La Gouvernante,” “The Governess.” And she’s, this is, she’s clearly giving some kind of telling off to this little boy. This, immensely, this was his most popular picture in his lifetime. “La Benedicite,” “The Grace.” And he was obviously very proud of this picture, 'cause there were a couple of versions of it. And this version, he actually took to Versailles to give to King Louis XV. This is the Chardin that I know the best, because it’s in the London National Gallery, so I always used to stand in front of it every year with my students, and we looked at it very carefully. And it’s a wonderful painting to really see Chardin’s highly distinctive technique. Of course, it’s a very, again, a very charming subject of this young school teacher.

Maybe the, a little child, I’m not sure whether it’s male or female, trying to learn to read. Maybe not the brightest child ever, so rather slightly dim expression on its face. But just look at the way that cap is painted with this crumbly paint texture. So, as I said, nothing flashy or fluid. The paint tends to be quite dry, and he likes to scumble. Scumble is where you drag dryish paint over the surface and it goes on in a slightly bumpy, rough way. Right at the end of, he lived a very, very long time, and at the end of his life, he had problems with eyesight, and he found it easier to work in pastel rather than oils. And he made this marvellous self-portrait and a portrait of his second wife. I just think this self-portrait is so moving. It’s so extraordinary. It’s so, again, it’s this honesty. This is really the great thing about Chardin, this truthfulness, this honesty of vision. This is how he was. He’s not trying to pretend to be an aristo. He’s not self-dramatizing himself. And here is his wife painted with, again, with truthful, or drawn with truthfulness and love in the technique of pastel. And I’d like to compare his self-portrait showing himself how he was. How you would, if you’re working in pastel, there’s a lot of coloured dust around, so you would probably wear something like this to protect your hair from getting full of dust.

He’s not trying to flatter himself, and he’s wearing very simple working clothing. The self-portrait, also in pastel, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour on the left-hand side that dates from a decade or so earlier, you can see he’s got great pretensions. He’s wearing a powdered wig. He’s wearing, there’s no way you would wear a blue velvet jacket while working in pastels, 'cause it wouldn’t be blue at the end of your, at the end of the day. So, but he’s, and he’s wearing that smirky smile, what Kenneth Clark called the smile of reasons. So he’s presenting himself to you as a very elegant, aristocratic character. It’s full of social pretension. And another self- portrait done less than a decade later on the right-hand side by Henry Fuseli, or Heinrich Fussli. Here, you feel, “Ooh, now something’s happened.” Romanticism has happened. And the artist is now really seeing himself as a sort of martyr hero. It’s got this extraordinary self-dramatizing intensity of that expression. So the Chardin portrait really falls completely between these two schools. It’s neither pretentious socially, nor is it pretentious in trying to present himself as being some martyr hero. I’ve left myself with not very much time, but maybe that was deliberate 'cause this is an artist I really don’t care for very much.

This is Francois Boucher. He is an artist who you could say represents the Ancien Regime in all its negative aspects of frivolous, insincere, self-indulgent. This is the artist, really, as a sort of lackey of a decadent, spoiled aristocracy. This is what’s called a fete champetre as opposed to a fete galante. Fete champetre, it’s shepherds and shepherdess, again, engaged in some kind of amorous discourse. It was actually the great philosopher and art critic Diderot in one of his salons who really put the boot into Boucher. Francois Boucher. Did I say who it was? This is Francois Boucher. And said, “This artist possesses every quality except truth.” That’s a very damning judgement . So in comparisons of rural life, and this, of course, very artificial. This is about as real rural life, Boucher’s picture, as Marie Antoinette’s little fake village in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. And for comparison, I show you Louis Le Nain, French peasants, bottom right-hand side, dated from the 17th century. A very sober and I would think truthful vision of these, of peasant life. And Millet, a century after Boucher in the middle of the 19th century, certainly showing the hard work involved in life as a peasant. But having been so dismissive of Boucher, I would like to say that actually, I think when he’s, you’re not seeing him at his best.

When you see a painting by Boucher in a museum alongside great masters of earlier periods or the 18th century, I think you have to understand him as being essentially a decorative artist. And he paints a lot of decorative works to go into boiseries, wood panelling. So you could see this sort of thing by Boucher in the Hotel de Soubise in Paris, what’s now the National Archives. And I think it is, his work is better when seen as part of an overall decorative context. These are two paintings in the Wallace Collection of erotic mythological scenes that were intended to be boiseries. They would’ve gone into panelling in a room but have been removed and framed actually in a slightly inappropriate Neoclassical style. So Boucher’s very, his interest in mythology is entirely erotic. Judgement of Paris on the left-hand side, Mars and Venus court in their adulterous affair on the right-hand side. The Wallace Collection has, in my opinion, way too many Bouchers, about 40 of them. But the most impressive are these two. They’re huge paintings on the main staircase of the Wallace Collection of the rising and the setting of the sun. And they were commissioned by Madame de Pompadour.

Actually, they were originally commissioned to be cartoons for tapestries. I think I’m going to move on quickly from him, because I want to have just a word about Fragonard. This is Fragonard’s most famous picture, also in the Wallace Collection in London, “The Swing.” It’s been recently cleaned and apparently all sorts of interesting detail has surfaced that was not visible before. I haven’t actually been to see it. It’s only just, I think, in the last couple of months gone on view at the Wallace Collection. And it’s another painting which could be used to illustrate the frivolity and the sheer silliness of the Ancien Regime. What’s it show? It shows a young aristocrat with his mistress. Apparently when he first painted this picture, the man pulling the ropes to the swing was dressed as a cleric or even as a bishop, which would’ve made it even more naughty. So you can see how, and of course this, the women in the 18th century were not wearing underpants. So the young man is ecstatic at the view that he has looking up her skirts as she’s swinging through the air. This is a work which is just the ultimate in the Rococo style, the sweet, sugary, bathroom pastel colours.

As I’ve said before, the Rococo abhors a straight line. There are no straight lines here. Everything is curving. All the limbs of the two figures, even in the young man lying on the ground. All a series of curves. Everything constantly undulating. Here’s a detail. And so that, it’s actually late. It dates from 1768. The height of the Rococo style was really in the 1730s and 40s. So he is actually, I would say, in a way, a retrogressive artist. The new style in the 1760s was Neoclassicism, and that was a style that was developed in Rome by a number of Northern European artists under the influence of Joachim Winckelmann, great prophet of the classical style. So, amazingly, these two pictures are painted in the same year. They’re both painted in 1768. It’s Benjamin West. It’s a classical scene, Cleombrotus, on the right-hand side. So I’m sure many of you heard me said before that one of the nice things about living in the Rococo period was never having to iron your shirt, 'cause you want the material to be crinkly. Soon as Neoclassicism comes along, of course, you have to get out the ironing board and the material has to be smooth, and it has to fall naturally, and it has to define the body underneath.

You could do a great compare and contrast between these two pictures, 'cause you can see that the move from Late Baroque and Rococo to Neoclassicism is really one of the great pendulum swings in Western art, happens in this decade of the 1760s. So with the Benjamin West, of course, everything there is sharply defined. The contours are defined. The space is defined. We’re going back to that Renaissance idea of having a floor that’s like a chess set. And you have that the space is defined and it’s confined, because you have a wall that’s parallel to the picture surface and the figures splayed out. Of course, the Fragonard is different in every possible way, the flickering light and the complex ambiguous space and so on. This is a mythological scene of, actually it’s about a decade earlier. Again, very Late Baroque, Rococo. It’s the story of Psyche and her sisters. Caused something of a scandal, because it was in the Mentmore sale, the great Rosebery Collection. They married into I think it was the Rothschilds. And they had a collection that rivalled, it would’ve been as great as Waddesdon. And it was, the whole collection was, and the house, Mentmore, was all offered to the nation for the sum, for a very, very modest sum of two million pounds. But the government at the time rejected it, and the collection was all sold by Sotheby’s. And, in fact, the museums spent a great deal more than two million in picking up just a few pieces.

This one sold for, it was misattributed by Sotheby’s. Of course, Christie’s were very gleeful about that and bought very cheaply and then sold on for a vast profit to the National Gallery. I think I’m going to have to move on. So, Fragonard. Yes, he can be very sugary, but he’s such a, he’s, this term painterly. What does it mean? It means using paint in a sensuous, expressive way. So Chardin is painterly, but he’s not flashy. This is very painterly, but in a much more dashing, very, very flashy, brilliant way. This is Fragonard’s portrait of Diderot. Just look at that brushwork. Flowing freely. Brilliant, dazzling technique. A lot of erotic work. And there probably were many more that haven’t survived. And I finish with this. His great unfinished masterpiece is a series of paintings commissioned by the last mistress of Louis XV. This is Madame du Barry painted by Vigee Le Brun in the insert. She had commissioned this pleasure pavilion at Louveciennes in the new, rather severe Neoclassical style. And she initially asked Fragonard to paint these period, these pictures to go in that pavilion called “The Pursuit of Love.” It’s a whole series of erotic scenes. But when they were nearly finished, she took a look at them and she thought, “No. No, no, this is old-fashioned. This is passe.” Even though she was a royal mistress. Now, the new chaste, rather more severe Neoclassical style was replacing the frothy frivolity of Fragonard. So the artist, she rejected Fragonard’s pictures and instead she commissioned an artist called Vien, Neoclassical artist, to paint a series of pictures. This is one of them on the right-hand side.

So what I think is quite interesting that, I mean, these are generally, they’re now in the Frick Collection, and they’re generally considered to be Fragonard’s greatest achievement. But this is the last of them, which he just didn’t bother to finish. I mean, he lived another quarter century, but, I mean, this, I think it says something about his attitude himself and as an artist that he would work to commission. He wasn’t painting to express his inner feelings in the way that, say, a Romantic artist would of the next generation. No, he’s just working. He’s earning a living. He’s a lackey to a royal mistress and he’s trying to, he’s producing his work for her and if she doesn’t want it, then he won’t even bother to finish it. Well, I must finish because I’ve overrun, and I’m going to see if I have any questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Versailles, it was wonderful going there. The performance was pretty so-so. It was a rather silly kind of pantomime presentation of “Purcell.”

“Did I feel like,” I never feel like Louis XIV. He’s one of my least favourite monarchs. And I sadly didn’t meet the ghost of Marie Antoinette. You wondered whether, I don’t think that could be the case, really, that Helena Fourment, I suppose it’s not just Jews, but other, Christians and Muslims also have all sorts of problems with women exposing their hair.

The Island of Cythera, spelt with a C.

Q: “Is there a ghostlike image on the left in the sky?”

A: I think what you’re looking at is a kind of a whole sweep of little cherubs sweeping off into the sky.

Yes, definitely, Jeff. Manet was very influenced by that particular picture of Watteau. That is true. And I’m sure that Morandi was influenced by Chardin. And they had a similar approach, in a way. You can feel the heaviness of those pots in the first painting.

“How many,” oh, there are so many museums in Paris. I discover new ones all the time.

Glad you love Chardin as much as I do.

He said, “I agree with you.” The sense of texture is really unmatched.

Q: Do I know what the red is that Chardin used?

A: You know, whether a red glows or not, it’s not the actual red that you use, it’s what’s around it that will make it glow. I’ve just been several times to the big Munch show, and he can really make the colour red, not just glow, it sings.

Thank you very much, Barbara. I know, the pastel is such a difficult technique, and I, those are so wonderful, the self-portrait and his wife. And I see exactly why you make the comparison with Rembrandt. It’s that sense of truthfulness, honesty. And I think he’s actually quite a profound artist, Chardin.

Thank you, Michelle. I think, yeah, the website, I think is coming. I think it’s really coming.

Q: “Was the Fragonard 'Swing’ ever in the National Gallery?”

A: No, I don’t think it, until, I think now that the Wallace Collection has managed to break its rules that it, before, it could never lend a picture. So the Wallace Collection was not allowed to lend pictures. So I don’t think the Fragonard “Swing” has ever been in the National Gallery.

Q: “What makes it Rococo?”

A: Oh my God, that’s a whole lecture. You have the colour, the curving lines, the frothiness. I could go on and on and on about that.

I didn’t see the dance piece based on “The Swing,” but I can see how it could lend itself to that. The new museum in Paris, well, it’s not new, but it is new to me, is the Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature, the Museum of Hunting and Nature, which is not at all what you might expect from that title. And it’s a really fascinating place to go to. Well, ‘cause the Louvre has lots of Chardins, but this Museum of Hunting and Nature have several of the pictures of game by Chardin.

Thank you very much everybody. And we move on to David and the Revolution on Sunday. See you then.