Patrick Bade
The Louvre, Part 3: The French School

Patrick Bade | The Louvre, Part 3: The French School

- Today we’re going to look at The French School. And once again, when we arrive at the Louvre we would go enter the museum through the Richelieu wing on the north side of the museum. And the paintings are on the top floor, but on the way up, we pass through the department which displays Renaissance, French Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts. And I always like to stop and look at the relief sculptures by Jean Goujon for the Fontaine des Innocents. The originals now belong to the museum. What you see on the actual fountain, these are modern reproductions. That’s what you see on the right-hand side. Well, actually at the moment, you can’t see them in the Louvre because the Fontaine des Innocents has just been restored and there’s a special exhibition at the Carnavalet Museum. But I like to look at them, well, they’re very, very beautiful, wonderfully seductive, these dancing ladies who are sources of , and their beautiful drapery, which captures both their body underneath, and also a sense of movement. So that monument has been there in Paris since the 16th century. And one of the things I’m stressing in all these lectures is how artists look at earlier art, and how they learn from it. And many, many French artists have looked at these reliefs. So here, this is actually a photograph I took about 10 days ago in Paris of the newly cleaned and restored monument. And so this, on the left is a painting by Ingres which is actually in the Musee d'Orsay now, “La Source,” and as you can see, it’s very directly inspired by the Jean Goujon. And in the middle is an umbrella stand, which is in my flat in Paris, which on all four sides it has brass copies of the Jean Goujon reliefs. And you find many, many wonderful sculptures by Goujon in French art. And when we get to the top, the earliest painting we’re going to look at is the so-called “Pieta de Villeneuve-les-Avignon” and it’s by an artist called Enguerrand Quarton.

He was born around 1410 and he died in 1466. And only two paintings survive by him, this is the most important and it’s a very beautiful work, and it shows the combined influences of Northern art, of Flemish art, and of Italian art. Remember that in the first half of the 15th century, you’ve got this revolution going on with artists attempting to give you a more convincing picture of the real world. You have the Florentine artists, Masaccio and so on, who were very concerned with the volume and form and space. And you have the Northern artists using the oil technique, who are more concerned with surface reality. And I think you have, as I said, you’ve got a combination of the two things in this picture with quite monumental and volumetric figures, but particularly the dome there on the left hand side is painted with great accuracy. And I think that’s a deeply felt and moving work. The other important French artist of the 16th century is Jean Fouquet, and only a very small number of his paintings survive. He also worked as an illuminator, a manuscript illuminator. And again, there is that Flemish influence with the enormous attention to detail, and the depiction of a face, so you see it’s the, for comparison, the van Eyck that I showed you last time, where the artist is in effect making a map of the face. But look at the difference between the background. You can see that the architecture in the van Eyck “Madonna with Chancellor Rolin” is Northern art, or even Romanesque because in fact, the arches are round. Whereas you can see that Jean Fouquet it’s believed that he went to Italy in the 1480s, and that he encountered the work of Montagna a major Italian artist.

And he certainly has a very complete grasp of perspective and we can see that all the decorative detail in the background is classical, it’s not gothic. Now we move on to the late 16th century in this very famous and very popular work. Of course, a lot of speculation. What is going on in this picture? And it’s not a lesbian love scene as some people think. Most historians believe that it’s a portrait of a royal mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrees, she was a mistress of King Henry IV, Henri-Quatre, the king of the Chicken in the Pot. And he was certainly a man with an eye for the ladies. And in fact, it seems to be a celebration of the fact that Gabrielle d'Estrees had become pregnant by the king and it’s thought that the woman sort of tweaking her nipple is actually her sister. And the woman sewing in the background also may be a reference to the impending birth. This is anonymous, it’s equal to Fontainebleau, School of Fontainebleau. This is really a provincial mannerist style, Mannerism with a capital M. This very courtly, elegant style that comes out of Florence. And through Fontainebleau, through the artist that France is the first imported to France, decorated parts of the Palace of Fontainebleau. It spread around Northern Europe. Big leap now. So from the end of the… Well, it’s only half a century actually but you can see what a difference between these two paintings. This is by a Flemish-born artist, French artist, called Philippe de Champaigne. He’s a wonderful artist. I think somewhat underrated though this particular work is of course well-known, probably his best known work. And there’s a very interesting back story to it. So Philippe de Champaigne, born in Brussels 1602, died in 1674. And the painting actually shows his daughter, Catherine. She’s the one who’s reclining. And she was in the, she was a nun in the convent of Port-Royal in the south of France.

I go past it every Saturday on the way to the flea market and I often think of this painting when I pass it. And she’s with the of the convent whose name was also, she’s also Catherine-Agnes Arnauld. And the painting celebrates what was seen as her miraculous recovery from paralysis. But what you think this is early 17th century, we’re in the heyday of the Counter-Reformation. We’re in the heyday of the Baroque style. So you would think, you think about this is exactly contemporary of course with Bernini. You know, if Bernini had been depicting this or, and Rubens. I think there would’ve been a lot more fuss. There would’ve been a lot more going on. There probably would have been buxom angels flying around and flapping drapery and all, and little of cherubs and drummer and rolling eyeballs, and open mouths and all of that. None of that here. Just this beam of light from above. And this reflects the particular religious ambience of the Port-Royal, which was the centre of Quietism with a capital “Q” was a particular version of Catholicism, which in some ways approached Protestantism because it put more emphasis on personal contact with God. So I think the sobriety of this painting, which I find very, very moving, has to do with the ethos of Jansenism, this version of Quietism that was practised at the Port-Royal. Now, very good painting this one. Again, I think it removed from painting because of its sobriety, because of its simplicity. This is by one of the Le Nain Brothers, they were three of them. There was Mathieu, there was Louis, and Antoine. And we don’t know a lot about them. We know that they were born around 1600, Mathieu just before and Louis and Antoine shortly afterwards. It’s, not it’s. They work together.

So it’s very difficult to sort out one of the Le Nain brothers from the others. But usually the best paintings, the most impressive paintings are attributed to the middle brother, which is Louis. And so this, here I think we need to make comparisons with Dutch ‘70s painting, so the Dutch painting, lots and lots of low-life paintings, peasants. But this is different. It’s actually quite a big picture. It’s on a lot and the figures have the gravitas and a monumentality, which you simply don’t find in Dutch painting of similar subject matter. Very, this peasant woman has a certain nobility and wonderful details, of course, like the cooking pot and the cat and the little child. So, here is a, called Dutch painting, which are usually small scale and jolly and anecdotal. There’s no anecdote that we can read in the paintings of Le Nain. They’re just a simple depiction of the peasants, none of the usual nonsense you get in Dutch paintings of people peeing in the corner and drunk and vomiting and dancing and all the stuff, that sort of humorous stuff that you tend to get in Dutch paintings. Now, they were not that well-known in their lifetime and they were completely forgotten afterwards. And so, the Le Nain brothers did in the 1840s, there’s always a reason why an artist will come back into fashion. Of course in the 1840s, we’ll get to that later. In France, you have the realist movement and you have Courbet and you have Millet, and they are interested in painting peasants, workers in a much more dignified and serious way. So they were looking at the Le Nain brothers for inspiration. Another very mysterious artist that we know very, very little about is Georges de La Tour.

I just looking at myself on my screen, I can see I’m looking a bit like Georges de La Tour myself with the breaking light from the side. He’s also 17th century, 1593 to 1652. We do have exact dates for him. And we know that he married a relatively wealthy wife, and we know that he lives in the small town of Luneville in Lorraine. I know that of course you’ll look at these and you’ll think immediately, ah, Caravaggio and Caravaggio is behind these. But we don’t know whether he actually ever saw a painting by Caravaggio. There is speculation he might have gone to Italy but I think the stronger likelihood is that he was looking at Dutch Caravaggio paintings, the Dutch artists of the city of Utrecht, who did go to Italy. They went to Rome and they brought back this Caravaggio style with a strong chiaroscuro with the light and shade. They brought that to Europe. The Utrecht artists you would really say were first rank artists. But they had a tremendous impact on many of the great artists in the north on Rembrandt, Francois, Vermeer, and clearly on Georges de La Tour. And again, they have, I think he was clearly a very religious man, a spiritual religious man, and possibly also influenced by the same kind of ideas that Philippe de Champaigne was influenced by with this much, with a version of Catholicism, which skews all the theatrical, the kind of operatic theatrical stuff of the Counter-Reformation and lays more emphasis on personal relationship with God and contemplation and Quietism. We see Mary Magdalene here on the left hand side who is contemplating a skull. And on the right hand side, we see Joseph and Jesus.

So Joseph is the husband of the Virgin Mary but of course not the father of Jesus. And in that Caravaggist way, I mean, in other paintings of Joseph, he can be painted as very beautiful and noble and so on but Georges de La Tour has chosen to paint him as a very . Here’s the detail of the Magdalene picture. So Caravaggio himself, I mean, one thing that suggests to me is that this Caravaggism is indirect, that it comes via Utrecht and not directly from Rome, is that we see the light sources. You never, almost never see an artificial light source in Caravaggio’s painting, but you do in all the Utrecht painters. And this is a very Utrecht effect where with the Jesus child’s hand in front of the flame and the fingers looking almost transparent. Move on to the most celebrated French artist of the 17th century of the Baroque period. This is Nicolas Poussin. His date’s 1594 to 16… No, 1594 to 1665. Very, very important key, key figure in French art right up through the centuries to the 20th century. But he actually spent nearly all his life in Italy. He was based in Rome, quite rarely went back to France. This is a self-portrait as I think you can see. And this is the Baroque period, so he is slightly younger contemporary of Rubens. And I think you can see Poussin and Rubens as the polar opposites within the Baroque style.

Rubens and Bernini of course are uber Baroque, full of movement, full of drama, kind of Hollywood technical drama. Poussin is a much more austere figure and he produces a version of the Baroque style that is calmer, more rational, restrained, even severe. And instead of all that kind of collinear movement that you get with Rubens, we have a composition here, which is as you based on rectangles, verticals, horizontals that create a sense of calm. This is an intriguing picture called “Et in Arcadia Ego” inspired by Virgil. It’s a line from Virgil and the line, “Even in our death is.” Even in Arcadia is the meaning of “Et in Arcadia Ego.” It’s death that is present. So even in the most idyllic, wonderful society, we’re all going to die in the end. So it’s really a vanitas, a memento mori. This painting some of you, I’m sure lots of you have read Dan Brown, “The Da Vinci Code,” and you may remember that there was a court case when he was sued by the authors of an earlier book called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” that many of the ideas is this great secret conspiracy of a bloodline that comes directly from Jesus. The central ideas of “The Da Vinci Code” came from the book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.” And in that book, of course there are various people through the centuries who are supposed to be in on the conspiracy and know about what’s going on. Leonard da Vinci, that’s why it’s called “The Da Vinci Code,” but also, and Debussy is another and Poussin is another. And in that book there was a theory that there are clues in this picture for the, where the grail and the treasure of the Holy Grail is located. So a biblical subject here, Old Testament, a Jewish Bible.

This is “The Judgement of Solomon.” And you can see again it is Poussin and a very calm, plasticizing version of the Baroque style. You can see everything is laid out parallel to the picture service. Although the figures are gesturing, there’s no real sense of movement here, everything is frozen and the figures have this very, very sculptural quality. And if you look at the treatment to the drapery, for instance, it looks like it’s carved, doesn’t look like it’s full of movement as it would if, as if Rubens was painting this. For me, the most beautiful paintings by Poussin in the Louvre, there’s a big collection of paintings by Poussin in the Louvre are come right at the end of his life. And it’s a series of four paintings of the seasons that were commissioned by the Duke de Richelieu who’s the nephew of the famous Cardinal de Richelieu. They’re painted between 1660 and 1664. And so it’s spring, summer, autumn, winter, and each corresponding to a particular book in the Jewish Bible. This is Genesis, of course, Adam and Eve in Paradise. And by this time, Poussin was in very poor health and his hands were trembling. And it’s Bernini had a very interesting comment about Poussin. He said with Poussin, the painting is very cerebral. And he said about Poussin, “His greatness is not in his hand, it’s in his head.” So, even despite the the the trembling hand, he’s able to create these very beautiful and rather serene paintings. This is Summer and it’s the book of Ruth and Boaz discovering Ruth gleaning in the fields. This is Autumn and it’s the Book of Numbers and it’s the Israelite spies returning from the land of Canaan bearing grapes.

And the final Winter is the book of Noah, and it shows the flood. Now Poussin is somehow always paired with Claude, Claude Lorrain. The two of them, the two greatest French artists of 17th century and around in the 1620s, they both went to Rome, they knew each other very well and apparently were on very good terms with one another based in Rome. Now, in fact, the Louvre collection of Claude’s is very small. The National Gallery in London has a much richer collection of paintings by Claude. And the reason for that is that the English milordy, English aristocrats on the Grand Tour in the 18th century, they were crazy for Claude. They absolutely adored his work was the English, famous English gardens of the 18th century were often inspired by the landscapes of Claude and they even had what was called the Claude glass, which is a kind of an orange tinted ovoid lens. So you could sit in the English countryside on a grey day and imagine you were in Central Italy. So, this is probably the most interesting painting by Claude in the Louvre collection. It’s very early on. It’s painted from the end, in the end of the 1620s when he’s still a very young man. And there’s a reason why I think no English milord would’ve wanted to touch this particular painting, they left it behind, because it shows the siege, the 1627 Siege of La Rochelle. La Rochelle was a Protestant city and Cardinal de Richelieu he perceives the city was a terrible, terrible siege. People starved to death. And this was really the Protestants holding out against Catholic domination and persecution. So I don’t think many English aristocrats would’ve really wanted this painting in their collection because those English were, of course, mostly staunchly Protestant and anti-Catholic.

A more characteristic painting harbour scene by Claude. This is what’s called a Capriccio because you’ve got real buildings that exist. You’ve got the Campidoglio of Michelangelo in the background, but he’s transferred it to the sea and put it beside a harbour. Again, this is a picture which doesn’t seem to have a particular theme or narrative. It’s really just a fantasy. Now, in the second half of the century or towards the end of the century, the leading French artists, I think really on a lower level than Poussin And Claude, this is Charles Le Brun and I suppose this is his most famous easel picture. He spent more of his time painting frescoes and he was discovered by the Chancellor of France, Nicolas Fouquet, a man with a brilliant eye for talent. And he brought together the team of Charles Le Brun, decorator and painter, Le Vau, architect, and Le Notre, garden designer. And he got them to design a palace for him outside of Paris called Vaux-le-Vicomte. I’ve just done a visit there in May with a group and I’m going to be doing it again in May next year. I really recommend it. It’s a magic, magic place, Vaux-le-Vicomte. So, of course, Louis XIV was invited for the grand opening of the palace and thought, aha, where does the money come from to pay for all of this? And why does my chancellor have a more magnificent palace than I have? So he had Fouquet arrested and he took over the team of Le Brun, Le Vau, and Le Notre to create Versailles.

But for me, Vaux-le-Vicomte is a hundred times more beautiful than Versailles. I mean, Versailles just got completely out of hand. The megalomania of Louis XIV and landed up, in my opinion, was a rather ill-proportioned building. But if you really want to see this wonderful , this combination of architecture, decoration, and garden, place to go is Vaux-le-Vicomte. So the history of western art is of course full of stories of its rivalries between artists and the chief rival of Charles Le Brun was this artist, Pierre Mignard. And in fact, they both lived a long time but Mignard outlived Le Brun so he had the satisfaction of taking over as principal painter to Louis XIV after Le Brun died. So this is very late Baroque, wonderful Baroque wig he’s wearing. And I’m very interested in him at the moment because, and I can’t resist sharing this with you, last year I bought this painting in Paris. Anonymous but I’ve done a bit of research and some compare and contrast, and I’m convinced that this is a painting by Pierre Mignard. So it is, well, I didn’t, I paid a remarkably small sum of money for this but it seems to me a painting of a quality that deserves to be in a great museum, this could hang in the Louvre and it would still look good. It’s one of those great portraits, particularly Baroque ones.

When you stand in front of them, Rembrandt, Velazquez and so on, you should feel, you should forget that this is just paint on canvas. You should feel that you’re confronted by a living person. And that’s what happened when I saw this is it just arrived in a, my favourite gallery in Paris, Galerie Amicorum, it was on the floor, they hadn’t even hung it. And I walked in, our eyes met and I thought I knew this man. I mean, he’s so alive, it’s such a wonderful portrait. And look at what, we did comparison. I did the morelli stuff of where you look at particularly, you look at the hands or you look at the lips, or you look at the drapery. or you look up here. I looked at the way the lace was painted and the material was painted, and I compared it with other paintings by Mignard. We don’t know who… So when I bought it, it was unattributed and of course we don’t know who the man was. I don’t think he’s a, he’s obviously somebody who’s reasonably well off from his clothing but this is not the clothing or the appearance of a great aristocrat. I think it’s more likely to be another artist or maybe a writer. Of course, if one could find that out, that would be very interesting too. So this is still 17th century Louis XIV and we move on to the 18th century. And the man who really sets the tone for what we call the Ancien Regime, The Ancien Regime is that period in France between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. So it’s a period with very aristocratic values. It’s a very hierarchical, France is dominated by the court, the aristocracy, and the church, and they’re all exempted from taxes. It’s only the ordinary people have to pay all the taxes and pay for all of this. And it’s a period of sophistication and aristocratic elegance.

And this is a painting, oh, I’m missing something here. This is just a detail. This is Antoine Watteau, who was, when he was born in 1684 at Valenciennes, which at the time was in the Spanish Netherlands. But so he wasn’t born French. He became French but he seems to us to be the ultimate French artist. And he created an entirely new genre of painting when he was accepted into the French Academy in 1720, no, 1717. They didn’t know, French are obsessed by rules and regulations and categories and there were, you could be accepted as a history painter, you could be accepted as a portraitist, you could accepted as a landscapist or a still life artist. This didn’t fit into any of those categories. So they created a new category, which they called the fete galante. A fete galante is a beautiful young people in theatrical costume. These are not the costumes that people actually wore in, it’s a fantasy theatrical version of early 18th century costume. And they’re in an idealised park landscape and there is flirtation, I suppose today what you might call sexual harassment. There’s a lot of groping and kissing and touching the men of the women. This, oh, I’m sorry, I don’t, I’ve somehow managed to delete the image of the whole picture. This is called “The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera.” The island of Cythera is the island of love. And you can see that they have pilgrims staffs.

So they’re pilgrims to the island of love. So this is a very discreet, poetic way, a metaphor for having sex. There’s quite a lot of discussion about whether the usual title is actually correct because is this, this detail in particular looks like actually the sex act has taken place and they’re leaving the island of Cythera. They’re not embarking to go towards it. You see the young woman here on the left looking back, sadly, regretfully, nostalgically on the couple on the right hand side who is still very much involved with one another. So, it’s a happy subject, you could say, young lovers. But as with many of Watteau’s paintings, I think one, the thing that brings, raises them above the chocolate box, you can see it can very easily slip into a chocolate box, bad imitations of Watteau, is this, that they are permeated with this sense of nostalgia and sadness. Apparently he was himself a very melancholic personality. He was tubercular and died very young. This is another of his great masterpieces. “Gilles.” Gilles is of course comic character of from the commedia dell'arte. But again, although we’ve got figures at the bottom, they look quite cheery comic. But Gilles he’s the tragic clown and this is a big picture actually. And some people the frontality of those and has reminded some art historians of images of Christ before the people. This is Rembrandt on the right hand side. I leave it to you to decide whether you think that’s a convincing theory or not, but there does seem to be a very tragic quality to this “Gilles.” So I said one of the themes I want to underline through all these talks is how The Royal Collection and then the Louvre, it’s always been there for artists to look at even before the revolution. It was always possible for artists to then, it was more or less a public collection. And I think when you go through the Louvre now, it’s so interesting to see the links across the century between different paintings. Not Louvre to Washington but it’s by Manet.

You know, he’s a realist in the 19th century. So he’s done a kind of scruffy, claudean version of the “Gilles” with this little boy. Now we move on to Chardin and this was the painting I showed you, the first painting I showed you by Watteau, “The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera” was the for his membership of the academy. It’s the same with the Royal Academy in London. When an artist is made Royal Academicians, he has to give a painting to the collection of the academy. So this dates from 1727. It’s quite early in Chardin’s very long career. He lives from 1699 to 1779. And title of this picture is “La raie” skate. And it’s a big picture by his standards, quite monumental. Often his works’ on a very small scale. Now, these days, I think most people would regard as one of the greatest artists of the 18th century. If I had to choose a single French artist of the 18th century, it would undoubtedly be Chardin over all the other very gifted artists. I think this would surprise him and it would certainly surprise connoisseurs in the 18th century. Now, his work was always appreciated and it was bought by royalty, Catherine the Great, the king of Sweden, Louis XV, they all owned paintings by Chardin, had an international reputation, famous Dr. Hunter in Glasgow bought paintings from Chardin. But in the 18th century you have the hierarchy of the genres. So, the different types of painting. Top of the heap is history painting with nude and draped figures and noble and heroic themes.

And lower down comes portraiture and any kind of painting with a human figure. And below that comes landscape painting. And right down the bottom really are still life and animal painters. So however good the artists are, and it’s the same in England, of course, with George Stubbs, who was very appreciated by the English aristocracy for his knowledge of the horse. But the art connoisseurs wouldn’t, the paintings of horses, paintings of still life by their very nature cannot be considered to be great art. It’s a stunning, amazing painting. He’s without ever being flashy, he is a great painter, elite painter. That means that he can use the substance of paint, the of paint on the surface to evoke, I mean, you can almost smell that fish on you. You know what it would be like to sliminess if you touched it and it’s an amazing gift that he has for this. Diderot who praised Chardin found this painting absolutely disgusting. And I think it does have, again, a tragic heroic quality. A painting that he probably knew was the Rembrandt “Flayed Ox” that I showed you last time. Again, there both paintings I think have a very moving, a very tragic quality and a sense of, again, memento mori reminding you of death. Now I look at this fantastic detail. He’s a great scumbler. Scumbling, I’ve talked about it before. I think first scumbler in western art was Titian. It’s where you have a slightly rough surface and dryish paint, and you drag it across and it goes on in a sort of crumbly way. But this is the one I, is the one I would steal from, there are many little pictures. I think these are the most beautiful paintings, magic paintings by Chardin, often of very simple objects. And in that they contrast with a lot of Dutch 17th century still lives, which of course he was inspired by, but the Dutch tend to have very rich things. You know, oriental carpets and elaborate Baroque silver, and costly porcelain. Here we’ve got a very just simple glass, garlic, and tiny picture, absolute magic.

It gets such poetry out of such simple subject matter. Now I think he was, when he understood his limitations as an artist, he understood what he was good at, but I think he was also ambitious. He starts to include the human figure to paint genre scenes, everyday life scenes. He’s not so foolish or so ambitious that he starts to paint nude figures and big heroic history paintings. These are simple paintings of everyday life. This is probably his most famous and popular picture. It’s called “La Benedicite,” it’s the grace. He was obviously pleased with it because he presented it to Louis XV. So it went directly into the Royal Collection. And you could say it hovers on the brink of sentimentality but to me it escapes that. Unlike many other cutesy 18th century paintings of children. There’s again, always a certain severity, a certain sobriety and great tenderness. I think another artist Jean Perronneau, he was exclusively a portraitist and he worked largely in pastel but this is an old painting and it’s a portrait of a lady called “Madame de Sorquainville.” And you may, I may have shown you this picture before. I use it quite a lot in lectures because for me she represents the Ancien Regime, the values of the Ancien Regime. This period in the 18th century, it’s less than a century 1715 to 1789 with very aristocratic culture and values. And she has, she’s wearing that smile. In aristocratic portraits of the 18th century everybody’s smiling at you all the time. You walk into an 18th century French room and you’re surrounded by smiling people. Kenneth Clark called it the smile of reason. I call it the smirk of reason ‘cause it’s a slightly superior smirky smile.

Here you see it a little closer too. Fragonard is the absolute tail end of the Baroque Rococo style and he illustrates another aspect of the Ancien Regime, which is its licentiousness. The 18th century is the golden age of erotic literature. Books like “Les Liaisons dangereuses” in France, “Fanny Hill” in England, and the memoirs of the period. “Memoirs of Casanova,” of course, are very notorious, just really a listing of his sexual conquests. And there’s quite a lot of that also in the highly entertaining memoirs of Mozart’s librettist, Jacopo dal Ponte. So you get very frank, very sensuous representations of the nude in the 18th century. This is, both these pictures upstairs in the Louvre, this one’s called “The Bolt” and this really could be an illustration to “Fanny Hill,” clearly an erotic scene. Fragonard another painterly painter. Now I said that Chardin is painterly but in a non-flashy way. Fragonard is extremely flashy. It’s dazzlingly brilliant really this brush work. You’ve got to admire it. I mean the confidence, you know, with this juicy, fluid brush work, it looks like it’s been thrown off very, very quickly. So, I’m always surprised when I look at the dates of Fragonard which is 1732 to 1806, he lives into the 19th century. So, he’s really reached his maturity as an artist in the 1760s, by which time he’s actually, you could say rather passe because that is the birth of Neoclassicism. And it reaches its height in the 1780s and '90s. And the transition from late Baroque Rococo to Neoclassicism is one of those great pendulum swings in western art. They’re opposites in every way.

And again, I’m sure you’ve heard me say this, that it’s wonderful thing living in the Baroque Rococo period was never having to iron your shirt. The more rumpled and the more full of movement and animation your clothing is, the better. And you know, this Marilyn Monroe thing of the wind lifting the material. And then you move on to Neoclassicism. This is a painting from the end of the 1790s by Jacques-Louis David, “Portrait of Madame Verninac.” And you have to get the ironing board out because the material has to be smooth and it’s no longer full of movement and it clings to the body underneath it, and it defines the body underneath it. This is an extraordinary painting that for a long time was misattributed and that’s because it was painted by a woman. And until the last generation, paintings by women sold for less money than paintings by men that was reattributed to various men. I think you could guess possibly that this is a painting by a woman. Her name was Marie-Guillemine Benoist. Her dates are 1768 to 1826. She was a pupil of another woman painter, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and later a pupil of David. And this, I think you… This is not a typically male view of female nudity. She is looking at us, she’s engaging at us, but there’s nothing remotely flirtatious or come-hither about her expression. She is looking at us as appraisingly as we are looking at her. And she has great dignity and great gravitas despite the fact that she is exposing breast. I think it’s a wonderful painting. I find it very arresting every time I walk past it in the Louvre. Have a look at the face. You see what I mean about this very cool, appraising expression on her face. Moving on to another very famous nude and an artist of course who is particularly known for his nudes.

This is Ingres and this is the so-called, the so-called “Baigneuse de Valpincon.” And of all his nudes, to me, this is the loveliest. It would seem to be an or in a Turkish or a Muslim harem. And like so many people, he was fascinated by the letters of Mary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who visited the harem of the Ottomans in Constantinople in Istanbul and got excited generations of male readers with her descriptions of these gorgeous women lolling around in the harem. So this is early in this astonishing painting. I don’t know whether you like it or not, that would be interesting to know. “The Turkish Bath,” which is the final masterpiece of Ingres. It’s got a, it’s signed at the bottom in rather shaky writing. Ingres paints it 81. So he was actually 81 when he finished this picture. And it’s the culmination of a lifetimes’ fantasy about harems, heaps of boneless, passive women. They all look like they’ve been bought from a sex shop and blown up with a bicycle pump. They don’t have any bones in their bodies lolling around and it’s very difficult to tell which hand is squeezing what and who is squeezing whom. So it’s, I sort of feel this is, I mean of course it’s an incredibly sexist male fantasy, isn’t it? And it’s Ingres little boy in a sweet shop with all these gorgeous, massive female nudes. The insert there is the man who bought it from Ingres. He was a Turkish prince called Khalil Bey who was notorious for collecting erotic pictures, Ingres’ male portraits mostly date from early in his career. And when he was in Italy under Napoleonic rule and this man was Napoleonic official, which called the, these are wonderful portraits. Just point out the cravat.

Notice the high, the period of very, very elaborately tied cravats famous stories of people like Beau Brummell who spent the entire morning doing his cravat before he emerged out into the world. And somebody visiting him at lunchtime noticed a huge pile of soiled cravats and said to his servant, “Oh, what’s that?” And the servant said, “Oh, those are today’s failures.” Well, cravats are a challenge to an artist. How do you depict such an elaborate cravat? And there are two ways to do it. You can and Ingres does it in a linear way. He’s actually drawing the structure of the cravat. And this is Delacroix, his great rival who uses a slushy painterly way of suggesting the cravat rather than delineating it. So, we have a couple of marvellous Ingres report ‘cause after a certain point in his career, after when he achieved a certain fame and he could pick and choose who he painted, he basically only painted women and he only painted women he fancied in that way. He is rather like Clint and he’s also, these portraits are wonderful for the depiction of interest in fashion. And if you wanted to do lecture on 19th century French women’s fashions from 1800 to 1860, you could do it entirely with paintings by Ingres. Wonderful details. Even though the painting is very tight, it’s very smooth, it’s not painterly, it’s never dry, it’s never boring. There’s always a sense of almost jewel-like sparkle to his paint surface. This may be his greatest portrait of all. Monsieur Bertin who is a editor of a conservative newspaper and he was a friend of Ingres, and this is pretty well-unique among Ingres’ later portraits in being a portrait of a man. And he had terrible difficulty with it.

And he struggled to find a pose that would be both formally satisfactory and would express the personality of the sitter. And he got so agitated at the point he broke down in tears and had to be comforted by Monsieur Bertin. I like to think this picture shows that moment actually, that it was a kind of eureka moment that there is Monsieur Bertin rather astonished actually, this distinguished middle-aged artist in floods of tears and turning towards him with a quizzical but also comforting expression. And I can’t resist showing you this. I mean, Ingres would be my favourite French, Ingres and Degas, my two favourite French artists of the 19th century, ever actually of any period. And I would love to have an Ingres drawing but outside my price range. So I bought this one on the right hand side, which is by a pupil of Ingres called Gomar Casas. He was a favourite pupil of Ingres and you can see that the drawing, the portrait is almost a ripoff of Monsieur Bertin. So that was a nice drawing within my price range. Gericault, the arch Romantic. Romantics have to die young. There’s no kudos in becoming a middle-aged or elderly romantic. It’s the same with… You know, romantics are… Rock stars are Romantics, you know, modern equivalent of Romantics with a capital R. So this is Gericault dying in his early 30s painted by a friend. He died within a couple of months of that other great Romantic who died prematurely, Lord Byron. So I showed you, you’ve got here, they both died in 1824. Gericault on the left, Byron on the right. I’m going to skip this ‘cause I’ll talk about it next time. Gericault obsessed by horses.

This is “The Race of the Riderless Horses” in the Corso in Rome. It’s currently in exhibition if you want to pop over to Paris after the Olympics at the Museum of Romantic Life. There’s an exhibition of like horses of Gericault’s Horses. Came to England, went to Epsom. This is his painting of “The Derby.” Of course, he is before the invention of photography. And it was only with photography, vast exposure of photography that people knew that horses don’t gallop like rabbits and they always have a foot on the ground. But how about these horses’ backside. I mean nobody understood horses as well as Gericault. And each horse is not a generic horse, each horse is a portrait of an individual, a real horse. So you know, you say yes, I know that horse from its backside, I’ve seen that backside. That’s a real horse that I know. And for me, his greatest achievement, these extraordinary a series, there were apparently 12 of them and I think they’re six that survived. Paint in 1821, paintings of “mad people” in inverted commas and no one can’t say that anymore. But he himself had a mental collapse and he was being treated by a doctor called Dr. Georget. And he painted these pictures for Dr. Georget and they were really painted in the spirit of medical and scientific inquiry. So, each portrait is of a particular, we don’t know who the people are, we don’t have any names, but we do know the particular form of madness that they suffered from. So this one, this woman was obsessed with gambling. This one had obsessive envy. So they were really, the one on the left is a paedophile kidnapper and the one on the right suffered from military megalomania. So there really is an attempt to understand madness or mental illness, shall we say.

Only the one actually in the Louvre, the first one. This, when I was a student at The Courtauld and I was actually researching Puvis de Chavannes and I went to the Paris, I went to the Louvre and I went to the print room of the Louvre. So this is in the Louvre but we don’t normally see it. And I knew about this drawing. It’s, my teacher… Actually even from earlier, my teacher at University College told me about this drawing that Gericault made of his own hand, his left hand on his deathbed in 1824. So, I went to the print room with the aim of looking through all the drawings by Puvis de Chavannes but the very first thing I asked for was this. And for me, it was such an experience to hold the hand of Gericault in my own hand. Delacroix, I can see I’m running out of time, so I’m going to move on quickly. He’s another romantic, cool character. He’s a dandy. He’s giving us a very phrasing stare. Of course he has the romantic tousled hair. This also in the Louvre is this fragment of a double portrait that he made of Chopin and his mistress, George Sand. He was great, Chopin and Delacroix were great mates. Funnily enough, they didn’t appreciate each other’s art but they loved each other in human terms. This George Sand didn’t like the way she was depicted. So Gericault, Delacroix never finished it. And it was chopped into, this is , it was one painting. I’m going to move, I won’t talk about this because I’m going to talk about the big version next time. This is a fascinating painting. Delacroix went to North Africa accompanying a diplomatic mission in 1834.

So he went to Algeria and he moved across to Morocco. And he kept a notebook, a diary and he tells us that he went to a Jewish wedding. So this is a Jewish wedding. Of course, he would never have been able to pay the Muslim equivalent. Jews were more open to visitors and the women in the Muslim households were of course kept safely hidden. And there’s a wonderful diary description, you know, very, very detailed of what he saw at this Jewish wedding. And it’s all put, fed into this picture. I’m going to move on. This is Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes and if you didn’t know that this was painted in the 18th century, you’d be unlikely to guess it. Because it’s very clearly painted out directly before the motif. It has a simplicity and a truthfulness that really anticipates the 19th century to Constable Corot and so on. And he did many of these sketches and they’re absolutely ravishing, but they were, these are what he’s famous for today. These are what people appreciate but he never exhibited anything like this. There’s another, the informality and snapshot of view of Rome, this is by Valenciennes again. So this, what you see on the right hand side is the sort of thing, a very slick, highly worked pictures that he sent to the salon. But as I said today, it’s the little oil sketches painted outdoors that people love. And that is to some extent true also of Corot. This is his sketch of the, no, this is the painting he sent to the salon of “The Bridge at Narni” and it’s very lovely. But this was repainted from this, this which is what he actually saw and which he got down from reality and has a fantastic immediacy and freshness and truthfulness that looks forward to impressionism. And this is the last picture I’m going to show you. Its a portrait by Corot and because, I finished with this because it again, underlines my point about artists going to the Louvre and learning from the art of the past. So, let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

I know I haven’t been in Paris, I’ve been in, I’m just back from the Munich and Bergen’s Opera Festivals with a group. I came back last night so I missed all of the Olympics.

Let me see. It’s a skull and, yes, it’s a skull in the lap of the Magdalene. Why did this art shift away from the personal? I’m not sure anymore what you’re referring to. Watteau’s painting of the isle of love there’s young child seated on the far right would appear to be in congress with the theme or painting. Yeah.

Q: Do I think that Joseph Wright of Derby learned his use of light? Where do I think he…

A: I don’t think Joseph Wright of Derby was probably aware of Caravaggio, even though he did go to Italy because nobody was looking at Caravaggio in the 18th century. He was a forgotten figure. I think Joseph Wright of Derby like the artist I showed you today, he learned his use of light from the Dutch Caravaggism, not directly from Caravaggio.

Chardin. Yeah, all right.

Lorenzo. Yes, sorry. Lorenzo Da Ponte. Jacopo dal Ponte is an artist, those little senior moment. Paula. Thank you, Paula. Oh dear, I’m really sorry to hear that you’re not able to see them so well. Mozart’s librettist, yes.

Is it possible? Yes, absolutely, Naomi. There’s no doubt about that. Chardin was one of the favourite artists of Sutti, very influenced by him. Where did Rosa Bonheur fit into the depiction of horses? Well, ‘cause Rosa she really understood horses, absolutely. And she’s quite a bit later. You know, she’s mid 19th century, so she’s a generation later than Gericault. I’m not a huge fan of Rosa Bonheur, really. There was a big show in Paris last year and I think I would take Gericault. Gericault and Gerome connection, I’m not sure what you’re asking there. And so, well, Degas was a new Degas, coral of course, because Degas didn’t very, very rarely painted outdoors and didn’t do very many landscape paintings.

So that seems to be it for today. Next week I’m going look at the huge French paintings in the Grande Galerie, famous ones like “Liberty Leading the People” and so on. So, see you then. Bye-bye.