Thursday, August 11, 2016

European Painting from the 1790s

Antonio Canova
Three Graces Dancing
ca. 1799
tempera on paper
Canova Museum, Possagno

Jean-Baptiste Regnault
The Three Graces
1797-98
oil on canvas
Louvre

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Minuet
1791
detached fresco
Ca'Rezzonico, Venice

The successful Tiepolo family of Venetian artists owned a villa in Zianigo near Mirano. There, the direct heir of the tradition, Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) retired during the 1790s. For his own amusement, Giandomenico proceeded to fresco many inside walls of the villa with fanciful scenes of gaiety, refining an image-vocabulary built up over a busy lifetime. In 1907  almost exactly a century after the artist's death  these paintings were lifted from  the walls and reinstalled in Venice. Today they are publicly displayed within a palazzo-museum, though (like Goya's final, private murals, also lifted from their proper setting) the original impact can only be reconstructed in imagination.

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Promenade
1791
detached fresco
Ca'Rezzonico, Venice

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Punchinello and the Tumblers
1791
detached fresco
Ca'Rezzonico, Venice

Pierre Paul Prud'hon
Portrait of Georges Anthony
1796
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon

"Citizens, what illusion managed to persuade you that you were inhuman?" Saint-Just exclaimed on 8 Ventôse year II (26 February 1794). "Your revolutionary tribunal has dispatched 300 scoundrels in the last year; did not the Spanish inquisition do more? And for what cause, in the name of God! And did the English courts execute no one this year? And no one mentions the German prisons in which the people are buried."

 Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror, translated by David Fernbach (Verso, 2012)

Jacques-Louis David
Portrait of the Marquise d'Orvilliers
1790
oil on canvas
Louvre

Henri François Riesener
Portrait of Maurice Quay
1797-99
oil on canvas
Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Portrait of Pierre Sériziat
1795
oil on canvas
Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Portrait of Emilie Sériziat and her son
1795
oil on canvas
Louvre

Jan Bernard Duvivier
Portrait of the Villers family
1790
oil on canvas
Groeninge Museum, Bruges

Henry Fuseli
Leonore discovering the dagger left by Alonzo
1790s
oil on canvas
private collection

Anne-Françoise-Élisabeth Lange (1772-1825)  pictured below, twice  was famous in the 1790s as Mademoiselle Lange, a so-called Merveilleuse of the Directoire. She was born into a troupe of traveling players, performed on stage from infancy, and conquered Paris in the decade after the Revolution as star of the Comédie-Française. Inevitably, she also served as muse to fashionable painters like Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824). There was evident shock-value in painting a specific woman naked, rather than a formalized nude.

Anne-Louis Girodet
Mademoiselle Lange as Danaë
1799
canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Anne-Louis Girodet
Mademoiselle Lange as Venus
1798
oil on canvas
Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig