Saturday, August 20, 2016

Statues and Persons in 18th-century French Art

Hubert Robert
Gardens at Frascati
1764
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Quotations throughout are from A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (New York : Hill and Wang, 1978)

"Here and there, on the trees, some leaves remain.  And I often stand deep in thought before them.  I contemplate a leaf and attach my hope to it.  When the wind plays with the leaf, I tremble in every limb.  And if it should fall, alas, my hope falls with it ..."  from the song Letzte Hoffnung, from Schubert's song-cycle Die Winterreise  

"In order to be able to question fate, there must be an alternative: she loves me / she loves me not; we require an object capable of a simple variation (will fall / won't fall) and an external force (divinity, chance, wind) which marks one of the poles of the variation. I always ask the same question (will I be loved?), and this question is an alternative: all or nothing; I do not suppose that things can develop, be exempted from desire's a propos. I am not dialectical. Dialectic would say: the leaf will not fall, and then it will fall; but meanwhile you will have changed and you will no longer ask yourself the question."

François-André Vincent
Standing man
ca. 1787
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carle Van Loo
Académie
18th century
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Laurent Pécheux
Portrait of Maria Luisa of Parma
1765
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art


"Though the lover's discourse is no more than a dust of figures stirring according to an unpredictable order, like a fly buzzing in a room, I can assign to love, at least retrospectively, according to my Image-repertoire, a settled course: it is by means of this historical hallucination that I sometimes make love into a romance, an adventure. This would appear to assume three stages (or three acts): first comes the instantaneous capture (I am ravished by the image); then a series of encounters (dates, telephone calls, letters, brief trips), during which I ecstatically "explore" the perfection of the loved being, i.e., the unhoped-for correspondence between an object and my desire: this is the sweetness of the beginning, the interval proper to the idyll. This happy period acquires its identity (its limits) from its opposition (at least in memory) to the "sequel": the "sequel" is the long train of sufferings, wounds, anxieties, distresses, resentments, despairs, embarrassments, and deceptions to which I fall prey, ceaselessly living under the threat of a downfall which would envelop at once the other, myself, and the glamorous encounter that first revealed us to each other."

John-Francis Rigaud
Design for a monument
18th century
drawing
British Museum

Jacques Philippe de Loutherbourg
Cowshed with young woman giving milk to a child
1766
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

François Lemoyne
Study for Omphale
ca. 1724
drawing
British Museum

François Lemoyne
Studies of a valet pouring wine
ca. 1723
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art

follower of Jean-Antoine Watteau
Woman before a mirror
18th century
drawing
British Museum

Augustin Pajou
Design for a vase & supporting console
18th century
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art


Pierre Lepautre after François Girardon
Equestrian statue of Louix XIV
ca. 1700-1710
drawing
British Museum

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Portrait of Louis XV on miniature throne at age five
ca. 1716
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin
Louis XV as Patron of the Salon of 1769
ca. 1769
oil on paper
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Benjamin Duvivier
Louis XVI as Protector of the French Revolution 
1789
bronze medal
British Museum

"How does a love end? – Then it does end? To tell the truth, no one – except for the others – ever knows anything about it; a kind of innocence conceals the end of this thing conceived, asserted, lived according to eternity. Whatever the loved being becomes, whether he vanishes or moves into the realm of Friendship, in any case I never see him disappear: the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking: the loved being once echoed loudly, now that being is entirely without resonance (the other never disappears when and how we expect). This phenomenon results from a constraint in the lover's discourse: I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative."