Friday, July 14, 2017

Late 18th-century Portraits IV

Charles Hénard
Miniature portrait of a woman
1798
watercolor on ivory
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Carl Fredrik von Breda
Portrait of Teresa Vandoni,
Italian singer at the Royal Opera, Stockholm

1797
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

circle of Jacques-Louis David
Family portrait
ca. 1795
oil on canvas
Musée de Tessé, Le Mans

"The French Revolution was made by the bourgeoisie.  By that I mean roughly what Burke meant at the time, when he said that "the moneyed men, merchants, principal tradesmen, and men of letters . . . are the chief actors in the French Revolution," though obviously I differ from Burke in thinking that the coming to power of such men was part of an irreversible change in the social and symbolic order.  "Part of," is sufficient here.  Not "caused by" or "expression of."  I am not interested in a narrative of causes.  All I want or need to do, for my present purpose, is insist on the oddity of the word "People" in a revolution of this social character."

"An image will do better than a thousand words.  There is a picture in the Le Mans Museum that for years was thought to be by David himself, and that I think must have come from someone in his inner circle.  It is rightly held to be one of the most poignant documents to come down to us of the change that the revolution wrought in personal style.  Nothing I can say will rob, or is meant to rob, the man in the center of the picture of his plain dignity.  It is massive and touching.  But for that very reason I think we should attend to the contrast between the father's careful symbolic déshabillé and the costumes of his sons and daughter, the china on the mantleshelf (one looks about for a terra-cotta Marat), the glimpse of picture-covered walls, the well-turned furniture, the spinet and the young girl's music lessons, the power to order this painting in the first place."

– T.J. Clark, from Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999)

Louis-Léopold Boilly
Portrait of Jan Anthony d'Averhoult
1792
oil on canvas
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
Portrait of the Marquise de Pezay
with the Marquise de Rougé and her sons Alexis and Adrien

1787
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
Self-portrait
1781
oil on canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
 
Angelica Kauffmann
Portrait of the Impromptu virtuoso Teresa Bandettini Landucci of Lucca
1794
oil on canvas
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Joseph Duplessis
Portrait of Christoph Willibald Gluck
1775
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Anton Raphael Mengs
Portrait of George, 3rd Earl Cowper
ca. 1769
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Young woman
ca. 1769
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

François Boucher
Portrait of Madame Bergeret
ca. 1766
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Anton von Maron
Portrait of Archibald Menzies
1763
oil on canvas
Harvard Art Museums

Antoine de Favray
Portrait of Dr Salvatore Bernard with his wife and son
1759
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Andrea Soldi
Portrait of sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac
1751
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London