Thursday, April 4, 2024

Rococo Heads

Louis-Marin Bonnet after François Boucher
Head of Flora
1769
color engraving printed from eight plates
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Maurice-Quentin de La Tour
Portrait of Maria Josepha, Dauphine of France
1749
pastel
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
Head of a Young Woman
1779
pastel
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Antonio Guardi
Head of a Woman
ca. 1739
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art

attributed to Pietro Rotari
Head of a Woman
ca. 1750
drawing
Princeton University Art Museum

Domenico Maggiotto
Woman fixing her Hair
ca. 1745
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1780
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Samuel De Wilde
King Lear in the Storm
1786
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

Henry Fuseli
Portrait of Martha Hess
ca. 1785
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

workshop of Jakob Matthias Schmutzer
Head of a Young Man
1780
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Jean-Étienne Liotard
Portrait of a Gentleman in a Gray Coat
ca. 1770
watercolor miniature on ivory
Milwaukee Art Museum

Simon-François Ravenet
Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland
ca. 1755
enamel miniature
Cleveland Museum of Art

Joseph-Charles Marin
Bacchante
ca. 1786
terracotta
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Rosalba Carriera
Diana
ca. 1740
pastel
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Head of a Young Woman
ca. 1760
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Head of an Old Woman
ca. 1772-75
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"Never, never did she feel in life the sense of recognition, the companionship, the great warm fact of solidarity that she found between the covers of a book! Sometimes she got near it, that warm spot, here in the library on a Friday afternoon: she could crank them up, these girls, get them speaking her language. But it was an effort, a great performance, a show she put on just to make them act for an hour as if she and they did speak it, the same language. She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation. They were like little lights in a wilderness, a moor: from a distance they seemed clustered together, multitudinous, but close up you saw that miles and miles of empty blackness separated them."

– Rachel Cusk, from the novel Arlington Park (2006)