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| 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."
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| François-André Vincent Standing man ca. 1787 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Carle Van Loo Académie 18th century drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| 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."
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| John-Francis Rigaud Design for a monument 18th century drawing British Museum |
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| Jacques Philippe de Loutherbourg Cowshed with young woman giving milk to a child 1766 drawing Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| François Lemoyne Study for Omphale ca. 1724 drawing British Museum |
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| François Lemoyne Studies of a valet pouring wine ca. 1723 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| follower of Jean-Antoine Watteau Woman before a mirror 18th century drawing British Museum |
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| Augustin Pajou Design for a vase & supporting console 18th century drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Pierre Lepautre after François Girardon Equestrian statue of Louix XIV ca. 1700-1710 drawing British Museum |
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| Hyacinthe Rigaud Portrait of Louis XV on miniature throne at age five ca. 1716 Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Gabriel de Saint-Aubin Louis XV as Patron of the Salon of 1769 ca. 1769 oil on paper Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| 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."