A Day in the Life
November 15, 2003
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting
Philip Conisbee, senior curator, European paintings and curator, French paintings, National Gallery of Art
A Magic Mirror? Surveying Genre in 18th-Century French Painting
Colin B. Bailey, chief curator, The Frick Collection
Despite the lowly status ascribed to genre painting in the Academy's hierarchy, every 18th-century figure painter of any stature (with the exception of Jacques-Louis David) tackled subjects from everyday life. This lecture addresses the different types of genre painting produced in 18th-century Paris, ranging from Watteau's fêtes galantes to Chardin's "little bits of common life" to Greuze's bourgeois dramas. It also examines a theme that serves to unify this diverse body of work: the immersion of the artist and his clientele in the rituals, pastimes, and preoccupations of Parisian sociability.
A Soldier's Life: Military Genre Painting in 18th-Century France
Julie Ann Plax, associate director, School of Art, University of Arizona
Early in his career, Jean-Antoine Watteau produced a group of military genre paintings. These scenes represent ordinary soldiers at ease, engaged in unheroic activities--images of military life that were quite different from the heroic battle scenes commissioned by Louis XIV. Watteau's was a civilian point of view; he had the opportunity to observe soldiers at rest in his hometown of Valenciennes, which housed a military hospital and military camps during the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713). Documents such as soldiers' journals and quartermasters' manuals help to illuminate both the typical soldier's life and Watteau's renditions of it.
The Themes of Games and the Hours of the Day in 18th-Century Art
Mary Tavener Holmes, independent curator, New York
Few places have understood the complex attractions of leisure time as well as France in the first half of the 18th century. Untroubled by Kipling-esque notions of filling "the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run," and equally far from the view that all idleness is wicked and slothful, the early 18th-century affluent class cherished unfettered time with an enthusiasm that still charms. It permeates the genre painting of the period, revealing that leisure time was a crucible for the fostering of relationships, creativity, and enlightenment.
The 18th-century genre artist joined this seductive conception of ease to a sophisticated grasp of traditional European imagery and allegory, enhancing deceptively simple narratives with multiple levels of understanding. The themes of Games and of Hours of the Day, popular in the genre art of the period, are "windows" through which one can explore not only imagery, but also the essential subject of all genre painting--the human condition. When Time is stripped of its power as remorseless prod, it becomes instead an ally in the understanding of humans, their occupations, and their desires.
Prospect and Promenade: The Figure in the Landscape in 18th-Century French Art
Richard Rand, senior curator and curator of paintings and sculpture, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Denis Diderot once famously claimed that Greuze's Marriage Contract and Vernet's landscapes were as much history paintings as Poussin's Seven Sacraments. What could he have had in mind with such a statement, which seems to undermine the humanistic theory of art that had been the foundation of ambitious painting since the Renaissance? The inclusion of numerous paintings we would call "landscapes" in the exhibition The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting begs numerous questions about the fluid nature of genre categories. Taking Diderot's quip as its starting point, this talk will explore some of the issues surrounding the appreciation of landscape in late 18th-century France. As the critical and popular status of landscape grew during this period, the role played by the human figure (both inside the painting as "staffage" and outside the frame as beholder) was often the determining factor in how these works of art were judged.