Eighteenth-century Art Research Articles

The Expressive Face: Manifestations of Sensibility in Eighteenth‐century French Art

Attempts to explore the way in which one particular aspect of appearance, facial expression, was used by 18th-century French artists to convey the different kinds or modes of feeling which were seen as either fashionable or desirable by their contemporaries. Ideal inner life in 18th-century France; Passion in art; Facial etiquette; Absorptive faces.

Head to Head Encounters

Head to Head Encounters

Un monument pastiche, le musée Nissim de Camondo à Paris

A pastiche monument, the Nissim de Camondo Museum in Paris. The Paris town house built in 1911 by René Sergent for the banker Moïse de Camondo, a major collector of eighteenth-century art, was a skilful interpretation of Gabriel’s Petit Trianon, adapted for a narrow urban building plot. The Petit Trianon at Versailles was seen, at this date, as the quintessence of the spirit of French taste. It was the continuity of this taste, through history, that Camondo wished to celebrate. The architect Sergent had already earned some recognition as a talented pasticheur, particularly in New York where his palace store, commissioned by the antique merchant Duveen on Fifth Avenue, reproduced the most notable compositions of the Place Louis XV. The building erected for Moïse de Camondo received a second « commemorative » function after the First World War. The banker donated his house, as a museum of eighteenth-century art, to the French nation, in memory of his son killed during the war.

Allan Ramsay: painter, essayist and man of the enlightenment

Allan Ramsay, Court painter to King George III, was one of the major portrait painters of the eighteenth-century British school. Born in Edinburgh, he was also an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment; his Dialogue on Taste merits an honoured place among eighteenth-century belles lettres. This book, by the world's foremost authority on Ramsay, gives an entirely fresh account of Ramsay's life and sheds new light on his artistic and intellectual development. A classical scholar and master of several modern languages, Ramsay was unquestionably the most erudite artist of the age. His friends included such celebrated men of letters as David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell; he also came to know the French philosophes Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach and Rousseau (whose portrait he painted). Alastair Smart describes Ramsay's early years, his artistic training in Scotland, England and Italy, his rise to prominence as the leading portrait painter in England, his two marriages, his travels abroad, and his appointment as painter to the King. He discusses Ramsay's ideas, especially as revealed in the Dialogue on Taste. He analyzes the various phases in Ramsay's development as a painter and explores his relationship to such established painters as Hogarth and Highmore and to the younger painters Reynolds and Gainsborough. Smart's extensive discussions of Ramsay's major works are accompanied by numerous reproductions of his paintings, many appearing for the first time. Smart's biography of a remarkable Enlightenment figure - the fruits of sustained research over many years - fills a considerable gap in our knowledge of British eighteenth-century art.

The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: "The Body of the Public."

What is the function of painting in a commercial society? John Barrell discusses how British artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Blake, and James Barry, attempted to answer this question. His provocative and illuminating book offers a new perspective on both art criticism and eighteenth-century British culture. 'I have learned as much from this book as from any work of art history I know.' Thomas Crow, London Review of Books 'Traversing two fields of academic study, art history and political theory, is an ambitious project. Barrell's combination of these two fields of knowledge and scholarship creates the possibility of perceiving the eighteenth century anew ...His text breaks new ground.' Pamela Divinsky, Oxford Art Journal 'Brilliant, original, and strongly argued ...The book is an extraordinary achievement, and I doubt we will read eighteenth-century art criticism in the same way any longer.' Robert Folkenflik, Studies in English Literature John Barrell is professor of English and Related Studies at the University of York.

Picturing Pedagogy: Education and the Child in the Paintings of Chardin

As is well known, Rousseau's insistence that childhood is a separate stage in human development would have profound ramifications in late eighteenthand nineteenth-century culture and society in France. In fact, when we think of education and the child in the late eighteenth century, Rousseau is given pride of place in creating a theoretical and practical model of childhood development and education and in insisting on the distinction between children and adults3 It is not surprising, therefore, that art historical studies concerned with the representation of children in the eighteenth century have tended to stress the primacy of Rousseauistic doctrine in late eighteenth-century art by examining the very significant and immediate impact of the philosopher's educational theories on the representation of children and their families.3 Yet, when one thinks of the most celebrated and

Characters in Stones, Marks on Paper: Enlightenment Discourse on Natural and Artificial Taches

This study focuses on a major issue in the study of eighteenth-century art and science: the divergent paths that works of artifice and creations of nature took in their development towards autonomy. Alexander Cozens's theory of the made-up “blot” is a paradigmatic instance of the former path, while the Enlightenment natural historian's formulation of a natural hieroglyphic is an exemplification of the latter. My extended argument exhibits the distinctively eighteenth-century modifications of, or deflections from, conventional modes of perceiving and representing nature. In this essay, however, I can indicate only how one of those modes, the ancient topos of “nature sporting,” was recast so that the traditional ambiguity fundamental to the conception of “artful” natural productions and “natural” fabrications became clarified in the middle of the century through an act of radical separation.

Drawing—A "Polite Recreation" in Eighteenth-Century England

Drawing—A "Polite Recreation" in Eighteenth-Century England KIM SLOAN "Yesterday begun my wife to learn to limn of one Browne, which Mr. Hill helps her to, and by her beginning, upon some eyes, I think she will do very fine things, and I shall take great delight in it."1 Thus Samuel Pepys, in 1665, recorded in his Diary the commencement of his wife's lat­ est diversion — learning to draw and to paint in miniature. The subse­ quent entries in his Diary about his wife's progress during the following year provide useful information about the methods employed for teach­ ing drawing in the seventeenth century; one learned, for example, to draw parts of the face first before proceeding to complete figures. We also learn that although Pepys praised and encouraged his wife in this leisure pastime, her drawing master, Mr. Browne, was not considered to be of sufficient social standing to sit with them at table.2 The purpose of this es­ say is to provide a brief compendium of amateur art instruction in eighteenth-century England and, at the same time, to illustrate whether the methods and social status of amateur art and drawing masters altered significantly during the 150 years after Pepys. In order to put eighteenth-century art education into a framework and finish establishing points of comparison, let us first look at an amateur in the nineteenth century. This particular young lady (from Wilkie Collins's Woman in White) is introducing herself to her new drawing master and discussing his duties: 217 218 / SLOAN Upon my word, if you can be contented with a quiet country life, I don't see why you should not get on well here. . . . After lunch, Miss Fairlie and I shoulder our sketchbooks and go out to misrepresent Na­ ture, under your directions. Drawing is her favorite whim, mind, not mine. Women can't draw —their minds are too flighty, and their eyes are too inattentive. No matter — my sister likes it; so I waste paint and spoil paper, for her sake, as composedly as any woman in England.3 From the framework thus provided by Pepys and Collins, one could be forgiven for assuming that for two hundred years women had been spending their leisure time in the company of drawing masters, "wasting paint and spoiling paper," and being humored by their husbands and friends. Wilkie Collins also indicated, in a later passage, that drawing masters were still considered by the majority of the English gentry as little more than servants.4 The question to keep in mind, therefore, when con­ sidering eighteenth-century amateur art education, is whether these as­ sumptions hold true. Throughout his Diary, Samuel Pepys shows a fascination with various instruments which could be used as an aid to drawing. A Mr. Spong in­ troduced him to the parallelogram or pantagraph with which persons with no skill in drawing could copy designs, prints, maps, etc. in any pro­ portion.5 He also attended lectures at Gresham College explaining the art of drawing pictures by Prince Rupert's rule and machine, and another method of Sir Christopher Wren's — although the latter told him that nothing worked as well as the use of squares6 or, "best in the world, a dark room [camera obscura]."7 Pepys was not unusual in his interest in pictorial arts; numerous entries in his Diary relate discussions of this sub­ ject with friends, notably John Evelyn and his wife who also painted.8 This fascination with mechanical methods of drawing and the sharing of their interest between husband and wife continued into the eighteenth century.9 Pepy's knowledge of drawing, however, had an important effect on the development of art education in the eighteenth century. As Clerk of the Acts of the Navy in 1672, he persuaded King Charles II to endow a Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital. The Hospital was a charity foundation which prepared poor children for apprenticeships in trades and the more talented of them for university. The Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital would take promising students and prepare them for apprenticeship at sea. This preparation included learning per­ spective, chart...

Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth-Century England

Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth-Century England CHARLES SCRUGGS Although we have learned a good deal in recent years about Phillis Wheatley's life and literary career, we have rarely attempted to dis­ cuss her poetry as poetry.1 As America's first important black poet, Phillis Wheatley has been treated less as an artist and more as a curi­ osity. For instance, right at the outset, American responses to her poems remained tied to racial debate. When her first and only book of poetry—Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—appeared in 1773, Abolitionists rushed to herald her artistic efforts as a symbol of deserved equality for the Negro; whereas pro-slavery critics poohpoohed her poems as objects beneath their contempt.2 This non-aesthetic approach to Phillis Wheatley continues in our own time. Her art is still a locus for political controversy, but the terms of the argu­ ment have shifted. In the 1970s, some feel that Phillis Wheatley has evinced a genuine concern for her race in her poetry; whereas others believe that the slave poet had a low opinion of her fellow bonds­ men.3 Whenever her poetry has been discussed as poetry, a "Romantic" bias has determined her critical reputation. Even in the twentieth century, criticism of her poetry has been shaped by prejudices inher­ ited from the Romantic period. To listen to her modern critics, "neoclassicism " was the bete noire of her brief poetic career. Saunders Red­ ding talks of the "chill ... of Pope's neo-classicism upon her," and M. A. Richmond complains that "neo-classicism" was responsible for 279 280 / SCRUGGS her artificiality. "Neo-classicism," says Richmond, encased Phillis Wheatley within the "tyranny of the couplet" and crushed her talent under "the heavy burden of ornamental rhetoric."4 The kindest thing that has been said of "neo-classicism" is that it taught her regularity.5 _ Thanks to Donald Greene (The Age of Exuberance) and others, we have become somewhat suspicious of the word "neo-classicism." Not only was this word invented by the nineteenth century but the con­ cept itself cannot possibly encompass the richness and complexity of eighteenth-century art. Even when the term "neo-classicism" makes sense within a limited context, no student of the eighteenth century today would treat it as though it were synonymous with the contem­ porary meaning of "artificiality." In fact, as all students of the eigh­ teenth century know, the word "artificial" presents an interesting his­ torical irony. The eighteenth century ordinarily did not use the word "artificial" in a pejorative sense—although it could be used that way. Usually "artificial" meant "artful, contrived with skill."6 That many of Phillis Wheatley's poems are "contrived with skill" is the basis of my argument in this paper. We are told that Phillis Wheatley was a bad poet because she lived in an age uncongenial, even hostile, to the true poetic sensibility. If she had been planted in better soil, such as the fertile ground of the Romantic period, then we would have had a real poet instead of a hothouse flower.7 Eigh­ teenth-century poetry, these critics insist, was impersonal, stylized, and ornate; and the poetical fashions of this period were dictatorial and absolute. Thus in imitating the literary conventions of her day, Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry which is artificial and insincere. This view is wrongheaded because it fails to understand those literary conventions which it deplores. More precisely, it fails to take into account that eighteenth-century aesthetic thought made a distinction between artifice and artificiality, and not between sincerity and arti­ ficiality.8 Because Phillis Wheatley's critics have refused to recognize the artifice of eighteenth-century poetry, they have not seen the com­ petent craftsmanship of Phillis Wheatley's poems. Not seeing the for­ est, they certainly cannot be expected to see the trees. I When Phillis Wheatley visited England in 1773, she was received there with more fanfare than she would ever receive in her lifetime in America. This reception is significant, because it tells us something about mid-eighteenth-century aesthetic taste. Arriving in London Phillis Wheatley I 281 with her owner Susannah Wheatley...