French Painting - From Le Nain to Fragonard (Art Ebook).pdf

French Painting: From Le Nain to Fragonard
Skira | 1964 | English | 270 pages | PDF | 28 MB

Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI: three famous reigns spanning a century and a half, during which time Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe. Rarely in the history of painting have the portrait, the still life, and landscape been represented by a finer, more varied succession of artists. The minority of Louis XIV (1643-1659) was marked by an art of refinement and restraint, soberly human in the work of the Le Nain brothers and Philippe de Champaigne, elegant without affectation in that of Eustache Le Sueur and Jacques Stella. Then came Watteau and the eighteenth century, an age of brilliant salons and discriminating collectors, when art was expected to give pleasure and did so, uniting freely plied, richly textured brushwork with an unfailing sense of poetry, joyous and sensual in Boucher and Fragonard, sober and silent in Chardin, Social life was at its most brilliant in the eighteenth century. Yet under the smooth surface were the stirrings of anxiety and dissatisfaction, a restless need to escape into the past, to travel in exotic lands, to fathom the secrets of nature and the human heart—all pointing the way to the effusions of Romanticism.