French Connection: French Painting at the National Gallery of Art

Ever since Lafayette, some connection between America and France, however tenuous, has existed. One of the strongest bonds between the two countries is the American love of French art. When we think of French art today, we instantly imagine the Impressionists. Our National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, however, houses one of the finest collections of 15^th to 18^th century French art in the world, thanks in part to the benefactors who saw something of America in those French artworks. French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century documents the rich and varied collection of artworks and shows how this French connection tells us as much about American history as it does about French history. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "French Connection."

[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century.]

Female Persuasion

Because of her thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette and her family painted over a span of just six years (including the 1783 portrait above), Elizabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun’s legacy is heavily linked to the fortunes of that doomed queen. Born April 16, 1755, Vigee-Lebrun ranks among the greatest women artists of the nineteenth century, and is undoubtedly the queen of the Rococo style, with Jean-Honore Fragonard as its king. She first learned painting from her father, who was a fan painter, and later met Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Joseph Vernet, and other prominent male French artists. However, Vigee-Lebrun made her name by painting the most fascinating women of her time, including Marie Antoinette. Even in pre-Revolutionary France, women artists enjoyed an increased degree of freedom and opportunity, yet still not equal to that offered to men. Recognizing a shift in the sexual balance, Vigee-Lebrun hitched her wagon to some of the greatest female stars of her time. She paired her soft yet abundant style to the effusive personalities of these other great women to create portraits that fully capture their personalities and place in the period.

Emma, Lady Hamilton was the “It girl” of the Neoclassical strain of Romanticism. Born Emy Lyon, “Emma” used her beauty and charm to rise through the ranks of British society. Her marriage to the elderly William, Lord Hamilton was made to save the reputation of a younger relation. Lord Hamilton looked the other way as Emma conducted a lengthy affair with Lord Nelson that led to the birth of two illegitimate children. Emma Hamilton also served as a model for artists such as George Romney, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Vigee-Lebrun. Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait of Lady Hamilton as Ariadne (above, from 1790) shows Emma caught in one of her “Attitudes,” in which she donned classical-looking dress and struck a pose. These “Attitudes” helped stoke the flames of Neoclassicism in Europe, turning even the head of Goethe and even leading to a kind of fashion craze. Even in heavy drapery, Emma Hamilton exuded sex. There’s always a hint of the erotic beneath all the finery in Rococo art, but Vigee-Lebrun’s portrait of Lady Hamilton as Ariadne gets straight to the point.

While Emma Hamilton stimulated the libido of the times, Madame de Staël stimulated the imagination. Vigee-Lebrun painted Madame de Staël as Corinne (above, from 1808) to allude to de Staël’s 1807 novel of the same name starring a young woman named Corinne. Named after the ancient Greek poet Corina, Corrine takes the Grand Tour with gusto, leaving behind her a trail of lovers, none of whom admired her for her mind as much as her beauty. Napoleon objected to the feminist perspective of de Staël’s novel so strongly that he had the author exiled from France in 1810. Like Marie Antoinette and Emma Hamiton, de Staël represents the strong woman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If the term feminism had been coined, they would all have been considered feminists on one level or another. Marie Antoinette may seem a strange feminist figure, but her outsider status in the court of Louis XVI and her hands-on approach to the education of her children make her more nuanced and approachable than the “Let them eat cake!” cartoon figure of legend. Vigee-Lebrun not only furthered the possibilities for herself and other women artists, but also provided examples of women persuading the world to follow a new course of gender equity.

Making Assumptions

You could make the bold statement that all Western art since the 15th century has been a reaction to the Renaissance. Correggio came at the tail end of the period known as the High Renaissance, dying on March 5, 1534. Born sometime in August 1489, Correggio began as a painter in the vein of Leonardo da Vinci, especially in works such as The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (above, from 1520), which recalls mystical group portraits of Leonardo’s such as The Virgin of the Rocks and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne. Correggio never emulates Leonardo’s distinctive sfumato, but he does approach the gentle handling of the genius and the naturalism of his figures. The wondering eyes of the infant Jesus staring at the ring on Saint Catherine’s finger, presumably symbolizing their “mystical marriage,” are familiar to anyone with a young child with a yen for shiny things. Behind the group, a beautifully green woodland landscape extends, similar to the stretches of natural wonder Leonardo would place behind his religious figures.

Correggio soon took his painting in a different direction—literally upwards with frescoes such as his Assumption of the Virgin (above, from 1526-1530) in the Cathedral of Parma. Standing beneath the dome, we see what the Virgin Mary would have seen during her assumption into Heaven. At the center of the swirling mass of figures, Jesus descends in a beautiful display of artistic foreshortening. Seemingly flying around the perimeter of the dome, Correggio gathers various saints and Bible figures (including Adam and Eve) to bear witness to the event. The illusionistic effects of Correggio’s gravity-defying ceiling frescoes blew the minds of spectators, helping creating a market for such effects that led to the excesses of Baroque frescoes, which soon burst out from cathedrals and churches and found new homes in the palaces of kings and queens seeking self-glorification. Correggio didn’t invent such perspective tricks, but he took them to a whole new level that stretched them beyond the bounds of Renaissance taste.

Correggio brought the same bravura brushwork and inventiveness to mythological themes such as Jupiter and Io (above, from 1531). The radiant flesh tones of Io rival that of the finest sculptors of the Baroque. Her pose of ecstacy prefigures similar poses in marble by Bernini a century later. Centuries later, the artists of the Rococo period would adopt Correggio as a forefather for his lavish treatment of the female nude in mythological guise. The excesses of an artist such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard have their root in the relative restraint of Correggio. It’s interesting that Correggio left no students behind to carry on his style, yet had such a wide range of influence centuries later. Working in Parma, outside the hotbed of artistic innovation that was Rome, Correggio stayed clear of the limelight in life and engaged the giants of the Renaissance at a distance. It’s hard to make assumptions about what Correggio’s motivations were in avoiding the artistic center of Rome, but like modern artists today who avoid the bright lights of New York, he most likely would have been a different artist if he had followed the crowd.

Parlor Games

In the wake of the Age of Englightenment, especially in France, women artists found more opportunity for success, including Marguerite Gerard. Born January 28, 1761, Gerard once found herself hailed with other great female French artists such as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Adelaide Labille-Guiard. Gerard learned painting from her brother-in-law, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, king of the late Rococo style. In 1775, after the death of her mother, Gerard moved to Paris to be with her sister and Fragonard, whose connections to royalty allowed him to live in the Louvre and have access to the great collection of the kings of France. Fragonard took Gerard as his prize student, chief assistant, and mistress, sharing his love of Dutch genre painting as well as other kinds of love. Gerard specialized in Dutch-type scenes translated into the French idiom such as Lady Reading in an Interior (above, from 1795-1800). Surrounded by bourgeois and upper class life, Gerard depicted mainly the women she was familiar with in those circles and made a name and small fortune in targeting that select market of consumers.

In many ways, Gerard is the female equivalent of Fragonard—light and airy and free of all the “sturm und drang” of Romanticism even as the French Revolution tore down the crown and transformed France right under her very nose. Fragonard soon found his style out of favor as his royal connections literally ceased to exist. Gerard, however, continued to appeal to the domesticity of an aspiring bourgeois, who wanted to hold on to some of the old ways if not the old leaders. Gerard’s Bad News (above, from 1804) quaintly depicts the familiar trope of a “frail” woman taking a fainting spell upon hearing bad news that overwhelms her senses. Perhaps Gerard painted such scenes tongue in cheek, confident in her own inner strength and cognizant of just how false and limiting such ideas were. Painting small domestic scenes of uncontroversial subjects, Gerard always found a ready market for her work in even the most tumultuous times. A secondary market for etchings and prints based on her paintings brought Gerard even more riches and renown, allowing her to eclipse other, equally talented women artists by simply playing to the audience more astutely.


Some of Gerard’s finest paintings involve the idea of music in the parlor performed by young women seeking to make themselves more accomplished and, thus, more of a desired match for young men from successful families. Some of Gerard’s works directly address this sexual component to the musical parlor games, but The Piano Lesson (above, from 1810) does it more subtly. Here, the mother teaches the young girl how to play the piano, which stands in for all the lessons of nineteenth century, upper class womanhood passed on from generation to generation. The adult woman has perhaps gained her position as wife and mother thanks in some way to her musical skills. The female child, without realizing it, reprises the course of her mother’s life, building an arsenal of charms with which to assault suitors some day. Gerard clearly recognized the power of such gender roles and exploited them to create saleable works to support her as an unmarried woman in a world that looked askance at such creatures. Just as she once seduced Fragonard with her beauty and vivaciousness, Gerard continues to seduce modern viewers with the beauty of her technique and the shrewdness of her mind.

Ray of Light

While the Rococo raged around him in eighteenth century France, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin painted quiet genre scenes that would continue to speak to artists and art lovers through the centuries. Born November 2, 1699, Chardin painted perhaps the greatest still life of his century, The Ray (above, from 1728), one of the greatest treasures of the Louvre. Chardin imbued the dead ray on the wall with as much life as the skittish cat on the table. Chardin’s still lives abound with beautiful textures and nuances, which gives him a timelessness absent in his more dated contemporaries, such as Fragonard and Boucher.

What’s amazing about Chardin’s paintings is how much he got out of such simple subjects. In House of Cards (above, from 1736-1737), we see a young boy in period dress playing at cards, all very plain and above board. However, Chardin models the figure so beautifully, especially in his expression, which conveys his sense of intensity while building his house of cards. Beneath this simple exterior, Chardin uses the idea of a house of cards and that house eventually falling down upon itself as a symbol of mortality, a memento mori more pleasant and subtle than the dead seafood of The Ray and other still lives. These interiors appealed to the growing middle-class of Chardin’s time, who had the leisure and money to indulge in games and patronize the arts, especially painters who reflected their lives back to them. Chardin played a big role in the non-Rococo taste of the time, the art for the masses rather than the royals, by assuming a major role in the eighteenth-century French Salon as arranger of exhibitions and later as treasurer.

“We use colors,” Chardin once said, “but we paint with our feelings.” This feeling comes across in almost all of Chardin’s work, but perhaps never as much as in his self portraits, especially The Self-Portrait With Eyeshade of 1775 (above). The aging Chardin here protects his wearying eyes from the brilliant sunlight yet still has the dexterity to depict himself in pastels at a level of de la Tour. Manet, Cezanne, and Matisse, among others, would discover Chardin at the Louvre and embrace his spirit and feeling if not his technique. Marcel Proust, the novelist master of interiors and deceptive simplicity, found a kindred spirit in the work of Chardin. Chaim Soutine went so far as to hang a ray in his studio to paint in homage to Chardin, until the neighbors complained about the smell. In the often loud world of art history, Chardin speaks softly yet echoes resoundingly in the hearts of those who know him.

On With the Show

Apprenticed to the set designer Claude Gillot, Jean-Antoine Watteau learned painting in the setting of the theatre. Watteau, born October 10, 1684, went on to create some of the most beautiful and psychologically fascinating images of the commedia dell’arte prior to the twentieth century. Mezzetin (above, from 1717) shows the comic valet of the theater strumming his mandolin, pining for the girl he never seems to win, symbolized here by the statue of the woman in the rear with her back turned to the singer. By showing the psychological state of the character as portrayed by the actor, within the stage conventions of a painted “painted” backdrop, Watteau addresses issues of identity and reality in the context of the theater that point forward to similar explorations by artists such as Pablo Picasso nearly two centuries later.

Gilles (above, from 1718) stands as Watteau’s most familiar image, one of the most popular paintings at the Louvre. Gilles wears the costume of a pierrot from the commedia dell’arte as well as an facial expression of discomfort and perhaps embarrassment, as if he has forgotten his lines and suffers the mockery of the other actors around him. Painting near the twilight of the Baroque and at the dawn of the Rococo, Watteau stands firmly in neither camp—Rubens-esque in his technique and light in his subject matter, ala Fragonard and Boucher, yet piercing to the individuality of the figure in a way that seems more modern than eighteenth century art normally does. Perhaps Watteau’s lack of an aristocratic clientele pushed him to create images for the newly emergent upper middle class of France, the first generation to realize the promise of the swelling Enlightenment ideals around them and value nature and human nature over God and king. Watteau’s figures seem awkward in their theatrical guises as much as they seem awkward in their time, as if they understood somehow that they were born too early.

Before tuberculosis (“consumption” back then) took Watteau’s life in 1721, at the age of 37, he painted Shop Sign of Gersaint (above), an advertisement of sorts for his art dealer Gersaint. Painted in only 8 days, Watteau bids farewell to the world in this painting, showing his own works being packed away, unsold and unwanted. Watteau lived a life full of illnesses and sensed that his own time on earth would be short. Little known during his lifetime, Watteau’s reputation lived on briefly through some followers before fading into obscurity. In the mid to late 1800s, exhibitions of his work from private collections caught the eye of Paris and Impressionists such as Renoir, who saw Watteau’s individuality in style and in his characterizations as a predecessor of their own bucking of prevailing trends. Today, Watteau stands as one of France's most beloved artists, an artist for whom his time has finally arrived.

Blondes and Brunettes

One of the greatest of the French Rococo painters of the eighteenth century, Francois Boucher was born September 29, 1703. Boucher epitomizes the excesses—visual, sensual, and sexual—of the days of King Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, the King’s favorite mistress and Boucher’s greatest patron. Genre scenes such as The Interrupted Sleep (above, from 1750) bring it all together—a sumptuous landscape within which a young man awakens a beautiful young girl for reasons left unsaid but perfectly understood. It’s like a scene from Dangerous Liaisons. As risqué as such images may seem, Boucher provided even more sexually charged images of royal mistresses and even his own wife for a private clientele.

Denis Diderot accused Boucher of prostituting his own wife in paintings such as 1745’s Brown Odalisque (above), which displays Madame Boucher’s charms for all to see. Boucher’s debt to Rubens comes through clearly in his love of Rubenesque flesh modeled in paint. Boucher painted the 15-year-old Marie-Louise O’Murphy, calling it his Blonde Odalisque. O’Murphy later became one of Louis XV’s many mistresses (and one of the many to be defeated in her challenge to Madame de Pompadour’s place as the favorite). Beneath all the froth and frills of the Rococo style always beats a passionate heart full of the intrigues and energy of sexual politics. Boucher catered to gentlemen who preferred both blondes and brunettes.

In addition to his paintings, especially his grand portraits of the rich and powerful, such as Madame de Pompadour (above, from 1758), Boucher helped design the Rococo "look" like few others. Boucher designed sets for many Parisian theaters and later designed the “theaters” that were the royal palaces at Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Choisy. Maurice Quentin de la Tour may have been a better portraitist and Jean-Honore Fragonard may have captured more of the light frivolousness of the Rococo period, but Boucher stands somewhere in between those two poles—painting the reality of the time with all its sexual energy yet still playing (and in many ways, writing the “rules”) of the game at the same time. Comparing the portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy to that of Madame Pompadour, you can see that the poor little Irish girl didn’t stand a chance. Boucher died in 1770, well before the French Revolution brought all the Rococo crumbling down, but I suspect that he knew that those days didn’t stand a chance, either.

Putting a Face to the Name

I’ll never forget the first time that I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and was walking down a hallway from one gallery to another, trying to cram in as many masters as possible in a single day. Along the walls of the corridor were photographs and works on paper that I had to sadly rush by if I was going to see everything I wanted to see. Suddenly, one work stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t believe how lifelike the portrait was. When I saw that it was pastels, I couldn’t stop looking closer and closer. A self-portrait by Maurice-Quentin de la Tour, born September 5, 1704 , floored me that day and has kept flooring me since. (Another Self-Portrait from 1751, at the height of his fame, appears above.)

La Tour took the medium of pastels to places it had never been before while working in 18th century France. Having tried my hand at pastels, I never cease to be amazed at just how realistic he could make his portraits, pairing the precision of oils with the pure color of pastels. La Tour took France by storm in the 1750s with his incredible portraits of the rich and famous—everyone from the philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau (shown above) to Louis XV and his family. “I penetrate into the depths of my subjects without their knowing it,” La Tour once said, “and capture them whole.” Although the prejudice against pastels as something for children already was waning when he came along, La Tour shattered that idea entirely, opening up a realm of possibilities for later masters of pastel such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt.

Dying in 1788 at the age of 84, La Tour didn’t live to see the bloodshed of the French Revolution and “the Reign of Terror” to follow. Unlike the frothy Rococo works of his contemporary Jean-Honore Fragonard, La Tour’s portraits present the personality and individuality of the elite of his time, such as the intimate portrait of Madame Pompadour above. La Tour painted a life-size portrait of Madame Pompadour in all her sartorial splendor that wowed audiences at the Salon, but I find this simple head shot to get at the person behind the persona. Such psychological insight makes La Tour’s portraits seem almost modern today, enough to stop anyone in a rush dead in their tracks.

French Pastry

Jean-Honore Fragonard, lead painter of the Rococo style in 18th century France, just before the French Revolution brought it all down, was born on this day in 1732. Turning 275 is not one of those nice, round anniversary numbers that museums like to commemorate, but I thought he was worth more than a passing mention.

Fragonard is one of those sweet, pleasant, subtly erotic, and almost always prolific (in a completely un-tortured artist kind of way) artist that enters and exits my imagination as quickly as I turn away from his works to something else, as filling for the soul as light French pastry is for the stomach. The Rococo style is such a sorbet of an artistic style, an intermezzo between the beefy Baroque and the robust Romantics, that I have trouble remembering anything of the genre. It was only when my wife and I visited Paris a few years ago and saw the opulence of the age that I could come to any kind of appreciation of his work as being totally a creation of its time and place.

Unfortunately, the only Fragonard work that has taken any purchase in my memory is his painting The Swing (shown above) because the scene is recreated as one of the vignettes of the Broadway musical Contact, which my wife and I saw years ago and came away from sorely unimpressed.