French eighteenth-century genre painting

Apollo, Sept, 2003 by Humphrey Wine

The organisers of 'The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting' have assembled some superb eighteenth-century French paintings. What is more, the exhibition's title is hot misleading. In its Ottawa manifestation, each of the three named artists has more or Less a room devoted to his works; including, in the case of Watteau, such well-known paintings as Mezzetin (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Iris (The dance) (Gemaldegalerie, Berlin); in the case of Chardin, unsurprisingly, Ottawa's own Return from the market and Governess, as well as the delightful Morning toilette (National-museum, Stockholm); and in Fragonard's case the jewel-like sketch for Le verrou (private collection, but destined to return on loan to the National Gallery, at the end of this exhibition). Naming a few of the other ninety paintings on show in the other six rooms will give an indication of the generally high standard of the exhibits: Boucher's Milliner (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) and La toilette (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid); Jean-Francois de Troy's Declaration of love (Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam), one of several pictures by this artist, who emerges as one of the show's triumphs; Greuze's Indolence (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford) and Young girl with a dog (private collection, England); C.-J. Vernet's Constructing a main road (Musee du Louvre, Paris), Hubert Robert's Demolition of houses on the Pont-au-change in 1788 (Musee Carnavalet, Paris), and an exquisite, privately-owned Danloux of 1791, Baron de Besenval in his 'salon de compagnie'. This display will be further enhanced at the exhibition's Washington venue by Greuze's Marriage contract (Musee du Louvre, Paris), among other additions. Such overwhelming riches made one readier to forgive the fact that many of the works had been shown in other recent exhibitions, for example the monographic shows devoted to Lancret, Chardin and Boilly, and an exhibition with a remit related to this one's, 'Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France', (1) sixteen of whose exhibits reappear here. One of these was Greuze's La simplicite (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth). This picture was also shown at the three venues of the very recent exhibition devoted to Mme de Pompadour, (2) and now surely deserves a platinum frequent flier card.

As the paintings by Vernet, Robert and Danloux make clear the organisers have stretched the meaning of "genre' to include pictures which would be equally at home--if not more so--in exhibitions devoted to landscape or portraiture. However, as the introductory catalogue essay points out, covering some of the same ground as Richard Rand's admirably clear essay in "Intimate Encounters', in the eighteenth century the term "genre' could include anything which was hot a history painting. Anyone failing to scrutinise the Ottawa catalogue, however, might be misled by the introductory wall panel, which equates genre paintings with 'factual representations of everyday life' (my italics), and will surely he confused on turning from that panel to be immediately confronted by a selection of fetes galantes by Watteau. Unfortunately, this is not the only occasion upon which the standard of wall text fails to match the quality of the works on display. Even allowing for the legal requirement in Ottawa that all text be in French as well as English, many opportunities to enhance the visitor's understanding of some of the themes of French eighteenth-century, genre are lost for want of a line or two of additional explanation--for example, those of children learning or playing, and that of reading. Three paintings by Pater of scenes from Scarron's Roman Comique, the date of which (1651-57) one is left to guess, are labelled identically when it might have been more helpful to include a line or two about the vogue for depicting scenes from plays and novels. More regrettable still was the inclusion of misleading information, for example the suggestion that the Academie de France a Rome was established in 1648, the oversimplification in the statement that Boucher invented the pastoral) and the assertion that Diderot 'pioneered' art criticism--he wrote his first Salon eighteen years after the first published Salon criticism known. (4)

Such errors, which with luck will disappear when the exhibition reaches Washington, are puzzling given that many of these points are more than adequately addressed in the catalogue entries. This publication includes several essays ranging from that of Katie Scott, who provocatively applies the theories of the child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971) to Chardin's pictures of children, to Marianne Roland Michel's straightforward and helpful account of orientalism in genre painting. The catalogue entries are of variable quality (those of Alan Wintermute are exemplary). A few notes follow on individual paintings as numbered in the catalogue, which irritatingly offers no information concerning which paintings are being exhibited in which of the exhibition's three venues: