Course Schedule: Fridays 10:30
am – 12:00 noon. Coffee and tea served at gallery sessions at 10 am.
14
Jan. -
Gallery - Rococo! Paris and Versailes under Louis XV
and Madame de Pompadour.
21
Jan. -
Visit - Musée du Louvre : Rococo
art and sculpture. Meet inside pyramid by information desk.
28
Jan. -
Gallery - Neoclassicism! Paris and Versailles under
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
4 Feb. -
Visit - Musée
du Louvre : Neoclassical art.
Meet inside pyramid by information desk.
11
Feb. -
Visit - Neoclassical architecture on the Left Bank,
from the Pantheon to the School of Surgery.
Meet on the steps of the Pantheon 75005 (closest metro
RER Luxembourg or buses 84 and 89)
Please bring 8€ in change for Pantheon
ticket and a metro ticket for the bus.
Bibliography:
Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris, an Architectural History (Yale
University Press)
Michael Levey Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting
(World of Art)
Nancy Mitford Madame de
Pompadour (New York Review Books Classics)
Antonia Fraser Marie
Antoinette: The Journey (Doubleday or Anchor)
The Reign of Louis XV 1724 - 1774
1724 - The court returns to
Versailles.
1725 - The king marries the
Polish princess Marie Lezczinska.
1726 - Cardinal Fleury named
Prime Minister. Opening of a period of stability in home and foreign affairs.
1733-36 - War of the Polish
succession.
1738 - First balanced state
budget in decades.
1741 - Beginning of war of
the Austrian Succession.
1743 - Death of Fleury.
1746 - Madame de Pompadour
becomes official mistress of the king.
1748 - Peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle ends war. Montesquieu publishes L'esprit des lois.
1751 - Beginning of the
publication of the Encyclopédie.
1756 - Beginning of Seven
Years war in alliance with Austria against Prussia and England.
1757 - Damiens attempts to
assassinate the king who is growing increasingly unpopular.
1758 - Choiseul named Prime
minister. Next dozen years prosperous and stable.
1763 - End of war. France
loses Canada and India to England.
1764 - Jesuits expelled from
France. Death of Madame de Pompadour.
1765 - Death of the Dauphin.
1769 - Madame du Barry
becomes the official royal mistress.
1770 - Choiseul fired. New
Dauphin marries Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette.
1774 - Death of Louis XV. He
is succeeded by his grandson, Louis XVI.
Arts and Arcitecture: Decoration and painting (Boucher) are dominated until 1760 by a light,
frivolous and refined style, an evolution from the Régence style, the
Rococo or style rocaille favouring curves, natural motifs, rustic themes
and a slightly artificial easy grace.
Realism, much discouraged at the time of the Louis XIV academies,
affects the details of rococo painting, the portrait (La Tour, Liotard) and
mainly the still lives and the scenes of domestic life painted by Chardin inspired by Dutch 17c art. Classicism
disappears except on the fronts of royal and public buildings modelled on the
old fashioned grandeur of the place Vendôme.
The return of the classical style, called
Neo-Classicism, begins in architecture (1755), followed by decoration (1765)
and finally painting (1780). A
certain nostalgia for the glories of the Grand Siècle but also the
influence of the philosophers and critics preaching a return to virtue and
utility favour at first a royal Neo-Classicism (style Gabriel- 1755)
dignified but less weighty than the Grand Style of Louis XIV, followed
by an increasingly austere and grave
Neo-Classicism (Soufflot,
Gondoin, Chalgrin - 1770) inspired directly from Greco-Roman antiquity, ending
in a severe even eccentric evolution just before the Revolution (Ledoux -
1785).
The rococo style will survive longer in
painting (Fragonard). Its
aristocratic and urbane elegance is
openly contested for the first time by Greuze (1760) in paintings that
are narrative, provincial and realistic.
David from 1780 will re-introduce into art classical subjects inspired
by Roman history in a severe but tense style, thus prefiguring the almost
romantic exaltation and feverish atmosphere of the revolutionary period.
