"Unequivocally a modern, Francois Boucher (1703-70) defined the French artistic avant-garde throughout his career. Yet the triumph of modernist aesthetics - with its focus on the self-critical, the autonomous, and the intellectually challenging - has long discouraged art historians and other viewers from taking Boucher's playful and alluring works seriously. Rethinking Boucher revisits the cultural meanings and reception of his diverse oeuvre, inviting us to revise the interpretive cliches by which we have sought to tame this artist and his epoch."--BOOK JACKET.

A new interpretation of the development of artistic modernity in eighteenth-century France What can be gained from considering a painting not only as an image but also a material object? How does the painter’s own experience of the process of making matter for our understanding of both the painting and its maker? The Painter’s Touch addresses these questions to offer a radical reinterpretation of three paradigmatic French painters of the eighteenth century. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth provides close readings of the works of François Boucher, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, entirely recasting our understanding of these painters’ practice. Using the notion of touch, she examines the implications of their strategic investment in materiality and sheds light on the distinct contribution of painting to the culture of the Enlightenment. Lajer-Burcharth traces how the distinct logic of these painters’ work—the operation of surface in Boucher, the deep materiality of Chardin, and the dynamic morphological structure in Fragonard—contributed to the formation of artistic identity. Through the notion of touch, she repositions these painters in the artistic culture of their time, shifting attention from institutions such as the academy and the Salon to the realms of the market, the medium, and the body. Lajer-Burcharth analyzes Boucher’s commercial tact, Chardin’s interiorized craft, and Fragonard’s materialization of eros. Foregrounding the question of experience—that of the painters and of the people they represent—she shows how painting as a medium contributed to the Enlightenment’s discourse on the self in both its individual and social functions. By examining what paintings actually “say” in brushstrokes, texture, and paint, The Painter’s Touch transforms our understanding of the role of painting in the emergence of modernity and provides new readings of some of the most important and beloved works of art of the era.

In a lively narrative that spans more than two centuries, the author tells the story of a royal and aristocratic building type that has been largely forgotten today: the pleasure dairy of early modern France. These garden statues have long been dismissed as the trifling follies of a reckless elite. The author challenges such assumptions and reveals the pivotal role that pleasure dairies played in cultural and political life, especially with respect to polarizing debates about nobility, femininity, and domesticity. Together with other forms of pastoral architecture such as model farms and hermitages, pleasure dairies were crucial arenas for elite women to exercise and experiment with identity and power.

A groundbreaking approach to Rococo religious d?r and spirituality in Europe and South America, The Spiritual Rococo addresses three basic conundrums that impede our understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics and culture. Why did the Rococo, ostensibly the least spiritual style in the pre-Modern canon, transform into one of the world?s most important modes for adorning sacred spaces? And why is Rococo still treated as a decadent nemesis of the Enlightenment when the two had fundamental characteristics in common? This book seeks to answer these questions by treating Rococo as a global phenomenon for the first time and by exploring its moral and spiritual dimensions through the lens of populist French religious literature of the day-a body of work the author calls the ?Spiritual Rococo? and which has never been applied directly to the arts. The book traces Rococo?s development from France through Central Europe, Portugal, Brazil, and South America by following a chain of interlocking case studies, whether artistic, literary, or ideological, and it also considers the parallel diffusion of the literature of the Spiritual Rococo in these same regions, placing particular emphasis on unpublished primary sources such as inventories. One of the ultimate goals of this study is to move beyond the clich?f Rococo?s frivolity and acknowledge its essential modernity. Thoroughly interdisciplinary, The Spiritual Rococo not only integrates different art historical fields in novel ways but also interacts with church and social history, literary and post-colonial studies, and anthropology, opening up new horizons in these fields.

From its establishment in 1648 until its disbanding in 1793 after the French Revolution, the Acad?e Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was the centre of the Parisian art world. Taking the reader behind the scenes of this elite bastion of French art theory, education, and practice, this engaging study uncovers the fascinating histories - official and unofficial - of that artistic community. Through an innovative approach to portraits - their values, functions, and lives as objects - this book explores two faces of the Acad?e. Official portraits grant us insider access to institutional hierarchies, ideologies, rituals, customs, and everyday experiences in the Acad?e's Louvre apartments. Unofficial portraits in turn reveal hidden histories of artists' personal relationships: family networks, intimate friendships, and bitter rivalries. Drawing on both art-historical and anthropological frames of analysis, this book offers insightful interpretations of portraits read through and against documentary evidence from the archives to create a rich story of people, places, and objects. Theoretically informed, rigorously researched, and historically grounded, this book sheds new light on the inner workings of the Acad?e. Its discoveries and compelling narrative make an invaluable and accessible contribution to our understanding of this pre-eminent European institution and the social lives of artists in early modern Paris.

This publication catalogues The Met’s remarkable collection of eighteenth-century French paintings in the context of the powerful institutions that governed the visual arts of the time—the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Académie de France à Rome, and the Paris Salon. At the height of their authority during the eighteenth century, these institutions nurtured the talents of artists in all genres. The Met’s collection encompasses stunning examples of work by leading artists of the period, including Antoine Watteau (Mezzetin), Jean Siméon Chardin (The Silver Tureen), François Boucher (The Toilette of Venus), Joseph Siffred Duplessis (Benjamin Franklin), Jean-Baptiste Greuze (Broken Eggs), Hubert Robert (the Bagatelle decorations), Jacques Louis David (The Death of Socrates), the Van Blarenberghes (The Outer Port of Brest), and François Gérard (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord). In the book’s introduction, author Katharine Baetjer provides a history of the Académie, its establishment, principles, and regulations, along with a discussion of the beginnings of public art discourse in France, taking us through the reforms unleashed by the Revolution. The consequent democratizing of the Salon, brought about by radicals under the leadership of Jacques Louis David, encouraged the formation of new publics with new tastes in subject matter and genres. The catalogue features 126 paintings by 50 artists. Each section includes a short biography of the artist and in-depth discussions of individual paintings incorporating the most up-to-date scholarship.

Exploring how the discrediting of Boucher and his school intersected with cultural debates about gender and class, this account of Boucher's art should persuade critics and admirers alike to take another, more considered look.