Before the heads fell ARTS
ROY STRONG
'France in the Eighteenth Century' is a stagger- ing show, the finest winter exhibition the Royal Academy has staged since the days of the great comprehensive Dutch and Flemish exhibitions of the postwar years. It is also a remarkable achievement for its organiser Mr Denys Sutton, ably seconded by Mr Francis Watson, who has amassed these treasures. I found them ravishing and, being basically out of temper with eigh- teenth century French fripperies and fol-de-rols, all the more overwhelming.
Here are over sixty pictures and drawings by Watteau, nearly seventy by Fragonard, nearly sixty by Boucher and twenty-four Chardins- in other words, the exhibitions within the ex- hibition are pretty breathtaking in themselves.
For anyone remotely interested in eighteenth
Century France this pile-up of material must be the definitive one this side of the year 2000.
But be warned. It is all too easy to let one's eyes plod rolling over the acres of gilt, pictures thick on the wall, one minute a Boucher 'land- scape in blue, the next a gesticulating grandee by Largilliere or an inlaid writing table by Gamier. So if you do go, and you must, be strong-minded, survey the scene and concentrate on a handful of gorgeous things only.
There is, for instance, a wonderful Oudry of a stately gazelle, a rather horrid animal, linger- ing and turning a hard eye towards us while three white dogs, berserk at the scent, tug with twitching noses from the post to which they have been tied. It is an eerie, sinister picture, heightened by a cold light, the fur of the dogs' white coats rendered with • a livid unnatural pallor. Among the Chardins there is an unfor- gettable picture from Chicago, The White Tablecloth. Painted as a firescreen, it recalls Velasquez's rendering of inanimate objects and looks forward to Cezanne. It seems worlds away from the rest of the court knees-up--a round table %,ith a crumpled cloth tossed over it, a loaf of bread, two wine glasses, a knife, a tankard in a wooden bucket and some sliced tomatoes on a pewter dish. Denys Sutton quotes. Proust : 'Nous avons appris de Chardin qu'une poire est aussi vivante qu'une femme, qu'une poterie vulgaire est aussi belle qu'une pierre pr6cieuse.'
Next comes a tranquil Watteau, lent by the Boymans Museum, a landscape from which the sun is about to sink below the skyline. A coun-
try girl sits on a grassy bank with her spindle in the twilight while a young man, wearing a
beribboned straw hat and holding a flute in his hands, peeps over the hillock at her feet. He seems to have finished playing but the music lingers and the girl pauses in a reverie from her work. After looking at this, take in one or two beautiful Watteau drawings of fingers tremb- ling on a flute or faces with lips pursed about to play.
In totally different mood come a clutch of portraits, the first a group by Largilliere of an English family, the Throckmortons of Cough: ton Court. These portraits of the daughters of 1. recusant baronet put Largilliere on the ma is probably the best portraitist in Europe ar that date (well worth an exhibition of his own The two daughters and their friend in the habi of Dominican nuns are dewy, pink and rose, against the translucent white lawns and linens, the painterly equivalent in fabric of Oudry's fur. Next comes a painting which must rank as one of the supreme achievements of the eighteenth century: David's great equestrian portrait of Count Stanislas-Kostka Potocki from the National Museum, Warsaw. It com- memorates an occasion when the count leapt astride a previously unmounted horse—which explains perhaps why he is in his shirt sleeves and why he doffs his plumed hat with such a lordly flourish.
So much for some of those things which once seen are not to be forgotten. Elsewhere are a succession of succulent bonbons: a saucy Boucher of Louis XV's Irish mistress, Louisa O'Murphy, slumped untidily, naked and upside down on a sofa; a Drouais of the Duc de Bouillon's two boys slumming it as peasant children playing a hurdy-gurdy; a dotty dog kennel by Send for Marie Antoinette, almost a tempietto of giltwood and pale blue velvet; and a showcase stuffed with little boxes of agate, of pale gold and translucent enamel, of gold of three different colours, of morocco leather embroidered in silk thread and gold with delectable little scenes such as a rhinoceros standing under a tree or a cascade of pink petals and green leaves.
One's only fear is that this exhibition may not prove the viable financial proposition which it ought by rights, on its own merits, to be. If it fails it will be because so much of the exhibition is possibly out of key with current public taste in the arts (apart from the general feeling that the French are a bit tiresome at the moment). If- the show had been staged seventy years ago, when Greuze girls were all the rage and pastiches of De Troy adorned the walls of the Academy, there need have been no doubts. But now, though we know the age had its serious side, its encyclopaedists and Voltaire pontificating away, nothing can dis- guise the fact that the image overwhelmingly projected in its art is of trivia and conspicuous indulgence. Take De Troy's ravishing picture of a girl about to tear off her garter and give it to her boyfriend: if this were, say, Toulouse- Lautrec it would have a bracing element of earthy reportage, if a Pre-Raphaelite there would be a moral implied. De Troy simply titillates.
And the same applies to a great number of these items, which titillate but fail to stir the intellect or emotions. The content is often appallingly shallow, bordering on the level of a high class girlie magazine. Silken-clad men
toss girls on swings so that their skirts flutter up, cavaliers and their ladies finger each other- in hazy golden landscapes, Jupiter peels the, clothes off Callisto, ladies, whether they happen to arrive in the guise of Venus or a merchant's wife, are forever being dressed and undressed. The subject matter, redolent of endless sexual, badinage and pointless luxury, quickly cloys. If we admire these things it is for their aesthetic quality, for the delicacy of the painting or the brilliance of sculptural technique; Madame Tussaud's horrifying wax of the severed head of Fouquier-Tinville would have made Louis XV glad that he wasn't around apres le deluge.
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