Art
Eighteenth-Century Painting
THE exhibition at the gallery of Frank Sabin covers two of the most interesting sections of eighteenth-century painting, namely the French and the Venetian schools, and it is extensive enough to bring out clearly the contrast that exists between the schools and the different tendencies which are apparent in each of them considered separately.
The sudden recovery made by Venetian painting in the eighteenth century is at first sight one of the mysteries in the history of art. Venice was at that moment in a decline, impoverished by protracted struggles with the Turks, ending in the loss of all her colonies and of the most important part of her trade, which had in any case been reduced by the rivalry of the Western powers. There was every reason, therefore, to think that Venice, which had ceased to be a first-rate power politically, would also have ceased to be of importance aesthetically, and yet exactly the contrary occurred and, with a sudden burst of energy, she regained the position which she had lost in the seventeenth century and within a few decades produced a flourishing school of which Tiepolo, Piazzetta and Guardi are but the most brilliant representatives. _ But this sudden expansion becomes less remarkable if we examine more carefully the kind of painting produced. Just at the moment when the Baroque was dying in Europe, to be succeeded in the more progressive countries by the Rococo or the neo-classical movement, Venice suddenly took up the dying style, and gave it a new lease of life. Venetian eighteenth-century painting was therefore not step forward towards a new style ; it was the final flowering of a style superseded elsewhere, and was therefore perfectly suited to a social backwater of great elegance where a com- mercial society which had turned itself into an aristocracy was dying in its vast palaces, the walls of which invited the brush of a great decorative painter like Tiepolo. This curious passage in European painting is represented at Sabin's by two brilliant Tiepolo sketches and Piazzetta's Portrait of a Young Sculptor (34).
The group of French paintings is much more varied and represents the most important tendencies which appeared in this school in the eighteenth century. There are, unfor- tunately, no works by Watteau, but his group is represented by several small Lancrets. Watteau and the other early Rococo painters catered principally for the bankers and the wealthiest members of the bourgeoisie who attained to a position of the greatest importance at the end of Louis XIV's reign and under the Regency. It was they who fostered the beginnings of the Rococo in decoration, and in painting they found the equivalent in the style of Watteau which, compared with the pompous Baroque of the court style during the later years of Louis XIV, can be called realistic. This style, typically displayed in Lancret's La Promenade (18), was taken up by Fragonard and Boucher and by them turned into the directly voluptuous full Rococo style associated with the Court of Louis XV, of which Boucher's Mlle. Nellie 0' Murphy (7) is an admirable example. Meanwhile, the rising bourgeoisie, the opinions of which are most clearly seen in the writings of the philosophes, had turned against this kind of frank appeal to the senses. Instead they, praised the simple domestic scenes of Greuze. Diderot's favourite painter. The two portraits of the artists' daughters (14) have all the qualities of simplicity, domesticity and sentimentality which made Greuze so palatable to his bourgeois contemporaries, and the. Young girl with a hid (15) has just that added sauce of veiled sensuality which would appeal to the large element of the Rococo man which lay hidden in Diderot and burst out, among the savage satire, in a book like La Religieuse. It is unfortunate that the one great realistic painter of the middle of the century, namely Chardin, is not represented at Sabin's. He was greatly admired by Diderot, who however also found much that he sought in the incipient classicism of Hubert Robert whose Ruined Temple (25) combines a reference to the splendour of ancient Rome with the appeal of the picturesque. The classical movement which was so closely identified with the democratic party and the Revolution reached its highest expression in David, whose Portrait of Mme. Tallien (10) shows how far French painting had'advanced from its position at the beginning of the century.
Asrrnostv BLUNT.
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