Art
The Three Louis " THREE French Reigns " is the title of the Exhibition which has just been opened at Sir Philip Sassoon's house in Park Lane, in aid of the Royal Northern Hospital. The period covered is 1648 to 1789, and it includes in a sense a whole cycle of French art. But the Exhibition is not composed of great works of art. Rather, it is a collection of the beautiful objects with which people were surrounded during the period in question, and it is calculated to appeal not to purist lovers of the highest manifestations of the human spirit but to those who suffer from the peculiar longing to find out what it felt like to live in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Those who wish to form an accurate visual image of the cabinet of a Comte de Toulouse or a Pomponne, or of the boudoir of a Mme. de Pompadour or a Marie-Antoinette will find here plenty of material for their mental reconstructions.
The weakest part of the Exhibition is the paintings. Except for Fmgonard, none of the great masters of the period is adequately represented, though there is one exquisite Chardin, and the name of Watteau appears on many labels. On the other hand, the very fact that the paintings show a generally high level of elegance and charm rather than outbursts of creative genius gives one a more accurate idea of what an average eighteenth-century salon contained, since there can never have been enough masterpieces to go round.
More remarkable is the silver, the examples of which seem to show that the taste of the craftsmen never quite kept pace with their increasing virtuosity. The seventeenth-century pieces, generally fairly solid and simple, have a certain state- liness, though hardly ever the nobility, of contemporary English ware. But in the eighteenth century, when fantasy was allowed a freer hand, French silversmiths seem to have devoted themselves to seeing what antics they could make their medium perform. The convolutions of the more ornate soup-tureens and bowls can only make one regret that their creators were so ingenious. But the collection of furniture makes it plain that French designers could achieve certain effects in this genre to per- fection. No more suitable setting can be imagined for the elaborate ceremonial of Louis XIV's Court at Versailles than the high-backed, velvet-covered armchair of the period, so emphatically different than the inferior tabouret that one can sympathize with the quarrels that occurred when some great lady who was entitled to the former was fobbed off with the latter. True, it would be hard to take one's ease in such chairs, but the defence would he that made in another context " Grandeur and dignity were the objects of the scheme, and comfort was in every ease secondary in the mind of its creator." - With the turn of the century the Court because more human, and the style of furniture changes. Designers begin to take into consideration the natural curves of the human back and the desire of the arm to rest on something soft. So the straight lines of the Louis XIV chair give way to curves. One need no longer sit bolt upright ; one can almost lounge. Other kinds of furniture develop in the same way. The massive solidity and brazen emblems of Boulle give way to something less noble but more attractive. A cupboard need no longer be the visible expression of the dignity of royalty it may be just elegant or even useful. One may even indulge in such trivialities as gueridens or those delicate bureaux at which nothing but the shortest and lightest note could ever be written. With Louis XV the desire for elegance and light- ness is carried almost to excess, and the tables often seem insecure on their curved, tapering legs. But this did not last, and the increasing seriousness of the next reign was accom- panied by a return to so-ea lied classical principles. The straight line asserted its claim everywhere, and flat surfaces and hard corners replaced the bellying fronts and subtle gradations of Louis XV furniture. But this cold Louis XVI style misses everything. It achieves neither the grandeur of Louis XIV's manner nor the taste of the Regence, nor the elegance of Louis XV, nor the perfect comfort of the best
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