For Love or Money? Rethinking Fragonard

Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture Vol. 40, 2011

MARY D. SHERIFF F or decades scholars were certain of it: Venus ruled rococo painting, that frivolous French confection whipped up by Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard. It was the Goncourt Brothers who heralded the reign of this goddess, and their image of eighteenth-century French art long held sway over both those scholars who celebrated rococo painting and those who condemned it's apparent lack of serious content. Watteau and Fragonard, the Goncourts cast as the great poets of love: Watteau for imagining a "Champs-Elysées of passion," and Fragonard for drawing inspiration from Ovid's Art of Love. It was Boucher, however, who personified the taste of eighteenth-century France, which the Goncourts pictured as a true realm of Venus in its devotion to "la volupté." 1 Although bits of the Goncourts' vision still circulate today, scholars largely treat their account as a historical construct open to deconstruction. What art historians have left in place, however, is the tacit claim that Watteau's work represents both the art of the regency under Philippe d'Orleans (1715 to 1723) and the origin of rococo painting. 2 Thus located, Watteau embodies the transition from the France fastueuse of Louis XIV to the France galante of Louis XV; from a culture of majesty and to one of agrément. 3 This focus on Watteau as the sole agent of change and mark of transition occludes the rich and varied artistic production of the Regency as well as the role of official institutions in disseminating a theory of representation that came to

Orientations--Space, Time, Image, Word, 2005

French Studies, 2006

The Art Bulletin 69:1, 1987

Romance Quarterly, 1992

Jean Plattard once suggested that, like all the major French poets of the midsixteenth century, Pierre de Ronsard overwhelmingly preferred the narrative-type, 1 historical and mythological painting produced at the Chateau de Fontainebleau by artists such as Il Rosso and Primaticcio to the concurrent genre of courtly portraiture practiced by painters such as François Clouet and Corneille de Lyon: "Les poetes donnaient naturellement a ces peintures historiques et mythologiques la preference sur les portraits." 2 The appeal, Plattard believed, was twofold. On the one hand, there was "l'ampleur de la conception" (p. 492) of narrative painting-its conceptual magnitude, or ability to represent multiple (yet related) subject matters in a single frame. On the other hand, there was its "hardiesse et. .. liberte de l'imagination" (p. 492)-its imaginative boldness, as demonstrated by the ability of narrative painting to give form to the purely conceptual truths of ideal Nature (to borrow the Neoplatonic terminology of the period). For Plattard, Ronsard considered these qualities "comme caracteristiques du genie de la poesie et des arts en general" (p. 492).

Nineteenth Century French Studies, 2005