Head of a Girl

Head of a Girl
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Head of a Girl

In my research of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the word “sentimental,” or “sentimentality” often came across my radar, which was deemed so essential to Greuze’s work that critics then described his style as “sentimental art.” I never comprehended the meaning of it until I saw this portrait, Head of a Girl.

The majority of Greuze’s later work (1769-1805) consisted of titillating portraits of young girls, some of which involved girls who exposed their breasts under thin gauze, strongly suggesting sexuality under the surface appearance of childhood innocence. This portrait captures the immediacy of beauty. The young girl turns her head around, and gazes into the direction of the painter. The pigment of her face looks incredibly real, her natural blush adds color to the skin, and her dark eyes look peaceful.  Greuze’s artistic skills undoubtedly are showcased on this face. The brush strokes are light and delicate, with a certain ambiguity in application that blends the colors and adds softness to the painting.

The girl’s dress falls half down, exposing her left shoulder: all of a sign of flirtation. She exposes her back while looking back, as if inviting the painter/viewer to join her. Now we realize her true reason for blushing. Greuze achieves sentimentality through his careful work of facial expressions that exudes emotions, especially innocence. While having the face of a child, the girl’s sexually suggesting actions tell the opposite. Under the thin disguise of purity, she remains inherently corrupted.   

  • 7:00 AM

Soap Bubbles

Chardin
Jean-Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, 1734

Chardin’s Soap Bubbles, painted at the pinnacle of his abilities, exemplifies the values of the Enlightenment as well as the style of the man himself.

Born in Paris in 1699, Chardin always had talent with painting. Perhaps more than any painter I’ve researched, he took the traditional route to painting success. He apprenticed to several lesser-known painters during his early years, although little of his work from this time survives. In 1728 he was admitted at an unusually young age to the French Royal Academy, where he would remain an active member for the rest of his life. His first Salon exhibition came in 1737. In both of these organizations he took a leadership role. He held every major position in the Royal Academy, and even took the honor of deciding which paintings should be hung where in certain years. He never left Paris, and he began painting more and more for the king. Eventually, he became the highest-paid painter in the king’s retinue before Chardin's death in 1779.

His style was cold and analytical. He painted most of his scenes with much emotion—many were still-lifes and even his domestic scenes generally depicted chastity and calmness rather than a violent event. This painting in particular seems to be an apt flagship for his life’s work. It is hard to imagine this painting having a huge emotional effect on someone. The subject matter seems more than a little dull, and the way it is painted seems dedicated to accuracy rather than effect. Chardin instead emphasizes the creative and investigative aspects of the enlightenment. The soap bubbles symbolize the spirit of discovery, or as Kant puts it “ escaping from their own immaturity by cultivation of the mind.”

Chardin is honestly not my favorite artist. I think that his paintings show disturbingly little emotion and his still-lifes generally creep me out at best. His domestic scenes, though kind of pretty, feel like they’re encased in ice. However, I can understand his value as an artist. His sense of color and proportion, particularly in his later still-lifes, is unparalleled. He paints everything true to form and subtly uses lighting to bring out the beauty in his domestic scenes. More so than that, he provides a heavy counterbalance to the extravagance of rococo, providing painting as an additional example of western thought’s trend towards enlightenment rationality in the 18th century.
  • 7:00 AM

The Iron Forge

1772

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Iron Forge, 1772

In 1772, in the middle of the First Industrial Revolution, Joseph Wright painted The Iron Forge, one in a series of five paintings in this particular setting. The Iron Forge was contemporary, innovative, and anything but gaudy. This industrial scene exemplifies the change in Britain, pulling the focus from the aristocracy to the working class. Despite the modernity of the painting, Wright’s style appears remnant from a different time. The Iron Forge bears striking resemblance to Caravaggio, with the strong contrasts between light and dark and the austerity of the space. The glowing piece of iron in almost the direct center illuminates the painting with a warm light, yet the effect is ominous. The iron creates a glowing circle of light, illuminating the family in the back and the two men whose fronts we cannot see – the man holding the iron and a mystery man in red with a miserable-looking child on his knee. The utilization of space reminds me of The Calling of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio.

The circle of men at the table and the circle made by the family, the worker, and the glowing iron take up similar space in the paintings. Then there are the subjects in the shadows, Jesus Christ and Saint Peter in Calling of Saint Matthew and the mystery man in The Iron Forge. Both paintings have a heightened sense of drama and urgency. In Saint Matthew, the story makes it dramatic. In Iron Forge, it is the setting that creates the sense of power and danger. For an unconventional painting, maybe Wright’s style didn’t stray too far from tradition after all.

  • 7:00 AM

Embarkation for Cythera

Antoine Watteau
Antoine Watteau, Embarkation for Cythera, 1710

The Rococo style emerged right in the middle of the Enlightenment, an era where religion was questioned and science took its place. Philosophers and scientists garnered respect and fame, entering the global stage as figures of authority. For once, religion fell to the wayside in favor of humanity and its comforts - specifically the lavish lifestyles of the wealthy. In all aspects of art, ranging from architecture to painting, the Rococo style celebrated glamour and was the first art style to so highly elevate nobility in such flamboyant manners.

Watteau paints these rich nobles in their expensive attire enjoying the beauty of nature and the beauty of their possessions. All around them the landscape is "blooming," filling the canvas entirely. In signature Rococo style, Watteau's Embarkation to Cythera was thought to be the re-discovery of sense of self and humanity. Sense of self was very important during this period, specifically through scientific humanism. Descartes describes this idea, declaring, "I resolve to seek no other knowledge than that which I find within myself, or perhaps in the great book of nature.” The Enlightenment was a time of great prosperity and decadence as the noblemen of France became able to show off their lives in art, gaining celebrity along the way. This piece is adorned with gold, soaked in color revealing the desire for human intimacy with one another and with nature. The figures in the scene prance around and enjoy each other’s company, in their own fairytale world that they made sure to have painted so that others can look on in envy.

  • 7:00 AM

The Sacrifice of Isaac

1729
Tiepolo, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1729
If any one Tiepolo painting could represent the painter's work as a whole, The Sacrifice of Isaac could be it.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo captures a biblical story in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to test his faith.  When Abraham consents and prepares to strike the fatal blow, an angel descends from the heavens to stop him, declaring that he has proven his loyalty to God's word, sending a bull for the ritual instead.  The painting, like the story, crackles with emotion and power.

Stylistically, The Sacrifice of Isaac represents something unique.  Marking his departure from his master Gregorio Lazzarini's dark colors, Tiepolo creates an airy but tense scene.  He renders his subjects from an unusual perspective, from slightly below to add physical depth and drama.  The subjects' angular limbs and billowing robes all hint at movement and energy.  Notice the mirrored positions of the angel's and Abraham's arms, the look of initial mistrust and then realization and relief in the father's eyes.  A ray of unearthly light creates a line through the sky matching the lean of the humans' bodies and the tree in the background, as though the figures were bending to their creator.

The Sacrifice of Isaac typifies Tiepolo's work with its biblical narrative and lighthearted hues juxtaposed with serious subject matter.  Tiepolo depicts God as neither loving nor malevolent but powerful and omniscient, and he asks the viewer to judge God's nature for himself.  This Enlightenment era line of thinking challenges religion and society.  As Descartes wrote, "...Never has my intention been more than to try to reform my own ideas, and rebuild them on foundations that would be wholly mine...The decision to abandon all one's preconceived notions is not an example for all to follow..."
  • 7:00 AM

Upper Belvedere Palace

Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt

Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, Upper Belvedere Palace, 1721 - 1724 

The Belvedere Palaces of Vienna appear to have been pulled off the page of a fairy tale book and plopped onto a gorgeous property complete with a reflection pool and immense garden. However, this is not the case, no matter how convinced your imagination may be. The structures were actually crafted by Austrian Rococo Architect, Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt. 

Hildebrandt, a sought after architect for the upper class, showed off his architectural talents in the design and construction of multiple palaces. Commissioned by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had met Hildebrandt while teaching civil and military engineering in Piedmont and had taken a liking to the architect, construction of the two palaces, Lower and Upper Belvedere, began in 1713. The two palaces are masterpieces of the Rococo period, displaying ornate and intricate details both inside and out. Upper Belvedere highlights Hildebrandt’s talent to put as much detail into the outside of a structure as the inside -  and highlights the cohesion Hildebrandt creates by doing so. Natural curves, meticulous detail, soft colors, sculptures that appear to be holding up the walls of the palace, and gold appear both inside and out. 

Hildebrandt’s use of gold especially stands out to me. While the majority of the Rococo architects displayed gold on almost every facade in their structures, Hildebrandt used it sparingly to make it capture the eye. The front façade of the palace only contains one large exhibit of gold, so when you look at the front, your eye is instantly drawn to the gold crest. On the inside, Hildebrandt employed the same method to make the gold details distinct. Many halls and rooms are meticulously designed in white or other pastel colors, making a more striking contrast between those rooms and the rooms and halls of gold. 

Hildebrandt separated himself from other Rococo architects through the method of using gold sparingly. Immanuel Kant explains that, “Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another… Have the courage to use your own intelligence! Is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” Hildebrandt followed this explanation of the enlightenment in two ways. First, by joining the movement of the Rococo artists and architects; and second, by advancing his own view of Rococo architecture. Hildebrandt ventured from the other architects who were solely using gold as a method of cohesion in their buildings, and he found other ways to create a sense of cohesion in his magnificent palaces. 




  • 7:00 AM

Stonemason's Yard

Canaletto
Canaletto, Stonemason's Yard, 1726

In the year of 1720, a 23-year-old young man came back from Roma to his beloved hometown, Venice, after things went little rough in the sets of Scarlatti's new opera. Unlike his father, the experience as a theatrical scenery painter was not all that delightful; for him, it was a little hard to adjust to working with theater people. Luckily, after, as he said later down the road in his life, "solemnly excommunicated the theater," he soon realized his talent in painting. As it turned out that the Roman sojourn was not all that fruitless, the experience of scenery painting gave him a thorough grounding in perspective, draughtsmanship, and architecture. So when he returned to Venice, he soon dove into the art of realistic view paintings. Shortly, a formerly-unknown name was mentioned more and more frequently among the patrons and finicky collectors, and compared alongside with the already famous Carlevaris.

Canaletto, a young painter specialized in Venetian townscapes, who could make the sun “shine" in his picture, attracted many eyes sated by the French Rococo style. Derived from his early apprenticeship in scene painting, the theatricality that Canaletto created in his painting provided the viewer with the exact amount of immediacy. Such as in his Stonemason's Yard, the close observation of daily life, expressed through the exaggerated foreshortening and great contrast of light and shadow, created a scene provincial, yet with the aesthetic merit that everyday life could not provide.

In the 1720s, before Canaletto turned his frame to more celebrated sites for the tourist market, we see a romantic, perhaps bit cavalier young painter, setting up his easel in the streets of Venice, among the working people and great architecture, conveying an easy and almost poetic mood of the townscapes. Well, appreciate and cherish that much as you can, in art and in life, because like Canaletto, it all slipped right through the brushes and never came back.

  • 7:00 AM

Marriage A-La-Mode, part II

1743
William Hogarth, Marriage A-La-Mode: 2, 1743

William Hogarth, an English painter, is known for his '"modern" and 'moral' subjects. Hogarth interned with a goldsmith. Later on his career he started to work with painting. Hogarth was continually claiming that his work was plagiarized and lobbied vociferously for the Copyright Act of 1735 to protect writers and artists.

In Marriage A-La-Mode presents a scene of higher class citizens. There are three hard diagonals. The first starting on the far left side, the corner of the frames down through the man in the blue coat. The second starts at the window down through the man in the red coat. The last one the man on the far right, beginning at his head going through all the way down through his toe.

Hogarth balances the painting with inception paintings (the paintings within the painting) above all of the people on the bottom. Also, the paintings are used as harsh verticals to split the painting in to thirds. The use of the clusters of people adds to this effect. Within the thirds there is a different object on the floor, left: a dog; middle: the handkerchief; and right the family tree. He uses the men on the far sides, on the left the man in the blue coat and on the right the man in the red coat to balance the painting as well.

The man standing facing the window holds blueprints for a building. One could assume that the building is the one that is being built outside the window. The men in the center, are holding money and papers that are talking about the marriage of the woman and the man to the left. The man in the red coat is pointing to the family tree on the floor. Possibly showing that they will be added to the family tree. If you look at the woman she does not look happy to be betrothed. While the man leaning into her looks more than delighted that she is going to be married.

  • 7:00 AM

Broken Eggs

1756
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Broken Eggs, 1756

 Upon his first meeting with Cosette, Monsieur Gillenormand can’t help but exclaims, “How pretty she is! She is a Greuze.” This reference of Greuze in Les Misérables clearly demonstrates the acknowledged touching quality of his paintings, as if bringing up the artist’s name immediately provokes an image of a misty-eyed, love-craving teenage girl.

Truthfully, Greuze did his fair amount of teen girl portraits. Unlike the fellow painters of his time, Fragonard and Hubert Robert, Greuze devoted himself in the picturesque details of the contemporary life of ordinary people, rather than indulging in the ancient art and brilliance of the Renaissance. Genre paintings, a term that arose in 18th century France to describe painters who, like Greuze, specialized in elimination of idealization and focusd on the rudimentary conponents of life. And what’s a better example of daily life than broken eggs? 

Finished in 1756, the time when Greuze first rose to fame, Broken Eggs presents a moral teaching to all. A young woman dressed in working-class clothes sits at the lower left, again looking sad and embarrassed; besides her a basket sits of broken eggs. The middle figure, a young man dressed in fancy attire tries to get to the woman, but he is being held angrily by what appears to be the girl’s mother. Then we recognize a naughty boy on far right, who completes the compositional triangle of the other figures. 

The broken eggs on the floor suggest the impossibility of repairing what’s broken, hinting the girl’s lost virginity. The mother looks aggressive and angry, threatening the young man to take responsibility of he has done. The man, on the other hand, does not seem that he’s going in a bloody fight with the mother, rather he shows a determination to fix the situation. This strikes a similarity even 250 years later, when people still try to restore the innocence that’s already lost, or deal with the consequences of irreparable actions. Greuze, the moral compass of 18th century French art, here, teaches us an important lesson - what’s broken is broken. 

  • 7:00 AM

Monkey as Painter

Chardin
Jean-Siméon Chardin, Monkey as Painter, 1740

I chose this painting because to me it seemed a little different from the rest of Chardin’s work. Chardin’s works may flaunt his talent for painting rich color and positioning his objects beautifully in space, but to me his work has always felt a little dry. I admired his talent, but I couldn’t spend hours looking at his paintings. Then I found this hilarious painting of a monkey carefully outlining what looks like a portrait. Clad in typical painter's garb and standing next to his painter’s equipment, Chardin’s monkey looks unnervingly human. Its haunting eyes stare back at the viewer plaintively. I can’t get over the eyes—they give the monkey intelligence, which for some reason makes it way funnier. Aside from being hilarious, this picture actually appeals to me on a compositional level as well. Chardin was a master of the art of painting, and he used his talent here. The brushwork around the monkey’s head in particular blows me away. The amount of detail he gets out of the fur on the monkey’s face seems impossible given the rather few brush strokes he uses.

Although painting a monkey as a painter deviates dramatically from Chardin’s typical still lifes and domestic scenes, Chardin’s hallmarked style shines through. In particular, the lighting is typical of Chardin—light does not seem to come from a specific source. The painting seems illuminated from within. Chardin forgoes the dramatic lighting present in paintings by past masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio for a quieter feel. His paintings feel calm—the studios, tables, and kitchens he paints seem inviting and warm. I am not sure how I feel about this. At a passing glance, his works seem pleasant enough to look at—the proportions fit nicely and the colors are beautiful. But to me, at least, his paintings seem to grow flat after a while. I cannot stare into one of his paintings and feel absorbed like I can the works of some of the great old masters. However, Chardin may not have objected to this. He painted in the enlightenment, and his works represented a move away from emotional religious scenes towards the cold rationality of the enlightenment. The flat emotion this painting and its brethren give off may signify a calculated choice to prefer science over the fires of torment or the light of salvation.

  • 3:09 PM