WITH A PLEASANT FEELING THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING À LA LOUIS XV IN THE SOUND OF THAT SENTENCE. 'CONTEZ-NOUS CELA, VICOMTE.' "
-- A countess during her reception in an 1805 Saint Petersberg salon, War and Peace, p.3
The culture of the eighteenth-century court was copied throughout Europe, and is still admired.
An exhibit at the Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory, 13th
An art-book editor on a quiet street nearby
This masterpiece suggests the fugacity of love, pleasure and life...
The Embarcation for Cythera by Antoine Watteau, 1717 / zoom
Cythera is the birthplace of Venus.
...but most works portray the goal of "amusing ourselves" in a way that is cultured and amiable with no further message. They do not go beyond excellent decoration...
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Die Freuden des Landlebens ("The Joys of Country Life") by Jean-Baptiste Pater, toward 1730 |
La Camargo danse by Nicolas Lancret vers 1730 / zoom
...that is often erotic.
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The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, toward 1768 / zoom
The Musical Contest by Fragonard, about 1755 / zoom
Le Verrou ("The Lock") by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, toward 1770
Les Quatre Saisons : L'hiver ("The Four Seasons: Winter") by François Bourcher, 1755 / zoom
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The works are extremely refined...
Madame de Pompadour by Boucher, 1756 / zoom
Madame de Pompadour, official royal mistress then friend and counselor of Louis XV from 1745 until her death in 1764. Her encouragement of the arts was exceptional.
...as was daily life...
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The light pink, made for her, was called "rose Pompadour."
She founded the Sèvres National Manufactory with Louis XV. It still produces porcelain on the highest level, including the tiles for the renovated Château Rouge métro station.
YouTube / zoom
...in the Parisian townhouses of the leading nobles and the roughly hundred châteaux that surrounded Paris. "The road between Paris and Versailles was a perpetual double file of carriages being driven at full speed [...] that between Paris and Orleans was empty except for an occasional post chaise."
-- Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford, 1954, p.4.
Madame de Pompadour constantly renewed the royal residences to amuse the bored king. An example is the château of Champs, east of Paris to give Louis XV a respite from the court.
"It is hardly possible to study 18th-century French domestic architecture except in, and around, Paris. Nearly all the country houses in the provinces are old fortified castles [...]there is extraordinarily little of the first importance further from Versailles than a comfortable day's drive."
-- Mitford, p.5.
The eighteenth century saw the rise of a middle-class that copied the nobles: Madame de Pompadour, originally Jeanne Poisson, perhaps the daughter of a powerful financier, was a commoner who absorbed the elite culture from childhood.
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The view of the peasantry:
Jeune berger dans un paysage ("Young shepherd in the countryside") by François Boucher, no date / zoom
La Petite Laitière ("The Little Milkmaid") by François Boucher, 1766 / zoom
Arthur Young, who travelled in France just before the Revolution, states that a peasant woman who seemed to be in her sixties was in fact 28.
Its poverty came from the taxation it was almost alone to bear.
-- Travels in France in the years 1787, 1788 and 1789 by Arthur Young; can be read online
Marie-Antoinette's obliviousness
fit that of the world she knew.
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