French Eighteenth-Century Painters

by Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

418 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1880

About the author

French writer and literary and art critic Edmond-Louis-Antoine Huot de Goncourt published books and founded the Académie Goncourt. His brother is Jules de Goncourt.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of which I’ve never tired: rich, fresh, inexhaustible, always close to hand. A museum of eighteenth century France composed of ekphrastic rhapsodies, technical disquisitions, searches of archives, collations of sale catalogues, piquant sketches of life and manners, contracts and love affairs, Salons and studios. The Goncourts unite the passionate meticulousness of the connoisseur-collector, the dreamy yearning of the belated aesthete, and the cold gaze of the urban novelist.

”Isn’t the hospital the last resource? No one is refused admission.” If this reply of Watteau’s to M. de Caylus’s anxious inquiries about his future were the only memorable thing in the whole of the honorary academician’s pedantic, aggressive account of the artist’s life, it would suffice to make his biography a document of the greatest value. It is a reply which provides the key to this character, so uncharacteristic of the period, so free from the material preoccupations, the workman’s attitude of the French painters of that date. Watteau announced the type of modern artist in the fine, the disinterested sense, the modern artist in pursuit of an ideal, despising money, careless of the morrow, leading a hazardous – and, I had almost said, if the word had not sunk so low, a bohemian – existence.

[...]

Watteau’s invalid condition was of earlier origin than Caylus indicates. The eccentricity of his moods and the misanthropy in his character attest sufficiently that Watteau was all his life a sick man. In all the portraits and studies left by the master of his bony person, his ungainly silhouette – the sufferer from tuberculosis is apparent. There even exists a gripping, terrible, almost macabre, portrait of the consumptive to which no one has yet called attention. This is the portrait reproduced as Plate 213 in M. de Julienne’s selection. Look at this Democritus in a nightcap, as he appears in this print which, incontestably, is the engraving from the drawing listed in La Roque’s catalogue as No. 599: “Watteau, laughing, drawn by himself.” You will seem to see the image of a face in a hospital, an image contorted by a kind of sardonic agony.

Their wonderful evocation of Chardin’s first success:

A lucky chance soon made him known and proved the beginning of popular favor. A surgeon, a friend of his father’s, asked him to do a signboard, a plafond as it was then called, for his shop, and Chardin, who may have seen the picture Watteau painted for Gersaint’s signboard, attempted a similar work, a lively scene from the Paris of his time on a panel fourteen feet in breadth by two feet three inches in height. He painted a surgeon-barber attending a man wounded in a duel, who had been deposited at the door of the shop. There is a crowd, a clamour, a ferment; the water-carrier is there, his buckets on the ground; dogs bark; a man dragging a vinaigrette is running towards the scene; a woman, perhaps the woman for whom the antagonists had drawn their swords, leans out of the window with an affrighted air. The varied background is full of the buzz of loiterers, of the press of the inquisitive, trying to see, trying to peer over one another’s heads. Paternally, the night-watchmen ward off the indiscreetly curious with their crossed rifles. The injured man, naked to the waist, with the sword wound in his side, and supported by the sister of mercy, is being bled by the surgeon and his assistant. The superintendent of police, in a full wig, walks up and down with the slow, grave tread of justice followed by a clerk, all lean and black. There is a general bustle, a coming and going, in the whole scene which has been rendered above all with verve, abruptly, and without second thoughts, with an uproar of gestures and tones, a tumult and outcry as of the actual scene.

And what a crowd, what a gathering, what a fine show of popular enthusiasm when one morning the signboard appeared, hoisted up on the front of the shop before anyone in the house had risen! The surgeon, to whom Chardin gave no warning, asked what was happening and why there were all those people. He was taken to look at the sign and searched it for the subjects he had commissioned: trepans, bistouris, a parade of all the instruments of his profession. He was on the point of anger, but was disarmed by public admiration. Gradually, the success of the picture gathered strength, and it was through this signboard that the Academy discovered the name and the ability of the painter.

The Surgeon-Barber’s Signboard surfaced at auction in 1783, at which it was purchased by Chardin’s nephew. It then dropped out of history. But the Goncourts got lucky: Laperlier, a private scholar in their network of auction-haunters and shop-rummagers, came across one of Chardin’s sketches for the signboard, “a frank, precipitate notation, full of the spirit and the fire of the last Venetian masters, in which the figures are merely spots, but spots which recall Guardi.” Laperlier’s heirs sold the sketch to the Musée Carnavalet in 1867, where it was destroyed by fire during the Commune (also the fate of Mérimée’s archive and archeological collection). The etching Jules de Goncourt was able to make of it - in 1862 - is now at Harvard.

[Greta V. · Rating 5 out of 5]

La prosa fortemente lirica dei Goncourt fa di questo libro d’arte una gemma preziosa. L’arte della parola va ad aggiungersi alle arti visive. Non siamo più in grado di scrivere in questo modo e di descrivere gli oggetti che ci circondano.