THIS TERRIFIC PIECE—about three paintings that tell the story of Paris in three episodes: Regency, Revolution, and Republic—is adapted from two tours, the History of Paris in Paintings at the Louvre, and the Age of the Impressionists at the Musée d’Orsay, offered by Paris Muse. This unique company offers private tours in Paris museums that have been described as “small and delicious” as opposed to “an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Founded in 2002, Paris Muse is the complete opposite of a large-group tour operator, never booking more than four people to a museum tour (but larger walking tours are also available). Guides, who are trained and experienced art historians, are native English speakers living in Paris doing graduate work or preparing publications related to art history. Tours are offered in about a dozen Paris museums, and there are two great tours for families. Visit the Paris Muse Web site, parismuse.com, for more details and to sign up for its Quoi de Neuf? newsletter. I subscribe and really enjoy it.
THE HISTORY OF Paris is often told as a story of rulers, the monuments they built, and the wars that knocked them down. In the painted visions of its artists, there is another, subtler version of that history. Before the late nineteenth century, very few Paris painters turned their eye on the actual city itself. They painted their cultural moment instead, capturing the spirit and ideas of their age in much the same way movies or popular novels do today. That’s why, when we visit the city’s museums today, if we are not always looking at paintings of Paris, we are often looking at paintings about Paris. The gilded frames that hang in the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay are windows into the minds of its past residents. With a little background we can begin to read them, to see how three paintings in particular speak to the preoccupations and desires of Parisians who lived during key episodes in the city’s history: Regency, Revolution, and Republic.
At first blush nothing could seem further removed from eighteenth-century Paris than the idyllic country setting in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (1717, Louvre, Sully Wing, 2nd floor, Gallery 36). Eight couples are making their way to a gilded boat that readies for sail. Each pair enacts a stage in the progress of seduction, their bodies forming an undulating ribbon across the surface of Watteau’s luminous landscape. At one end, a man in a blue cape strenuously woos his partner, who gazes away at her fan, feigning indifference. Another suitor gently tugs his lover down the hill to the shore. She looks back over her shoulder wistfully. Closer to the boat, the women no longer need to be cajoled. These maidens cling exuberantly to their suitors’ arms. The discreet eroticism of this flirtation is underscored by chubby “putti” soaring high above the couples, some of them engaged in suggestive, even risqué, gymnastics.
The scene may have been conjured by Watteau’s imagination, but it reflects a real form of elite entertainment enjoyed by the ancien régime. A fête galante—an elaborate outdoor party involving role-playing and theater performances—allowed courtiers to try out new identities and gallant seductions. This party is taking place on the island of Cythera, however, believed to be the sacred birthplace of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love. That’s why we also see a statue of her, festooned with roses (her signature flower), watching over the couples. Her son Cupid is here, too. His arrows have been laid to rest, his mission accomplished.
Watteau came to painting by way of eighteenth-century Parisian theater, where this theme of a mythic voyage to Cythera was already very popular, especially in the opera-ballet. It’s no accident that his carefully choreographed couples appear to be performing some kind of minuet. A “pilgrimage to Cythera” was also contemporary slang for a trip to the suburb of Saint-Cloud, where on the extensive grounds of the royal palace there (destroyed in 1870), Parisian lovers enjoyed many a fresh-air Sunday outing. A boat departed for Saint-Cloud from the present-day Samaritaine department store (recently closed). Because eighteenth-century subversive writers used Cythera as a phony publication locale, Venus’s mythical isle also became synonymous with the underground libertine press.
That’s why, despite the otherworldly mood of amorous reverie in Watteau’s painting, it was later understood to literally document the degeneracy of a morally bankrupt elite, a class whose most pressing concern appeared to be how long the party would last. In the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, Watteau’s seemingly apolitical painting looked both reactionary and royal, sparking such an outrage that the Louvre’s curator placed it in storage.
Back in 1717, however, Watteau’s Cythera was a new kind of painting for a new age. Louis XIV’s long absolutist reign had come to a close just two years before. His nephew, Philippe II, was now ruling as regent for the child-king Louis XV. A well-read, tolerant ruler, Philippe reversed many of his uncle’s absolutist policies, ending his wars and closing the worst of the Parisian prisons. Censored books that had once been banned were now in print. Around Philippe’s primary residence at the Palais Royal a more relaxed court life set in, once again in Paris after a long Versailles exile.
His regency’s cultural détente blew fresh air into Watteau’s vaporous painting, which shows people enjoying themselves informally, not following some strict court ritual. That’s also evident in the intermingling of classes. Eighteenth-century peasant blouses and straw hats mix freely with shimmering, aristocratic silks. These textures and delicately colored details are intended to be savored up close, with a relaxed and roving eye. Watteau’s intimate painting is more at home in a Parisian hôtel particulier than in some grand hallway at Versailles.
In stunning contrast, the massive scale of Jacques-Louis David’s The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789—over ten by thirteen feet!—Louvre, Denon Wing, 1st floor, Gallery 75) commands our attention more urgently. Like Watteau, David took his story from the Parisian stage, specifically Voltaire’s Brutus, first performed in 1730. But the two works’ similarities end there. In place of pleasure, we have a tragic story told in a style more cerebral than sensual. This suited the stern moral climate of Paris during the last days of the ancien régime.
David transports us to the home of Junius Brutus, first consul of Rome, who had rid the republic of its last king, Tarquin. Shrouded in metaphorical darkness, Brutus turns his back on the horrible sight of his two dead sons, executed for their involvement in a treasonous plot to restore the very monarchy Brutus had brought down. David believed that painting should ask its viewers tough ethical questions. Is Brutus above humanity, for his personal sacrifice to the republic, or below it, for allowing his own sons to be killed?
The painting received rave reviews at the Louvre’s annual Salon, opening just weeks within the 1789 storming of the Bastille. In the months that followed, its main theme—of measuring the interests of a society against those of an individual—was no longer a remote concern for ancient Roman leaders. Parisians subsequently adopted David’s Brutus as a heroic antiroyalist, the kind of dutiful father to the nation that France needed. It is doubtful, however, that David’s original client for the painting, the king himself, saw Brutus the same way. It was one of Louis XVI’s last acquisitions before the entire royal collection was seized by the new government.
David’s technique was by far the most Revolutionary aspect of his painting. He developed an austere neoclassical style that could be grasped immediately by the throngs visiting the Salon, held in the Louvre’s still-crowded Salon Carré. The grace and delicacy of Watteau might be lost in this shuffle, but David’s crisp lines guaranteed his painting maximum visibility. His figures’ pantomime of gestures—Brutus’s tight clutch on the letter revealing his sons’ treachery versus his wife’s mournfully extended arm—magnifies their emotional conflict across the space of a noisy gallery (the effect still works today). David wanted his paintings to speak directly to a motley Parisian public. It was, arguably, an audience that painters were thinking about for the very first time in history.
Parisian women were soon emulating Roman fashion, wearing the same corset-free looser shifts with high-waisted belts as the women in Brutus. David’s nearby Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800) is an excellent example of this Parisian fashion à l’antique. Brutus helped launch a taste for Roman-inspired furniture, too. Jacob Frères began their careers by creating historical replicas for David to paint (he was a stickler for accurate interiors in his paintings). Later, they would produce similar Empire-style furniture for Napoléon I.
David was not just setting fashion and decorating trends in Paris, however. He played an active role in the new government. As elected deputy to the Convention, he voted for the execution of his former royal patron. Since his radical ideas had failed to win him many friends at the Royal Academy of Painting, when the new government put him in charge of it, he had it abolished. He organized more egalitarian salons open to submission from all artists. David was also given the job of glorifying Revolutionary martyrs in paint, and organizing government-sponsored pageants—like the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794—which transformed Paris into a stage set of patriotic spectacle.
All of this Revolutionary handiwork got him into serious trouble during the post-Terror crackdown. David was arrested and briefly imprisoned at the Palais du Luxembourg. While in his prison room, he painted a self-portrait, which the Louvre now owns as well. Although promising to follow principles rather than men from now on in, David began painting for Napoléon in 1798, just a year shy of the coup d’état that would make him, like Brutus, first consul of France. The work that now draws David’s biggest crowds at the Louvre is his Coronation, a marvelous piece of Napoleonic propaganda that signals both the end of David’s radical challenges to his audience and the return of absolutist power to Paris.
One can imagine why later generations of Parisian artists might want to steer clear of politics and power, and focus more on the act of painting itself. By Auguste Renoir’s time, the Impressionists weren’t interested in reaching the Parisian public—le peuple—as David had tried to do. Paris was now a teeming metropolis with many different publics, each with their own idea of what French art should look like. Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) was shown in what we might now call an “alternative art space” because his work was banished from the mainstream Salon (David’s egalitarian policies didn’t last too long).
Today, there’s usually a crowd in front of Renoir’s painting at the Musée d’Orsay (Level 5, Gallery 32), but in 1877 most Parisians weren’t ready to accept that contemporary scenes from their daily life were worthy enough for something as lasting and high-minded as fine art. Renoir felt differently. He painted his boyhood friends, sipping their grenadine, on a scale normally reserved for heroes. Instead of to a Roman interior, we are transported to a recognizable locale in Paris, the Moulin de la Galette guinguette at the foot of the Montmartre mill that gave it its name.
Although the merrymakers are relaxed, the painting itself is a complex piece of craft, a large composition with several figures moving under changing conditions of light, filtered through the courtyard’s acacia trees. While David used light to help tell his story (Brutus in darkness, his wife and daughters in the harsh light of reality), for Renoir light is the story. And in place of David’s clearly outlined figures, Renoir’s softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.
The impression of ease and spontaneity this new technique created was hard won. It took Renoir over a summer, working in his nearby atelier on rue Cortot, to finish the painting. His friends later claimed that Renoir painted the whole thing right there at the Moulin de la Galette, but in view of its large dimensions that’s unlikely. Plus, he also had a fair amount of editing to do back at the studio. During Renoir’s time, Montmartre was outside the official city limits, so it was an especially freewheeling, some might say seedy, place. The Moulin de la Galette in particular was not exactly respectable, which was precisely its attraction for bourgeois Parisians who went up there to “slum” on the weekends. Besides struggling artists, it was frequented by pimps, prostitutes, and local toughs. Renoir’s idealized vision hints at none of that. He’s more interested in the pleasurable surfaces of things, not their complicated substances.
When the painting was exhibited in 1877 Paris was not as peaceful as Renoir’s painting would have us believe. In an effort to revive the monarchy that year, President MacMahon dismissed his Republican-minded prime minister and put a monarchist in charge. He then dissolved the parliament. His constitutional coup d’état, known as le seize mai after the date on which it happened, nearly brought the rocky Third Republic down for good, just seven years into its existence. Renoir remained focused on light and color throughout. “For me, a picture should be something likable, joyous, and pretty—yes, pretty,” he said. “There are enough ugly things in life for us not to add to them.”
Like Renoir himself, the urbane figures in his painting are turning away, taking a day off from the ugly hassles of modern life. This form of escapist leisure for the masses was born in Renoir’s Paris. But most of it was taking place in new glitzy attractions on the boulevards. By 1877 the Moulin de la Galette was the last remaining guinguette in Paris. Visitors to the Orsay tend to get nostalgic over Renoir’s painting now, but there was already a good deal of nostalgia—for the simple life that once was—when it was painted.
Eventually Renoir became a successful, even wealthy painter in his old age. He and his Impressionist friends were the first generation of artists who managed to do this from the bohemian margins, without ascending the traditional hierarchy of the Parisian art world. Unlike Watteau and David, for example, Renoir did not have lengthy academic training. He went to the École des Beaux-Arts (what the Royal Academy became after the Revolution), but he didn’t stay for long. Copying plaster casts of antique sculpture bored him; he was anxious to start painting outdoors. While this new path for the arts may represent a triumph of innovation over tradition (no more Greeks and Romans!), Renoir was looking to the past, specifically to Watteau. His Bal is an Impressionist update of the fête galante theme, with its animated couples acting out the stages of seduction, drawing us back into the space of the picture. Renoir rediscovers Watteau’s mythic Island of Cythera right here in his own city.
Future generations of Parisian artists will continue to keep the past greats in mind, too, but the good ones will always try to capture what defines their moment.
