The spirit of free painterly movement, begun by Titian in the sixteenth century and transformed into the Baroque spirit of the seventeenth century, had turned into something prettier and less imposing by the start of the eighteenth century – the Rococo. Churches all over central Europe were still being painted with saints and members of the Holy Family dramatically ascending into the heavens. But privately, away from the moralistic public face of the historic institutions, radical change was setting in. The philosophical and scientific advances into reason made earlier by René Descartes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and in the later eighteenth century by Immanuel Kant, were all forcing the educated classes to see individual human reason as the only benchmark for knowledge rather than the teachings of the Church. Belief in religion did not dwindle, however. If anything the diversification of different Protestant sects proved how much more spiritually needy the questioning population was becoming in the face of this underlying empiricism. Membership of the educated class was growing all the time. By the second half of the century the industrial revolution had begun in Britain. Its new and rapidly increasing middle-class population was creating wealth, and with it fresh ways of seeing the world. The shift of power from the landed aristocracy to the industrialists was underway. Throughout society riches were steadily increasing due to foreign trade and the European colonization of every habitable continent around the planet.
In France the regulated official academy art of Poussin-like classicism was out of sympathy with new desires for personal freedoms. Even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, was demanding art that was more light-hearted. But this king, who built the magnificent and megalomaniacal palace of Versailles, died in 1715 before seeing the grand classicizing influence of his court diminish. The new Regent moved the entire camp of aristocrats out of Versailles and back into Paris, and the whole court system changed. The resulting fragmentation of the court into smaller, private, townhouse mini-palaces allowed the stiff public faces of royalty, religion and government to mellow. The house parties began and a culture of individual indulgence, free of public morals, set in. Watteau came along just in time to satisfy their needs. In a spirit that was free of academic rules and constraints he painted casual scenes of grand garden parties that sparkled with rich silks and simmered with amorous undercurrents. It was all a very new direction for painting – frivolous, sexy set-designs for a self-absorbed elite. Watteau died young while his new style was still gathering admirers, and he was immediately replaced by the fleshier and more overtly erotic art of Boucher and his pupil Fragonard. They captured the essence of the Rococo in France, creating the style as they painted. The elegant clothes of Watteau’s quietly flirtatious couples came off in their hands to reveal the sensual people beneath, sometimes as gods, other times blatantly as real-life lovers. Another gifted Frenchman, working alongside this carefree erotic vein of Rococo art, was a quiet man of the very opposite kinds of sensibilities. Chardin was painting to capture the simplest objects, still lifes and servants, with as much restraint and dignity as he possessed.
At the same time, in England, the Londoner Hogarth set about launching satirical attacks on everyone around him. There wasn’t a social class or situation that wasn’t ripe for reducing down to its most obviously hypocritical or immoral self. The marriages of convenience between rich merchants and poor aristocrats, the gin-soaked workers in the tenements of the East End – even the fat clergy got it in the neck. By disseminating his ‘low-life’ moralistic tales through prints, Hogarth’s judgmental, humane and amusing views of contemporary life were speaking to all classes, on something like the same level, while at the same time drawing attention to the many levels that society was splitting into.
In Italy the Rococo found its feet in different ways. From the strong and heavier Baroque style something lighter was emerging, through artists like Solimena, Ricci and Zuccarelli, until it reached its peak in the grand and assured frescos of Tiepolo in Venice. Whereas Tiepolo’s opulent paintings were a little too Catholic in taste for the British, both Ricci and Zuccarelli worked in England, adapting to and influencing British style. But no one rose to the challenge of the island’s cool rationalism better than Canaletto, the greatest view-painter of the Venetian republic. In crisp, exacting daylight he painted perfect scenes of Venetian canals, with palaces of honey-hued stone rising out of the water, surrounded by the rich colours of the city’s historic pageantry.
The English grand tourists who bought Canaletto’s work returned home to be painted themselves by some of the finest and most subtle portrait artists who have ever lived. The eighteenth century was the golden age of British painting, and portraits were what everyone wanted. It wasn’t always what artists themselves wanted to paint, and it took the greatest painters of the day, Gainsborough and Reynolds, to force artistic development on the public. Gainsborough, in his free and intuitive style, brought in the beauty of the English landscape, while Reynolds turned his sitters into historical actors on a huge scale.
Across the channel in France the century saw changes in painting that were as revolutionary as the country’s politics. By the 1760s the taste for frothy sensuality, without any moral or political purpose, was running out. The age of reason and enlightenment was rejecting traditional authority and looking for a new way to express itself. That expression was found in the classical world, before Christian religions and feudal power structures developed. It seemed like a world of kindred spirits, with middle-class morals, democracy, intellectual freedom and a questioning just like they were experiencing or wanted to experience. The French were looking for heroic art to match the period’s growing sense of individual power and to reflect their confidant sense of optimism. The spirit of the Ancients was being re-created in the cultures of the eighteenth century, so it was only a matter of time before that world was re-created in the neo-Classical paintings of David.
THE PAINTING The silk dresses and costumes reflect the sun in this secluded corner of a park. The aristocracy are at play, flirtatiously living in a moment of fun and pleasure. The couple are dressed as figures from Italian pantomime known as commedia dell’arte. Harlequin masks himself and jokingly propositions his lover Columbine. Surprised and flattered, she leans toward her new admirer. Dressing up, parties and affairs were all part of daily life in Parisian society. The formalities of court at Versailles under the Sun King slackened when the new Regent moved everyone back to central Paris in 1715. Watteau captured the mood with a new kind of painting of genteel picnics, his fêtes galantes. The costumes have all the elegance of van Dyck’s Lord John Stuart and his Brother Lord Bernard Stuart, painted sixty years before, but Watteau’s clients were bored of looking stately. They wanted to see themselves as the intelligent, social, amorous people they were, idealized in natural surroundings. But Watteau’s art was never just about frivolity. This painting doesn’t just show a happy party – there is a sad seriousness in the face of the man reading the letter. Watteau hints that pleasure should be enjoyed to the full, because it never lasts.
THE ARTIST Neither a Parisian, nor even really French, Watteau redefined what is was to be both during his short life. The greatest Rococo painter of his day, his Flemish roots show through his inspiration, Rubens. In France at this time the official academy had just paused its love affair with the harsh classicism of Poussin. Taste was looking toward the free painting of colourists like Rubens and Titian, and this change was lucky for Watteau. His caustic and melancholy personality hadn’t won him admirers at the centre of court, but his paintings hit the tone of the times for his aristocratic friends, who kept him busy enough not to need royal patronage. His fêtes galantes, with all their courtly seduction, are the first that combine nature and man in one painterly swirl. His trees and skies have a fluffiness that inspired Gainsborough, but his statues, urns and fountains, as well as his glowing people, seem to melt together in blurry outlines. He might have borrowed his compositions from Giorgione, but he transformed them into something totally his own. A touchy and sad character, Watteau suffered from tuberculosis for most of his life. He died of the disease aged thirty-six.
b. Valenciennes 1684: d. Nogent-sur-Marne, nr Paris 1721
Harlequin and Columbine, c. 1717
Oil on panel
36 × 24.9cm (14¼ × 9¾ in)
Wallace Collection, London
THE PAINTING A rosy-cheeked young girl stands motionless at a chair. Chardin has caught her in the moment she has stopped to think about something. It spoken to now, she looks as if she would turn to us, eyes still glazed, before snapping out of her reverie. Her frozen pose and wide eyes are perfectly evocative of such a delicate moment. Chardin has painted a transitory feeling, one that everyone has had, but somehow no one had ever thought to paint it before. It is the masterpiece by an artist who painted with a single-minded vision and individual integrity. His originality came directly from his own views and feelings for life. A fairly modest man, his normal field was still lifes, but when he painted other subjects he depicted the people ‘below stairs’ instead of the aristocrats who employed them. This little girl is a house servant, probably a seamstress by the look of the scissors and pincushion ribboned to her dress. She has been called up to the family to deliver a shuttlecock and battledore racket – the eighteenth-century version of badminton – or maybe to play with the bored children of the house. The power of the painting lies in its unpretentiousness.
THE ARTIST Chardin is one of the greatest painters of eighteenth-century France, and one of the world’s finest still life and genre painters. But when he died his contemporaries took no notice, and within just a few years the French neo-Classical establishment had consigned him to obscurity. He wasn’t like other artists. The followers of Watteau were painting frothy elegant parkland scenes, erotic nude allegories or grand portraits and landscapes. According to the academy of the time, Chardin was painting the lowliest sort of pictures, small still lifes of bread and pots. Not only were his subjects not grand, neither was the way he painted them. He painted with a small-scale, honest intimacy that was completely at odds with the egotistical pomp of pre-revolutionary France. Like the incredibly delicate genre pictures of servants or the bourgeois, his still lifes were simple, direct and unaffected. His thick brushwork and airy sense of space within a picture set him apart from other artists of his time. It might have been this, as well as his diligent, unpretentious character, that allowed the art establishment to brush him aside as not like them and therefore unimportant.
b. Paris 1699; d. Paris 1779
Girl with a Shuttlecock, c. 1737
Oil on canvas
82 × 66 cm (32¼ × 26 in)
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
THE PAINTING At the centre of all the crisp billowing drapery is one of Boucher’s most famous nudes. Her fleshy pink body looks all the warmer sprawled over the icy blues and greens of the cloth. Pale skin and sensually reddened cheeks are the only living colours he has allowed here. In the past, artists like Cranach needed to paint classical myth when their patrons wanted naked flesh. Artist and patron didn’t dare to be so crude as do anything else. Boucher was a master of these allegories himself, they were his bread and butter, but his classical scenes went beyond just painting nudes – he was painting sexuality. He broke the taboo. He allowed himself to paint sex without any coyness with the subject or even from his sitter. The plump boudoir cushions are in disarray, the carpet is pulled up at the edges, and her pearl necklace is lying on the low bed table. We don’t know her name for sure, but the chances are she is one of Louis XV’s mistresses that Boucher often painted in exactly this pose. Boucher’s sensual skill made him the most sought-after decorative artist in France.
THE ARTIST Boucher stands out in total contrast to his subtle, quiet contemporary Chardin. After Watteau’s death, Boucher became the defining artist of eighteenth-century France. Incredibly popular, he was the most famous painter of his day. Louis XV made him King’s Painter and head of the painting Académie Royale. In return Boucher painted his mistresses and even taught the power behind the throne, Madame de Pompadour, how to paint. He knew what the French wanted after Watteau, and he painted it for them. He gave the eighteenth century all it wanted to know about sex but had been afraid to ask for from Watteau. But after 1,000 paintings and 10,000 drawings, the wit who said he didn’t like nature because it was ‘too green and badly lit’ was getting out of touch. Boucher’s one-liner art was starting to bore the public. There were just too many amorous couples and nude women – people began to want moral depth. The king still liked it, but then as the 1789 Revolution proved, royal taste wasn’t that of the people. The neo-Classicists of Napoleon’s time attacked Boucher’s decadence, but his excellent draughtsmanship and fleshy sensuality have since been prized again. With Fragonard, he is seen as the international leader of the Rococo.
b. Paris 1703, d. Paris 1770
Odalisque, c. 1745
Oil on canvas
54 × 65 cm (21 × 25½ in)
Louvre, Paris
THE PAINTING Tom Rakewell, the ‘hero’ of Hogarth’s series of eight moralizing paintings, inherits his miser father’s wealth and literally goes blowing the cash. By the time of this third scene, he is already on his way to ruin. He is being groped by a prostitute he has brought back to the notorious Rose-Tavern in London’s Drury Lane. On the way there they have had a prankish run-in with a night-watchman – his staff and lantern are at Tom’s feet. Tom’s shirt is undone and his sword is tellingly ‘unsheathed’. It is 3am (we know because a girl is stealing his watch). At the table one prostitute spits at another who pulls a dagger, while an angry pimp threatens another girl who tries seduction to win him over. Next to the undressing stripper a chamber pot is spilling onto a plate of food. Her minder at the door holds the pewter dish that she dances on, and next to him a band plays under the defaced paintings of Roman emperors. This is an orgy after all. The only portrait left intact is of Nero, watching over the room while a girl accidentally sets fire to a map of the world.
THE ARTIST Hogarth was the most internationally important British artist of his time. His middle-class morals, unconnected with the old power structures of the Church or aristocracy, made his art very influential across a changing Europe. His famous ‘low life’ pictures were a social revolution. Etched in their thousands, they proved that artists could be independent of rich patrons. This five-foot tall, pugnacious little cockney was part of the new London middle class, and to him everyone was ripe for ridicule. His mistrust of foreigners, including their Old Masters, led him to found an art school, which in turn partly led to the foundation of Britain’s Royal Academy. Despite his dislike of foreigners his painting technique comes from Europe. His Rococo style comes out of France, but Hogarth turned it into a bawdy laugh of his own making. His study of the seedier side of life affected him. He was a founding governor of the first orphanage, and painted some of his best work for its walls, for free. But he failed in his real ambition, to paint grand history pictures. His talents just didn’t suit this sort of scale. After public slanging matches with most of the art establishment, he died embittered.
b. London 1697; d. London 1764
The Rake’s Progress: III,
The Rake at the Rose-Tavern, 1733
Oil on canvas
62.2 × 75 cm (24½ × 29½ in)
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
b. Belluno 1659; d. Venice 1734
Personification of Painting, c. 1700-10
Oil on canvas
76 × 63.5 cm (30 × 25 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING This is the living embodiment of painting itself. Ricci turns what he does with a brush into something godly. The figure’s classical robes, bare chest and laurel wreath hint that she is a Muse. The classical world never got round to creating a Muse of painting – only poetry, history and music were important enough to the Ancient Greeks to have goddesses – so Ricci invented one. Her crumpled golden drapery is balanced out by the moody sky swirling in the background. Ricci’s colours and the free and easy way he handled paint were typical of the greatest Venetian artists like Titian and Veronese, but he also brought in the softness of Correggio, creating his own personal style.
THE ARTIST Ricci was one of the most colourful characters of his time, not just because his vibrant handling and atmospheric lighting were loved everywhere. His many dangerous liaisons around Europe meant he often had to run for his life to other countries. The Duke of Parma saved him from the death penalty after one of these affairs. Ricci is one of the founders of the light and airy Rococo style in Italy, and his work leads to Tiepolo and the rebirth of Venetian art in the eighteenth century. He was one of the foreign artists working in England that Hogarth hated so much. After Hogarth’s father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, beat him to the best commissions at Hampton Court and St Paul’s Cathedral, Ricci returned to work in Venice.
b. Calale di Serino 1657; d. Barra 1747
Deborah and Barak, 18th century
Oil on canvas
128 × 102 cm (50½ × 40 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING Dramatic light and colour in an uneven but balanced composition give Solimena’s picture a Baroque sense of tense action. The scene is taken from the Old Testament story about a prophetess called Deborah. She lived under a palm tree, doling out sage sayings and judging arguments for the Israelites. During one of these sessions she sent for Barak and told him to raise an army of 10,000 to retake Israel. Solimena has glorified the dusty meeting under a tree and turned it into an enthroned queen passing on the word of God to a mightily armoured hero. Deborah is one of the few powerful female figures of divine intervention in the Old Testament, so Solimena has given her the presence of an enthroned Madonna or even of a quasi-pagan deity like Veronese’s Venice Enthroned.
THE ARTIST Solimena was one of the eighteenth century’s most famous and well-paid artists. After his predecessor, Luca Giordano, Solimena was the leader of Neapolitan art in the first half of the eighteenth century. His pictures are full of puffy clouds, solid, floating angels and asymmetrically laid-out compositions full of colourful action. His classic but complicated draughtsmanship, inherited from Raphael, made him one of the century’s most imitated Baroque artists. He fed the massive demand for his work in Naples with the help of an enormous studio. Naples was ruled by both the Spanish and the Austrians in Solimena’s lifetime – and both needed art to glorify their regimes.
THE PAINTING Filling the vast room of a Venetian palace, Tiepolo’s Cleopatra frescoes are his best and most spectacular work. This huge wall painting is set between two actual doors, so the painted steps give the illusion of leading to real action in another room. Tiepolo hired an architectural painter to help him with this typically grand Rococo trick. Both are in the painting, standing at the left of the banquet. Still peering out over the feast 250 years later, Tiepolo is in the middle with his collaborator Mengozzi-Colonna to his left. Cleopatra’s extravagance and hospitality were legendary. When Antony was invited to her fabulous palace, he was overawed by the luxury she lived in for a provincial Egyptian. To counter Antony’s vulgar thoughts about money, Cleopatra took off her earring, a famous rare pearl, and dropped it into a glass of vinegar. As it dissolved she drank it, showing her ambivalence to mere wealth. It is the story of riches to end all stories of riches, and its setting here does everything to heighten the effect. It summed up the splendour of Tiepolo’s art so well that he painted it more than any other subject.
THE ARTIST During his life Tiepolo was thought of as the greatest Venetian painter alive, and now he is seen as eighteenth-century Italy’s most inventive Rococo artist. He was the last great fresco artist, ending a tradition that went back 400 years to Giotto. His biggest inspiration was his fellow Venetian Veronese, whose grand Renaissance decorations had a similar purpose and feel to those of Tiepolo’s – so much so that Tiepolo was called the new Veronese. But Veronese’s monumental solidity was transformed into the light airiness of the Rococo that Tiepolo perfected. With pale, translucent colours he transformed the flat ceilings of churches and palaces, turning them into three-dimensional openings to heaven, filled with flying chariots, gods and saints. Correggio had invented that illusionism 200 years earlier in Parma, and kick-started the Baroque with it. Now Tiepolo brought it to its perfect, floating conclusion. At the invitation of Charles III he spent the last eight years of his life painting in Madrid with his two sons. But after his death his altarpieces were thrown out for new ones by his jealous rival in Spain, Anton Raphael Mengs. Story has it that Mengs even tried to pay some heavies to beat up the old man.
b. Venice 1696; d. Madrid 1770
Cleopatra’s Banquet, c. 1747
Fresco detail
Palazzo Labia, Venice
THE PAINTING The power and splendour of Venice with its carnivals, festivals and regattas is Canaletto’s subject. Every year since it was decreed in 1315 there has been a regatta on the Grand Canal. It used to be held on 2 February, when this picture is set. It is evening, with the light falling from the west over Ca’ Foscari and lighting up the honey coloured stones of Venice. One of the grandest of the boats takes up Canaletto’s foreground; it is one of the two barges that were built every year in the great military shipbuilding yard, the Arsenal, especially for the regatta. Just to the left is part of the macchina della regatta, the incredibly elaborate pavilion built for Venice’s elected monarch, the Doge, to hand out prize flags to the winners. The building with the flag-draped balcony is the Palazzo Balbi, built for an owner that died surveying the building work. It is the same balcony that Napoleon was to stand on sixty years later when he came to watch the regatta, his regatta by then. The once great power became just another of Napoleon’s possessions, and Venice never again regained its independence.
THE ARTIST After following his father into stage design, painting backdrops for Vivaldi’s concerts, Canaletto went to Rome aged twenty-three and started sketching the ruins. It inspired him to do the same back home. Other artists like Guardi painted Venice in a free, more ‘Venetian’ way, but Canaletto’s atmosphere of cool rationality was achieved through precision. To do this he used a camera obscura. This was a kind of basic camera that reflected an image, known since Archimedes’ time 2,000 years earlier. A hundred years before Canaletto, Vermeer had used one. Canaletto traced over reflections of Venice, and painted up the finished thing in oils. Selling much of his work to the English nobility, more than half of his signed paintings are still in Britain today (the Royal Collection has the world’s greatest number). As the Austrian War of Succession (1740–48) raged across the continent, Canaletto headed for the safety of his biggest market, and stayed painting country houses and London views for ten years. But his brilliance began to slip and he was accused of being an imposter, not the famous Canaletto at all. He returned home to a similarly lukewarm reception and died, still painting, without his earlier fame or fortune.
b. Venice 1697; d. Venice 1768
Regatta on the Grand Canal (detail), c. 1735
Oil on canvas
218.4 × 149.8 cm (86 × 54 in)
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Durham
THE PAINTING What Canaletto was doing for Venice, Panini was doing in a completely different way for the eternal city, Rome. His Pantheon is a fairly faithful recording of Europe’s greatest surviving ancient monument, but details like the gently crumbling frieze under the coffered dome are Panini’s own. So are the small sprigs of vegetation growing out around the thirty-feet wide opening in the roof. But Panini was in the business of picturesque ancient monuments; having this one looking as pristine as it did when it was built in AD 125 did not help his purpose. After the Eastern Roman emperor gave the building to the pope in AD 608, it was converted from a pagan temple dedicated to all the gods to a Christian church dedicated to all the martyrs. In a typical Roman way the pagan gods were simply replaced by their Christian counterparts. All that changed was the statues in the alcoves. Characteristic Panini details are the monks, priests and worshippers scattered everywhere, and the tiny man looking down from the roof. On the right there is a Swiss Guard from the Vatican with his pike, by chance kneeling near the tomb of Raphael, walled up here in 1520. At the time that this was painted, no one knew where exactly Rapahel was buried.
THE ARTIST In Rome Panini created what are called capriccio – fantasy paintings full of real and imagined places stuck together in a way that best suited the artist’s composition. Like Canaletto he started designing stage-sets and was inspired by the ruins of Rome. But unlike him Panini wasn’t interested in painting things as he saw them. His views are made on the canvas. The Colosseum, Trajan’s Column and the Roman Forum jostle together with famous classical sculptures. He was putting the best of the classical world together in one painting. It was pure showmanship and people loved its contrast to the more exacting views. The grand tourists in Rome, like van Dyck’s Lord Stuart brothers, wanted to go home with a Panini, so he built up a studio of assistants to meet the demand. After marrying a Frenchwoman he became Head of Perspective at the French Academy in Rome. His ideas filtered into French art. But it was one of his own assistants, the young Frenchman Robert, who went on to develop Panini’s theatrical style and influence a new generation of French art.
b. Piacenza 1691–92, d. Rome 1765
The Interior of the Pantheon, Rome, 1732
Oil on canvas
199 × 98.4 cm (47 × 38¼ in)
Private Collection
b. Milan 1688; d. Beijing 1766
Autumn Cries on the Artemesia Plain, mid-18th century
Ink and colour on silk
72 × 31 cm (28½ × 12 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTINIG This painting represents the brief melding of Asian and European art. It is a Sino-Italian hybrid. The landscape comes out of the Sung Dynasty traditions of Xu Xi, and Castiglione continues the line drawing and fine brushwork of Emperor Huizong and the Shigehide artist. But he has added European three-dimensionality by giving the landscape a linear perspective, and adding solidity to the deer with shadows. This was one of Emperor Quinlong’s prized paintings. To his eyes the deer and doe represented two things – the eternal struggle of sexual domination, and the proud and ancient traditions of stag hunting by the Emperor’s nomadic ancestors. He had just revived the hunt and filled his Summer Palace gardens with deer to chase.
THE ARTIST Castiglione was a Jesuit artist who, after ten years of painting in Italy and Portugal, headed out to Macao in 1714 to convert the locals. Keen to learn the language and etiquette it didn’t take him long to get introduced to the emperor. He became a court favourite and was made an official, a Mandarin, and so wore a peacock-decorated silk gown with a sapphire-studded hat. He painted as a Chinese-European for three emperors, at a time when they were most interested in learning about western culture. Unfortunately civil war and colonialism pecked away at China’s international goodwill until the West was rejected completely, culminating in war, when the Summer Palace was sacked and this painting was taken to Scotland.
b. Pitigliano 1702; d. Florence 1788
The Rape of Europa, mid-18th century
Oil on canvas
135 × 153 cm (53 × 60 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING Correggio’s Jupiter and Io tells the tale of one of Jupiter’s infatuations. The insatiable god assumed many shapes to ravish unsuspecting mortals, not always female. Here he is, at it again. The popularity of these obscure myths was not entirely due to their sexual content. In medieval times the classical myths were translated into Christian terms in the Moralized Ovid. This one was read as Christ transformed into a bull to plod off up to heaven carrying a human soul on his back. This perhaps was not an obvious subject for a painting, but at least it could have been read as a Christian image if, for instance, the local bishop was coming over. Zuccarelli’s light, pale landscape is a minor backdrop here for his plump cherubs and maidens – all colourful Rococo decorations in a scene that only really needs Europa and a bull.
THE ARTIST Zuccarelli was a Rococo landscape painter and one of the eighteenth century’s most influential. The English liked him most, as they did Canaletto. It was Canaletto’s dealer, Joseph Smith, who introduced Zuccarelli to his English clients and changed the course of his career. Perhaps it was because he took the grand classicism of Claude and the wildness of Rosa, both English favourites, and combined them with his own lighter and sweeter decorative taste that he went down so well. He worked in England for sixteen years, leaving a huge influence on British landscape painting. He was one of the founder members of the Royal Academy.
THE PAINTING Guardi is a quintessentially Venetian artist. While the older Canaletto usually painted exacting copies of Venetian views, Guardi was sloshing thick paint around and creating work of real imagination. Like most of his paintings, here he has included as much swirling sky as possible. Through two triangles of colour, one dusky blue, the other dusty brown, he flings some sunlight. It catches some cloud here and a Gothic church pinnacle there. Where all the sunlight is coming from is not obvious, but then it is not supposed to be. Everything is mysteriously unreal. The men playing dice look real enough, but look a little closer and you see that they are actually just a few brilliantly executed dashes of colour. They are all paint rather than flesh and bone. The view looks convincing enough as some little-known Venetian back street, but it isn’t. It consists of bits and pieces of reality that Guardi has mixed together to create his own fantasy. The outlines of the warm, flesh-toned buildings melt in the evening sun. It is a wispy fantasy of Venice, an impression of what it was really like, without Canaletto’s rational details to get in the way.
THE ARTIST Guardi was the best-known member of a family of Venetian painters, and Tiepolo’s brother-in-law. But he died in poverty, forgotten. His cityscapes were never thought a match for Canaletto’s. At the age of forty Guardi was even reduced to taking work in his studio as an assistant. Seeing how the English tourists snapped up Canaletto’s style, Guardi tried his hand at it. He got himself a camera obscura, which projected an image to trace, and painted the rest as Canaletto did. These paintings went down very well, but unfortunately he never signed them so we don’t know where they are or what they looked like. They probably have Canaletto labels on them now. But Guardi didn’t stick to this, as he much preferred his own free style. Everything in his paintings shimmers. The reflected water and sky takes over from the buildings as the main attraction. In his waterway paintings he used so much sparkling blue water and sky that it can be hard to see where the canal ends and the horizon starts. If you are lucky there might be a tiny gondolier there to guide you. It took the age of Impressionism to dawn before Guardi’s Venetian impressions were fully valued.
b. Venice 1712; d. Venice 1793
A Venetian Capriccio, late 18th century
Oil on canvas
55.5 × 41.5 cm (22 × 16¼ in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING During the annual Venetian carnival in 1751, a rhino was brought to Venice. For the well-known genre painter Longhi, it was an opportunity not to be missed. This small conversation piece was for the Venetian nobility to talk about and giggle at. It records the patrician Giovanni Grimani and his family, fresh from the carnival raging outside, privately viewing the strange wondrous animal. Grimani seemed to like hiring Longhi to paint visiting ‘freaks’ to Venice. The famous eighteenth-century Irish giant Cornelio Magrat went through the same sort of spectacle as the rhino, and Longhi painted him too for Grimani. This terrifying exotic beast seems to have lost some of its viciousness after its long tour of Europe. Starting out from India, it had already been to Berlin, Frankfurt, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart and Paris before wearily hopping on the boat to Venice. Standing there, immobile amongst its own dung, it is quietly munching on some hay. As if to taunt it out of its boredom, unsuccessfully by the look of it, the owner Captain van der Meer holds up his taming whip and the rhino’s own severed horn. Longhi isn’t using blatant satire, but he’s certainly suggesting the absurdity of it all. This painting sums up Venetian decadence in every way. The city’s power, as well as its painting, was almost finished.
THE ARTIST Across the continent from Hogarth and Bruegel, this Venetian goldsmith’s son was giving his own twist to contemporary ‘low life’ painting. This was a kind of genre painting that wasn’t trying to show a window into the heavens or consciously advance art in its own right. It was there to show a small moral point, or just to be picturesque. Bruegel’s carousing peasants, fighting and urinating in the corners, did it in a straightforward, new way. Hogarth did it to be heavily satirical, and crammed his pictures with up-to-the-minute jokes about every class of person. After all, his prints were being bought by all classes. Longhi learnt from the work of both these artists, and transformed it for the tastes of the Venetian nobility who were buying his work. When his painting poked fun, it only did it in the lightest way. His talent was for showing the Venetian aristocracy in a mirror to itself, by way of anecdote. This was at a time when the aristocratic world was slipping away, to be overrun by Napoleon in 1797.
b. Venice 1702; d. Venice 1785
The Rhinoceros, 1751
Oil on canvas
62 × 50 cm (24½ × 19¾ in)
Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento, Venice
THE PAINTING This is one of the subtlest and most moving portraits Gainsborough ever painted. It has all the informality and emotion of Rubens’ portrait of his own daughter. Gainsborough had inherited Rubens’ free painterly style. It comes through in the swirling background landscape, there to frame the girls’ silky beauty rather than to distract us by being real. But instead of flicked into being, like in Rubens’ portrait, here the girls’ hair is finer and more realistic. Their faces have a deep opaque solidity that has more to do with Gainsborough’s complex painting techniques than just shadow or light. There is nothing sentimental about these girls, which there so easily could have been. The deep look of the older sister and the bored, attention-loving look of the younger one make this a most engaging portrait. It is a private family picture, which might explain why he never finished it. You can see the ghostly outlines of a hissing cat, which would have taken the painting in a very different direction. But it seems he was happiest concentrating on the sisterly embrace. Their expressions added all he wanted.
THE ARTIST ‘Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of art, among the very first...’ So said his greatest rival, Reynolds, when he died – twelve years after the American Revolution – as one of the eighteenth century’s most original and natural artists. The two had been in lifelong competition, and artistically disagreed about everything. Reynolds was the intellectual artist, Gainsborough the intuitive one. Aged thirteen he left his small-town merchant roots and became a painter’s apprentice in London. His love of landscape came from Dutch and Flemish pictures, as well as from Watteau, while his love of shimmering drapery came from van Dyck. Landscapes were his calling, but in England clients wanted portraits, so he ingeniously combined the two when he could. His Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted in their country estate, shows off their status and Gainsborough’s landscape talents. He painted every part of his 700 pictures himself, without the usual help of apprentices, painting into the night by candlelight. With what Reynolds called ‘those odd scratches and marks’, he would impressionistically brush people onto the canvas. His inventiveness did not fit with the rules and teaching methods of the new Royal Academy, although he was a founder member. He quit, and set up his own exhibitions.
b. Sudbury 1727; d. London 1788
The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat, c. 1760-1
Oil on canvas
75.6 × 63 cm (29¾ × 24½ in)
National Gallery, London
THE PAINTING This is a heroic double portrait. Acland and Townshend are like eighteenth-century Robin Hoods, dashing through the forest with hair flowing in the wind and taut bows about to fire at their kill. Reynolds has made the two friends the epitome of elegant hunter-gatherers. He puts them in tight-fitting clothes to show off their manly, stretching physiques, but still manages to give them the flowing drapery of a classical hunting scene. The green and brown material shimmers with gold thread, putting them in place as natural champions of the forest. They are both noblemen of nature and successes at the hunt, with their kill of the day piled up behind them. Once you accept the fact that Reynolds paid local boys to dress up and stand in those positions for hours, in order to paint this action snapshot, then it does start to look pretty impressive. He transformed the stale portraiture of England into dynamic, classically allusive allegory with this sort of painting. He has made the two look like dashing, energetic supermen and loyal friends. The truth wasn’t so prosaic. They quarrelled before it was finished, and both refused to pay or take it away.
THE ARTIST As the dominant figure in eighteenth-century English painting, Reynolds died having founded a distinctly British school. More than anyone he elevated art and the status of the artist in Britain. In his time Old Masters were bought-up on grand tours, while homegrown artists painted portraits. Reynolds wanted to change all that. So he married portraiture with the grand style of allegory and history painting, building his artistic reputation on suiting historic imagery to the personalities of his sitters. He was the first president of the new Royal Academy in 1768. Here he delivered his fifteen Discourses on Art, spelling out, in his Devon accent, the academic grandeur of painting. His father had been an Oxford don and Reynolds’ friends were literary types, the opposite of his more intuitive rival Gainsborough who ‘detested reading’. Samuel Boswell even dedicated his famous Life of Johnson to Reynolds. With 150 portraits a year he needed assistants to carry out the much of the work, like Rubens had done. His funeral proved how far he had changed the standing of artists in Britain – three dukes, two marquises, three earls, a viscount and a baron carried his coffin to St Paul’s Cathedral.
b. Plympton 1723; d. London 1792
Colonel John Dyke Acland
and Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney, 1769
Oil on canvas
239 × 184 cm (94 × 72½ cm)
Private Collection
b. Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 1738, d. London 1820
The Death of General Wolfe, c. 1771
Oil on canvas
43 × 61 cm (17 × 24 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING Having won the battle for Quebec in 1759, ending the French presence in Canada, General Wolfe lies dying in the arms of his men. Wolfe had kept North America British, but by the time this was painted, colonial revolution was in the air. West brought his American revolutionary spirit to London with this work, a turning point in art. History paintings like this had always been in classical, everlasting costume. West not only painted the characters as they actually looked, but painted them as portraits too. It is a real battlefield. There are no allegories of victory with laurel crowns. But the poses are as grandly classical as any allegory had been. The picture caused an uproar, but it made him History Painter to the king.
THE AKTIST West is the father of American painting. Born to Pennsylvanian Quakers, he went to Rome to learn to paint. By 1763 he was painting in London, and became a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768. After he showed a version of The Death of General Wolfe in the Royal Academy’s 1771 exhibition, his reputation as an ingenious American was set. His London studio became a mecca for American artists, who returned home influenced by his style. They all made the pilgrimage to the old world to take its new art back with them. West took over from Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy, and during his twenty-eight years in office helped see in the Romantic movement.
b. Liverpool 1724; d. London 1806
Tristram Shandy, c. 1762
Oil on canvas
102 × 127 cm (40 × 50 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING A perfectly studied racehorse is all Stubbs wants us to see. Its owner Viscount Bolingbroke had divorced his wife, Lady Diana Spencer, for adultery and wanted a portrait of his new love, his racehorse. The springtime landscape is as uncluttered and undiverting as possible, making the dark horse a silhouette against it. Every muscle is caught under the sunlit coat. The light green field is like a manicured lawn, and the parkland vista is a fashionable bit of landscaping. From the perfectly bred racehorse to the sculpted countryside, this painting is as much about man’s control of nature as it is about the anatomy of this animal. Even the groom is turned away from us so as not to attract our attention. All eyes are on Stubbs’ perfect racehorse.
THE ARTIST Stubbs did for animal painting what Leonardo and the Renaissance had done for human figure painting. His life’s work was based on a full understanding of the anatomy of animals. Born into a poor Liverpool family, he worked with his father in the family shop. By the age of sixteen he was teaching himself how to paint, and dissecting horses and dogs. He lectured in anatomy at York Hospital and etched for medical manuals, until he had made enough money to visit Italy. He said the trip proved to him that ‘nature is superior to art’. His book The Anatomy of the Horse, published in 1766, shot him to fame and commissions to paint horses came rolling in.
b. Paris 1733, d. Paris 1808
Egyptian Fantasy, 1760
Oil on canvas
63.5 × 95cm (25 × 37½ in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING The epic scale of the pyramids is exaggerated beyond reality in Robert’s ancient fantasy. He had never been to Egypt, and he didn’t need to. A shaft of sunlight hits the centre ground, but blackened clouds cast the shadows of night everywhere else. Vast flights of stairs, massed with figures involved in torch-lit rituals, wind around the building which soars through the clouds like some Tower of Babel. The fallen obelisk in the foreground shows it is not even Ancient Egypt anymore. Robert is hinting at some more sinister post-Pharaoh, pre-Islamic, indeterminate world. His brushwork is free, the figures are single dabs of colour, and the floating clouds are smeared on over a chunk of dark paint that hints at the grandeur of the monument.
THE ARTIST Having spent eleven years in Rome, sketching the ruins with Panini and Fragonard in the French Academy, Robert developed his semi-real grand fantasies. Continuing Claude’s Franco-Roman tradition of idealized landscapes, Robert added grand ruins just when Rococo frivolity wanted to see them. Nothing was serious, or exactly real, it was evocative and picturesque. Louis XVI put him in charge of opening a museum in the Louvre Palace – one year before the French Revolution. Robert found himself in jail waiting to be beheaded, like the king. Somehow they set him free and beheaded someone else with the same name by mistake. He continued to paint into his 80s until, as his friend Vigée-Lebrun said, ‘he died brush in hand’.
b. Grasse 1732; d. Paris 1806
The Bolt, c. 1778
Oil on panel
26 × 32.5 cm (10¼ × 12¾ in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING The seething sensuality and eroticism of this picture make it one of the French Rococo’s most powerful. From the cavernous dishevelled bed, the woman desperately leaps for the door, knocking over a chair. But she is restrained by the man, who envelops her with one arm while bolting the door with the other hand. Sexuality and domination could only be painted this blatantly in eighteenth-century France. This painting was taken from the collection of Robert’s patron, the treasurer of France, after his beheading during the French Revolution. Its fast energetic sketchiness gives movement and feeling. Fragonard painted a more finished version, but the thrust of his erotic paintings is in their free and urgent brushwork. In its content and handling this leap-frogs David’s neo-Classicism and looks right into Romanticism.
THE ARTIST After a brief training with Chardin, an artist with opposite views in life and art, Fragonard became Boucher’s star pupil. Together they gave France a generation of erotic Rococo art, that Fragonard painted with Gainsborough-like naturalness. But when Louis XVI’s mistress Madame du Barry rejected Fragonard’s Progress of Love, which she had commissioned, it left his reputation in tatters. Taste was shifting away to neo-Classicism, and by the 1789 Revolution Fragonard’s aristocratic sensuality was intolerable. He gave up painting altogether. David got him a job in the newly opened Louvre Museum, and by 1795 he was running it. After overseeing the stolen European artworks that Napoleon was daily shipping into Paris, Fragonard left, to die in obscurity.
THE PAINTING This is one of the greatest political statements in art. Marat was a journalist of the French Revolution, a friend of David’s, who was martyred by the opponents of change. David was called to paint the scene the day after Marat was murdered in his bath. David expresses all the sense of lost nobility and reason that he no doubt felt himself. Marat still holds the letter that his killer used to get into his house – it is bloodstained, but clearly names Charlotte Corday as the assassin. The incision under his neck has filled the bath with blood, the stained weapon lies by his hand, and he still clutches the pen and ink of the Age of Reason. There is just enough gore to impart the gravity of the violent death. The bath is covered, draped with linen, to enable Marat to work on his revolutionary writings. Both the pose and the drapery purposefully recall the dead Christ. The possessions of the Church had just been nationalized for the people. Religion was giving way to reason and Marat was its new, martyred saint. David created a huge sombre void over the body, with only the most important aspects shown. Its restraint mirrors the art of the classical world.
THE ARTIST By the time of the French Revolution David was already a national figure. Reasserting the cool grandeur of the classical world, with his crisply painted noble Greeks, he led the neo-Classical movement. The Ancients’ ideas of democracy and individual freedom captured the ethos of his generation, while the decadence of the monarchy, with its frivolous art by Boucher and Fragonard, was out of keeping with the times. While handed-down ideas of feudalism and religion were losing their relevance, David went back to the classical world for inspiration. The cool, uncluttered sculpture of the Ancients was his inspiration – fine harsh drawing, with muscles picked out in chiaroscuro. It was austere but it was powerful. But like Robert, even David was eventually thrown in the Bastille. Beheading would have followed if it hadn’t been for his ex-wife pleading for his release. While she was a monarchist, he had voted for Louis XVI’s execution. But her continued love inspired his Intervention of the Sabine Women, which he started in prison, as well as their remarriage. Once Napoleon took control of France David became his painting propagandist, but he fled to Brussels after Napoleon’s defeat.
b. Paris 1748; d. Brussels 1825
The Death of Marat, 1793
Oil on canvas
165 × 128.3 cm (65 × 50½ in)
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
b. Paris 1755; d. Paris 1842
Self-Portrait of the Artist and her Daughter, 1789
Oil on canvas
130 × 94 cm (51¼ × 37 in)
Louvre, Paris
THE PAINTING Vigée-Lebrun was a famous beauty and wit who held society parties for the doomed French ancien régime. As the ideas of the noble simplicity of Ancient Greece were coming into art through David and through Vigée-Lebrun herself, she was walking around Paris dressed in classical robes and holding salons à la Grecque. And this is how she has painted herself here, wrapped in drapery with her hair tied up in the way it would have been seen in antique sculpture. But this isn’t a portrait just to show off her fashionablity. Her nine-year-old daughter Jeanne is wrapped around her neck with all the softness and sentimentality of the children of Murillo or Gainsborough. Like David’s The Death of Marat, the background is an austere block of colour but the unremitting triangle in the centre is a soft one.
THE ARTIST During her hugely successful career Vigée-Lebrun befriended Queen Marie-Antoinette and painted her dozens of times. She was a famously charming socialite who specialized in soft, pretty paintings of women and children from her social circle. When the Revolution came and the queen was beheaded, Vigée-Lebrun and her daughter left France, and an unhappy marriage, behind. She spent the next fifteen years painting the great and the good in capitals all over Europe. She finally resettled in France after Napoleon’s exile and wrote her three-volume memoirs, where she sums up her resolute character: ‘the day my daughter was born I never left my studio...I went on working’.
