Day 230 - Tocque' and Fragonard

January 2, 2021

Gallery 605 leapfrogs from the religious  art of the Quattrocento to 18th century France and paintings that depict a wide array of secular subjects: portraits, scenes from the theater, images of courting couples,  genre scenes, and still-lifes showing the spoils of the hunt.  (The hunt was a popular aristocratic pastime, I read; these paintings have a few too many dead birds for my taste.)  It's interesting to see how the the preoccupations and artistic preferences of the aristocracy and of the rising haute bourgeoisie changed over the centuries.

Today's choices are both paintings of individuals.  The first is a portrait in oil on canvas of the society portrait painter Jean Marc Nattier by his student and eventual son-in-law, Louis Tocque'. About 36" high and 26" wide, the painting shows Nattier from the waist up,  a palette resting in his left hand and a paintbrush held between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. He is dressed in a brown coat and shown against a dark brown ground, so that our attention immediately goes to the parts of the painting that aren't brown: Nattier's cheerful, intelligent face,  his gray curls ( a wig, I presume),  his white shirt and gold-trimmed scarf,  and his hands. What I especially like about the work is the contrast between the tight, careful brushwork of the face, with its use of tiny dots of white to indicate Nattier's pupils and highlight the tip his nose, and the loose brushstrokes used in the rest of the figure, particularly Nattier's coat and his hands. 

The "surprise"  work is "The Love Letter" by Jean Honore' Fragonard.  Painted in oil on canvas and measuring perhaps 32" X 28", it shows a pretty young woman leaning forward at her desk but turning her head to look out toward us; she has apparently just received a love note tucked into a small bouquet of flowers. What makes  the painting such a surprise to me - though not to someone more knowledgeable about Fragonard than I - is that it's a radical corrective to my erroneous preconceptions about the artist.  I'd thought of him as a highly controlled, precise painter.  Instead, what strikes me about this work is the freedom with which he wielded his brush, using dabs of color to indicate the folds of the sitter's dress and the flowers in her nosegay,  along with squiggly strokes to suggest the lace of her dress  and the curly hair on her dog's floppy ears. 

I'd always thought of Impressionism as a marked departure from earlier French painting, and I suppose that in its depictions of plein-air scenes it was. But I can also see continuities between the Impressionists  and their 18th century counterparts.  I vaguely remember distinctions drawn in Fine Arts 13 between  "linear" and "painterly" painters - those who use strong outlines to represent form and those who create form with brushstrokes.  Maybe that division is overly simple. But in any event, I'd put both the Impressionists and the painters whose works I saw today squarely in the "painterly" category.