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Family |
One of his sons, Antoine Monnoyer (died 1747), called 'Young Baptiste,' was a painter of flowers. Another of his sons, known as 'Frere Baptiste,' who went to Rome and became a Dominican friar, and a painter. |
Works |
His suites of engravings, most notably Le Livre de toutes sortes de fleurs d'après nature show flowers with botanical accuracy and served decorative designers for decades. Monnoyer's engravings of flower pieces were being used by tapestry makers, such as at the Soho tapestry works in London, long after his death. In the twentieth century the poet Wallace Stevens invoked Monnoyer's title Livre de toutes sortes de fleurs d'après nature in his philosophical poem "Esthéthique du Mal", whose centrality to Stevens' work was stressed by Harold Bloom; for Stevens "all sorts of flowers" epitomized the anodyne and sentimental poem, attempting to address and assuage "all sorts of misfortune". |
Notes |
References |
Graves, Robert Edmund (1894). "Monnoyer, Jean Baptiste" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 38. London: Smith, Elder & Co. |
External links |
48 artworks by or after Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer at the Art UK site |
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (c. 1716 – 19 November 1783) was a French painter who specialized in portraits executed in pastels. |
Biography |
Perronneau was born in Paris. His exact date of birth is unknown, but posthumous accounts suggest that it was around 1716. He began his career as an engraver, apparently studying with Laurent Cars, whose portrait he drew, and working for the entrepreneurial printseller Gabriel Huquier, rue Saint-Jacques, Paris, making his first portraits in oils, and especially in pastels, in the 1740s. His career was much in the shadow of the master of the French pastel portrait, Maurice Quentin de La Tour. In the Salon of 1750, Perronneau exhibited his pastel portrait of Maurice Quentin de la Tour, but found to his dismay that La Tour was exhibiting his own self-portrait, perhaps a malicious confrontation to demonstrate his superiority in the technique. |
He made his Salon debut with a pastel portrait in 1746 and received full membership in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1753, with portraits of fellow artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the sculptor Lambert-Sigisbert Adam, both now at the Louvre Museum. After 1779 he no longer exhibited in the Paris Salons, but the clientele in his portraits reveal how widely he travelled in the provinces of France, with a group of sitters connected with Orléans, but also in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Lyon. Farther afield he may have been in Turin and Rome, and in Spain, Hamburg, Poland, Russia, and England. |
Perronneau produced a varied body of work in which he insists on the psychology of his characters and transmits a little of the spirit of the Enlightenment, as evidenced by the expressiveness of the faces he depicts, the liveliness of the looks, the half-smiles we can watch and guess about. |
Often close to the harmonies of "camaïeu", his pastels and oils willingly play on monochrome variations: the ochres of the portrait of Mme. de Sorquainville, the grays of Pierre Bouguer, François-Hubert Drouais or Laurent Cars, the blue-grays of the Fillette au chat from the National Gallery in London. Georges Brunel notes that 'Perronneau's pastels always look somewhat unfinished, or weathered by time', and adds: 'Misleading impression, as it is probably a deliberate choice of style and technique. Above all, Perronneau seeks solidity and strength […]. |
Unusually for his time, Perronneau also depicts cats in the foreground, that is to say as pets. This is the case for Magdaleine Pinceloup de La Grange, for Mlle Huquier or for the Girl with a Cat (1745) from the National Gallery in London –undoubtedly one of her most famous works-. |
Perronneau´s works |
Several portraits of this artist can be found today in various museums or private collections in Europe and America. Although his work is particularly dispersed, the two most important public collections are at the Louvre, in Paris, and at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, in Orléans. |
Anecdote |
Perroneau, while in London (1761) testified twice at court during the famous trial of his painter friend, Theódore Gardelle, who had brutally killed and burned his landlady. |
Perronneau died in Amsterdam virtually unknown, according to his biographers. |
References |
Getty Museum: Jean-Baptiste Perronneau |
National Gallery of Art, Washington: Jean-Baptiste Perronneau |
National Gallery, London: Jean-Baptiste Perronneau The National Gallery has Perronneau's masterful portrait of Jacques Cazotte |
Musée Cognaq-Jay, Paris: Jean-Baptiste Perronneau: Portrait of the connoisseur Charles Lenormant du Coudray, shown at the Salon of 1769. |
Attribution of a portrait of Crozat to Perronneau |
Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online edition |
Further reading |
Bénézit, Emmanuel (2006) [first published in French in 1911–1923]. Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Vol. 10. Paris: Gründ. pp. 1207–1209. ISBN 2-7000-3080-X – via the Internet Archive. |
D'Arnout, Dominique (2014). Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, ca. 1715-1783: un portraitiste dans l'Europe des Lumières (catalogue raisonné) (in French). Paris: Arthena. ISBN 978-2-903239-54-1. |
Klingsöhr-Le Roy, Cathrin (1996). "Perronneau, Jean-Baptiste". In Turner, Jane (ed.). The Dictionary of Art. Vol. 24. New York: Grove's Dictionaries. pp. 480–481. ISBN 1-884446-00-0. OCLC 1033638207 – via the Internet Archive. |
Vaillat, Léandre and Ratouis de Limay, Paul (1923). J.-B. Perronneau (1715-1783) : sa vie et son oeuvre (in French). Paris: Librairie nationale d'art et d'histoire. OCLC 697928483 – via the Internet Archive. |
Vollmer, Hans (1932). "Perroneau, Jean-Baptiste". In Vollmer, Hans (ed.). Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler (in German). Vol. 26. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann. pp. 441–442. |
External links |
Perronneau's Cat Portraits |
Jean Siméon Chardin (French: [ʒɑ̃ simeɔ̃ ʃaʁdɛ̃]; November 2, 1699 – December 6, 1779) was an 18th-century French painter. He is considered a master of still life, and is also noted for his genre paintings which depict kitchen maids, children, and domestic activities. Carefully balanced composition, soft diffusion of light, and granular impasto characterize his work. |
Life |
Chardin was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, and rarely left the city. He lived on the Left Bank near Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV granted him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre. |
Chardin entered into a marriage contract with Marguerite Saintard in 1723, whom he did not marry until 1731. He served apprenticeships with the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel, and in 1724 became a master in the Académie de Saint-Luc. |
According to one nineteenth-century writer, at a time when it was hard for unknown painters to come to the attention of the Royal Academy, he first found notice by displaying a painting at the "small Corpus Christi" (held eight days after the regular one) on the Place Dauphine (by the Pont Neuf). Van Loo, passing by in 1720, bought it and later assisted the young painter. |
Upon presentation of The Ray and The Buffet in 1728, he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. The following year he ceded his position in the Académie de Saint-Luc. He made a modest living by "produc[ing] paintings in the various genres at whatever price his customers chose to pay him", and by such work as the restoration of the frescoes at the Galerie François I at Fontainebleau in 1731. |
In November 1731 his son Jean-Pierre was baptized, and a daughter, Marguerite-Agnès, was baptized in 1733. In 1735 his wife Marguerite died, and within two years Marguerite-Agnès had died as well. |
Beginning in 1737 Chardin exhibited regularly at the Salon. He would prove to be a "dedicated academician", regularly attending meetings for fifty years, and functioning successively as counsellor, treasurer, and secretary, overseeing in 1761 the installation of Salon exhibitions. |
Chardin's work gained popularity through reproductive engravings of his genre paintings (made by artists such as François-Bernard Lépicié and P.-L. Sugurue), which brought Chardin income in the form of "what would now be called royalties". In 1744 he entered his second marriage, this time to Françoise-Marguerite Pouget. The union brought a substantial improvement in Chardin's financial circumstances. In 1745 a daughter, Angélique-Françoise, was born, but she died in 1746. |
In 1752 Chardin was granted a pension of 500 livres by Louis XV. In 1756 Chardin returned to the subject of the still life. At the Salon of 1759 he exhibited nine paintings; it was the first Salon to be commented upon by Denis Diderot, who would prove to be a great admirer and public champion of Chardin's work. Beginning in 1761, his responsibilities on behalf of the Salon, simultaneously arranging the exhibitions and acting as treasurer, resulted in a diminution of productivity in painting, and the showing of 'replicas' of previous works. In 1763 his services to the Académie were acknowledged with an extra 200 livres in pension. In 1765 he was unanimously elected associate member of the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts of Rouen, but there is no evidence that he left Paris to accept the honor. By 1770 Chardin was the 'Premier peintre du roi', and his pension of 1,400 livres was the highest in the academy. In the 1770s his eyesight weakened and he took to painting in pastels, a medium in which he executed portraits of his wife and himself (see Self-portrait at top right). His works in pastels are now highly valued. |
In 1772 Chardin's son, also a painter, drowned in Venice, a probable suicide. The artist's last known oil painting was dated 1776; his final Salon participation was in 1779, and featured several pastel studies. Gravely ill by November of that year, he died in Paris on December 6, at the age of 80. |
Work |
Chardin worked very slowly and painted only slightly more than 200 pictures (about four a year) in total. |
Chardin's work had little in common with the Rococo painting that dominated French art in the 18th century. At a time when history painting was considered the supreme classification for public art, Chardin's subjects of choice were viewed as minor categories. He favored simple yet beautifully textured still lifes, and sensitively handled domestic interiors and genre paintings. Simple, even stark, paintings of common household items (Still Life with a Smoker's Box) and an uncanny ability to portray children's innocence in an unsentimental manner (Boy with a Top [right]) nevertheless found an appreciative audience in his time, and account for his timeless appeal. |
Largely self-taught, Chardin was greatly influenced by the realism and subject matter of the 17th-century Low Country masters. Despite his unconventional portrayal of the ascendant bourgeoisie, early support came from patrons in the French aristocracy, including Louis XV. Though his popularity rested initially on paintings of animals and fruit, by the 1730s he introduced kitchen utensils into his work (The Copper Cistern, c. 1735, Louvre). Soon figures populated his scenes as well, supposedly in response to a portrait painter who challenged him to take up the genre. Woman Sealing a Letter (ca. 1733), which may have been his first attempt, was followed by half-length compositions of children saying grace, as in Le Bénédicité, and kitchen maids in moments of reflection. These humble scenes deal with simple, everyday activities, yet they also have functioned as a source of documentary information about a level of French society not hitherto considered a worthy subject for painting. The pictures are noteworthy for their formal structure and pictorial harmony. Chardin said about painting, "Who said one paints with colors? One employs colors, but one paints with feeling." |
A child playing was a favourite subject of Chardin. He depicted an adolescent building a house of cards on at least four occasions. The version at Waddesdon Manor is the most elaborate. Scenes such as these derived from 17th-century Netherlandish vanitas works, which bore messages about the transitory nature of human life and the worthlessness of material ambitions, but Chardin's also display a delight in the ephemeral phases of childhood for their own sake. |
Chardin frequently painted replicas of his compositions—especially his genre paintings, nearly all of which exist in multiple versions which in many cases are virtually indistinguishable. Beginning with The Governess (1739, in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Chardin shifted his attention from working-class subjects to slightly more spacious scenes of bourgeois life. Chardin's extant paintings, which number about 200, are in many major museums, including the Louvre. |
Influence |
Chardin's influence on the art of the modern era was wide-ranging and has been well-documented. Édouard Manet's half-length Boy Blowing Bubbles and the still lifes of Paul Cézanne are equally indebted to their predecessor. He was one of Henri Matisse's most admired painters; as an art student Matisse made copies of four Chardin paintings in the Louvre. Chaïm Soutine's still lifes looked to Chardin for inspiration, as did the paintings of Georges Braque, and later, Giorgio Morandi. In 1999 Lucian Freud painted and etched several copies after The Young Schoolmistress (National Gallery, London). |
Marcel Proust, in the chapter "How to open your eyes?" from In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), describes a melancholic young man sitting at his simple breakfast table. The only comfort he finds is in the imaginary ideas of beauty depicted in the great masterpieces of the Louvre, materializing fancy palaces, rich princes, and the like. The author tells the young man to follow him to another section of the Louvre where the pictures of Chardin are. There he would see the beauty in still life at home and in everyday activities like peeling turnips. |
Gallery |
See also |
The Attributes of Civilian and Military Music |
Soap Bubbles (painting) |
The House of Cards |
Notes |
References |
ArtCyclopedia: Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. |
Rosenberg, Pierre (1979). Chardin, 1699–1779 (exposition catalogue). Paris; Cleveland, OH: Édition de la Réunion des musées nationales; Cleveland Museum of Arts. ISBN 0-910-386-48-X. OCLC 1148189380 – via the Internet Archive. |
Rosenberg, Pierre (2000), Chardin. Munich: Prestel. ISBN 9783791323398. |
Rosenberg, Pierre, and Florence Bruyant (2000), Chardin. London: Royal Academy of Arts. ISBN 0-900946-83-0. |
External links |
Media related to Jean Siméon Chardin at Wikimedia Commons |
Chardin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Getty Museum: Chardin. |
WebMuseum: Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. |
Jean-Baptiste-Simeon-Chardin.org Archived 14 March 2014 at the Wayback Machine 124 works by Jean Siméon Chardin. |
Artcylopedia: Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin – identifies where Chardin's work is in galleries and museums around the world. |
Web Gallery of Art: Chardin. |
Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online edition |
Chardin, Boy Building a House of Cards at Waddesdon Manor |
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French: [ʒɑ̃ ɔnɔʁe fʁaɡɔnaʁ]; 5 April 1732 – 22 August 1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawings and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism. |
Biography |
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