Francois Boucher, 1742
La Toilette
Category: 18th Century
Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun ~ Self-portrait, 1781-82 [Kimball Art Museum]
➔ The Project Gutenberg [1/3]
➔ The Project Gutenberg [2/3]
➔ The Project Gutenberg [3/3]
Basket of plums
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| Anne Vallayer-Coster, 1769 |
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| ➔ Anne Vallayer Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie Antoinette |
Bonheur du jour
Martin Carlin, ca. 1766 ➔ Les Arts Décoratifs: Musée Nissim de Camondo
La ceinture, le plateau et le gradin de ce meuble sont ornés de dix-sept plaques de porcelaine à bouquets de fleurs sur fond blanc dans des encadrements verts et or enchâssés dans des montures de bronze. Neuf plaques portent la lettre date n de l’année 1766 et certaines sont signées des peintres de fleurs Xhrouet, Catrice et Pierre jeune. L’arrière du meuble est marqueté de branches de fleurs en sycomore et amarante. Le tiroir plaqué de bois de rose forme écritoire. C’est le marchand mercier Simon-Philippe Poirier qui fit appel à Carlin pour lui confier la fabrication de ce type de meubles agrémentés de plaques de porcelaine de Sèvres qu’il commandait à la manufacture. Onze tables de même modèle dont les plaques sont datées entre 1765 et 1774 sont répertoriées, notamment deux dans la collection Rothschild à Waddesdon Manor, et deux autres au Metropolitan Museum de New York. C’est l’antiquaire Seligmann qui vendit ce meuble à Moïse de Camondo, provenant des collections du comte d’Aubigny et du général baron de Charrette. Poirier avait livré une table semblable à Madame Du Barry et la comtesse d’Artois, belle-sœur du roi Louis XVI, en possédait également une.
Martin Carlin is known to have made at least eleven such bonheurs-du-jour, seven of which were signed by him. Raised on four slender curving legs, these tables are mounted with seventeen Sèvres plaques painted with delicate floral ornament, specially ordered for this purpose. Twelve of the plaques on this table bear the date-letter for 1768, the year that Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, bought hers from the marchand-mercier Simon-Philippe Poirier. It is possible that this desk was the one that belonged to her.
➔ Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
➔ Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Bonheur du jour”
The name for a lady’s writing-desk, so called because, when it was introduced in France about 1760, it speedily became intensely fashionable. [1] The bonheur du jour is always very light and graceful; its special characteristic is a raised back, which may form a little cabinet or a nest of drawers, or may simply be fitted with a mirror. The top often surrounded with a chased and gilded bronze gallery, serves for placing small ornaments. Beneath the writing surface there is usually a single drawer, often neatly fitted for toiletries or writing supplies. The details vary greatly, but the general characteristics are always traceable. The bonheur du jour has never been so delicate, so charming, so coquettish as in the quarter of a century which followed its introduction. Early examples were raised on slender cabriole legs; under the influence of neoclassicism, examples made after about 1775 had straight, tapering legs. The marchand-mercier Simon-Philippe Poirier had the idea of mounting bonheurs du jour with specially-made plaques of Sèvres porcelain that he commissioned and for which he had a monopoly; the earliest Sèvres-mounted bonheur du jours are datable from the marks under their plaques to 1766-67.[2] The choicer examples of the time are inlaid with marqueterie, edged with exotic woods, set in gilded bronze, or enriched with panels of Oriental lacquer.
[1] F.J.B. Watson once suggested that “its somewhat obscure name perhaps refers to its sudden and astonishing success.” (Watson, Louis XVI Furniure [London: Tiranti] 1960:23, note 8); the first appearance of the term bonheur du jour that he identified was in 1770, in an inventory of the duc de Villars’ property at Marseille.
[2]Svend Eriksen, Early Neo-Classicism in France (London: Faber & Faber) 1974, plate 111, bonheur du jour stamped by Martin Carlin in the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; another with plaques dated for 1766 is in the James A. de Rothschild collection, Waddesdon Manor.
La petite commode de Madame de Pompadour
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Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, Maitresse du Roi
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| Estampille de Pierre Walter, fut livrée au Château de Bellevue en 1751 |
Franz Anton Bustelli
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| ➔ Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg |
No one has had such an effect on the artistic direction of Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg as Franz Anton Bustelli. The sculptor was employed at Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg on 3 November 1754 as a figure-maker – just shortly after Joseph Jakob Ringler succeeded in making porcelain. Within just a brief period, he became model master at the manufactory and helped it achieve world fame with his elaborate rococo designs. Bustelli remained with Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg until his death in 1763 and, after just nine years, left around 150 new designs.
His most outstanding figures and services still in production today include the CHINOISERIES, the portrait bust of Count Sigmund von Haimhausen, who was director of the manufactory at the time, as well as his CRUCIFIXION GROUP dating from 1755/56.
This is also the case for the most artistic of Franz Anton Bustelli’s ensembles of figures – the 16 characters of the COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE, which were first mentioned in the manufactory’s records in 1760 and which to this day are still produced according to his designs.
As highly sought after collectors’ pieces, the 16 figures will be reissued in a limited edition to celebrate the manufactory’s 260th anniversary: such contemporary fashion designers as Vivienne Westwood, Christian Lacroix, Emanuel Ungaro, Naoki Takizawa and Elie Saab were invited to “dress” one of the protagonists in the COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE ” in new clothes”.
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| ➔ The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Bustelli modeled sixteen characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte, the lively improvisatory theater that came to life in the sixteenth century. Harlequin was the commedia’s principal character, always dressed in a brightly colored suit of triangular patches. Sometimes he was accompanied by Columbine, who played different roles in the plays. Here Harlequina wears the same patchwork costume as her partner. Although some of Bustelli’s figures were inspired by engravings, they all have a sense of graceful movement that suggests the artist’s firsthand impression of a theatrical performance.
Three Studies of a Young Girl Wearing a Hat
He drew obsessively from life, and had such an aptitude for this that one contemporary observed that Watteau “was more satisfied with his drawings than his paintings”. According to the Comte de Caylus, Watteau’s friend and biographer, the artist kept all of his immaculate studies in a bound volume, which he plundered when it came to creating a painting. A central preoccupation of scholars of Watteau’s drawings is to spot the frequency with which particular figures appear almost verbatim in the paintings. To complicate things, Watteau often sketched on sheets of paper already decorated with drawings after intervals of several years.
➔ Alastair Sooke for The Telegraph
Let them eat cake
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| Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin ~ La Brioche or Le Dessert, 1763 [Louvre, Paris, France]
“We have learned from Chardin that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone.” – Marcel Proust
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| Edouard Manet ~ Nature Morte à la Brioche, 1880 |
Poupées de Cire
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| Louis XV and Mozart at the home of the Marquise de Pompadour
Le Musée Grévin is a waxwork museum in Paris located on the Grands Boulevards in the IXe arrondissement on the right bank of the Seine, at 10, Boulevard Montmartre, Paris, France. It is open daily; an admission fee is charged.
The museum was founded in 1882 by Arthur Meyer, a journalist for Le Gaulois, and named for its first artistic director, caricaturist Alfred Grévin. It is one of the oldest wax museums in Europe. Its baroque architecture includes a mirrored mirage room based on the principle of a catoptric cistula and a theater for magic shows.
Le Musée Grévin now contains some 300 characters arranged in scenes from the history of France and modern life, including a panorama of French history from Charlemagne to Napoleon III, bloody scenes of the French Revolution, movie stars, and international figures such as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Pope John Paul II. The tableau of Charlotte Corday murdering Jean-Paul Marat includes the actual knife and bathtub used.
Louis Aragon wrote poems under the name of Le Musée Grévin (using the pseudonym of François la Colère), published during the Vichy regime by the Éditions de Minuit underground editor.
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Des enfants de Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne
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| Tête d’étude de jeune garçon and Tête d’étude de fillette, 3rd quarter of the XVIII century Drouot |
Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne (1704 – 1778) came from a dynasty of sculptors. Son of Jean-Louis Lemoyne. He was trained by his father and from 1723 by Robert Le Lorrain, with additional advice from the portrait painters François de Troy and Nicolas de Largillierre; he won the Prix de Rome in 1725. However, his father’s ill-health and financial misfortunes obliged him to forego the usual period of study at the Académie de France in Rome and to remain in Paris, a loss of which he was always conscious. In 1728 he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale on presentation of the marble group Pyrrhus Immolating Polyxenes on the Tomb of Achilles (untraced), and in 1738 he was received (reçu) as a full member with a marble statuette of a Young Girl Leaving the Bath (destr.). He had a successful academic career, eventually succeeding François Boucher as Rector of the Académie in 1768. [Grove Dictionary of Art Online]
Many of the most important 18th-century French sculptors studied under Lemoyne, including Jean-Antoine Houdon and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle.
Bust of a Girl, 1769 [Oberlin Museum]; Fillette au fichu, 1769 [Louvre Museum, Paris]
tout ceci est magnifique 