
Intimate Encounters
Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France
Richard Rand(Author)
Princeton University Press
Published on 5. October 1997
Book
Paperback/Softback
232 pages
978-0-691-01662-7 (ISBN)
Description
Paintings by such celebrated eighteenth-century artists as Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, and Boilly have long been admired for their charming and intimate subjects - fetes galantes, pastorals, tableaux de mode, middle-class domestic interiors, and scenes of family life and romantic love - and for their pleasing colour schemes. In this lavishly illustrated and produced book, genre painting is explored for the first time within the broader cultural context of Enlightenment France.Through a series of innovative and lively essays dealing largely with aspects of art, gender, and politics in the decades preceding the French Revolution, "Intimate Encounters" enables us to appreciate genre paintings anew: although they are almost always attractive to the eye, sometimes to the point of appearing fanciful, the paintings also bear the intellectual imprint of turbulent times. the interactions of 'ordinary' people - nonhistorical, nonmythic figures - within the family and in romantic encounters. We learn that genre painters tended to infuse their depictions of intimacy with moral and ideological significance.
Their imagery coincided with fundamental debates over gender roles and relationships, the family, child-rearing, and illicit versus conjugal love, topics that were crucial to such writers and social commentators as Rousseau, Diderot, and Laclos.Published in conjunction with a major travelling exhibition, "Intimate Encounters" contains five essays written by specialists from a variety of disciplines, which are followed by fifty-one full catalog entries on the paintings included in the show. The essays delve into such matters as art criticism and the presence of women in cultural life (Richard Rand), the family and the ideology of sentimentalism (Sarah Maza), the influence of innovative theater on genre painting (Mark Ledbury), the debate over women's rights (Virginia Swain), and the production and marketing of prints to a growing art audience (Anne L. Schroder).
Their imagery coincided with fundamental debates over gender roles and relationships, the family, child-rearing, and illicit versus conjugal love, topics that were crucial to such writers and social commentators as Rousseau, Diderot, and Laclos.Published in conjunction with a major travelling exhibition, "Intimate Encounters" contains five essays written by specialists from a variety of disciplines, which are followed by fifty-one full catalog entries on the paintings included in the show. The essays delve into such matters as art criticism and the presence of women in cultural life (Richard Rand), the family and the ideology of sentimentalism (Sarah Maza), the influence of innovative theater on genre painting (Mark Ledbury), the debate over women's rights (Virginia Swain), and the production and marketing of prints to a growing art audience (Anne L. Schroder).
Reviews / Votes
Marries the pleasures of the catalogue to the virtues of the academic text and so allows us to appreciate genre paintings at different levels... Rand's commentaries place each of the paintings in a context that draws helpfully on the latest insights of art criticism and social commentators of the age... -- The Art NewspaperMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
60 color illus. 86 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 305 mm
Width: 229 mm
Weight
1106 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-01662-7 (9780691016627)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
The principal author of this volume, Richard Rand, is Curator of European Art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. He has published studies on Fragonard and Greuze in The Burlington Magazine, The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, and Gazette des Beaux-Arts.
Content
Lenders to the Exhibition Hidden from View: French Women Authors and the Language of Rights, 1727-1792 The "Bourgeois" Family Revisited: Sentimentalism and Social Class in Prerevolutionary French Culture Intimate Dramas: Genre Painting and New Theater in Eighteenth-Century France Genre Prints in Eighteenth-Century France: Production, Market, and Audience Catalogue of Paintings Checklist of Prints Bibliography Exbibitions List of Artists Index Photo Credits