17th C Baroque Art Chardin And Greuze

This next section I want to discuss two artists who I think are, they're hard to classify. When I was in school, one of my teachers said that they were rococo, another one said that they were romantic. What they both kind of have in common is that they're both working during the period of time in the 18th century when a lot of different styles are kind of coexisting. And you can say that they both exist under the overarching style of the Baroque. Now, since they're both in France, it would be kind of safe to say that they're rococo, but they really are a little different than some of the rococo scenes that we've seen before, which are basically aristocrats out in the country having fun. So these two artists, Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Grousse, are two artists that are a little bit of an anomaly. And so, I think it might be safer to just classify them as Baroque when you are answering on a test for them. But check with your teacher if you're at a different school than mine. To start with, I think looking at these self-portraits are a really good way of getting at the heart of who these artists were because self-portraiture, as we discussed with Rembrandt, is very psychological. It lets you have a little bit of insight into how the artists themselves viewed themselves and also, in a way, how they presented themselves to society or how they expected to be seen. I think that there is something very honest about these self-portraits by Chardin. He's showing himself as being a little bit ugly. He's not your stereotypically attractive guy. His hair is tied up. Actually, he probably had a shaved head because a lot of them wore wigs at this time, especially in England. And there's actually stories about people having their wigs snatched from them with fishing line as they're walking down the street. But Chardin is a middle-class bourgeoisie kind of painter. And he's regarding himself in a very honest, simple way. And his paintings reflect an awful lot of that idea. The reason why he has his head wrapped up, there's two possible reasons. One is he, it turns out he was a little allergic to oil paint. And I think it might have bothered him or affected him. But he also worked an awful lot with pastel. And pastel is a kind of medium that, during the Baroque period, the Rococo period, it was basically used for studies. But there are a lot of pastel drawings by Chardin left that still exist today. And there are portraits in the Rococo style of important people because pastel is starting to become accepted as a kind of style of art and a medium of art that's acceptable. In the right-hand image, he's wearing a visor. It's almost like a baseball hat to shield his eyes from the glare. And I think another interesting component of this is that he's actually depicting himself with eyeglasses on. And that is, you know, eyeglasses, I think, as early as the 1300s or 1200s, intellectuals started using eyeglasses and they started figuring out how to grind lenses. So, this is also a historical document that kind of shows a little bit of the history of the time period through costume and through the sort of accoutrements or extra things that the artist is wearing. We'll start first by talking about Chardin's painting called Grace at the Table. And if you think about all the scenes that we have seen before, this is a really good sort of updated view from France in the middle of the 18th century of a genre scene that's meant to literally depict someone who is being faithful and being religious and how important faith is to everyday life. So, I suppose Martin Luther and Calvin would really have been into this kind of art. They would have probably approved of it in some ways because it's really a depiction of taking the idea of everyday existence and using it in the worship of God. In this picture, we have a maid who is setting a table of food out in front of two little girls. And she is actually instructing one of the little girls to clasp her hands in a prayerful position and say her thanks to God before she eats her meal. The formal stuff in the painting really helps to sort of further this genre imagery and almost takes a page, I think, from Rembrandt, if you think about Rembrandt's paintings from the 1600s. It's got a very low-key or earth-toned palette. It's painted almost a little roughly like Rembrandt does, almost sketchily in some areas. And it also has a sort of tenebristic effect to it. Although we don't have heightened chiaroscuro, we don't have really the passage of light and shadow, the background is very murky. And the figures and the tablecloth sort of stand out almost in a frieze-like tableau. And it also almost looks a little bit like a stage set. And I think that probably, if you look at how you're looking at this, it almost seems like a set from a stage. And remember that drama and the dramatic arts have been going on since, well, for a very long time. But Shakespeare's theater, the Globe Theater, was around 1600. So we have almost 150 years of the public sort of framing how they see things by looking at theater. And I'm sure that artists did the same thing, that they're sort of taking a page out of almost set design, as we discussed when we were looking at Antoine Watteau. Other interesting, fun little details in this, there's a children's chair that the smaller child is sitting at. And in the lower left-hand corner, you see a drum set and a flute. And in the lower right-hand corner, you have a little charcoal brazier, which is basically meant to keep the room warm. And sometimes this would even be placed underneath the table to keep feet warm. So the painting is a depiction of a middle-class bourgeois family and the maid that is serving them. And I think that this is sort of the idea, again, that when we were looking at the Limbourg brothers, of God is in the details and God is in everyday kind of existence. Another pretty famous painting by Chardin is this one called Soap Bubbles. And there are various interpretations of what this painting means. But I think that probably the safest and simplest interpretation of what it means is, this is a young man, probably around the between the ages of 12 and 16, who's blowing soap bubbles. So he's doing something that is childlike. And there's a little boy standing behind him who's watching him do that almost in a jealous way, but not necessarily. And there's a cup on the ledge right next to him that has soapy water in it with a straw in it. And this little boy who's blowing soap bubbles is probably a depiction of the fleeting nature of youth because the soap bubble could represent in some ways the way that soap bubbles are very transitory and they exist only for an instance, kind of like youth. So in a way, this painting is a memento mori. It's a reminder of the fleetingness of life and that things end very quickly. And in a way, it might also be that you should enjoy it while you can. Since Chardin seems to be kind of very religious in some ways, it could probably be more the idea of a warning that life is fleeting and exists like a soap bubble and only exists for a moment. The symbol of the soap bubble is very interesting because it comes up in other places. And a kind of similar symbol to that is when we were looking at Bosch and we were seeing these sort of glass globes that people were living in that were getting shattered sometimes. From a formal or physical point of view, like just the visual elements we see here again, it's painted with a low-key palette. Everything's very earth tone. There's no intense or saturated colors. There's only a little dash of gray along the left edge of the soap bubble, which is a way of showing its reflection of the sky. And it has a kind of chiaroscuro and antenobrism that makes it a little bit more dramatic than the benediction we saw just before. And it's a way of highlighting who this little boy is. I love how the plants that are surrounding him sort of frame it and make it almost as if you are standing outside the building, looking in at this kid who's leaning over the ledge in the window. And the ledge of the window itself juts out almost like in Caravaggio's still life, where it's meant to sort of project towards you and pull you in, in a way. And it also frames things in, as we've seen in other paintings, in a way it's like a frame within a frame. A good comparison would be to Jan Vermeer's paintings that take place about a hundred years before. And Vermeer, when he's painting his lacemaker, is doing very similar things to what Chardin is doing. He's showing this idea that it's a genre scene, that you don't need to necessarily tell historical or biblical tales to show good, solid people going about solid pursuits in their life, and how painting itself can be an allegory or a metaphor for your existence, for anyone's existence, before they get to heaven. And so, for instance, there's a lot of similar visual things in Vermeer's painting to Chardin's. Talking about the fact that they're both very intimate genre scenes, they both depict the roles of people in the society at the time. For instance, we have a little boy and the kinds of pursuits that he would do, and this represents in some ways Rousseau's ideas about the changing role of childhood. And really, it doesn't change fully until probably the 19th century in industrialization, but there's a growing trend towards looking at the idea that you need to educate children and that children should be allowed to play when they are young. That really exists mainly in the upper classes and the upper middle classes. In the right-hand image, we've got a kind of similar role, that it's the role of what a good woman would do, and that she would be industrious and make lace. And they really share a lot, even in how they are cropped. It's very close up, it's very intimate, and there's a passage of light traveling across the two figures that sort of highlights who they are and gives you a sense of volume. The major difference probably is just that Vermeer is a little bit more innovative in terms of his use of color, because he's using some saturated, intense colors. And we think that Vermeer, in particular, probably used the camera obscura, where I'm pretty sure Chardin did not. This next artist, who's also a French artist from more or less the Baroque period, and again, we're not really sure if he's Rococo or Romantic. Check with your professor on that, but I think Baroque is a safe bet. This painting called Broken Eggs is an allegory for losing one's virginity. I always get allegory and metaphor confused, so I think an allegory is sort of like a representation or personification of things, and a metaphor is basically almost telling it like a story. In this instance, the symbolism is of a young girl who has dropped a basket of eggs, and one of the eggs is broken, or actually a whole bunch of the eggs are broken. And this is a metaphor for losing one's virginity. And I was taught one interpretation of this, and if you go to the Metropolitan Museum's website where this painting is, they have a slightly different interpretation. It's just a subtle difference, but the Metropolitan's interpretation of this is that this is a young woman who has gotten sexually active with the young man who's standing behind her, and that the old woman is sort of interceding and yelling at the young man, and in the lower right-hand corner, there's a little boy who's the girl's little brother, and he is trying to put the eggs back together. I was taught as an undergrad that the scene is very similar to that, that the young woman who's seated on the ground looking dejected is actually a young woman who has lost her virginity, and she's kind of bummed out about it, and that the boy behind her, or the young man behind her, who looks like he's in his 20s, is actually her older brother, and that the young woman, or the old woman, is actually sort of yelling at her brother saying, why didn't you defend her honor, and why didn't you stop this from happening? And in the lower right-hand corner, again, we've got this little boy putting things together. So let's take a closer look at some of the details first. We have this detail that shows the basket of eggs and some of the eggs spilled out on the ground, and we have a reference almost to some of the poetry that we studied before about the pastoral existence and the nymph and the shepherd in some of those poems that we read, and the idea is reflected in the fact that she's got a little sun hat on, and that there's a basket, and it sort of seems like these are people who are closer to the pastor and a pastoral existence. We see the eggs on the ground. In the lower right-hand corner of the painting, this is a detail, shows a little boy who's looking very upset, and he's sort of leaning on a little block of wood, and he actually has one of the eggs, and he's trying to put it together, and always reminds me of the Humpty Dumpty thing, you know, the Great Fall, and all the king's horses, and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again, but what I'm kind of suggesting is he's trying to do something that's impossible. You know, the joke is once you lose your virginity, you'll never find it again, and this little boy represents innocence in a way, and how innocence can be lost, and he represents that as a symbol. Looking at the painting overall as a composition, I think, is really kind of good too. The way that we're looking at this, it actually looks a little bit more like a stage set, or more like a design, and if you go to the Metropolitan's website, they say that there was actually an earlier engraving done by another artist, and that Gruss is kind of copying him in a way, or using that as the schema for his painting, but I actually think that probably Gruss is doing something that's a little bit more unique, but is similar to some other artists that we're going to be looking at. I think this is really based in a theatrical design, and to me, what it looks like is actually that they're up slightly on a tilted stage, and stages at this point in time actually tilted towards the audience, and you can see that the male figure is standing at a slightly higher level, like his feet are at a higher level in the background, which could show a sort of tilted stage, and the figures are arranged almost the way figures would be arranged in a stage to present the dramatic action, and the rest of the scene behind them is darkened, and has a sort of earth-toned and less saturated color behind it. We do have a little window on the left hand side that looks a little bit like Vermeer's windows, and hanging in the window are little still life objects that really sort of add to the authenticity of the image, but I think that Gruss is actually making paintings that are somewhat based on theatrical design and theatrical art from this time period, and again, in terms of the symbolism or iconography of this painting, it's very clear to me that the idea is to teach a moralizing lesson, which in a way takes it slightly out of the realm of what we saw in Rococo art that was made for the aristocracy, so this is really sort of a middle-class bourgeoisie kind of attitude.