Category: Rococo

Reclining Girl by François Boucher

Reclining Girl by François Boucher (1751)

There is always some debate with regards paintings and nudity and what is appropriate and what is inappropriate and whether the depiction is merely erotic or crosses the line and becomes pornographic.  There has been much discussion about today’s painting in My Daily Art Display as to whether the female body is being treated as a person or as an object.

My featured artist today is François Boucher a French Rococo painter who was well known for his paintings of voluptuous females which also incorporated classical themes.  Some of his works of art were portraits of the famous Madame Pompadour but what made today’s work somewhat controversial was that his nude painting featured a fourteen year old girl.  Today’s oil on canvas picture entitled Reclining Girl was painted in 1751 and can be seen in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.  There is also a very similar painting featuring this girl, by the same artist, in a similar pose in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.  So who is the girl and how did she come to pose naked for the artist?

The girl is Mary-Louise O’Murphy de Boisfaily who was born in Rouen in 1737.  She was the fifth daughter of an Irish army officer who, after her father’s retirement from military service, had taken up shoemaking to bring money into the household.  After her father died her mother took the family to live in Paris where she tried to find work for her daughters and made ends meet by trading second hand clothes.  Mary-Louise finally got work as a dancer at L’Opera and earned some money as a model.    It was around this time that she came into contact with Casanova the famous Venetian adventurer and womaniser and was he, according to his memoirs, who takes the credit for introducing the young girl to both Louis XV of France and the artist Boucher.  Art historians have said that the painting was simply a way of offering herself up to Louis XV as a prospective mistress.  It was almost an advert for her services and this is why, in some quarters, the painting was looked upon as being somewhat degrading and vulgar.   However whatever the intentions of Marie-Louise and Boucher were, it proved successful for she became one of Louis’s courtesans, albeit to start with, not one of his principal courtesans but one of his lower-echelon “companions”.  However through her guile and beauty she soon rose through the “ranks” and became one of the ruler’s favourites.  In 1754 she gave birth to Louis’s illegitimate daughter Agathe Louise de Saint-Antoine.  Marie-Louise remained a favourite of Louis and all would have remained well but she made the fatal error of attempting to oust Madame Pompadour as Louis’s favourite mistress and for that she paid the penalty – banishment from the royal court and at the tender age of 17 was married off to Comte de Beaufranchet.  The marriage did not last very long as her husband was killed in battle.   Marie-Louise married twice more, her last being at the age of sixty-one, to a man some thirty years older her junior but this partnership ended in divorce.  She died in 1814 at the age of 77.  If you want to read more about her life you can as her story was dramatised in the 1997 novel by Duncan Sprott entitled Our Lady of the Potatoes.

The painting is without doubt sexually provocative.   The girl, and we should remember she was barely fourteen years of age, is seen face down, lying naked, splayed on a chaise-longue.   I wonder whether the artist decided that because of her age he should not show her frontally naked.  Her face-down pose however does not detract from the sensuality of the painting and in some way may add to it.  We concentrate our view on the girl’s buttocks and her thighs which are wide apart.   This pose shows the willingness of the model to entertain any sexual overtures from a lover.  This was exactly the message she wanted to give Louis.   One notes the similarity between the curves of her body and the curves and creases of the pillow on which her right leg rests and which pushes upwards separating her thighs.   It is a sumptuous setting with the heavy velvet drapes and the silk bedding.

It is a painting you will either like and find it beautifully erotic or you will hate it and condemn it as just another form of pornography wrapped in the guise of a work of art.  It is simpy up to you as it is all in the eye of the beholder.

The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1767)

The Rococo style of art was characterised by lightness, grace, playfulness and intimacy and emerged out of France around the beginning of the 18th century and in the following century spread throughout Europe.  The actual word rococo is thought to have been used disapprovingly by a pupil of Jacques-Louis David who ridiculed the taste, which was in vogue in the mid-18th century.  He combined the artistic genres of rocaille, which prospered in the mid 16th century and was applied to works that depicted fancy rock-work and shell-work, and barocco (baroque) genre. 

The featured artist in My Daily Art Display is Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose works are amongst the most complete embodiments of the Rococo spirit.   He has been described as the “fragrant essence” of the 18th century.  He was famous for the fluid grace and sensuous charm of his paintings and for the virtuosity of his technique.  The painting by Fragonard featured today is probably his most famous and is the oil on canvas work entitled The Swing which he completed in 1767 and which is now part of the Wallace Collection in London.

The story behind the painting is fascinating and well documented.  The French dramatist and songwriter Charles Collé tells how he met the painter Francois Doyen in 1767 who tells him that he has been approached by a “gentleman of the court” who had seen one of his religious paintings being exhibited in Paris.  The painter Doyen goes to meet the gentleman and relates to Collé what happened next:

“…I found him at his ‘pleasure house’ with his mistress.  He started by flattering me with courtesies and finished by avowing that he was dying with a desire to have me make a picture, the idea of which he was going to outline. I should like Madame (pointing to his mistress) on a swing that a bishop would set going. You will place me in such a way that I would be able to see the legs of the lovely girl, and better still, if you want enliven your picture a little more……. I confess, M. Doyen said to me, that this proposition, which I wouldn’t have expected, considering the character of the picture that led to it, perplexed me and left me speechless for a moment. I collected myself, however, enough to say to him almost at once: “Ah Monsieur, it is necessary to add to the essential idea of your picture by making Madame’s shoes fly into the air and having some cupids catch them.”

Doyen decided not to accept the commission but instead passed it on to Fragonard.  The identity of the patron is unknown, though he was at one time thought to have been the Baron de Saint-Julien, the Receiver General of the French Clergy, which would have explained the request to include a bishop pushing a the swing.  However Fragonard insisted on replacing the bishop with the more traditional figure of the cuckholded husband.  

So let us examine the picture.  We see a young woman on a swing.  She is swinging with gay, if somewhat thoughtless, abandon as the sunlight beams down upon her.  She is at the apex of her arc and suddenly her shoe has flown off.  She has achieved this position due to the help afforded to her by the naive cleric (or cuckholded husband), on the right, who we can see pulling the swing rope.  On the left, lying on the ground below the swing, semi-concealed in the shrubbery,  is a young attentive male courtier who is staring at the long and exposed legs of the young woman.  Her legs are parted and with the motion of the swing, her skirt is open.  Not only are her legs exposed but the young man is able to see under the many petticoats that she is wearing under her pink flowing dress.  She knows he is watching her every move and is obviously pleased by this attention.   He reaches out as if to try and touch her. 

Fragonard once again made free association of fanciful costumes and provided us with a slight bit of erotic suggestions.  This work by Fragonard is without doubt erotic but does not actually cross the line to be viewed as vulgar.  There is a joyful aspect to this painting.  However the painting received mixed reviews with the artist being criticised for the frivolity of the picture and that he should show “a little more self-respect”.    The artist was unmoved by such disparagement and truth be told the popularity of his work continued.   His commissions came in thick and fast, both from wealthy patrons and from the royal government.   The royal patronage came to an end with their downfall during the French Revolution of 1789 and a year later Fragonard returned to his native Provence.  Two years later, he went back to live in Paris.  He died there in 1806 aged 74.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born in Grasse, Provence and since 1926 the town has been the home of the very famous French Parfumerie Fragonard !!