Royalty and Revolution in French Painting

Royalty and Revolution in French Painting udemy course

Baroque, Academic Classicism, Rococo, Naturalism, and the Neoclassical Styles in the 18th Century

This course draws a wide arc of history through the eighteenth century in France, spanning from the Baroque splendor of the monarchy through the aristocracy's embrace of the Rococo style during the Regency period. However, the major historical events of that century hinge on the changing place of the Third Estate, the large population in France that belonged to neither royalty, aristocracy, nor clergy; the uprising of French peasants at the close of the eighteenth century and the deposition of the absolutist Bourbon monarchy transformed the political history of Western Europe and beyond. Images of this Third Estate also reflect shifting attitudes; from the patronizing, "natural dignity" imbued into images of silent, anonymous peasantry for French elites with a taste for northern genre scenes to the appropriation of a Neoclassical vocabulary by the bourgeoisie to express their ideals of heroism and resistance, we see in this course how French painting in the eighteenth century mirrored the significant social and political developments of the same century. From the late seventeenth through the turn of the nineteenth century in France, we see a varied arc of styles reflect the turbulent political and social history of the era. We start our course firmly in the French Baroque splendor of Louis XIV, but after his death during the Regency, we see elite taste let its hair down in the sensual frolics of the Rococo. What style could be more emblematic for the frivolous, self-gratifying pursuits of the aristocracy in Florence than the canvases by Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard that we have just looked at? In that context, the appearance of “Natural” art, sourced in the late seventeenth century’s interpretation of Dutch genre scenes but with a patronizing air absent in its Northern models, becomes for the history of painting a symptom of the popular backlash which would explode at the close of the eighteenth century. During that defining moment for the course of Western civilization’s political history, we witness in art the highest art of the unpopular ruling class transition into the Classicizing, heroic rallying cries for a population intent on reclaiming the vestiges of dignity it had glimpsed through the writings of French thinkers like Rousseau, Descartes, Voltaire, and the other beacons of the Enlightenment Era.