Jeffrey M. Hurwit

Mark Ledbury

Melissa Lee Hyde

François Boucher

Dr. Mark Ledbury

Director Mark Ledbury

François Boucher (1703-1770) has suffered a curious fate: to have been so identified with the French Rococo as to have lost his visibility as an artist in his own right. Rethinking Boucher reclaims the artist's individuality, revealing not only the diversity of his talents but also the variety of visual and intellectual traditions with which he engaged. Part one, "The Various Boucher," examines the artist's identity in relation to his portraits and self-portraits, his ingenious genre scenes, and his overlooked religious paintings. Part two, "The Unexpected Boucher," focuses on the network of social and cultural contexts in which the artist functioned, including the commercial print market, the theaters of Paris, and the contemporary textual explorations of the exotic. The final part, "The Enlightened Boucher," discusses Boucher's work as a vehicle for Enlightenment visions of the body, whether conjured by Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Madame de Pompadour, Boucher's most famous patron.

Rethinking Boucher

Jennifer Dawn Milam

This collection of new essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as patronized artists over the course of the eighteenth century. It provides a much needed examination, with admirable breadth and variety, of women's artistic production and patronage in Europe during the century.Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where The Woman Question was so hotly debated. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme Adélaïde and Nattier; the Duchess of Osuna and Goya; Mme de Pompadour; Marie-Antoinette and Vigée-Lebrun; Labille-Guiard; Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman; David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.

Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-century Europe

Exploring how the discrediting of Boucher and his school intersected with cultural debates about gender and class, this account of Boucher's art should persuade critics and admirers alike to take another, more considered look.

François Boucher and His Critics

Making Up the Rococo

Katie Scott

In Rococo echo, a team of international contributors adopts a wide lens to explore the relationship of the Rococo with time. Through chapters organised around broad temporal moments -- the French Revolution, the First World War and the turn of the twenty-first century -- contributors show that the Rococo has been viewed variously as modern, late, ruined, revived, preserved and anticipated. Taking into account the temporality of the Rococo as form, some contributors consider its function as both a visual language and a cultural marker engaged in different ways with the politics of nationalism, gender and race. The Rococo is examined, too, as a mode of expression that encompassed and assimilated styles, and which functioned as a surprisingly effective means of resisting both authority -- whether political, religious or artistic -- and cultural norms of gender and class. Contributors also show how the Rococo, from its birth in France, reverberated through England, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the South American colonies to become a pan-European, even global movement.--Back cover.

Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola

Rococo Echo

Mary D. Sheriff

Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment: French Art from the Horvitz Collection' is primarily an exhibition of drawings but will include pastels, paintings, and sculptures selected from one of the world?s best private collections of French drawings. The exhibition will feature nearly 120 works by many of the most prominent artists of the eighteenth century, including Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, as well as lesser-known artists both male and female, such as Anne Vallayer-Coster, Gabrielle Capet, François-André Vincent, Philibert-Louis Debucourt. Ranging from spirited, improvisational sketches and figural studies, to highly finished drawings of exquisite beauty, the works included in the exhibition vary in terms of style, genre, and period.0Becoming a Woman will be organized into thematic sections that address some of the most important and defining questions of women?s lives in the eighteenth century. These include: how the stages of a woman?s life were measured; what cultural attitudes and conditions in France shaped how women were defined; what significant relations women formed with men; what social and familial rituals gave order to their lives; what pleasures they pursued; and what work they accomplished. The aim is to bring new insights to the questions of what it meant to be a woman in this period, by offering the first exhibition to focus specifically on representations of women of a broad range of ages and conditions.00Exhibition: Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA (06.10.-31.12.2017).

Melissa Lee Hyde

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