L'amour peintre

Description

From Watteau's Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (1717) to Fragonard's The Lock (circa 1778), French painters produced a remarkable series of masterpieces with love as their main subject, which seem to embody the brilliant and ambiguous values of a sophisticated culture aware of its heyday. Eighteenth-century France established the refinement of amorous behaviour as the supreme manifestation of Enlightenment civilisation.

The most gifted painters, Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), among others, devoted their immense talent to love. The exceptional fertility of their amorous inspiration, whether chaste or immodest, is the subject of this book.

Painters, draughtsmen and engravers contributed, through illustration, to the unprecedented success of romantic fiction, which was initially gallant, soon became libertine, and finally tender and sentimental.

The exquisite and civilised sensuality of Watteau, the worldly and hedonistic pleasure of Boucher, the bawdy ambiguity of libertine illustrators and the tender sensitivity of Fragonard are the subject of careful analysis in this study, which combines art history, cultural history and social history.