Exploring genre painting within the broad cultural context of Enlightenment France, this book deals with aspects of art, gender and politics in the decades preceding the French Revolution, to argue that the paintings bear the intellectual imprint of turbulent times. The book presents over 75 genre paintings and prints that depict the interactions of "ordinary" people - non-historical, non-mythic figures - within the family and in romantic encounters. It shows how genre painters tended to infuse their depictions of intimacy with moral and ideological significance. Their imagery coincided with fundamental debates over gender roles and relationships, the family, child-rearing, and illicit versus conjugal love, topics that were crucial to such writers and social commentators as Rosseau, Diderot and Laclos. The five essays included in this volume discuss such matters as: art criticism and the presence of women in cultural life; the family and the ideology of sentimentalism; the influence of innovative theatre on genre painting; the debate over women's rights; and the production and marketing of prints to a growing art audience.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From The New Yorker
Mr. Rand has been assisted by Juliette M. Bianco and four contributors of essays in the creation of this survey of genre painting depicting Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France. The paintings, with the exception of Watteau's ambiguous fantasies and Chardin's understated views of middle-class life, are brilliantly colorful scenes of flirtation, seduction, and peeping-Tommery. The critics of the time, quoted at length, complained of the "feminization" of painting. Female authors unconnected with painting complained discreetly of their limited rights. There was a lively market for prints. These matters are earnestly reported by the scholarly contributors to the overall text. There is no information from the patrons who actually bought these cheerful works instead of the sober historical and religious paintings favored by the critics. One would like to know what those cash customers thought when they made their choices.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Marries the pleasures of the catalogue to the virtues of the academic text and so allows us to appreciate genre paintings at different levels. . . . Rand's commentaries place each of the paintings in a context that draws helpfully on the latest insights of art criticism and social commentators of the age. . .
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