#french classicism

The Baroque Chapelle Royale was Louis XIV’s final addition to the Palace of Versailles.  It was also the last project of the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart who designed most of the palace.

MWW Artwork of the Day (6/17/19) Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665) The Abduction of the Sabine Women (c. 1633-34) Oil on canvas, 154 x 206 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund)

According to legend, Romulus, having settled Rome with his gang of bachelor warriors, attempted to negotiate marriages for them with the neighboring Sabine tribe. When they turned down his offer Romulus, unscrupulous fellow that he was, organized a festival as a ruse and invited the Sabines to attend. That's him here at the left raising the hem on his cloak in a pre-arranged signal to his men, each of whom will carry off one of the Sabine maidens, bringing her back to Rome to provide the city with future generations. You can read all about it in Plutarch, Livy or Virgil.  As you can see, the artist has some of them getting carried away and abducting a mother, her babies and an old woman in the heat of the action. The "yellow guy" at the right is really wearing an armor modeled after a Roman "lorica," which was made of leather and reproduced the anatomy of the male torso.  

MWW Artwork of the Day (7/20/17) Claude Lorrain (French, 1600-1682) Port Scene with the Departure of Ulysses from the Land of the Feaci (1646) Oil on canvas, 119 x 150 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

"Claude Lorrain knew the real world by heart, down to its minute details. He used it as a means of expressing the harmonious universe of his soul." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Claude produced many hundreds of paintings and over 1,300 drawings in a long career spent mainly in Rome.  Most of the paintings were large canvases in which the landscape or seascape dominates the tiny figures in the foreground acting out a mythological or biblical scene.  Regardless of subject, their real focus was always on the subtle effects of light, which infused the scene and unified the composition of the pictures.  By means of the extraordinary luminosity wrought through thin, semi-transparent layers of oil paint, he subordinated every element to the poetic feeling of the whole, devising images more beautiful and better ordered than nature itself.

Perhaps nowhere were these tendencies more pronounced than in embarkation scenes such as this one.  As Turner was to do in his early pictures, Claude renders the sea as a poetic element that multiplies light and reflects it upon the dream palaces which frame it.

Ecstatic Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI

Expiatory chapel in Paris. Designed in 1816 as a tribute to the former king and queen of France, guillotined during the french revolution, this monument is built upon the cemetery that hosted their remains.

The Springtime, Pierre-Auguste Cot, 1873