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Jean Jouvenet et la peinture d'histoire à Paris by Antoine Schnapper; Nicolas Vleughels (Académie de France à Rome) by Bernard Hercenberg Review by: Donald Posner The Art Bulletin, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 454-456 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049546 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 23:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 23:35:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jean Jouvenet et la peinture d'histoire a Paris

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Jean Jouvenet et la peinture d'histoire à Paris by Antoine Schnapper; Nicolas Vleughels(Académie de France à Rome) by Bernard HercenbergReview by: Donald PosnerThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 454-456Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049546 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 23:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The ArtBulletin.

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454 THE ART BULLETIN

known. I belong to those who think that Lorraine became "provin- cial" only after ca. 1660. In contrast with what then took place, Lorraine at the beginning of the century must have been a true capital, a living center of the first order. Lorraine's artistic vitality perhaps may not by itself "explain" the genius of La Tour, but undoubtedly Lorraine presented a more varied situation, one indeed quite open to international currents, than is still generally believed today. Surely the work of Bellange and the draftsmen at the beginning of the century, to whose work I propose to return elsewhere, is proof enough. Other explanations of La Tour's forma- tion include the invalidated hypothesis, already developed by A. Blunt,17 of the place of the theater."I At the very moment when the work of Nicolson and Wright appeared, Grossmann insisted, for his part, on the role of the Dutch tradition.19 Yet the funda- mental division among La Tour specialists concerns the trip to Italy. In sum one can say that the scholars in the Latin world not only accept the Italian voyage but judge it indispensable to explain La Tour's Caravaggism, whereas scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world reject the idea, proposing that La Tour had contacts with the Utrecht Caravaggists.

This note may be concluded with something new on La Tour, a composition so far known in this one example (Fig. 1), which belongs to a private collection in the center of France.20 If we are certainly in the presence here only of an old and good copy, we have in it no less certainly the reflection of a new type of Magdalen, evidence of La Tour's predilection for this theme.21 Still, this night scene does not enlighten us further with respect to the numerous La Tour problems that remain in suspense or give us a key to the mystery of La Tour. Much has been brilliantly resolved by Nicolson and Wright, but much still has to be ac- complished to understand La Tour's world of lucid and detached observation, silent meditation, realism, cruelty, naturalism, abstrac- tion, seclusion, and stylization.

PIERRE ROSENBERG

Mus&e du Louvre

ANTOINE SCHNAPPER, Jean Jouvenet et la peinture d'histoire a Paris, Paris, L6once Laget, 1974. Pp. 300; 269 ills. 390 N.F. BERNARD HERCENBERG, Nicolas Vleughels (Acaddmie de France a Rome), Paris, Leonce Laget, 1975. Pp. 259; 265 ills. 215 N.F.

17 Cf. above, n. 13. I8 For the two paintings in San Francisco, see the excellent work by Martha Kellogg Smith, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., 1975. I" F. Grossmann, "Some Observations on Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Tradition," Burlington Magazine, cxv, 1973, 576- 583. " Canvas; 72.5 x 58cm. 21! may add that the St. Jerome Reading (N. 20, fig. 38), now in New York, comes, to judge from a photograph in the R.K.D. in the Hague, from the collection of Count Stacklenberg at Reval. In the work of Nicolson and Wright one will find new, precise details concerning the provenance of a number of works (e.g., Nos. 30, 57).

Probably no body of art-historical material is today being more rapidly expanded or more completely rethought than French art during the hundred-year period that begins around 1680. For the history of paint- ing this means the years that extend, roughly, from the death of Le Brun to the emergence of David. Today, the works of many all but forgotten but once respected or even famous artists are being looked at again, sympathetically, by a generation of scholars com- mitted to a major effort of historical reconstruction. The two books under review are among the monographs or exhibition catalogues devoted to La Fosse, J.-F. de Troy, Tremolieres, Restout, Carle van Loo, Oudry, and others that have either already appeared or are in preparation. The main stimulus for this recent research is the conviction that our present view of the period, because it is based on 19th-century aesthetic and historical judgments, is

fundamentally distorted and that to correct our vision we must learn to see the art of the time as nearly as possible in the way that contemporaries saw it. How much needs to be done is suggested by the fact that of Jouvenet's fairly large body of works only about a half-dozen paintings have been reasonably well known since the last century. At the same time, the achievements of many other artists have been largely obscured by the intensity of our admiration for masters like Watteau and Chardin, who were not the most admired artists of their own day.

The outlines of an alternative history of the period are taking shape. They are, in fact, already sharply drawn in Pierre Rosen- berg's introduction to the catalogue of his splendid exhibition, "The Age of Louis XV" (Toledo, Chicago, Ottawa, 1975- 76). Rosenberg's critical approach to the period is in marked contrast to the one taken, for instance, by Michael Levey in his chapters on painting in the recent Pelican History of Art volume on 18th- century France (1973). A polemic may be brewing, and the books by Schnapper and Hercenberg can help to fuel it. Vleughels, for example, is dismissed summarily by Levey as "lacking in imagina- tion of every kind," but in Rosenberg's view Vleughels was "an excellent painter," who understandably appealed to some of "the most informed amateurs" of his day. Underlying what appear to be just subjective responses to the painter's work is, I think, the issue of the extent to which our judgments should be guided by the critical opinions of an artist's contemporaries. Jouvenet enjoyed a great repu- tation in his time. In one view, this is irrelevant except as a commentary on the tastes and expectations of his public; the artist's true stature and historic role can be determined only in the larger context of artistic developments that unfolded throughout Europe in the course of a century or more. In the other view, stated by Schnapper in his monograph on Jouvenet, we cannot dis- regard the judgment of contemporaries because they knew their art in a fullness and variety that can never be wholly recovered (p. 10). Schnapper goes so far as to say that the art historian cannot pre- sume to arrive at a more profound and better-ordered knowledge of the past than the people who lived in that past (ibid., n. 1). Personally, I cannot subscribe to such an extreme position, but it is of course true that we must in any case ask why it was that contemporaries thought Jouvenet so grand. Whether, and to what extent, they were justified, is another question, but one that can be argued only in the light of Schnapper's exemplary reconstitution of Jouvenet's art and activity.

Jouvenet (1644- 1717) grew up and trained, initially under his painter-father, in Rouen. Schnapper speculates about what he could have learned in his native city, but there is a total absence of evidence about this period of the artist's career. The same is true of the first seven or so years of his life in Paris, where he arrived about 1661 at the age of seventeen. By 1668, however, Jouvenet was a student at the Acad6mie Royale and the following year he was working under Le Brun's supervision at the chateau of St.-Germain- en-Laye. Still, the first visual evidence of his activity dates from about 1673, when he painted the now lost, but fortunately engraved, May for Notre-Dame and had perhaps just completed his still sur- viving reception-piece for the Academy. These works look back to Poussin and they are deeply marked by the influence of Le Brun. In the next decades Jouvenet's reputation grew steadily as his style took on a highly personal, even rather mannered, character and as he proved himself a commanding figure in the production of major decorative and religious works.

A good deal of Jouvenet's work as a decorator has been lost, and the general context and chronology of all aspects of his output have long been unclear. Schnapper has succeeded in giving us an idea of the extent and character of the artist's decorative under- takings, and he has been able to document the circumstances and details of Jouvenet's contributions to pictorial enterprises in Paris and elsewhere. Sometimes the author tells us even more about con- text than we really need, at least in the main text. For instance, in 1687 Jouvenet painted one picture for the church of the convent of St.-Cyr; Schnapper traces the history of the pictures made for St.-Cyr from 1686 to the Revolution (pp. 85ff.), and he discusses the paintings made by the Boullogne, Antoine Coypel, Frangois

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BOOK REVIEWS 455

Houasse, Stiemart (the last two in 1708) and others as well as Jouvenet's. This makes slow going for the reader, but all students of French painting around 1700 will benefit greatly from the informa- tion to be found in the book.

Having prepared the grounds for an art-historical interpretation and assessment of Jouvenet's art about as completely and solidly as is now possible, Schnapper presents the artist's work against the broader background of Parisian religious and decorative painting of the period. His discussion ranges from a description of the character of religious life at the time to an analysis of the principles of contemporary ceiling decoration. Among other things, Schnapper shows that opportunities for history painters were not so restricted as Pierre Marcel maintained in his great book of 1906 on French painting from 1690 to 1721. Most important, he confirms the im- pression that Jouvenet was essentially a conservative artist, "classique et r6aliste: id6aliste dans la tradition . . de Raphael, des Car- raches, de Poussin" (p. 168).

Jouvenet's historic role was to maintain and pass on traditional values (most obviously to his nephew Restout)1 and thus to help preserve them until toward the end of the 18th century they were widely appreciated again. Of course, Jouvenet did not take on this role consciously; he did not feel threatened in any way by the Rubinistes. Schnapper is surely right to insist that French painting around 1700 should not be treated, as it was by Marcel, pri- marily in terms of a Flemish-inspired transition from the academicism of Le Brun to the Rococo of Boucher. Even the artists we would call most advanced were not rejecting the past or trying to achieve specific new goals. They were merely exploring available traditions more freely and using a wider range of models than had previously been customary. Artistically, the period was not revolu- tionary, nor even reformatory. Jouvenet's conservatism thus has neither positive nor negative value in our assessment of his stature. This situation means, however, that while we judge the artistic significance of La Fosse, for instance, partly on the grounds of the new, fruitful ideas that emerged in his work, our judgment of Jouvenet can be based only on the personal way he used mainly traditional ideas.

Early in his career Jouvenet formulated an idiosyncratic style that changed little in the course of his life. Related to this stability was his practice of constantly repeating figures and compositional motifs and of producing numerous repetitions of his pictures. In fact, of the one hundred and fifty or so paintings that Schnapper catalogues only about a third are original inventions, the rest being replicas of one kind or another. Schnapper describes Jouvenet's style well, and in a fine chapter that introduces the catalogues of paintings and drawings he discusses the artist's working procedure and the production of replicas. Nevertheless, two basic questions remain unanswered: how and under what influence did the artist's style take shape? What is the essential content of Jouvenet's works, so many of which he repeated and which were, therefore, evidently much ad- mired by his contemporaries?

The first question probably cannot be satisfactorily dealt with so long as we know so little about Jouvenet's career before the mid- seventies, when, as Schnapper shows, the elements of the artist's stylistic vocabulary were largely formed. The crucial factor in the determination of his style, I think, was his concept of com- positional organization. Unlike Le Brun and his followers, who compose by assembling and balancing heavily weighted, contained groups of elements, Jouvenet builds dynamic structures in which forms are activated and linked by an interlocking of diagonal thrusts and counter-thrusts. The character of the artist's figure types and poses, his sharp-featured physiognomies, and even his use of chiaroscuro seem oriented to this larger idea of pictorial form. It should be emphasized that Jouvenet was stretching but not breaking the principles of French "classicism." Still, it is hard to see how he could have developed his style on the basis of contemporary or

1 It is interesting that Boucher collected and copied Jouvenet drawings. See R. S. Slatkin, "A Note on a Boucher Drawing," Master Drawings, xiii, 1975, 260.

earlier French paintings alone. The influence of Flemish art, which used to be exaggerated in discussions of Jouvenet's work, is real, but as Schnapper makes clear, Flemish art cannot really explain the artist's manner. One wonders what Jouvenet knew of Italian Baroque painting. I suspect that this is a case where motif-hunting would provide some useful clues to the origins of Jouvenet's style. The fact that he never visited Italy should not lead us to dismiss the possibility that he had a fair knowledge of developments there. Although it is not germane to the specific stylistic question that concerns us, it might be pointed out that Jouvenet's Triumph of Justice ceiling in the Palais de Justice at Rennes is partially in- debted to Andrea Sacchi's Divine Wisdom ceiling in the Barberini Palace in Rome.

The question about content reaches beyond iconographical prob- lems to Jouvenet's conception of human and supra-human events. One regrets that Schnapper did not develop more fully and sys- tematically his analyses of the dramatic configurations of Jouvenet's pictures. Schnapper points out (p. 135), for instance, that in the Supper in the House of Simon (fig. 120) there is a shift from the usual focus on the relationship of Christ and the Magdalene to the moral lesson Christ gives to Simon. It seems to me that this is not a special case, for an emphasis on "spiritual proclamation" marks many, perhaps most, of Jouvenet's religious works. Often virtually identical figures bearing the same message appear in different thematic contexts. The figure of the Virgin in the Pentecost (fig. 143), for instance, recurs as "Religion" in the Triumph of Justice (fig. 158), and as the Virgin in the Visitation (fig. 164). Their poses and gestures seem generated by the sudden reception or revelation of divine illumination, and the pictorial dynamics of Jouvenet's com- positions seem the result of responses to their expressive, declama- tory character. The artist appears to have chosen or at least favored subjects that allowed for this type of statement. Indeed, his last work, the Visitation of 1716 for Notre-Dame in Paris (fig. 164), is iconographically remarkable in presenting, not the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, but the following moment, when the Virgin sud- denly lifts her voice in a song of thanksgiving and praise of God. It is not unlikely that Jouvenet himself decided to make the Visitation into a "Magnificat"; the theme is very rare in art, but wonderfully suited to contain the expressive content that seems to have dominated the artist's imagination and that his style seems designed to serve.

In a chapter on Jouvenet's critical fortunes Schnapper relates how his reputation reached giddy heights in the 18th century (when in the dawning light of Neoclassicism Diderot exclaimed about his Resurrection of Lazarus: "Quelle vie! Quels regards! Quelle force d'expression! Quelle joie! Quelle reconnaissance!" [p. 154]), and plummeted in the 19th century (when one identified him with the "decadent" Carracci and spoke of his work as "vulgaire et path6tique" [p. 164]). Schnapper has presented Jouvenet's work with admirable completeness and, happily, "debarrasse des couches de prejug6s qui . . . arrant le regard" (p. 165). One sees clearly now that the artist's intellectual and emotional range was rather limited. His paintings of subjects from myth and ancient history, and his decorative undertakings, are splendidly competent, but hardly moving. His strength was in religious painting, although even in that field one might maintain that his originality consisted merely in producing well-wrought, and only superficially expressive, pictorial formulae. This, however, may be grossly un- just. The admiration of his contemporaries may be based on some- thing more solid. Further study of the content of Jouvenet's work and of its connections to thought and sentiment of the time may enable us to perceive it as richer and more deeply felt than we now imagine.

Vleughels (1688- 1737) appears in most histories of French art, if at all, only as a friend of Watteau, in some of whose f&es galantes he is portrayed.Vleughels's liberal directorship of the Acad~mie de France & Rome is occasionally referred to, but his own artistic activity has generally not been thought worthy of mention. In these circumstances, this large, thoroughly documented and well- illustrated book, which catalogues more than four hundred paint- ings, prints, and drawings, comes as something of a surprise. Yet of course we cannot know whether Vleughels's friendship

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456 THE ART BULLETIN

with Watteau had any art-historical significance or what artistic guidance in the Academy during his tenure was really like without a clear understanding of his personal pictorial ideals and practice. Hercenberg's reconstruction of Vleughels's oeuvre was truly a labor of love, demanding rigorous research and the ordering of a great body of material. It is very much to Hercenberg's credit that in the end he makes only modest claims for his hero's art. For Vleughels was, in fact, a very minor artist. Some of his paintings, small works mostly on panel or copper, and his drawings are un- deniably charming and well made, and one understands their appeal to enthusiasts for "le petit goa~t," like the Comtesse de Verrue, who owned at least eleven of his pictures. However, except for the man- nerisms of style that enable us to identify his work, one sees nothing that can truly be spoken of as a personal idiom. Hercenberg, furthermore, concludes that it is practically impossible to recog- nize a stylistic evolution in Vleughels's oeuvre, mainly because the artist borrowed heavily, continuously, and unsystematically from a wide range of pictorial sources (p. 24).

Under the influence of his father, a Flemish painter who settled in Paris in 1642, Vleughels began his career as an admirer of Rubens. During his first stay in Italy, from about 1703 to 1715, he also became enamored of Veronese. It was natural, therefore, that he should have been well regarded by progressive artists and amateurs at a time when "colorism" was coming to be recog- nized-as it had not yet been by Jouvenet's generation- as opening genuinely new directions for French painting. Vleughels's coloristic bias, however, did not prevent him from culling ideas from the masters of dessin. His work, which encompasses mythological, historical, religious, allegorical, and genre subjects, is something of a patchwork of borrowed motifs. Hercenberg points to many, espe- cially' those deriving from Rubens and Veronese, although, to make a small criticism, Hercenberg is often less precise and thus less convincing than he might be. One might add a few more examples here to give an idea of Vleughels's range of interests. The Venus in fig. 74 comes from Tintoretto's Origin of the Milky Way; Campaspe in fig. 30 from 'Annibale Carracci's Venus and Anchises in the Farnese Gallery; Thisbe in fig. 80 from the Ajax in Poussin's Dresden Empire of Flora; the Madonna and Child in fig. 118 from Cavedone's Virgin with St. Petronius in the Bologna Gallery; fig. 59 seems to depend on Cigoli's Ecce Homo in the Pitti Gallery; fig. 19 presupposes the example of Fetti's parable paintings. It is important for-our understanding of the period to recognize that other colorists of the time, although in a more original and less extensive way, also looked to a great variety of sources. And if many artists of the next generation continued to do so, it was partly because of the teaching of Vleughels, who headed the French Academy in Rome in the years when such men as Natoire, Carle van Loo, Boucher, Subleyras, and Dandre-Bardon were students there.

In 1724 the Duc d'Antin, Surintendant des Batiments, sent Vleughels to Rome to take charge of the Academy from the incompetent Charles Poerson. Vleughels, whom the Surintendant knew through the great collector Crozat, was ideally suited for the post. Urbane and amiable, at ease among men of high birth and station, he had made many important social contacts during his long first residence in Italy. His administrative effectiveness is documented by his acquisition of the Mancini Palace as a new home for the Academy in 1725, and, even more striking, by his quick success in making Italian art collections accessible to the pensionnaires of the Academy. Poerson had written to Paris lamenting the fact that places housing great paintings were closed to students; just two years after he arrived in Italy, Vleughels reported that students would now be welcome to visit the major galleries of Florence, Bologna, Parma, Modena, Venice (pp. 16-17).

Vleughels's pedagogy was founded, like his own art, on the no- tion that the- widest possible knowledge of pictorial modes was necessary to the student. This was not in itself a new idea, but its application under his exceptionally tolerant tutelage must have been remarkably liberating. Furthermore, his efforts to instill in his charges a love of landscape and his recognition of the need for stu- dents to produce "tableaux d'invention" were imaginative and fruit- ful innovations in academic training.

Hercenberg's text is succinct and for the most part excellently tailored to the requirements of his subject. Still, one wishes that he had allowed himself to deal a little more expansively with some of the questions that his study raises. One would like to know more about the sources of Vleughels's ideas about art and the teaching of art. The Academy's involvement with contemporary Italian artistic developments in Vleughels's time is hardly touched upon. Something more, too, remains to be said about the relation- ship of Vleughels and Watteau, although Hercenberg is surely cor- rect in concluding that Vleughels was the main beneficiary of it and the problem is otherwise logically in the province of Watteau scholarship. One specially knotty question, however, concerns a group of landscape drawings, some of them formerly given to Watteau, that Rosenberg has recently attributed to Vleughels. Hercenberg (pp. 142-43) does not accept them, maybe rightly, but one would have liked a more detailed discussion of them.

A final word must be said about the production of the books under review. They issue from the same publishing house and in- augurate two parallel series of art-historical studies, one devoted ex- clusively to French artists and the other to French artists active mainly in Italy or to problems focusing on French-Italian con- nections. These series, by publishing the results of much research now or soon to be undertaken, will play an especially important role in the process of rethinking the history of 18th-century art. Hercenberg's book, which was awarded the Paul Cailleux prize for 1975, has been beautifully produced; one can only hope that it will set the standard for future volumes in both series. Unfor- tunately, Schnapper's Jouvenet suffers from the poor quality of its illustrations, inadequate proofreading, and a price that puts it beyond the means of most of the people who need or would like to own it.

DONALD POSNER

New York University, Institute of Fine Arts

FRANKLIN W. ROBINSON, Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667): A

Study of His Place in Dutch Genre Painting of the Golden Age, New York, Abner Schram, 1974. Pp. 240; 1 color pl., 240 black-and-white ills. $45

If one had to pick a single master to represent the scope of Dutch genre painting during the mid-17th century, the choice would cer- tainly be Gabriel Metsu. As Robinson shows in his monograph, Metsu's oeuvre reflects the contributions of many of his con- temporaries. His career was short, only twenty-two years between his first dated work of 1645 (Robinson, 1) and his death in 1667, but he was very productive. His subjects range from the bawdy interiors and religious scenes of Nicolaus Knilpfer and Jan Steen, to depictions of men and women in domestic settings popularized by Gerard Dou, to themes of social interaction of men and women explored by Gerard Terborch and Jan Vermeer. Similarly, Metsu's painting styles range from the broad and freely executed style of Steen to the feinmalerei techniques of Dou and Frans van Mieris the Elder. Metsu's work also varies enormously with respect to quality. Few Dutch genre paintings are as Compelling as the Beit pendants of a Man Writing a Letter and a Woman Reading a Letter (R. 145, 146), but many of his works suffer from being overly anecdotal and theatrical. Metsu's early works, in particular, are crude both in concept and execution.

Robinson estimates that over 150 paintings by Metsu are extant, but of these only nineteen are dated. Given the range of styles, subject matter, and techniques that Metsu explores throughout his life, establishing the chronology of his work is a difficult task. To help explain Metsu's evolution Robinson has undertaken the for- midable task of relating Metsu's work to the larger artistic environment in which he lived. While examining Metsu's chronology, Robinson frequently compares his work to paintings by other artists to find influences and source materials for Metsu's paintings. The approach is admirable, and badly needed in a field where monographic studies too frequently isolate the artists.

After a short introduction that offers biographical information

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