France in the 17th Century painting analysis

• Claude Lorrain, Landscape with a Piping Shepherd, 1629-32

• Landscape as a genre of painting is still relatively new

• They start to develop it by filling their landscape paintings with classical narratives

• An imagination of the ancient world like an old Greek shepherd or something like that

• Lorrain loves the natural elements themselves like the big leafy trees in the background

  • Sometimes they’re asymmetrical and more biological than other people’s, more atmospheric

• Claude, Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648

• Example of how landscape painting is being developed in a different way in France than it is in Holland

• Uses landscape to tell a story in the Bible

• Focus on the light, loves the reflection of the sun on the water

• His paintings can be quite architectural too

• Nicolas Poussin,

• Paints in Rome and Italy for a while - likes their style but not their contemporary style (likes High Renaissance and Early Renaissance not like Caravaggio)

• The French pull Poussin back from Italy even though he doesn’t really want that and he becomes a major influence on French painting

• Poussin, Burial of Phocion, 1648

• Includes stories of antiquity in his landscapes

• The story in the front is just kind of a justification of making the rest of the painting

• Tends to have very defined foreground, middleground, and background, or a succession of planes

• Poussin, Et En Arcadia Eco, 1655

• I too am in paradise/Eden” - the I essentially is death, it’s saying that death is in paradise too (memento mori)

• Shepherds wandering around in Arcadia/paradise and they find a tomb and read the side of it and it says “I too am in Arcadia”

• Also a landscape painting (classized or classical because of the story)

• Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701

• This king starts a royal academy of art around this time, it’s the first official one in Europe and starts kind of a trend

  • It’s not just a school, it’s like a government bureaucracy that decides what they want art to be and they hold up Poussin as their ideal (but even in his day he was looking back)

  • It’s very conservative from an artistic perspective

• An important era for French culture, this king is trying to consolidate power, “the sun king”

• Dancer guy, another way to assort power and make things revolve around him

• Charles Le Brun, Versailles, begun 1669

• King Louis moved the court and had this entirely new palace built on what used to be a hunting lodge

• Bb b By forcing the court to move here he kind of cut them off from their traditional network and spies and stuff

• Gigantic, tightly controlled, this is deliberate to show when you show up who’s in charge

• Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Charles Le Brun, Hall of Mirrors, 1680

• King Louis made everyone line up and watch him walk across this hall so they could “watch the sun rise”