Hour Chicago by Ann Slavick

Author:Ann Slavick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615780419
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee

Moving into the 18th in Gallery 215, you’ll find one of the most famous of the ROCOCO painters, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. His four-part Rinaldo and Armida series is taken from Torquato Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered, a story about the Crusades. The pagan girl Armida seduces the Christian Rinaldo, thus delaying the taking of Jerusalem. This is a typical Rococo painting with many curvilinear movements, color reminiscent of a rainbow ice cream cone, and a hopelessly ROMANTIC subject matter.

The Italian Tiepolo held a plum job as the Spanish court painter. His sons, who acted as his assistants, were promised jobs as court painters after their father retired or died. (Later in this tour you will see how the artist Francisco de Goya disrupted this sequence.) Tiepolo also did many religious paintings, most of them in museums in his native country, Italy.

Other Rococo pieces, such as Jean-Antoine Watteau’s small Fête Champêtre (1718–1721) and François Boucher’s Are They Thinking About the Grape? (1747), are also in this gallery. Watteau used the elements of the Rococo style, including partylike scenes, but probably because he had serious health problems he also showed a more difficult side of life through melancholy or expressions of longing on faces and richer, less pastel color. Watteau’s atmosphere is unlike François Boucher’s people, who not only party but feel delicious doing so. Boucher’s work was a perfect representation of the giddy mood at the court as it tried to ignore what was happening among the peasants.

Also in this gallery is a totally different kind of 18th-century painter, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, represented by White Tablecloth (1731–1732). Chardin, from a well-to-do family, became enchanted—before the French Revolution—with daily peasant life. His painting is simple, straightforward, and shows a plain repast, placed on a table without elaborate settings, waiting to be enjoyed by an ordinary family. His brushstrokes are evident rather than smoothed, conveying a more casual attitude toward his subject matter. He saw beauty in the simple life.

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