By 1700 the decorative arts were well on the downward path. Bernini had been dead twenty years, but his influence, together with that of Borromini, was still a living thing, and was still working irreparable mischief. Sir M. Digby Wyatt, in a powerful article written for Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, referring to Borromini, says: ‘From his fervid imagination and rare facility as a draughtsman and designer, he soon obtained ample employment; and in his capricious vagaries, every tendency to extravagance that Bernini’s style possessed Borromini contrived to caricature. Until his death, in 1667, he continued sedulously occupied in subverting all known principles of order and symmetry, not only to his own enrichment, but to the admiration of the leaders of the fashion of the day. The anomalies he introduced into design, the disproportionate mouldings, broken, contrasted, and re-entering curves, ... became the mode of the day, and all Europe was speedily busy in devising similar enormities. In France the fever raged speedily, and the popular style, in place of the quaint but picturesque forms to be seen in the engravings of Du Cerceau, 1576, substituted the more elaborate but less agreeable ones to be found in Marot, 1727, and Mariette, 1726-7.... Despite this debasing influence,’ continues our author, ‘many of the French artists of the time, both of Louis XIV. and XV., in the midst of their extravagances, made many beautiful ornamental designs, showing in them a sense of capricious beauty of line rarely surpassed.’
| La Danse, Louis XV, skin leaf, mother of pearl stick, carved, painted, & gilt. 22” X 11-3/4”. | The Duchess of Portland. |
| Pastorelle, Louis XV, skin leaf, tortoiseshell stick, with gold incrustations 18-1/4” × 10”. | The Duchess of Portland. |
This, although written at the period of perhaps the very lowest ebb of the decorative arts, the mid-Victorian era, pretty well sums up the matter, and is a fair estimate of the decorative tendencies that obtained at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The general character of the fan, therefore, necessarily partook of this debasing influence, and reflected the ornamental vulgarities and fashionable inanities of the time. Thus we have, in moulded ornament, a profusion of those extravagant shell-like cartouches which have become identified with the periods of Louis XV. and XVI.; curly structures elaborately perforated, beginning and ending at will, observing no reasonable or well-defined law, but expressing only the caprice of the artist. These either formed the starting-point for the lighter ornaments, or were associated with naturalistic swags and festoons of fruit and flowers, masks, ribbons, etc.
With the dawn of the eighteenth century, French pictorial art enters upon that era of fêtes galantes, conversations galantes, and amusements champêtres, which, whatever its shortcomings, was purely French and native to the soil. The pernicious influence of the Italian decadence is about to be shaken off. Watteau was sixteen years old, and just commencing those labours which resulted in the practical regeneration of French painting. He may be said to dominate the art of the eighteenth century as completely as Le Brun had overshadowed the century which preceded. He sums up in himself that spirit of the joyousness of life, that careless, impulsive frivolity which is the note of the age.
His immediate followers, Lancret, Pater, and in some sense De Troy, carried on the tradition, but with a more pronounced convention: the shimmer and sheen of silk and satin draperies are painted according to a recipe, the general treatment of the subjects reveals a less delicate fancy, and a less tender sympathy.
Boucher, friend and servant of La Pompadour, ‘with her fan that breaks through halberds,’[97] has been styled, with more or less semblance to truth, the Anacreon of painters. His convention is of an entirely different order to that of Watteau and his school; but if his method and style is more artificial, it is because life and manners have become less sincere, and because he is true to his belief that ‘Nature wanted harmony and seduction’; he yields nothing to his predecessors in artistic power, he is completely master of his technique, and understands exactly the measure of his gifts. In his pupil Fragonard, we have in reality the true heir and successor of Watteau—the same supple touch, the same alluring grace, the same captivating invention and suggestiveness which always summons us to an enchanted land of love, and music, and dalliance.
It was an exceedingly gay, light-hearted, and pleasant time—in painting at any rate. Strephon sat at the feet of Phyllis, warbling soft nothings to the accompaniment of the lute. Dan Cupid, who was everywhere in evidence, took it for granted that his presence was always à propos, and never troubled his curly head as to whether his decorative surroundings were in the nicest possible taste. The fan necessarily reflected this eccentricity and extravagance—indeed it took its natural place in the general decorative scheme; the ‘dainty rogues’ of the sideboard and mantel-shelf were in complete harmony with the still more dainty rogues of the fan; the shepherdess in her flowered skirt rubbed shoulders, or attempted to do so, with the fine lady in crinoline.