Girlish and slightly awkward, her skirts disheveled by the breeze, Diana is shown as though embarking on a woodland jaunt. The turning figure of the goddess, the poised, expectant look of her dog, and the lightness of her simple drapery lend a sense of buoyancy and delicacy to the ponderous weight of the marble. Lemoyne’s surviving masterpiece, this statue formed part of a group executed by several eighteenth-century French sculptors for the gardens of the Château de la Muette at Marly, a royal retreat and hunting lodge near Paris. This sculptural series helped to generate a new interest in graceful vitality, replacing the earlier ideals of serene monumentality in European statuary.
GALLERY 55: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, A Young Girl Reading, painted c. 1776
The delicate rococo style of the 1700s culminates in the work of Fragonard, court painter to Louis XVI. Indeed, an intimate portrayal such as this typifies rococo taste. Stabilized only by the straight wall and armrest, curving lines wind through the composition. Fragonard’s fascination with the irregular extends to the positioning of the girl’s hand and the boneless curl of her little finger, to the interlacings of her hair ribbons and the bows on her gown. The radiant golden quality of the light and the frothy texture of the paint add to the picture’s sensuous warmth.
GALLERY 56: Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon in His Study, dated 1812
Sensitive to the political aspirations of his sitter, David has here chosen an activity, a time, and a setting that subtly but pointedly illuminate the tenacity and drive of the conqueror Napoleon. With the clock pointing to 4:13 and with candles guttering, Napoleon is presumably rising from a night of work; his dress uniform is wrinkled and his face unshaven. The study is littered with symbols of power, the sword alluding to Napoleon’s military conquests and the scroll on the desk representing the Napoleonic Code, still the basis of French law. The crisp silhouettes and dark colors typify the neoclassical style that followed the French Revolution of 1789.
British Art
(Galleries 57-59 and 61)
The history of sixteenth-century England was characterized by unstable, often short-lived alliances made with her several continental neighbors. No wonder then that the influx and influence of foreign artists during this and the following century reflects the diversity of political ties between England and Europe. In the 1500s, the German Hans Holbein the Younger (gallery 40) was court artist to Henry VIII soon after that monarch’s audacious break with the Church, and in the 1600s the Fleming, Anthony van Dyck (galleries 42 and 43), was in the employ of Charles I.
In the eighteenth century, however, when England became a leading maritime and industrial nation under George III and George IV, a large group of native British painters emerged, and in 1768 the Royal Academy was founded in London. The portraitists were led by Sir Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy, and Thomas Gainsborough, noted for his virtuoso brushwork. Among their contemporaries and followers were Romney, Hoppner, Raeburn and Lawrence. In the early 1800s, England produced two landscapists who achieved international reputations. Constable was basically a realist in his study of scenes in natural light; Turner, however, was a romantic who interpreted the moods of nature.