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4:1 Seduction in the Court of Louis XV: Boucher’s pastoral paintings
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From the course by The University of Melbourne
Sexing the Canvas: Art and Gender
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From the lesson
Sexual Codes in Eighteenth Century French Courtly Painting
This week Jennifer Milam, Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney, reveals the sexual codes and symbols of art in eighteenth century French painting. Professor Milam uncovers the erotic references imbedded in the courtly art of François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Two pastoral paintings by François Boucher form the centrepiece of this discussion of the playful and provocative representation of gender in the Ancien Régime. In addition, Professor Milam provides an in depth account of how these codes operated in some famous prints and drawings of the period.
Meet the Instructors
Jeanette HoornProfessor
Culture and Communication
[MUSIC]
I'm Jennifer Milam, professor of art history and
18th century studies at the University of Sydney.
I'm very pleased to be here today taking part in this Coursera
course Sexing the Canvas online specifically to talk about
the collection of 18th Century art at the National Gallery of Victoria,
which is a real gem of a collection in Australia.
There are two particular works that I'm very interested in telling you about.
These are Boucher's pastoral paintings behind me.
A pendant pair which means two works that were created to be displayed together.
But also, before we really start talking about these particular works, I think it's
really nice to begin with how these works are hung here in the collection
on either side of a medallion portrait by John Baptist Lemuel of Louis XV.
Because both the paintings and the medallion sculpture are from 1748,
which is really at the height of King Louis XV's time as king.
And they epitomise aspects of 18th century French art.
18th century French art is defined by its lightness of touch,
by its sense of beauty, also by its eroticism and
connections with themes of love.
Louis XV was known as Loius XV The Well-Loved and
this didn't just mean that he was well loved by his people.
He also was known to be well loved by woman.
He had several mistresses,
the most important of which was Madame de Pompadour, and Madame de Pompadour was
the single most important female patron, of the arts in France.
Her favourite painter was Francois Boucher.
Francois Boucher was first painter to the King.
He was also the director of The Academy.
The Academy of French Painting and Sculpture, which was a group of artists
who during the time of Louis XIV, who is Louis XV great grandfather,
The Academy came together to establish the rules of painting and sculpture and
to talk about the arts and how artists should be trained and educated.
This is important because as we’ll see when we talk more specifically about these
two pastoral works we'll see that Boucher not only follows rules
that are important in the way you display and depict the female body and
the male body in scenes of love and sexuality.
But also that he plays with conventions.
And this is a very important part of Rococo art,
because as viewers of Rococo painting it relied on
very highly skilled viewers who from birth had been surrounded by
extraordinary works of art and had learned how to decode the paintings
in connection with their ideals of sociability and behaviour.
So these two particular works which are pastoral paintings were done in 1748 and
are closely connected to pastoral literature and
performances of pastoral plays.
Now plays in the 18th century did not only take place in theatres,
not only the official theatres but also the more informal theatres, the faire
theatres, which is where you see these kinds of pastoral plays taking place.
But also more importantly pastoral plays
were performed in the private theatres of the nobility.
Now, Boucher our artist worked with a particular playwright named Favart.
And Favart had really reformed the comic opera.
He reformed it by taking what in faire theatre conventionally was very bawdy and
ribald kind of performances of sexuality in pantomime, and
connected them with refined codes of sociability that appealed to the nobility.
With the idea that the more refined audiences would start
coming back to the theatre.
Now Favare and Boucher actually grew up on the same street so
their relationship may go back many years.
We don't know how far.
But certainly in the 1740s they were collaborating,
and one of the really interesting things about these particular works is that
Boucher may have come up with the ideas that then he painted,
and Favart then turned into plays and performances.
Because we often think that paintings are illustrations of literature, but
in this case we know it was at least a collaboration because Boucher
was not only already well-known for his pastoral paintings,
but he also did costume design and background,
scenic back-drops for pastoral plays, Favart's in particular.
Now, many of these plays are derived from
a tradition of pastoral literature that goes back to the 17th Century.
There was a type of Salon culture that was dominated by women,
and the tastes of women, going back to the time of Louis the XIV.
By the time of Louis the XV, women really did set a lot of the standards of taste.
Whether it be in the visual arts or in literature and performances, and
more importantly, in the discourse about what refined
behaviour informed all of the visual and literary arts.
So, the pastoral plays, just to give you a little bit more of
a sense about what kind of plays these were, first of all there was no dialogue.
There were some songs in the background that everyone knew and
told people enough information about what each of the characters was doing.
But, these were really, really simple plots.
They were always set in a golden age, somewhere in a landscape.
And they were always about simple stories of love.
So there was a shepherdess and there was a shepherd.
And that's what we see in the work on the right.
And there is a little shepherd up above the shepherdess below.
Who is giving her a flute lesson.
The work on the left is a second scene, or a subsequent scene,
where there is a girl who is asleep and
there is a young man who is not the shepherd, but a young man who is
delivering a basket of flowers from the shepherd as a surprise gift.
So when she wakes up, this mysterious basket, which is the title of the work,
has appeared next to her as a gift, a magical gift from her lover.
These are the basic plots.
It's always about a simple love story between a shepherd and a shepherdess.
Now, when Favart performed these plays his wife was often the main lead.
And that didn't mean she was the shepherdess,
it meant she was the shepherd.
So women conventionally
played both roles.
This is very important when we start to think about how these particular
canvases have been sexed, so to speak.
Because it is quite different from many other eras in which men and
women are depicted.
So for example, in the work on the right,
you see the shepherd, who's in the red coat, playing,
he has his arms around the young woman and he's helping her play a little flute.
Below at her feet is a crown of flowers,
and to her right are the sheep.
It’s very important to realise these aren't real shepherds and
shepherdesses that work in the fields.
They are ideal shepherds and shepherdesses who wander around
the landscape with their sheep, and think about nothing except love.
And so, the sheep in these particular paintings are always perfectly coiffed.
And the really funny thing about it is that woman in this particular period who
had dairies, like Marie Antoinette a little bit later, would often have sheep
and then they would go out in their gardens and walk around with sheep and
they would have these wonderful little pink bows and
they would be perfectly shampooed.
And sometimes they were even imported from places like Spain,
because you wanted the best type of perfect sheep.
But anyway, in this scene you can see that the shepherdess isn't really
engaged with the sheep.
That instead, she's learning her agreeable lesson
from her shepherd who is attempting to woo her.
On the right hand side of the painting is a fountain which refers to this
longer tradition that goes back to the 17th century of a fountain of love.
So, the scene is very much set as an ideal place in nature where a shepherd and
shepherdess have nothing else to do but play music,
lounge around, and really pursue their love of each other.
Now, another important aspect of
this is its connection with aristocratic ways of life.
So, the nobility defined themselves also by not working.
And at this point in the 18th century,
they also had no real military function anymore.
They were courtiers and, in reality,
they spent a great deal of their time pursuing leisure.
Leisure was their primary occupation.
And one aspect of that leisure was the pursuit of love.
So at this stage in 18th century France,
the pursuit of love was a highly codified way of wooing a woman.
And what's important about that is that in making love to
a woman the act of consummation was something that would end the pleasures.
So what you really find in an erotic painting is a coded
way of extending the pleasures of the pursuit of love,
not the consummation of love.
However, part of the pleasure of viewing the work is actually the coded play
that lets you know that the end result of eroticism is often the sexual act.
So, in the painting itself, one of the things you see at
the foot of the young woman is a crown, a crown of flowers.
Now, that of course is a reference to the lover crown.
That when a lover is made the ruler over her lover's heart,
she gets a little crown on her head, or
she might give it over to her lover as his crown.
However, it also had an erotic meaning,
because the circle of the lover was also a reference to
the female body part, the hole, where things go through.
So when you start to actually describe the symbols you start to
realise that the sexuality part of it is something that is very
detached from the visual codes that are highly refined and
enjoyed through an understanding of the motif but never expressed directly.
Now, another aspect of that, Is the actual flute.
The lesson on which she's getting.
Now the flute is very much a reference to the male penis.
And so she's being taught to play it,
is another way of being taught how to play the male sexual part.
So these are the types of codes that are built into these works.
They are visual jokes,
puns that viewers of the time would have instantly recognised.
But part of the pleasure of that is seeing how the crudeness
of sexuality is turned into something that is highly refined and
coded and not understood by everyone, only understood by
people within a small elite circle, who know what the codes mean.
Now, I said that I was going to talk a little bit more about how
Boucher confounds conventions of paintings,
the rules of paintings in ways that also connect with issues of gender.
Now in The Agreeable Lesson,
you see that the male figure is seated above the female figure.
Now that was a convention.
Men were the stronger part, so
men are always placed in a dominant position over the female figure.
There are some wonderful texts by a student of Boucher who wrote
in a diary about his time in Boucher’s studio.
And this young artist's name was Mannlich and was a very important source for
us to know more about what it was like to work in Boucher’s studio.
Boucher had an enormous studio and spent a lot of time.
We know that from Mannlich one of he things that he would do was he would have
students make many, many drawings and Boucher would come in and
sign them at the last minute so he could sell them on.
So he always has his eye on the market a little bit.
But one of the thing that Mannlich tells us about is that Boucher's
correcting the way that his students depict the female body or
draw the female body when he says that the female body should be approached
as if it has no bones at all or hardly any bones.
So, the idea is that they're curved, soft lines.
Nothing that's hard or breaks the eye in a way as it moves around the canvas.
So male figure seated in a dominant position.
Female figure very languid, often as if it has no bones, very gently curved.
And even more importantly, of a finer colour, almost like a porcelain
white colour, where the male figure has more of a sun-kissed look.
That's really an anachronistic way of saying it.
But the male body has more flesh tones.
And it was a way a coding the male figure versus the female figure.
So some of this is through position, and some of it is through colour, and
other aspects of it are through the actual line that the figure Is painted with.
Now, we see this additionally in The Mysterious Basket.
And The Mysterious Basket has a very different kind of male figure.
He does not look like the shepherd.
So, with the shepherd and
shepherdess you almost get the feeling like they're very similar figures.
They have a different colour and a different position, but
it's almost as if they could be swapped.
They wear different clothes, so we know one is the shepherd, but
really their facial features, the refined body lines
all really kind of confuse gender differences.
Now that is not the case with The Mysterious Basket.
You get the lovely shepherdess who's fallen asleep, but you get the figure,
the more rustic figure, who is delivering the basket.
Now this is an important way in terms of the way Boucher has depicted that
figure to show up that he is a rustic.
He's not a shepherd, he's a rustic.
He's a rustic who does a favour for the shepherd but
it's the shepherd who is the stand-in for the noble man.
And so, that figure is much more to our eyes masculine.
He has a very bulging muscles.
Especially as you see as he hands down the basket you can see the ripples and veins.
You see a much fleshier and
kind of physicality to his figure that we don't see with The Shepherd.
Now that is partly a class distinction.
So, we're not only seeing more of a difference between a male and
female figure, we're also seeing a difference of refinement.
He is a crude character, whereas the shepherdhess is a highly refined character
who is standing in for the noble woman or the elite, refined woman.
Now, these works, Boucher in particular,
was often criticised when pastoral scenes were put on view at the public Salons.
And like I said earlier in this piece,
these works really were intended for noble viewers,
or at least very high ranking members of the bourgeoisie.
And so the way that these kind of coded meanings were
understood was by people who really were looking for
a kind of pastoral version of themselves that they understood and recognised.
When they were put on view at the Salons,
they were seen somewhat as misleading and dangerous
because they represented sexuality as having absolutely no consequences.
So you might learn to play the a flute, but
there's no suggestion that that can lead to any sort of moral downfall.
So when you get into the public space of the Salon, the Salon being the place where
art exhibitions take place every two years in Paris and are known to be,
or at least considered to be, one of the first truly public spaces in Europe.
We have descriptions of the crowd there being described as the fish monger's wife,
the perfumes of fish monger's wife mixed with the perfumes of the lady of court.
So everyone was in equal in this space, but
works were understood in different ways.
So some critics of Boucher in addressing works like the Agreeable Lesson,
talked about how it was very finely painted, but
there was a bit of a problem because the male figure didn't look masculine enough,
partly in response to that, Boucher then when he approaches
making some male characters makes them look very masculine, but
it is in the context of telling a particular story.
Now less friendly critics, because the ones who talk about the particular
formal qualities of the work, were more friendly to Boucher.
They came out of the academy.
But one of the things that happens in the public spaces of Salon is you get writers.
You get the first professional art critics, one of whom is a man named
Denis Diderot, who was one of the founding editors of the Encyclopaedia,
the big enlightenment project, which was about really establishing knowledge.
Now, Diderot wrote some really amusing Salon criticism, and
he didn't like Boucher's work.
He thought it was morally degenerate,
that it challenged the moral integrity of the family.
There are many reasons why he didn't like it.
But in one of the later Salons, almost 20 years later,
when Boucher was still displaying a lot of these pastoral works, Diderot says,
When am I ever going to be rid of these damn pastorals?
The man exists and paints so he can show me tits and ass.
Those are Diderot's words roughly translated.
But, Diderot's real problem with these kinds of works was that young women,
unsuspecting young women, would come and linger in front of these coded paintings
about sexuality and not realise that there was some sort
of price to be paid for the pleasures of love.
And when we go into the drawing room,
I'll be able to show you some more didactic narrative displays
of that kind of depiction of eroticism and sexuality in 18th century art.
[MUSIC]
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