Volume 27, Number 15 · October 9, 1980
Re-inventing the Eighteenth Century
By Francis Haskell
La Peinture d'histoire en France de 1747 à 1785
by Jean Locquin
Arthena (Paris, facsimile reprint of 1912 edition), 358 pp., 400 F
1700 tal: Tanke och form i rokokon
an exhibition at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm October 5, 1979-January 6, 1980
L'Arte del Settecento Emiliano: La Pittura
an exhibition at Palazzo di Re Enzo, Bologna, September-November, 1979
L'Arte del Settecento Emiliano: L'Arte a Parma dai Farnese ai Borbone
an exhibition at Palazzo della Pilotta, Parma, 1979
Chardin, 1699-1779
by Pierre Rosenberg. catalogue of the exhibition at Le Grand Palais, Paris, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1979
distributed by Indiana University Press, 428, 307 illus pp., $32.50 (paper)
Chardin and the Still-Life Tradition in France
by Gabriel P. Weisberg, with William S. Talbot. catalogue of the exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1979
distributed by Indiana University Press, 128, 102 illus pp., $7.95 (paper)
Civiltà del '700 a Napoli, 1734-1799
an exhibition at the Palazzo di Capodimonte, Naples, December 1979-October, 1980
The Architecture of the French Enlightenment
by Allan Braham
University of California Press, 288, 424 illus pp., $60.00 thereafter
Alessandro Magnasco
by Fausta Franchini Guelfi
Cassa di Risparmio (Genoa), 420, 278 illus pp., 75,000 lire
Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art
by Fred Licht
Universe Books, 288, 135 illus pp., $16.50
John Flaxman
edited by David Bindman. catalogue of the exhibition at the Hamburg Kunsthalle and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Winter 1979
Thames and Hudson, 188, 430 illus pp., $24.95
The Fuseli Circle at Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s
by Nancy L. Pressly. catalogue of the exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art 1979
145, 146 illus pp., $11.50 (paper)
L'Art européen à la cour d'Espagne au XVIIIe siècle
exhibition at La Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, Le Grand Palais, Paris, and Prado, Madrid, May 1979-April 1980
To most lovers of art, and writers of textbooks, the main achievements of eighteenth-century painting can be summed up in a few names and a few countries—for example, Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, and Greuze in France; Tiepolo, Longhi, Canaletto, and Guardi in Venice; Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Reynolds in England. Works of all of these have been admired and much sought after for over a hundred years, and the fame of all of them has been sustained to a significant extent by their having painted easel pictures for private collectors. This has meant that until fairly recently the market was always assured of a regular supply. Even Tiepolo, whose contemporary reputation depended on his frescoes and altarpieces, produced very numerous oil sketches and drawings. In the 1920s one further figure achieved special status in fashionable circles—the name of Magnasco was given to a society in London designed to promote a renewed appreciation of baroque art which thus became associated in England with the bizarre, picturesque, and often cruel fantasies of a painter who worked principally in Genoa and Milan.
Review, 4131 words
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