Royalty and Revolution in French Painting

This course draws a wide arc of history through the eighteenth century in France, spanning from the Baroque splendor of the monarchy through the aristocracy's embrace of the Rococo style during the Regency period. However, the major historical events of that century hinge on the changing place of the Third Estate, the large population in France that belonged to neither royalty, aristocracy, nor clergy; the uprising of French peasants at the close of the eighteenth century and the deposition of the absolutist Bourbon monarchy transformed the political history of Western Europe and beyond. Images of this Third Estate also reflect shifting attitudes; from the patronizing, "natural dignity" imbued into images of silent, anonymous peasantry for French elites with a taste for northern genre scenes to the appropriation of a Neoclassical vocabulary by the bourgeoisie to express their ideals of heroism and resistance, we see in this course how French painting in the eighteenth century mirrored the significant social and political developments of the same century.