Delicious Decadence: The Rediscovery of French Eighteenth-Century Painting in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Guillaume Faroult, Monica Preti, and Christoph Vogtherr (review)

This collection of essays, which arises from a conference held at the Wallace Collection in 2008, seeks from the outset to problematize the belated ‘rediscovery’ of French eighteenth-century art. Far from falling into irremediable neglect, numerous contributors demonstrate the persistence of a taste for the rococo in the cabinets of French collectors who have long been overlooked, such as the Baron de Vèze and the Marquis de Cypierre. Yet this loyalty was more pronounced among connoisseurs than it was among historians of art, implying that the eighteenth century was more suited to gratifying the amateur than inspiring the serious critic. In this regard, as Frances Suzman Jowell argues, the intervention of figures such as Théophile Thoré in the 1840s changed the terms of the debate: not only did he succeed in enlisting the rococo for the political left, but he also advanced the claim that the rococo was the national style par excellence. However, as Frances Fowle, Humphrey Wine, and Stephen Duffy suggest, the fondness for the French eighteenth century in Britain only went so far. There were few really capital specimens of French paintings across the English Channel outside a handful of collections. When the Wallace Collection opened its doors at the turn of the twentieth century, prudish sections of the British press still found the decadence of the Ancien Régime not so much delicious as shameful and full of dire warnings; among those wedded to the Italian grand manner, the rococo was still disparaged as trifling and lewd, pretty and pink. In this way the moral and aesthetic criteria by which rococo art was evaluated and vilified were consistent across the nineteenth century. Moreover, as Jon Whiteley argues perceptively, the fad for eighteenth-century painting was inseparable from the vogue among British collectors for eighteenth-century interiors and ceramics. The decision taken by the editors to focus on collections of paintings, rather than decorative arts, while producing coherence across the chapters, disguises some of the interdependence between the two pursuits. Where the volume really breaks ground is in exploring the rediscovery of the rococo across national borders. In Second Empire Paris, the eighteenth-century paintings amassed by the Pereire brothers or the Duc de Morny belonged to a key moment in the public display of private treasures by members of the social elite, as Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy shows. The manifold connections with the entourage of Napoleon III raise the question of what this court-inflected revivalism owed to the earlier example of Louis Philippe. Christoph Vogtherr documents the preoccupation in Germany with French eighteenth-century art in the Imperial collections, including Watteau’s magnificent L’Enseigne de Gersaint (1720). A furious debate exploded around 1900 not just on art-historical methods and attributions following the landmark work of Richard Dohme; it also witnessed nationalist demands in France for the repatriation of paintings regarded as an exiled patrimony. The volume’s broader European perspective, with examples from France, England, Scotland, and Germany, sheds new light on the political stakes of style.