#the wallace collection

[questwithambition]

Sunday: cafes, art galleries and bookshops

[artsandculture]

The Swing (1767) 🎨 Jean-Honoré Fragonard 🏛️ The Wallace Collection 📍 London, England

The painting is Fragonard's most famous work, and one of the most emblematic images of eighteenth-century art. Its genesis is reported by the writer Charles Collé. According to his journals and memoirs for 1767, the history painter Gabriel-François Doyen was commissioned by an unnamed ‘gentleman of the Court’ late in 1767 to paint his young mistress on a swing, pushed by a bishop with himself admiring her legs from below. Doyen, who had just had a major success at the Salon as a religious history painter, refused and suggested Fragonard. Fragonard was at that time about to completely change his career from a history painter with important royal commissions to a painter of small and highly sophisticated cabinet pictures. This was at least in part a reaction to his problems with payments from the royal arts administration. The commission might have in part triggered that change or might simply have come at the right moment.The painting marks the re-launch of Fragonard's career with paintings for a small, well-informed circle. Those could either be highly erotic works, like P430, or works that required an advanced knowledge of art history and old master painting. Fragonard's move was highly successful.

Compared with the original brief, in the finished painting, the older man is no longer a priest, a barking dog has been added, and Falconet's sculpture of 'L'amour menaçant (Menacing Love)' comments on the story. Fragonard answers the libertine intentions of his patron by picking a Rococo style. Fragonard often employed different styles or languages at the same time, and he seems to have seen a Rococo idiom as particularly apt for an erotic scene. This move has fundamentally shaped perceptions of Rococo art. With Fragonard's famous work, the style changed its associations. Fragonard combines a backward-looking Rococo element with a pre-Romantic rendering of a forceful and uncontrollable, often obscene nature.

The name of the work derives from an engraving by Nicolas de Launay after the painting that was published in 1782. It has been used as a template for countless caricatures and is increasingly popular with contemporary artists and designers.

[daydreamsandplaylists]

Hello my guiding light, my North Star, my siren call

[empirearchives]

Details of the Divorce of Josephine and Napoleon (15 December 1809)

by Henri Frédéric Schopin

Michel Louis Etienne Regnaud in the back looking dead inside. He looks a lot like Louis Bonaparte here.

Napoleon placing his hand on the hands of his stepson, Eugène. Behind them is Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, on the right.

Josephine with her daughter, Hortense. The man to the right of them is Cambacérès, the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire (Napoleon’s second-in-command).

Everyone else. They include Marshal Bessières holding a chair, Marshal Ney and the Vice-Grand Elector, Talleyrand.

The bee symbol used here was the symbol of the First French Empire. Almost everything with the Napoleonic bees were either altered or destroyed during the Bourbon Restoration.

[lyingsummerchild]

The Wallace Collection, London

[octaviasdread]

(don’t repost photos)

The Wallace Collection, London

a vast collection of art, sculptures, furniture, and historical armour within a gorgeous townhouse with its original decor and influences from the French rococo style

[aworldofpattern]

1. Daphnis and Chloe by François Boucher, 1743 (The Wallace Collection)

2. FKA Twigs at the Sundance Festival in 2019, wearing corset printed with 'Daphnis and Chloe', from Vivienne Westwood's 'Portrait' collection, Autumn-Winter 1990-91.

[kultofathena]

Tod Cutler – 14th Century Effigy Rondel Dagger

Mid to late 14thC Rondel dagger. Featuring a flower shaped pommel and disc guard in bronze with a fluted wooden grip. A very strong double sided, diamond section blade. This type of ‘gentle’ motif of a flower was typical of knights of the 13th and 14th C. You can see motifs and daggers like this on effigy’s and artwork throughout the period. Later rondel daggers had a top ‘disc’ style guard as well but early ones had a more normal shaped dagger pommel as seen here. The unsharpened blade is crafted from EN45 high carbon steel and the guard is a composite of bronze and wood; the pommel is cast from matching bronze and the blade is peened over the pommel to complete the dagger. The grip is polished wood.

As well as the dagger being typical of the period it comes with a very distinctive ‘cupped’ leather sheath which has been shaped around the bottom rondel with a brass shaped shape with fluting and a heart motif cut out.

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Thomas Gainsborough (English, 1727-1788) Mrs Mary Robinson (Perdita), 1781 The Wallace Collection

[aquitainequeen]

You all know what I thought, the moment I saw this picture.

I've been on this hellsite far too long.

[foundatthemuseum]

The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals - 1624

(information, thoughts and sources below the break)

Found in The Wallace Collection, London, The Laughing Cavalier is probably a portrait you've seen as in a print or referenced in film. Despite it's name however, the sitter isn't depicted laughing and was almost certainly not a cavalier. The portrait gained it's name in the Victorian era and stuck to this day.

Frans Hals paintings were widely regarded in his lifetime and by those after, an 1885 letter from Vincent van Gogh to his younger brother Theo van Gogh enthuses about Hals' use of colour, particularly noting the depth of tone in his blacks, writing that  "Frans Hals has no less than twenty-seven blacks" which is especially apparent in this painting along with the remarkable embroidery.

The portrait can be seen at The Wallace Collection in London, as well as online as part of the Frans Hals: The Male Portrait exhibition.

(opinions) I loved being able to see this portrait in person, on a good screen you can see the difference in the blacks but as someone who had only ever seen it in low-quality prints it honestly stunned me when I saw it in person. Up-close you can really see every little detail and regardless who the sitter was (we have theories, but it's not certain who he was) he has a level of charisma in this portrait that's very charming.

Sources:

The Laughing Cavaler image - The Wallace Collection

Vincent Van Gough's letter - Van Gough's letters Webexhibits

[questwithambition]

I had a delightful Sunday last week: coffee and a wander around The Wallace Collection, walking though Marylebone with an obligatory stop at Daunt books, and then basking in the sun at Regent’s Park with a cupcake 🧁

[eco-friendly-ghost]

Wallace Collection - DayDream

Daydream, I fell asleep amid the flowers

For a couple of hours on a beautiful day

Daydream, I dreamed of you amid the flowers

For a couple of hours, such a beautiful day

[paintinganangel]

[oldbooksandgoldframes]

Jan Weenix, The Wallace Collection

A Dutch artist working in the late 17th century, most famous for his depiction of hunting animals as shown in the top paintings in both photos above.

[stonelord1]

The Lost Plot (by the Guardian) and 'The Lost King' Exhibition

A number of film critics have now viewed the new Steve Coogan movie, THE LOST KING, about the finding of Richard III’s remains. Reviews have been mixed but generally quite positive; I imagine it might be one of those ‘marmite’ films, which viewers either love or loathe. A exhibition in The Wallace Collection had also been arranged to coincide with the upcoming general release of the…