Jennifer Milam

Playful Constructions and Fragonard's Swinging Scenes

Happy Hazards of the Swing is Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s most familiar painting, held to be highly representative of its time, a paradigm of rococo pleasure and aristocratic decadence (fig.1).1 Since 1982, when Donald Posner published his compelling analysis of the swinging-woman motif, interpretation of the scene has been guided by iconographic readings of female fickleness and erotic love.2 An emblematic tradition denoting inconstancy partially informs depictions of swinging women. Yet, when taken as a solution to an iconographic puzzle, such an interpretation does not account for nuances of difference where significance often lies. Fragonard painted not one but three versions of a woman’s ride on a swing (figs. 3 and 6). He varied his approach to the theme on each of these canvases. For this artist at least, the swing was not simply a stock motif suited to easy interpretation and execution, unaltered by compositional change. On the contrary, by elaborating on the notion of swinging as a game of visual distortion, Fragonard manipulated and transformed emblematic conventions in order to muse on the vertiginous experience occasioned by a playful application of paint.

Fragonard and the Blindman’s Game: Interpreting representations of blindman’s buff

This article focuses on Fragonard’s five depictions of blindman’s buff painted between 1750 and 1780. The aims are twofold. Firstly, to reconsider the traditional emblematics of the subject matter in light of changing estimations of the roles of passion and love in courtship and marriage, and a revitalized interest in pastoral games as an elite alternative to gambling. Careful readings of texts by Rousseau, Diderot, Caraccioli and Dusaulx, among others, afford these new perspectives. Secondly, to explore the formal variations of Fragonard’s scenes as attempts to resist the constraints placed upon interpretation by the fixed message of an emblematic cliche inherited from Le Bas, Watteau, Pater and Lancret. Visual analyses of Fragonard’s paintings yield intriguing implications for art-making and viewing contained within the blindman’s game. Positing a vital relationship between context, content and form, his images urge us to pay attention to multiple meanings and to contemplate the necessity of feigning blindness as part of the aesthetic experience in order to reach the imagination, to stimulate sensation and to struggle with interpretation.

Cosmopolitan translation and patriotic sensibilities in German garden art

ABSTRACT My focus in this article is on a small group of German theorists, designers and patrons who thought extensively about the relationship between national identity and garden design: Christian Hirschfeld, Prince Franz von Anhalt-Dessau and his wife Luise, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Prince Pückler. These garden enthusiasts knew one another through personal contact or their writings, and they responded to and developed their ideas in relation to the newly framed creative enterprise in German lands of “garden-landscape-art”. What they shared was a conviction that garden forms affect feelings, with the role of the garden artist to determine paths that would alter and diversify the visitor’s experience of place. This essay explores how spontaneous emotions, elicited by movement through the garden, were linked with a growing sense of patriotism that contrasted with cosmopolitan judgments in the writings of Hirschfeld, Pückler, and Goethe.

Visual and aural intellectual histories: an introduction

ABSTRACT If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual “texts”, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.

Cosmopolitan time in the Jardin de Monceau

If a picturesque garden can be made into a country of illusions, why should we refuse to do it? Illusions only provide enjoyment; if liberty guides them, let art direct them, and one will never be far from nature. Nature is varied according to climate; let us try through illusion also to vary climates, or rather to banish the memory of our own; let us carry into our gardens the scene-changes of the Opera; let us show in a real situation, what the most clever painters might provide as decorations — all times and all places. Carmontelle, Jardin de Monceau, 1779

Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality and the Pursuit of Volupté

Enlightenment writers proposed the existence of an animal soul, refuting the Cartesian beast-machine. Arguments credit the caresses of a dog to its master as direct visual evidence of the capacity of an animal to feel and show . A focus on paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard sets the Rococo representation of lapdogs within the context of changing ideas about the relationship between animal and human. Eroticized images of lapdogs are related to radical materialist theories that assert the role of physical pleasure in human motivation.

Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art by Michael Yonan (review)

Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780) was one of the most powerful women in Europe during the eighteenth century. She governed the Habsburg Empire for forty years and orchestrated strategic alliances across Europe through arranged marriages for many of her fifteen children. History has been captivated less by direct evidence of her political authority than by the domestic myths that she cultivated around herself as a devoted daughter, wife, widow, and mother. These myths have cast a particular slant on the historical memory of this important female ruler, which, as Michael Yonan has demonstrated in his recent monograph, is largely due to the role played by material culture in constructing an unprecedented image of female monarchical power. Significantly, Yonan did not take the approach of conventional patronage studies to make this point.