Musée Cognacq-Jay Exhibit Photo Gallery
- If you wish to see the images larger, click on each or watch in a slideshow.
- These texts are translated from the French exhibition brochure.
- Read the blog post: Read the blog post: Echoes of the Enlightenment: 300 years of Retro Fashion
Rooms 1 and 2 Finery and Ornaments:
Aspiring to Perfection and Prestige
The new French style, adopted in the courts and cities of Europe, is evident in portraits of aristocratic and bourgeois women. Satins, embroidery, and finery combine to create a self-presentation where clothing, a marker of rank, elevates fashion to a language of splendor, but also to an art of seduction and self-expression.
The dialogue between period paintings and costumes illuminates the construction of femininity, poised between an ideal of beauty, a desire for realism, and social representation. The art of appearance experienced an unprecedented boom: fashion asserted itself, fueled by the rivalry between the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie. Nattier embodies this balance between idealization and sumptuousness, as evidenced by his portraits of princesses commissioned by Louis XV. The models, whether from the Court or the urban elite, often participated in the creation of their own image, thus affirming their role in the invention of a new feminine aesthetic.
Room 3 Portraits as the Staging Identity and Social Status
During the Age of Enlightenment, portraiture experienced an unprecedented boom. Aristocrats and the bourgeoisie alike commissioned portraits to assert their rank and wealth. Painters magnified their subjects through the splendor of their clothing and accessories: velvet, taffeta, satin, furs, and gold and silver embroidery. Every detail—fabrics, ornaments, and jewelry—emphasized refinement and social status.
Some artists excel in this art of appearance: Labille-Guiard, Vigée Le Brun, and Vestier are distinguished by their keen sense of materials and detail. Trained in miniature painting, Antoine Vestier focused on the fineness of fabrics and the precision of patterns.
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, also a miniaturist and the daughter of a haberdasher, drew on this world for her taste for luxury and costume. For Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, daughter of a hairdresser and a pastel painter, an appreciation for fashion and feminine grace was rooted in her family environment; her training with a fan painter had awakened her taste for detail and decorative refinement. Under the brushes of these portraitists, fashion became a language of prestige and distinction, giving life to the elegance and splendor of 18th-century society.
Room 4 Portraits of Sensibility: Family Bliss and Child-like Wonder
From the 1770s onwards, novels and philosophical writings were the scene of profound changes, celebrating marital bliss and granting the child a psychology and personality of their own, finally worthy of interest (Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the famous Émile or On Education in 1762).
An original vein of portraiture accompanied these transformations, depicting young girls and women with a beauty that claimed to be simpler and more natural, and playful, mischievous children.
Social upheavals and this taste for naturalness were met with a growing vogue for white cotton and muslin fabrics, drawn from the realm of intimacy and undergarments.
Undergarments took center stage in portraits of women and children. French paintings, imbued with the Rousseauian ideal, and English paintings, with their refined and relaxed elegance, echoed and influenced each other at the dawn of the 19th century.
Room 5 Fantasized Feminities and Games of Love:
Fêtes Galantes and Pastoral Festivities
In the 18th century, new genres emerged: the fêtes galantes of Watteau and Lancret, and the pastorals of Boucher, presented a dreamlike and fantasized femininity. For this new theater of the imagination, they employed costumes and cross-dressing, creating a poetic and idealized image of women.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the painter Antoine Watteau invented a new genre: the fête galante. It celebrated refined love, grace, and the elegant pleasures of a society that loved to present itself.
Aristocrats and bourgeois alike gathered at the opera, at balls, or at costume parties, playing at being shepherdesses, dancers, or pilgrims. Watteau blended mythology and contemporary figures to create a poetic vision of a world of seduction and reverie. His successors—Lancret, Ollivier, and Watteau de Lille—continued this art of staged happiness and femininity.
Inspired by this spirit, François Boucher paved the way for pastoral scenes, where shepherds and shepherdesses, dressed in silk and velvet, moved through an idealized landscape. This taste for pastoral scenes was part of a long literary tradition, heir to the bucolic poetry of the Renaissance and Antiquity. It also drew inspiration from Northern painting, attentive to peasant life, and from the performing arts that so fascinated the 18th century.
Room 6 and 7 Fêtes Galantes, Pastoral Festivities and Portraits:
A new culture for high society
Eighteenth-century society, fond of operas and theatres, loved to blend its entertainment with a veritable “social theatricality.” It thus staged itself in fashion, shows, salons, and promenades.
Beyond the works of Watteau, Lancret, and Boucher, fêtes galantes and pastorals also had a genuine social dimension. Indeed, cross-dressing and disguises held a place of honor in this new 18th-century worldly culture.
Just like the painters, the nobility embraced the conventions of the Commedia dell’arte and pastorals in their balls and country gatherings. And these genres, so prevalent in genre scenes and decorative arts, even permeated portraiture.
The reference to a bucolic nature characteristic of 18th-century pastoral scenes forms a source of inspiration for contemporary creations. This heritage can be found both in Cindy Sherman’s reinterpretation of Rococo decorative arts and in the haute couture of the House of CHANEL.
