Eye Candy for today: Jean-Etienne Liotard pastel portrait. For detail images, links & info, see my Lines and Colors post: linesandcolors.com/2026/01/12/e...
#pastel #pastelpainting #pastelportrait #portraitpainting #18thcenturyart #18thcenturypastel #18thcenturypainting
A young woman turns her bare shoulder toward us, her light skin softly illuminated against a dark, indistinct background. Her auburn curls are loosely gathered with a dark blue ribbon with stars, framing a face that hovers between innocence and allure. She cradles a white dove tightly against her breast, her fingers gently enclosing its body as its head nestles into the curve of her skin while looking up at the young woman. Her lips are parted, her gaze heavy-lidded and turned slightly away, suggesting an absorbed, private reverie. The tight framing, lack of narrative setting, and skyward gaze draw us into an intimate encounter with a singular figure who is both posed and palpably alive, inviting contemplation of her interior state as much as her exposed beauty. French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze titles this figure not as a named sitter but as an allegory of “Voluptuousness” to make desire itself the subject. The painting belongs to his late career, when changing taste, the rise of Neoclassicism, and the upheavals of the French Revolution had eroded the acclaim he enjoyed in the 1760s for moralizing domestic dramas. Once championed by French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot as a painter of virtue and feeling, Greuze increasingly relied on smaller, sensual heads and bust-length figures for private collectors. Here, the lingering softness of Rococo sentiment fuses with a more pointed erotic charge: the exposed shoulder, moist eyes, and ambiguous half-smile stage the tension between modesty and seduction that had always haunted his work. Painted around 1789–1790, as the old regime collapsed and his own fortunes declined, this image can be read as both a consummation and an endpoint of an artist turning inward to a perfected type he knew well, presenting sensual pleasure as fragile, intimate, and curiously isolated at the threshold of a new political and artistic age.
“Voluptuousness (Сладострастие)” by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French) - Oil on canvas / 1789–1790 - Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow, Russia) #WomenInArt #Greuze #18thCenturyArt #Rococo #Neoclassicism #PushkinMuseum #Jean-BaptisteGreuze #artText #arte #EuropeanArt #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaWoman
This portrait belongs to French artist Jean Honoré Fragonard’s celebrated “figures de fantaisie” aka “Fantasy Figures” which are wonderful “fantasy” portraits reputedly executed in a single burst, where theatrical costume and bravado brushwork display the painter’s genius as much as a sitter’s status. Until recently this painting was called “Woman with a Dog,” but a recently connected drawing confirms the model as Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson, an aristocratic salonnière whose intellectual circle bridged court culture and Enlightenment conversation. Fragonard outfits her in pseudo–Maria de’ Medici court dress, echoing famous Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (whom Fragonard had studied), collapsing past and present into playful masquerade. Flooded with warm light against a dark, indistinct background, Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson turns toward us in three-quarter view, her cheeks flushed, red lips in a knowing half-smile. She wears an extravagant rose-pink gown with paned sleeves, gleaming pearls woven through her powdered gray hair and bodice, an ermine-trimmed mantle, and a starched white ruff incised with swift strokes. Cradled in her hands, a small cute white lapdog with a long thin blue ribbon gazes up at her, its curved echoing her own. Fragonard’s loose, wet-in-wet brushwork lets satin, fur, and lace dissolve into bravura strokes, while her sharply modeled face and direct gaze towards us anchor the swirl of costume, performance, and paint. The pampered lapdog underscores intimacy, luxury, and fidelity while also winking at Rococo vibes as companion, accessory, and co-conspirator. Painted at the height of Fragonard’s success, the work captures a worldly woman and a master painter staging identity itself with a panting that is brilliant, performative, and on the edge of a French society soon to be undone.
“Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson with a Dog” by Jean Honoré Fragonard (French) - Oil on canvas / ca. 1769 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #Fragonard #Rococo #JeanHonoréFragonard #TheMet #arte #MetMuseum #FrenchArt #18thCenturyArt #WomenWithDogs #DogArt
This likeness is one of six portraits Salem merchant Timothy Orne ordered from Boston painter Joseph Badger in 1756 and 1757 to display the prosperity of his household. Orne’s wealth came from a fleet of more than fifty vessels trading fish, grain, molasses, rum, textiles … and at times enslaved people …through the Atlantic world as the same maritime system that nourished his fortune also trafficked in human bondage. The portrait thus records not only young Rebecca’s refinement but the hidden labor of African and Indigenous people whose dispossession and forced work underwrote Salem’s elegance. A ghostly-pale girl stands before a warm, neutral background with her dark hair drawn back and her gaze steady and self-possessed. She wears a rose-colored silk dress with pale blue-gray ruffles that frame her neck and sleeves while the sheen of the fabric is painted in thin, careful layers. In her right hand clings a soft gray pet squirrel, probably an elite colonial child’s companion, signaling gentility and leisure. Her body is turned slightly to the our left, so that the oval of her face becomes the focus. Nothing around her tells of labor or landscape; this is a portrait of status, youth, and belonging in mid-18th-century New England. As an adult, Rebecca married Salem captain and merchant Joseph Cabot in 1768, keeping her within the same shipping-and-slavery-entangled network her father built. Charlestown-born, Badger was originally a house-painter and largely self-taught. He had, by the 1750s, become one of Boston’s “go-to” portraitists for merchants who could not yet command the wildly popular John Singleton Copley. Badger’s methodical underpainting, gray preparatory tones, and frontal poses suited clients who wanted restraint, good taste, and recognizable likenesses. In giving Rebecca a fashionable squirrel, he joined a small colonial trend using an animal to signal both affection and control over nature.
“Portrait of Rebecca Orne” by Joseph Badger (American) – Oil on canvas / 1757 – Worcester Art Museum (Massachusetts) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #ColonialArt #AmericanArt #18thCenturyArt #WorcesterArtMuseum #Portraiture #NewEnglandHistory #ArtHistory #BlueskyArt #GirlsInArt #AmericanArtist
Painted in 1767, this is among the rare 18th-century Russian portraits to individualize an enslaved/serf child of non-Russian, Oirat–Kalmyk origin. Annushka was a pupil and protégée of Countess Varvara Sheremeteva. The Russian artist Ivan Petrovich Argunov himself was a serf of the Sheremetev household, so the work stages a remarkable “serf painting a serf” moment inside aristocratic culture. A young Kalmyk woman sits slightly turned in a carved chair, returning our look with a composed, almost adult self-possession. Her skin is a warm beige tone, eyes dark and almond-shaped, hair smoothed back with a ribboned bow under a bonnet. She wears a crimson silk dress edged in gold braid, over a white lace chemise and fine jewelry that speak to courtly education rather than steppe life. With both hands she carefully presents a small gilt-framed portrait of a white Russian noblewoman (her patron) so that we cannot see her without also seeing the woman who owned and shaped her future. The olive-brown background and close cropping keep all attention on her face and on the tension between childlike body and ceremonial pose. The girl’s luxurious dress and the picture of her benefactress proclaim her incorporation into an elite, Orthodox, Russified world, even as her features make visible the empire’s reach across Central Asian peoples. Argunov’s satin surfaces, precise lace, and calm light echo his portraits of the Sheremetevs, granting Annushka the same dignity as an 18th-century assertion that social dependence did not erase personhood, memory, or cultural difference. Argunov was one of the founders of Russian secular portraiture, working inside the Sheremetev estate system at the very moment Catherine II was promoting a more European, aristocratic visual culture. In the 1760s, Argunov was already an established master in the household, supervising work so that he understood the representational needs of the elite and the lived realities of dependence.
"Portrait of a Kalmyk Girl, Annushka" by Ivan Petrovich Argunov (Russian) - Oil on canvas / 1767 - Museum of Ceramics and the Kuskovo Estate (Moscow, Russia) #WomenInArt #PortraitofaWoman #art #artText #artwork #BlueskyArt #arte #IvanArgunov #Argunov #KalmykHistory #youth #18thCenturyArt #RussianArt
🔗siga.spainculture.us/news/events/lectures/in-...
#CarnegieMuseumOfArt #ArtAndImperialism #AtlanticWorld #ArtHistory #17thCenturyArt #18thCenturyArt #DecolonizingArtHistory #ArtAndEmpire #MuseumTalks #ArtDialogue #PittsburghArts #GlobalArtHistories
John Hoppner was well known for his skills as a colorist. Though many of his works have become faded over time from harmful mediums, this gorgeous piece still shines brightly in the Zimmerli’s European art gallery. Look at that BLUE RIBBON! #JohnHoppner #18thCenturyArt #PortraitSeries
Delighted to see this conversation out in J18, reproducing our workshop on #joshuareynolds, #mai and #18thcenturyart www.journal18.org/nq/reflectio...
Anonymous Artist, The Aristocrat, 1786. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collectio...
#ArtHistory #Etchings #Prints #PoliticalArt #DutchAet #Art #18thCenturyArt
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💻 Visit GildedHistories.WordPress.com for more art and history content! #CreativeHistorian
Delight in the elegance of the past with New Hours Dedicated to Madame the Princess
mflibra.com/products/175... — a 1753 French-Latin treasure in exquisite binding.
#BookWithASoul #MFLIBRA #OwnAPieceOfHistory #RareBooks #CollectorTreasures #FrenchLatinText #18thCenturyArt #DevotionalBooks
Delight in the elegance of the past with New Hours Dedicated to Madame the Princess
mflibra.com/products/175... — a 1753 French-Latin treasure in exquisite binding.
#BookWithASoul #MFLIBRA #OwnAPieceOfHistory #RareBooks #CollectorTreasures #FrenchLatinText #18thCenturyArt #DevotionalBooks
painting of an embodiment of the sun as a handsome nude male surrounded by heavenly figures
Welcome back the sun - Happy Solstice!
#solstice #wintersolstice #FrançoisBoucher #1753 #LeLeverduSoleil #returnofthesun #boucher #18thcenturyart
Femme à la lorgnette, by Henri Nicolas van Gorp (1758-1820, French). Well-dressed upper class lady wearing a fashionable straw hat, holds a lorgnette to her eye as she peers at the window.
"When I spy on my neighbors, I always wear my best, for they are certainly spying on me."
Femme à la lorgnette, by Henri Nicolas van Gorp (1758-1820, French)
#georgianera #georgian #femaleportrait #18thcenturyfashion #18thcenturyart #historicalfashion
Lady wearing tall conical hat, sits on a blue-cushioned settee. Her white and brown spaniel dog is standing on its hind legs, its fore paws resting on her leg. The dog is staring at her inquisitively.
"When I'm at home, I like to wear strange hats to amuse my little dog."
Portrait of Elizabeth, Lady Webster, by Louis Gauffier (1762 - 1801)
#18thcenturyart #femaleportrait #georgianera #georgian #18thcenturyfashion
Delight in the elegance of the past with New Hours Dedicated to Madame the Princess
mflibra.com/products/175... a rare 1753 French-Latin treasure in exquisite binding, crafted for devotional reading.
#BookWithASoul #MFLIBRA #OwnAPieceOfHistory #RareBooks #CollectorTreasures #18thCenturyArt
Delight in the elegance of the past with New Hours Dedicated to Madame the Princess
mflibra.com/products/175... a rare 1753 French-Latin treasure in exquisite binding, crafted for devotional reading.
#BookWithASoul #MFLIBRA #OwnAPieceOfHistory #RareBooks #CollectorTreasures #18thCenturyArt
An elaborate rococo mantel clock made of gilded bronze, with figures and swirling drapery crowded around a clock in the shape of a sphere, which tells the time by means of numbers that revolve on rings around the centre of the sphere
“The Triumph Of Love Over Time”, a 1780s clock in the MET. Jean-Baptiste Lepaute; figures by Augustine Pajou. The young god of love points to the minutes with an arrow, while an aging Father Time looks on dolefully. Fabulous. #metmuseum #18thcenturyart #clocks #Frenchart #AugustinePajou #rococo
