Eighteenth-Century Painting
Eighteenth-Century Painting
Viking Press | 1964 | ISBN: N/A | English | 238 pages | PDF | 37.2 MB
Apart from five great artists, two of them belonging to the French School, European painting of the eighteenth century is distinctly less rich than that of the centuries before and after it. This is perhaps not the general view, but it is at least certain that the age of elegance suffers from what might be called a halo of excessive seductiveness. It is undoubtedly in this too systematically pursued seductiveness, this too consciously sought and deliberate elegance, that its relative weakness lies. But this century has given us five admirable painters who to a large extent redeem its prevailing mediocrity. They do in fact tend to make us forget the Mannerism of a period of European painting which at least produced an impressive number of minor painters, a harvest of over-skilful and often charming - perhaps too charming - executants.