HISTORY OF FRANCE

• 13th century Spreading the weight of vaults over a series of ribs, columns, and pilasters, Gothic architecture allows the dissolution of the wall. Windows in cathedrals and churches are filled with stained glass; the shimmering colored light transfigures the vast interiors. Depicting biblical stories, scenes from the lives of the saints, or single figures, stained-glass windows complement the sculptures on the exterior and the rites and ceremonies observed within.
• 1209 The Albigensian Crusade is launched by Pope Innocent III with the help of Cistercian monks. While the original spark for this war springs from papal desire to extinguish the growing problem of heresy in the region surrounding Toulouse, the political struggle between the independent southern territories and lords from northern France, joined after 1226 by Louis VIII, plays itself out in a war. In 1229, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, who had been Louis VIII's main adversary, is compelled to cede territory to the king's control.
• ca. 1210–1250 Artists at Chartres install an elaborate and extensive program of stained-glass windows in the cathedral under construction there. In addition to religious and historical subjects, the intensely colored windows depict numerous scenes of tradespeople at work, including bakers, furriers, wheelwrights, and weavers. These tradespeople were likely contributors—through hefty taxes—to the construction of the church.
• 1226 Louis IX (d. 1270), grandson of Philip Augustus, becomes king. A pious man involved in works of charity and with a strong sense of his responsibilities, he exemplifies the virtues of the Christian knight. A protector both of the university and the arts, Louis IX makes Paris a thriving cultural center. Having bought the Crown of Thorns from the Byzantine emperor in 1237, Louis IX commissions the Sainte-Chapelle, his royal chapel on the Île de la Cité in Paris, as its reliquary. During his long reign, the capital becomes a center for the production of all precious arts: manuscript illumination, ivory carving, and goldsmiths' work. Louis is canonized in 1297, less than thirty years after his death.
• 1274 The Capetian kings foster national unity through the use of one language. The monk Primat translates the Grandes chroniques de France, a manuscript written at Saint-Denis celebrating the Capetian dynasty, from Latin into French.
• 1300s With 20 million inhabitants, France is reputed the most powerful nation in Europe, as compared to Germany with a population of 14 million and England with 4 million.
• 1309–1367 Due in part to political insecurity in Italy, the French pope Clement V takes up residence in Avignon, which at the time belongs to the count of Provence, a vassal of the king of France. The papal court at Avignon attracts intellectuals and artists from France and Italy, among them Petrarch and Simone Martini.
• 1320s Endemic wars and the development of sea trade contribute to the decline of the annual fairs held in the county of Champagne east of Paris. Diverse wares such as Flemish cloth and tapestry work, Chinese silk, Egyptian satin, Eastern spices, furs from the North, and even wax from Russia had been available at these fairs, which made the region a crucial center of international commerce and banking since the late eleventh century.
• 1328 Philip VI, the first French king from the Valois branch of the Capetian dynasty, ascends to the French throne.
• 1348 The Black Death reaches France, killing, according to chronicler Jean Froissart, a third of the population.
• ca. 1337–1453 These are the conventional dates given for the Hundred Years' War, a struggle better described as a series of battles between England and France over the succession to the French throne. Upon the death of the French king Charles IV in 1328, King Edward III of England claims the French throne and, in 1337, crosses the Channel with an army. The two countries fight intermittently for more than a century. In 1453, Charles VII, taking advantage of the Wars of the Roses in England, regains Normandy and Aquitaine and brings the conflict to an end.
• 13th century Spreading the weight of vaults over a series of ribs, columns, and pilasters, Gothic architecture allows the dissolution of the wall. Windows in cathedrals and churches are filled with stained glass; the shimmering colored light transfigures the vast interiors. Depicting biblical stories, scenes from the lives of the saints, or single figures, stained-glass windows complement the sculptures on the exterior and the rites and ceremonies observed within.
• 1209 The Albigensian Crusade is launched by Pope Innocent III with the help of Cistercian monks. While the original spark for this war springs from papal desire to extinguish the growing problem of heresy in the region surrounding Toulouse, the political struggle between the independent southern territories and lords from northern France, joined after 1226 by Louis VIII, plays itself out in a war. In 1229, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, who had been Louis VIII's main adversary, is compelled to cede territory to the king's control.
• ca. 1210–1250 Artists at Chartres install an elaborate and extensive program of stained-glass windows in the cathedral under construction there. In addition to religious and historical subjects, the intensely colored windows depict numerous scenes of tradespeople at work, including bakers, furriers, wheelwrights, and weavers. These tradespeople were likely contributors—through hefty taxes—to the construction of the church.
• 1226 Louis IX (d. 1270), grandson of Philip Augustus, becomes king. A pious man involved in works of charity and with a strong sense of his responsibilities, he exemplifies the virtues of the Christian knight. A protector both of the university and the arts, Louis IX makes Paris a thriving cultural center. Having bought the Crown of Thorns from the Byzantine emperor in 1237, Louis IX commissions the Sainte-Chapelle, his royal chapel on the Île de la Cité in Paris, as its reliquary. During his long reign, the capital becomes a center for the production of all precious arts: manuscript illumination, ivory carving, and goldsmiths' work. Louis is canonized in 1297, less than thirty years after his death.
• 1274 The Capetian kings foster national unity through the use of one language. The monk Primat translates the Grandes chroniques de France, a manuscript written at Saint-Denis celebrating the Capetian dynasty, from Latin into French.
• 1300s With 20 million inhabitants, France is reputed the most powerful nation in Europe, as compared to Germany with a population of 14 million and England with 4 million.
• 1309–1367 Due in part to political insecurity in Italy, the French pope Clement V takes up residence in Avignon, which at the time belongs to the count of Provence, a vassal of the king of France. The papal court at Avignon attracts intellectuals and artists from France and Italy, among them Petrarch and Simone Martini.
• 1320s Endemic wars and the development of sea trade contribute to the decline of the annual fairs held in the county of Champagne east of Paris. Diverse wares such as Flemish cloth and tapestry work, Chinese silk, Egyptian satin, Eastern spices, furs from the North, and even wax from Russia had been available at these fairs, which made the region a crucial center of international commerce and banking since the late eleventh century.
• 1328 Philip VI, the first French king from the Valois branch of the Capetian dynasty, ascends to the French throne.
• 1348 The Black Death reaches France, killing, according to chronicler Jean Froissart, a third of the population.
• ca. 1337–1453 These are the conventional dates given for the Hundred Years' War, a struggle better described as a series of battles between England and France over the succession to the French throne. Upon the death of the French king Charles IV in 1328, King Edward III of England claims the French throne and, in 1337, crosses the Channel with an army. The two countries fight intermittently for more than a century. In 1453, Charles VII, taking advantage of the Wars of the Roses in England, regains Normandy and Aquitaine and brings the conflict to an end.
• 15th century The dukes of Burgundy are an influential presence in French politics, involved in various struggles for control of the throne. By mid-century, their possessions include much of the Netherlands and the duchy of Luxembourg, but pass to the Habsburg family with Mary of Burgundy's marriage to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519) in 1477.
• 1405 Christine de Pisan (1365–ca. 1434) publishes La Cité des dames, a celebratory history of female virtue. Her treatise is modeled on Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women of 1401.
• early 15th century The Limbourg brothers, a family of Netherlandish painters first trained as goldsmiths in Paris, enter the service of Jean, duc de Berry, for whom they produce two illuminated manuscripts: the Belles Heures (in the Cloisters Collection) and the Très Riches Heures.
• 1453 The Hundred Years' War ends with the expulsion of English forces from France. The French victory owes much to the intervention of Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–1431), a peasant girl urged by voices to aid the dauphin who, with her assistance, is crowned King Charles VII (r. 1422–61) in Reims in 1429. Taken prisoner by the English in 1431, she is burned at the stake in Rouen. Charles's reconciliation with Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, facilitates his gradual reconquest of towns and territories in northern France.
• late 15th century Netherlandish painter Jean Hey (Master of Moulins) (active 1480–1500), called pictor egregius (outstanding painter) by contemporary author Jean Lemaire, is in the service of Bourbon dukes in France. Hey's portraits include that of Margaret of Austria (1480–1530; 1975.1.130), painted about 1490 during her betrothal to Charles VIII.
• 1494 Charles VIII (r. 1483–98) invades Italy in an attempt to conquer the kingdom of Naples, to which he has a distant claim. He seizes Naples with relative ease, but an alliance among Pope Alexander VI, Venice, Milan, Spain, and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I forces his retreat months later. The tensions caused by foreign powers, notably France and Spain, intent on the takeover of Italian city-states leads to the Habsburg-Valois Wars (or Italian Wars; 1494–1559). Although Charles's capture of Naples is ultimately reversed, he returns to France with Italian craftsmen to assist in the construction of his château at Amboise, heralding the assimilation of Italian Renaissance ideals into French art and architecture of the sixteenth century.
• 1527 François I (r. 1515–47) undertakes the expansion of his hunting lodge at Fontainebleau, with the aim of creating a court equal in luxury and modernity to any other in Europe. To this end, he invites Italian artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, Rosso Fiorentino, and Francesco Primaticcio to contribute paintings, sculpture, and decorative objects to the château.
• 16th century Jean and François Clouet, father and son painters of Netherlandish birth, are in the service of the Valois kings; they are aptly credited with popularizing portraiture in France. About 1536, Jean executes a portrait of Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), a scholar, humanist, and royal librarian to François I. Budé is instrumental in reviving the classics in France. His Commentaries on Greek Language of 1529 promotes the study of classical languages, and in 1530 he is a catalytic force in the foundation of the Collège de France in Paris.
• 1536 John Calvin (born Jean Cauvin, 1509–1564), a French theologian working in Basel, completes The Institutes of the Christian Religion, an influential work defining the principles of Protestant belief and justifying them on the basis of Scripture. Calvinist theology includes the belief in predestination, by which only certain people—the elect—are chosen by God for salvation. Later in this year, Calvin settles in Geneva, where his ideas gain widespread acceptance by the 1540s.
• 1550s Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) and Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560) lead La Pléiade, a group of French poets whose aim is to promote the composition of modern French poetry based on classical models. Du Bellay's Defense and Illustration of the French Language of 1549 argues that through the enrichment of the French language, contemporary poets can produce a corpus of work to rival that of the Italians.
• 1562–1598 The Wars of Religion are fought both as an ongoing struggle for Huguenots (French Protestants) to attain freedom of worship, and as a culmination of tensions among the nobility, particularly between the Guise, a powerful Catholic family, and Protestant Bourbon princes.
• 1572 Widow of King Henry II and Regent from 1560 to 1574, Catherine de' Medicis (1519–1589) orders the assassination of Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny in an attempt to maintain Catholic hegemony in France. This escalates into the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre on August 23/24, in which thousands of Protestants are slain in Paris.
• 1580s Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) publishes his three-volume Essays, in which he examines such topics as friendship, religion, and death, all through the lens of his own experience. Montaigne's concern for introspection as a means of discovery makes him an important representative of humanist thought in France.
• 1598 King Henry IV (r. 1589–1610), himself originally a Huguenot, promulgates the Edict of Nantes, which grants religious freedom and civil rights to French Protestants.
• 1620s Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), a Flemish master whose international renown stretches from Northern Europe and his native Antwerp to Southern Europe and the Italian peninsula, is active at the French court. There he paints a monumental cycle of allegorical scenes from the life of Marie de' Medici for the Luxembourg Palace (now Musée du Louvre, Paris). A companion cycle of scenes from the life of Henry IV is planned but never completed; six of these canvases are in the artist's studio at his death. (An oil sketch for The Triumph of Henry IV is in the Metropolitan Museum; 42.187.) The far-reaching influence of Rubens is felt by the late seventeenth century and extends well into the eighteenth.
• 1622 Armand Jean du Plessis (1585–1642), duc de Richelieu, a cleric in the service of Marie de' Medici, is granted a cardinalate. Thereafter the Cardinal Richelieu rises steadily in power, and as his influence as a public figure increases, so too does his ambition as a patron. In his professional capacities, Richelieu is involved in many royal projects, including the decoration of the Palais du Luxembourg and the summoning of Italian artists to France. He funds numerous projects of his own as well; of particular note is the renovation of buildings at the Sorbonne from the late 1620s into the 1640s. Richelieu amasses a great personal collection, including masterworks from antiquity through his own time (see Caravaggio's Musicians, 52.81).
• 1622–41 Sébastien Stoskopff (1597–1657), a painter from the city of Strasbourg, resides in Paris. Among the first great still-life painters working in France, Stoskopff's virtuosity lies in his ability to render the texture and surface luster of shells, glass, and metal objects with meticulous detail and finish. He paints the Still Life with a Nautilus, Panther Shell, and Chip-Wood Box (2002.68) during his stay in Paris, about 1630.
• 1627 Simon Vouet (1590–1649), a painter active at the time in Rome, is called to court by Louis XIII and later made his chief painter. While he is among the first artists to introduce elements of the Italian Baroque into French painting, the Caravaggesque style he practices in Rome soon gives way to a sensuous, decorative approach that points toward the Rococo. Vouet is briefly displaced in the king's favor by Poussin; the rivalry thus established between the two painters mirrors that which occurs between the conflicting styles—decorative and classicizing, respectively—that they espouse.
• by 1629 The Le Nain family of painters—Antoine (1588?–1648), Louis (1593?–1648), and Mathieu (1607–1677)—are active in Paris. While the brothers often collaborate, each excels in a different aspect of painting. Antoine is a skilled miniaturist, Mathieu a portraitist, and Louis conceives of genre scenes such as the Peasant Family (Louvre) that imbue their subjects, often treated humorously or satirically by other contemporary artists, with a classicizing dignity.
• 1633 Graphic artist and native of Nancy, Jacques Callot (1592–1635) produces Great Miseries of War, two print series depicting the carnage and suffering he witnesses during the Thirty Years' War. Of less emotional intensity but lacking none of the immediacy of this series are works he produces between 1612 and 1621 for the Medici in Florence. Callot's directness and descriptive abilities over a wide range of subject matter—from witty depictions of court festivals and scenes from the Italian commedia dell'arte to frank and often moralizing portrayals of human brutality—influence many Northern artists, including La Tour, Watteau, and Rembrandt.
• 1639 Georges de La Tour (1593–1652) is named painter to the king. Active in his native Lorraine, La Tour is among the finest Northern artists working in a Caravaggesque style. The Fortune Teller (60.30 )and The Penitent Magdalen (1978.517) reflect the influence of Caravaggio in both their genre subjects and their technique of lighting, with a strong contrast of illumination and shadow. These characteristics combine with simple geometry of form and a meditative mood in the pictures for which he is chiefly known, including several compositions of the Magdalen and a canvas of Joseph the Carpenter (Louvre).
• 1640 Louis XIII summons Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) to Paris as his principal painter. Between 1624 and 1640, Poussin is active in Italy; he first travels to Venice and is influenced by the poetic mythological subjects and warm palette of Titian, and later settles in Rome. There, inspired by Raphael and works of classical antiquity, he develops a style of painting that aims through subject matter, clarity of composition, and precision of gesture and detail to convey the nobility of human actions. Dissatisfied with French court life, he returns to Italy by 1643; his work nevertheless sets the tone for a classicism that prevails in French art throughout the century.
• 1643 The five-year-old Louis XIV (1638–1715) succeeds his father as king of France, with his mother, Anne of Austria, serving as regent. Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–1661), Anne's advisor and successor of the late king's chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, helps to centralize the power of the monarch. He does this mostly through astute diplomacy, as earlier schemes of taxation stir waves of unrest that culminate in a series of uprisings known as the Fronde (1648–53). Louis assumes leadership at Mazarin's death; by this time, the road is well paved for the absolutism associated with his reign, exemplified by a statement attributed to the king: "L'état, c'est moi" ("I am the state"). With his chief advisor Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), he devises elaborate systems of domestic government and court policy designed to exert complete control over his subjects and curtail the power of the nobility. Architecture and the visual arts play a vital role in this plan, as a classicizing style is made "official" and large-scale artistic endeavors have as their sole aim the glorification of the monarch and the preservation of his fame. In 1662, the artist Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) becomes chief painter to the king, but wields even greater power than the title implies. Le Brun, acting as supervisor of all royal artistic projects, overseeing the construction and decoration of the palace at Versailles, and directing the Gobelins workshops and the Royal Academy (founded 1648), virtually controls the artistic output of the country for nearly three decades.
• mid-17th century François Mansart (1598–1666) is one of the most influential architects of his day, particularly for château (country house) and hôtel (townhouse) design. The Château de Maisons (1642–50) near Paris exemplifies Mansart's masterful application of classical form to Baroque structures.
• 1648 The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture is founded in Paris. In 1663, Charles Le Brun becomes its director, and imposes a strict curriculum of practical and theoretical studies based on the classical style deemed appropriate by the monarch and by Le Brun himself. The Académie establishes history (narrative) painting as the highest of art forms and praises the painters of antiquity, also Raphael—and, among contemporaries, Poussin—as the greatest artists, but regards as inferior still-life painting, the Venetian colorists, and those inspired by them, including Rubens. A rivalry between Poussinistes—those who assert the superiority of drawing—and Rubénistes—who maintain the importance of color—extends into the next century.
• 1656–61 Architect Louis Le Vau (1612–1670) and painter/designer Charles Le Brun build the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte for Louis XIV's superintendent of finances Nicolas Fouquet (1615–1680). André Le Nôtre (1613–1700) provides designs for the gardens, his earliest masterworks. The harmony of style among the three collaborators earns the admiration and envy of Louis, who visits the château in the year of its completion, weeks before Fouquet's arrest and banishment for draining the treasury for personal profit. The king shortly thereafter appoints the three men to posts at court.
• 1662 Louis XIV purchases the Gobelins workshops in Paris, where his minister Colbert gathers artisans to create tapestries and furniture for the king's palaces. Charles Le Brun serves as director and chief designer from 1663 until his death.
• 1664 A competition is begun for a design to complete the Louvre. Rebuilding and expansion of the medieval palace has been in progress, with interruptions, since the reign of Francis I. Henry IV (r. 1589–1610) chooses the Louvre as his residence, and numerous projects for its enlargement, including the construction of the Grande Galerie du Bord de l'Eau, which joins the Louvre to the Palais des Tuileries, are conceived during his rule. In 1665, the great Roman Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) comes to Paris and submits several designs for the palace's remaining structural component: an eastern facade. Louis XIV rejects these designs and entrusts the project to Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault (1613–1688). Completed in 1670, the eastern facade is a triumph of French classicism, with its grand colonnade and center pavilion that recall ancient Roman temple architecture.
• 1666 A branch of the Académie is founded in Rome; eight years later the Prix de Rome is established, awarding a period of study in Rome to gifted painters, sculptors, and (after 1720) architects. These institutions stress the importance of a firm grounding in the classical tradition so integral to the Académie's curriculum and crucial to French art of the period.
• 1669 Louis XIV orders the construction of a royal palace at Versailles, a small town outside of Paris. Work begins under Louis Le Vau, designer of the Garden Front; Le Vau dies in the following year, and Jules Hardouin Mansart (1646–1708) takes over the project. The interior is dominated by the great Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) flanked by the Salon de la Guerre (War) and Salon de la Paix (Peace). The lavish decorative program, executed by Le Brun with stucco reliefs by Antoine Coyzevox (1640–1720), a sculptor with a particular gift for portraiture, reflects Baroque ideals. Equally lavish are the garden designs of André Le Nôtre. Louis moves to Versailles with his court in 1682; removed from the cultural hub of Paris, members of the aristocracy live under the watchful eye of the king, who dictates rules of behavior and fashion that keep the wealth and authority of the nobles in check.
• 1680–91 Jules Hardouin Mansart constructs the Church of the Invalides in Paris; it adjoins the Hôtel des Invalides (1671–76), a veterans' hospital built by Libéral Bruant. Influenced in some aspects by Italian Renaissance structures—particularly in its Greek cross plan, which recalls Michelangelo's plan for Saint Peter's in Rome—the church, with a massive, dramatic facade and tall dome, is chiefly an interpretation of the Roman Baroque. Mansart's town-planning projects include the Place des Victoires (1684–86) and the Place Vendôme of 1699, the year in which he is named chief architect for royal buildings.
• 1682 Pierre Puget (1620–1694) completes his masterpiece, the larger-than-lifesize sculpture Milo of Crotona. This marble group depicts, possibly as a warning against pride, the boastful hero of myth being attacked by a lion. The great tension created by a strong diagonal composition of the figure's limbs and garment drapery, as well as a graphic depiction of physical anguish, embody a Baroque sensibility, greatly influenced by the sculptor's years of study in Italy. The moralizing classical theme undoubtedly appeals to Louis XIV, who accepts the sculpture for display at Versailles (now in the Louvre) and retains Puget in his employ. This happens in concurrence with the death of the statesman Colbert, who in the previous decade criticized the "heated" imagination of Puget, then active in Toulon; it is largely due to opposition from strict classicists such as Colbert that Puget achieves success at court only in the later years of his career.
• 1699–1700 The earliest surviving Parisian silver teapot, now in the Museum's collection (48.187.78), is made. The introduction of tea and coffee into France in the seventeenth century provided an important impetus for the development of new forms in silver. French silver set the artistic standard for court silver throughout Europe, and the Swedes were especially influenced by French designs; it is recorded that a drawing of a teapot very similar to this one was sent to Sweden in 1702.
• 1712 Painter Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) is admitted to the Académie Royale. His reception piece, The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (submitted 1717), is a scene in which delicately rendered figures amble and repose in an idyllic landscape. Because this type of composition, characteristic of Watteau's oeuvre, is unprecedented at the Académie, a new category—the fête galante, literally an "elegant party"—is created expressly for his admission. Watteau also frequently depicts characters from the Italian theater, the commedia dell'arte, in similarly pastoral settings; Mezzetin (34.138) is one such example. Inspired by Rubens's colorism and sixteenth-century Venetian painting in compositions that are by turns playful and wistful, Watteau's works embody a refined fragility that make him a major proponent of Rococo style. Watteau is also a skilled draftsman who uses the technique of drawing in black, red, and white chalks—known as trois crayons—to effectively render the nuances of human form and flesh. His acceptance by the Académie illustrates the shift away from a rigid classical style that occurs after the death of Le Brun.
• 1715 At his great-grandfather's death, Louis XV (1710–1774) is king of France. Philippe II, duc d'Orléans, serves as regent until his death in 1723; from 1726 until 1743, the monarch is aided by André Hercule de Fleury. Lacking in the absolutist preoccupations of his predecessor as well as the finances to sustain them, Louis is a weak leader and easily influenced by favorites, who attain considerable power at court. Chief among them are his mistresses, Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764) and her successor, the comtesse du Barry (1743–1793). During Louis's reign, the grand drama of the Baroque gives way to a highly ornate but intimate style of great delicacy and refinement known as Rococo (from coquillage and rocaille, which refers to decoration with irregularly shaped stones and shells). This period marks a golden age of French furniture and decorative arts, as architects, designers, and artisans work together to create interior spaces of such splendor and sophistication that the line between function and ornament is blurred. Nicolas Pineau's (1684–1754) room of about 1735 from the Hôtel de Varengeville, Paris, is one such example of this style.
• 1728 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) is accepted into the Académie as a "painter skilled in animals and fruits." In contrast to the narrative, often historical subjects chosen by his most illustrious contemporaries, Chardin paints still lifes and interiors that are themselves pervaded by a sense of great stillness. His Silver Tureen (59.9) dates from this year.
• 1731 François Boucher (1703–1770) returns to Paris after a three-year stay in Italy, where he studies the works of Baroque masters as well as Italian and Dutch landscapists and Venetian vedute. He is soon received by the Académie Royale (1734) and numbers among his patrons King Louis XV (r. 1715–74) and Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress (see 20.155.9; 49.7.46). Boucher's paintings—with their bright palette and sentimental or erotic themes—as well as his prolific designs for furniture, tapestry, and other decorative objects, exemplify the spirit of the Rococo.
• 1732 Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766) paints Mlle de Lambesc as Minerva with the Comte de Brionne (Louvre); the idealized, mythologizing portrait type secures for Nattier great popularity at court and remains fashionable until late in his career.
• 1737 The Salon, an annual exhibition of paintings selected by a jury of artists from the Académie, is permanently established; it is held at the Salon Carré of the Louvre.
• 1745 Louis XV allows the pottery at Vincennes to manufacture porcelain bearing the royal fleur-de-lis emblem; pleased with its output, he later moves the factory to Sèvres (1756), near the château of Madame de Pompadour. The workshops at Sèvres produce costly objects such as small sculptural figures, tableware, vases, clocks, and plaques with brilliant ground colors, delicate enamels, and gold borders and scrollwork.
• mid-18th century The Enlightenment flourishes in France. This movement, centered in Paris, asserts the importance of human reason as well as the existence of natural law, and is promulgated by writers, scientists, philosophers, and theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Voltaire (1694–1778), baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Denis Diderot (1713–1784). Inspired by this flowering of rationalism and order, the focus of the arts turns from the florid Rococo toward a greater simplicity and morality. At the same time, the discovery of the ruins of the ancient cities Herculaneum (1709) and Pompeii (1748) renews interest in the classical world, and revolutions in France and America later in the century invite comparisons between ancient and modern government. These factors combine to advance the Neoclassical movement in the visual arts and architecture.
• 1753–76 Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714–1785) executes a monumental tomb for the Maréchal de Saxe (Church of Saint Thomas, Strasbourg). The allegorical sculptural group depicts the Maréchal stepping into an open sarcophagus, while a female figure representing France attempts to restrain him and looks imploringly to the shrouded figure of Death. A mourning Hercules is depicted at left, along with animals symbolizing the Maréchal's vanquished foes. The figures are classical in pose and gesture, but the theatricality of the monument looks back to the Baroque. One of the most gifted sculptors of his time, Pigalle excels at sculpture on both grand and intimate scales.
• 1755 Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713–1780) undertakes the design for the Church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. Soufflot's aim is to construct a church reflecting his interests in both classical Roman architecture and the elegance of Gothic church design, but he is plagued by opposition from contemporary critics and the design undergoes several revisions. The church—an early monument of the Neoclassical movement—is completed over a decade after his death, and in 1791 is secularized as the Panthéon des Grands Hommes.
• 1761 Returning to France after five years of study at the French Academy in Rome, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) quickly establishes in Paris a clientele for cabinet pictures that bear the influence of both Italian Baroque painting and Dutch landscapes. Fragonard works in a fluid, painterly style that recalls—with rapid brushwork and a warm palette—the oil sketches of Rubens. He achieves great success with private collectors as well as more official patrons, and is commissioned by the comtesse du Barry to produce a series of panels for her château at Louveciennes (now Frick Collection, New York). Du Barry rejects the completed panels, and Fragonard departs for Italy, eventually slipping from favor as the Neoclassical style flourishes.
• 1761 Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) paints The Village Bride (Louvre), one of many moralizing and often melodramatic genre scenes that, opposed to the whimsy of the Rococo, earn him the praise of Enlightenment supporters, particularly Diderot. Greuze often refers symbolically in his paintings to the theme of compromised virtue or lost innocence, as in Broken Eggs (20.155.8).
• 1768 Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) returns to Paris from training in Rome and is soon established as the foremost sculptor in France. In his portrait busts, his two great preoccupations—study from nature and the antique—combine to lifelike and vibrant effect. At the Salon of 1779, Houdon exhibits a series of portrait busts of such famous men as Voltaire, Rousseau, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. At the same Salon, his gifted contemporary Augustin Pajou (1730–1809) exhibits a portrait bust of Louis XVI in armor (now Versailles). The success of Houdon and Pajou comes with the spread of the Enlightenment, which seeks to preserve and venerate those figures of public life who contribute to the intellectual and philosophical advancement of the age.
• 1779 Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), a young portraitist trained by her father, is summoned to Versailles and the employ of the queen, Marie Antoinette. Forced for political reasons to flee at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, Vigée-Lebrun travels to Italy, Vienna, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Dresden, and London. Her technical virtuosity, as well as the sensitivity and elegance of her likenesses, meet with international acclaim. A painting by Marie-Victoire Lemoine (1754–1820) (57.103) may provide a view of Vigée-Lebrun's atelier.
• 1783 Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806), one of the most gifted and successful cabinet makers of the second half of the eighteenth century, produces a fall-front secretary (secrétaire à abattant) (20.155.11), matching commode, and encoignure (corner cabinet) for Queen Marie Antoinette's cabinet intérieur at Versailles. The exquisite secretary, with its Japanese black and gold lacquer paneling and gilt bronze mounts, is a masterwork of eighteenth century cabinet design. Reisner is a favorite of the Queen, for whom he also produces a mechanical table (1778) now in the Museum's collection (33.12). Another favorite of the queen, Georges Jacob (1739–1814), supplies his patroness and other members of the French royal family with elegant sets of seat furniture, including (1784) a pair of side chairs (1977.102.13,14) for Marie Antoinette's boudoir at the Tuileries palace.
• late 18th century Pigalle's student, Claude Michel (1738–1814), known as Clodion, produces the Nymph and Satyr Carousing (14.40.687). Although its antique theme is characteristic of the Neoclassical period, the terracotta sculptural group nevertheless exemplifies a Rococo ideal in its small scale and swirling forms engaged in amorous abandonment. Clodion executes a number of large-scale commissions during his successful career, but his fame rests upon small groups, often with Bacchic themes, such as this one.
• 1784 Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–1799) designs a monument to Isaac Newton (ink and wash drawing, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). The massive, hollow sphere pierced at the top by small holes in imitation of starlight is never realized, but its plan illustrates the visionary nature of a theorist who devotes his career to promoting purity in architectural form.
• 1787 Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) paints The Death of Socrates (31.45). This painting depicts the ancient philosopher about to drink a cup of hemlock, enacting the death sentence for refusing to renounce his beliefs. In its heroic subject matter and clarity of execution, it is a supreme Neoclassical statement from the foremost painter of the period. David is forced into exile during the Revolution but returns during the reign of Napoleon.
• 1789 The French Revolution begins, instigated by numerous factors, including the country's unstable finances (worsened by participation in the American Revolution and war with Austria from 1792) and the mounting dissatisfaction of peasants, whose heavy taxes are used to pay the debts accrued by a court known for its decadence and splendor. The philosophical developments of the Enlightenment, particularly the belief in the authority of the individual, also stir unrest as social and economic reforms fail to keep pace with intellectual progress. By 1792, the Revolutionary legislature abolishes the monarchy and the king is executed for treason in 1793; a provisional government, led by Maximilien Robespierre, is established in the same year. Known as the Reign of Terror, the period of Robespierre's leadership—or dictatorship—is marked by uprising and massacre from which no individual suspected of antirevolutionary activity is exempt. Robespierre is arrested and guillotined in 1794, and a new legislature, called the Directory, is established. Five years later, general Napoleon I (1769–1821) returns from a campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars, overthrows the Directory, and rules France as emperor from 1804 until 1814.
• ca. 1800 A faction emerges from the studio of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825). Known as the Primitifs, these artists push the Neoclassical style championed by their master toward a greater simplicity, emulating the linear purity of Greek vase painting and fifteenth-century Italian art.
• 1801 Architects Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) publish the Recueil de décorations intérieures, a compilation of drawings of contemporary design that will set the standard for the Empire style of interior decoration, which spreads throughout Europe. The two collaborate on the interior of Joséphine Bonaparte's château outside of Paris, Malmaison (1800–1802), whose decoration reflects the Imperial Roman models and Egyptian-inspired motifs characteristic of the Empire style.
• 1804 Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), a student of David, paints the monumental canvas Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa. This propagandizing work depicts the general's visit to plague-afflicted prisoners during the siege of Jaffa. Recalling both Christian imagery and the divine touch of kings, Gros depicts Napoleon touching an inmate, who gestures in incredulity. The architectural setting and figures in exotic dress mark an early appearance of Orientalism, a fascination with the Eastern world that is stimulated in part by Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, and that will persist in art throughout the nineteenth century.
• 1804 Napoleon I Bonaparte (1769–1821) has himself proclaimed emperor of the French. At his coronation on December 2, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Napoleon takes the imperial crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and places it on his own head. As First Painter to the emperor, Jacques-Louis David portrays the royal splendor of this event in The Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon I and the Crowning of the Empress Joséphine (1805–7; Musée du Louvre, Paris), and produces other iconic images of Napoleon, including a depiction of the general as he signals to lead his troops across the Alps in a campaign that will vanquish his Austrian foes (Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1800; Musée National de Malmaison). This mounted equestrian portrait recalls, in its format and pose, sculpted memorials to the heroes of antiquity (in fact, Napoleon crossed the Alps riding a mule).
• 1806 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), praised as the greatest sculptor of the age, executes a large-scale classical nude figure of Napoleon as a benevolent Mars. Canova produces portraits of other members of the emperor's family, including the idealized reclining nude figure of Pauline Borghese, Napoleon's sister, in the guise of Venus (1808; Galleria Borghese, Rome).
• 1814 The Allied armies of Britain, Russia, and Austria enter Paris. Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba, and Louis XVIII (r. 1814–24) ascends the throne, establishing a constitutional monarchy. The Congress of Vienna meets between September 1814 and June 1815 with the aim of restructuring the European continent, nearly all of which has been taken as the spoils of Napoleon's military campaigns. In the following year, Napoleon escapes from exile and returns to power for a brief period known as the "Hundred Days." He is finally defeated by Allied forces under the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo (1815), and exiled to Saint Helena, where he dies in 1821.
• 1816 The French government frigate Medusa founders off the coast of Africa; the ship's captain abandons 150 passengers on a makeshift raft, of whom only fifteen survive after thirteen days at sea. Théodore Gericault (1791–1824) depicts this controversial subject with chilling explicitness in The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19; Louvre), a triumph of early Romantic painting in its description of human anguish and the futile struggle of man against nature.
• 1824 In a pivotal year for the development of French painting, works by contemporary British painters such as landscapist John Constable (1776–1837) are exhibited at the Salon, along with Eugène Delacroix's (1798–1863) Massacre at Chios (Louvre). Though met with mixed reviews, the canvas becomes an icon of the emerging Romantic aesthetic in French painting. In the same year, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) returns to France after an eighteen-year sojourn in Italy. The two artists—one the great proponent of French Romantic painting, the other a staunch exponent of Davidian classicism—are posited in a stylistic rivalry, lasting until mid-century, that recalls that of the poussinistes and rubénistes of a century earlier: Ingres' art asserts the supremacy of academic tradition, linear contour, and design, while that of Delacroix counters with freer brushwork, often-turbulent compositions, and sensuous colorism.
• 1830 The July Revolution, an uprising stirred by and among the middle classes, rages for three days in reaction against attempts by King Charles X (r. 1824–30) to return to the absolutist monarchy of the ancien régime. Charles abdicates and flees; despite the citizens' clamor for a republic, the duc d'Orléans is proclaimed limited constitutional monarch as Louis-Philippe. In this year, Delacroix paints Liberty Leading the People (Louvre), combining realism and allegory in a depiction of the personification of Liberty bearing a tricolor and leading combatants through a corpse-littered barricade. Louis-Philippe himself acquires the work when it is shown at the Salon of 1831.
• ca. 1830–70 The Barbizon School of landscape painting flourishes in the region of the French village from which it takes its name. Influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch masters, the Barbizon painters turn away from idealized classical landscapes in favor of direct observation of nature and sketching out-of-doors, en plein air (a practice facilitated by the introduction, in 1841, of collapsible metal squeeze tubes of paint). Central figures of this school are Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), Jules Dupré (1811–1889), and Charles Daubigny (1817–1878). In 1849, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) settles in Barbizon, where he paints The Gleaners (1857), The Angelus (1859; both Louvre), and other works that endow peasant life with a monumental dignity.
• 1831 Sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye (1796–1875) submits a plaster model to the Salon—Tiger Devouring a Gavial of the Ganges—winning public acclaim. Best known for animal groups such as this, Barye appeals to a contemporary taste for unflinching images of nature at its most ferocious.
• 1834 Auguste Préault (1809–1879) exhibits the plaster relief panel Tuerie (Slaughter) at the Salon. Its fragmented figures contort into gestures of anguish, their mouths opened to cry out. The emphasis on physical and emotional extremes, a radical departure from the conventions of classical relief, marks Préault's vanguard approach.
• 1836 The Arc de Triomphe is unveiled at the Place d'Étoile in Paris. Begun in 1806 by Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin (1739–1811), the triumphal arch is conceived as an emblem of Napoleonic rule inspired by ancient Roman models. Louis-Philippe fosters its completion by architects L. Goust, Jean-Nicolas Huyot, and Guillaume-Abel Blouet, with a revised decorative program celebrating French patriotism. Among the various participants in its decoration is François Rude (1784–1855), who executes one of four sculptural groups flanking the arch's opening, The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, better known as La Marseillaise. The work elevates the volunteer soldiers to the status of mythic heroes as they advance—nude, or wearing classical armor—under the sweeping winged allegorical figure of Liberty.
• 1839 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) exhibits a photographic image, produced on a silver-coated copper plate with iodine vapors, which he calls the daguerreotype. His collaborator for six years (from 1827) is Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), the French chemist who in 1816 produces the first negative and, in 1826, the earliest surviving photographic image.
• 1842 onward Major excavations in northern Iraq, then part of the Ottoman Turkish empire, are undertaken by French and British diplomats and adventurers. Many of the monumental stone sculptures and reliefs discovered within ancient Assyrian royal palaces (dating from the ninth to seventh century B.C.) are shipped to London and Paris, prompting a vogue for all things Assyrian. Many architects and artists are influenced by the discoveries and an Assyrian Revival style flourishes in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
• 1848 The February Revolution overthrows Orléans rule and establishes the Second Republic. In late June of this year, class riots break out in the working districts of Paris and are brutally suppressed by the army. The "Year of Revolutions" has a profound effect on contemporary artists such as Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), who depicts the tragic casualties of the uprising in Memory of Civil War (Louvre), shown at the Salon of 1850–51.
• 1849 On an official mission for the Ministère de l'Instruction Publique, Maxime Du Camp (1822–1894) sets out for the Middle East, where he will make a photographic inventory of the sights and monuments of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Du Camp's archaeological reportage inspires many others to make the journey in the 1850s.
• 1851 After the failure of a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the president to serve for more than one term, Louis-Napoleon mobilizes a military coup d'état that results in the fall of the Second Republic. He is named emperor of the Second Empire in the following year.
• 1851 The French government initiates a project of documenting the nation's architectural heritage, assigning five photographers, including Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) and Édouard Baldus (1813–1889), to record different regions of the country.
• 1853 Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820–1910), known as Nadar, opens a photographic studio soon to become a hub of the most illustrious personalities of the day. Known to posterity for his elegant portraits of such luminaries as the actress Sarah Bernhardt and writer Charles Baudelaire, Nadar is better known to his contemporaries as a novelist and essayist.
• 1854 American Commodore Matthew Perry and the Tokugawa shogunate conclude the Kanagawa treaty that opens Japan, hitherto an isolationist country, to trade with the West (limited trade, particularly with Dutch merchants, had been permitted up to this point). Shortly thereafter, Japanese wares—furniture, decorative objects, textiles, and prints—are widely available in Europe and avidly collected by an affluent bourgeoisie, including artists such as Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, and writers such as Baudelaire, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Émile Zola. Japanese pictorial arts, especially prints, and other aspects of the Japanese aesthetic exert a profound influence on contemporary French artists, authors, and composers. In 1872, the critic and collector Philippe Burty uses the term japonisme to refer to this widespread cultural phenomenon and to promote its study.
• 1855 The Exposition Universelle, including a major art exhibition, is held in Paris with the aim of displaying the social, industrial, and cultural progress in France under Napoleon III. Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) submits a monumental canvas, The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life, to the exposition jury, who reject it. Outraged by the stylistic strictures imposed by the Academy of Fine Arts, Courbet organizes a private exhibition in a tent near the fairground entrance, calling it his Pavilion of Realism. Courbet's radical departure from academic tradition had rocked the art world six years earlier, when he exhibited three pictures—Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, After Dinner at Ornans, and A Burial at Ornans—at the Salon of 1849. These works, depicting the landscape and inhabitants of his rural birthplace, elevate scenes from everyday life to the grand scale formerly reserved for history painting. Courbet's pictures espouse the cry of contemporary critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in his review of the Salon of 1846 for an art that reflects the "heroism of modern life," and he leads a generation of Realist painters that has as its literary counterpart the circle of Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), author of Madame Bovary (both 1857).
• 1858 English dress designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), often regarded as "the father of haute couture," opens a firm in Paris. The House of Worth dominates Parisian fashion through the second half of the nineteenth century.
• late 1850s The increasing popularity of photography encourages the development of faster printing processes and the circulation of inexpensive types of photographic prints, including the stereograph and the carte-de-visite.
• 1861 Construction begins on the Paris Opéra, designed by Charles Garnier (1825–1898). It is conceived by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), city planner under Napoleon III, as the converging point of several major boulevards. Incorporating Renaissance and Baroque architectural elements and decorative motifs, the ornate structure symbolizes Second Empire decadence, the appeal of which endures well after the empire's fall. Its profuse exterior adornment includes The Dance by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), a Beaux-Arts sculptor who rises to prominence with Ugolino and His Sons (1860–62; Louvre; see MMA 67.250) at the Salon of 1863. The Opéra is completed in 1875.
• ca. 1862 Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) paints The Third-Class Carriage (29.100.129), an unidealized portrayal of the living conditions of the working class and the psychological isolation symptomatic of modern urban life. The artist is already well known for the satirical drawings and political cartoons he produces for Paris weeklies, such as Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834 (57.650.192), depicting the wake of a massacre of working-class opponents of the oppressive government under Louis-Philippe.
• 1863 The Salon des Refusés is established for the exhibition of works rejected by the Salon jury (more than half the submissions for this year are rejected), and includes pictures by Cézanne, Pissarro, Whistler, and Édouard Manet (1832–1883). Many of the works displayed generate controversy, particularly Manet's canvas Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe; Musée d'Orsay, Paris). While its composition of male figures reclining in a clearing with a nude female figure derives from classical and Renaissance sources (see Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael, 19.74.1), its contemporaneity and directness of approach shock modern audiences. Manet stirs a second scandal with Olympia (Musée d'Orsay), painted in 1863 and exhibited at the Salon of 1865. In a composition that recalls old master paintings, notably the Venus of Urbino by Titian, a nude female figure reclines on a couch. Manet's modern courtesan, who unabashedly engages the viewer's glance, arouses critical disgust and claims of indecency and vulgarity.
• 1866 Jules Chéret (1836–1932) popularizes a technique of color lithography that marks the rise of the modern advertising poster. His designs influence the painter and graphic artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), who captures in his brief but prolific career the gaiety—and, often, the garishness—of the theaters, circuses, and cabarets of fin-de-siècle Paris.
• 1870 The Franco-Prussian War breaks out, ending in French defeat. At the fall of Napoleon III, the Third Republic is established. In the following year, a socialist Commune is set up in Paris (March 18–May 29); Gustave Courbet is an active participant in Commune politics, and leads a commission for the protection of artistic monuments. After the Commune's overthrow, Courbet is accused of ordering the demolition of the Vendôme Column, a symbol of Napoleonic rule; he is imprisoned and, declared responsible for the column's restoration, flees to Switzerland shortly after his release in 1873, living there in exile until his death in 1877.
• 1874 The first of eight exhibitions of Impressionist painting is held in Nadar's studio in Paris, featuring works by Claude Monet (1840–1926), Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903). Maligned by critics, one of whom coins the term impressionisme pejoratively after Monet's Impression: Sunrise, 1872 (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), this group of artists is dedicated to the depiction of modern life, especially landscape and genre subjects, based on direct observation. They develop a style of painting with loose, broken brushstrokes that mirrors the often fleeting nature of their subjects.
• 1874 American painter Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) settles in Paris. Her cosmopolitan upbringing and early travels allow her access to studies with such masters as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Thomas Couture (1815–1879), and she exhibits at the Salon for the first time in 1868. By the mid-1870s, her style becomes less Academic, and she exhibits with the Impressionists in 1880, 1881, and 1886. Cassatt later displays her refined draftsmanship and graphic technique in paintings and prints—particularly of maternal scenes—markedly inspired by the Japanese aesthetic. In her later years, she acts as advisor to several American friends in purchasing old master and nineteenth-century French avant-garde art; among them is Louisine Havemeyer (1855–1929), who bequeaths nearly 2,000 paintings and art objects from her collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 1929.
• 1874 The young American expatriate John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) enters the studio of portraitist Carolus-Duran (1838–1917) in Paris. He will soon achieve his own success as a portraitist, depicting with liveliness and elegance the American and European elite of his age, as in his portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau, known as Madame X (1883–84; 16.53). Sargent is also a gifted plein-air landscapist.
• 1875 Georges Bizet's (1838–1875) opera Carmen is performed for the first time in Paris; it is a critical failure. Despite its musical vivacity and complex psychological characterizations, contemporary audiences are unsympathetic to the opera's realism and the inspiration Bizet takes from the German Romantic composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), who himself faced great unpopularity during his three-year stay in Paris (1839–42).
• late 1870s Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) turns away from Impressionism, seeking to imbue objects and landscapes with a sense of solidity and permanence by reducing them to their basic geometric forms: the cube, cone, and cylinder. Though not commercially successful in his lifetime, Cézanne's approach to painting, broadly categorized as Post-Impressionist, influences major movements in twentieth-century art, especially Cubism.
• 1880 Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is commissioned to execute a sculptural portal for a planned museum of decorative arts (never realized); he chooses Dante's Inferno as the subject, and calls his doors The Gates of Hell, an allusion to Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (ca. 1426–52) for the Baptistery of the cathedral in Florence. The lintel, pilasters, and door panels are adorned with reliefs of the turbulently swirling, tortured forms that inhabit Dante's hell, most of which are identifiable. Several of Rodin's major sculptures, including The Thinker (originally conceived as a portrayal of Dante) and The Kiss (a representation of the ill-fated lovers Paolo and Francesca), are enlarged versions of figures that appear on The Gates of Hell.
• 1881 Edgar Degas (1834–1917) exhibits The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (29.100.370) at the sixth Impressionist exhibition. The wax sculpture, wearing a real tulle skirt and horsehair wig tied with a silk ribbon, causes a scandal because of its naturalistic depiction of the young model. Performers—ballet dancers, opera singers, and musicians—recur in Degas' oeuvre, which spans several media, including paint, pastel, wax, and photography. Degas is a gifted draftsman, capturing through sophisticated compositional technique the self-conscious poise of ballerinas and the casual postures of solitary bathers.
• 1886 Painter Georges Seurat (1859–1891) completes A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–5; Art Institute of Chicago; see MMA 51.112.6). The artist employs a technique known variously as Divisionism or Pointillism, in which small patches or dots of pure colors are juxtaposed to produce a visual harmony when viewed from a distance. This systematic method, rooted in contemporary color theories, places Seurat at the forefront of the Neo-Impressionist movement, along with Paul Signac (1863–1935) and Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944), son of Camille Pissarro. Works by these artists appear in the last Impressionist exhibition of 1886.
• 1886 Émile Zola (1840–1902) publishes L'Oeuvre, a novel that addresses the aesthetic issues of the later nineteenth century. The author-critic rejects contemporary Academic painting, asserts the imprint of an artist's personality or temperament on his work, and champions the painter Édouard Manet (1832–1883) as the leader of a "modern school of Naturalism." At the publication of L'Oeuvre, Paul Cézanne, a close childhood friend of Zola, claims to recognize himself in the primary character Claude Lantier, a failed artist who commits suicide; the two fall out and never speak again.
• 1886 Jean Moréas (1856–1910) publishes a Symbolist manifesto in the widely read periodical Le Figaro, arguing for an aesthetic that rejects naturalism in favor of the subjective world of dreams, nuances, and the imagination. Admired by and closely associated with the work of the Symbolists are painters Gustave Moreau (1826–1898)—who engages the opposing tensions of physicality, spirituality, desire, and morality in canvases such as Oedipus and the Sphinx (21.134.1) and several works on the theme of Salome—and Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an admirer of Francisco Goya and Edgar Allan Poe who evokes a fantastic, visionary dream-world in works such as the lithograph Marsh Flower: A Sad Human Face (1885).
• 1888 In Brittany, painter and graphic artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Émile Bernard (1868–1941) produce paintings of simplified, flattened forms rendered in bold, unmodulated colors. This style, which they call "Synthetism," is Symbolist in its intent to convey emotions and ideas beyond representing the visual world. A characteristic Synthetist work is Gauguin's 1888 canvas The Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).
• 1888 In February, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) departs Paris for Arles in the south of France, hoping to establish an artists' community. Under the bright sulphur-yellow light of Provence, his work comes into its own as he realizes the expressive potential of color and line. On October 23, he is joined by Paul Gauguin; they spend 9 weeks painting side by side and living together in the Yellow House. Gauguin's abrupt departure on December 23 is precipitated by Van Gogh's breakdown, during which he cuts off part of his left ear with a razor.
• 1888 A group of young artists form the Nabis, from the Hebrew word for "prophet," with the aim of promoting decorative painting as inspired by Gauguin's Synthetist model. Maurice Denis (1870–1943) is a founding member of the Nabis and writes in an article of 1890 for La Revue Blanche, "Remember that a picture, before being a war horse, a female nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Other core members include Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867–1944), and Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940). The Nabis are associated with the Symbolist movement.
• 1889 The Exposition Universelle is held in Paris as a centennial celebration of the French Revolution. The Eiffel Tower, a 984-foot-high iron structure designed by Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) and erected between 1887 and 1889, stands near the fairground entrance on the Champ de Mars as a symbol of the triumph of science, engineering, and industry.
• 1890 Claude Monet, chief exponent of Impressionism, purchases a house in Giverny, whose landscape profoundly inspires him. About this time, he begins the first of several series of paintings depicting a single subject in various conditions of light and weather. His subjects include haystacks (29.100.109), poplars, the facade of Rouen Cathedral, and water lilies. He exhibits these during the 1890s in several one-man shows at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris.
• 1891 Paul Gauguin makes his first trip to Tahiti, where he stays until 1893. There he paints Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) (51.112.2), in which he adapts the vernacular art and customs of the South Pacific to express a Christian theme. The two central figures are based on a photograph of a low relief in the Javanese temple of Borobudur, characteristic of Gauguin's liberal borrowing from photography and other sources. A late work, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), painted in Papeete in 1897, is Gauguin's allegorical variation on the theme of the three ages of man—or in this case, woman, here represented by female figures in a Tahitian landscape.
• 1892 Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), an Alsatian Jew and French general staff officer, is tried and wrongly convicted for passing French secret documents to a German military attaché. The resultant controversy, known as The Dreyfus Affair, is largely the result of anti-Semitism in France. After the court martial and nearly immediate acquittal (1898) of the actual traitor, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the pro-Dreyfus critic Émile Zola publishes "J'accuse," an open letter to the president of the French Republic accusing the judges of acquitting Esterhazy on orders from the war office. Zola is tried for libel and sentenced to jail, but flees to England. Dreyfus is finally exonerated in 1906.
• 1894 Claude Debussy (1862–1918) composes the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), an orchestral work inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé's poem of 1876. Debussy is the major exponent of an impressionistic movement in music that rejects narrative and drama—ideals championed by Romantic composers such as Richard Wagner—with the aim of evoking subtleties of mood, atmosphere, and transitory impressions. Inspired by contemporary painting by Monet and Symbolist poetry, Debussy achieves impressionistic effects through the use of new chord combinations, whole-tone chords, pentatonic pitch collections, timbre, and unresolved dissonances. He is also closely associated with the Symbolist movement in music, which, like its counterparts in the visual arts and literature, rejects a strict adherence to naturalism in favor of evocation, suggestion, and imagination.
• 1895 German entrepreneur Siegfried Bing (1838–1905) expands and reopens his Oriental crafts shop in Paris as the Maison de l'Art Nouveau. Bing is a specialist in Eastern arts, and promotes a Japanese aesthetic as a means of uniting art and craft in a manner that imbues even the most utilitarian object with a simple beauty. He is credited—through the foundation of a periodical, Le Japon Artistique, and various exhibitions of ancient artifacts and contemporary works—with the promotion of japonisme in France. The Art Nouveau style borrows from Japanese art its emphasis on linear ornamental motifs such as intertwining vegetal forms. Bing's Maison de l'Art Nouveau features designs by the painters Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Paul Ranson (1864–1909), as well as Belgian architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957). Other masters of this style are Hector Guimard (1867–1942), designer of the elegant cast-iron tendrils that adorn entrances to the Paris Métro (ca. 1900), and René Lalique (1860–1945), jewelry and glassware designer.