Le beau fard: Vermillion rouge and powdered faces
The application
and material consumption of powder, lead based white paint and especially
vermillion rouge in the eighteenth century was a social practise that was
intimately interwoven with a issues of class, gender in addition to the work of
leisure that has been discussed earlier, in so much as the application of these
products necessitated the interaction with certain articles of furniture and
decoration such as tables specifically manufactured for the toilette as well as
commonly the interaction with others of either the same or lower class (it was
common for guests, suitors and class subordinates alike to be received, greeted
and conversed with while either a lady or a gentleman was at their toilette for
reasons of self-fashioning that have been discussed above; i.e. the performance
of self for an audience).
When Charles-Nicolas
Cochin commented in 1750 that “It is well known that rouge is nothing more than
the mark of rank or wealth, because it cannot be supposed that anyone has
thought to become more beautiful with this terrible crimson patch” he touched
on an important aspect of eighteenth century cosmetic application.[1] That rather than a beautifying process makeup
was a symbol of aristocratic identity.
This may be understood for two reasons: both the lengthy, languid, process
of its application at the toilette that pointed towards a certain capacity of
leisure but also the expense of these products and the necessity of wearing
them at court and in fashionable society.
This explains the commotion that was caused as court gossip suggested
that in 1756 Madame de Pompadour was going to give up wearing her customary
rouge thereby – because she did not wear much powder at the time, preferring to
display her naturally creamy completion – dispense with un fard
altogether.[2]
Aristocratic ladies and gentlemen in early
and mid-eighteenth century France wielded a heavy-laden make-up brush with
theatrical verve.[3]
By the mid
eighteenth century, however, when The cup of chocolate was painted, the
lowering cost of vermillion made rouge freely available so that it became a
standard feature on the top of most ladies (including in this middle class
ladies) dressing tables and began to have very different associations from an
uncomplicated marker of aristocratic identity.
Cochin goes on to comment “It is surprising that such distinction has
been attached to a colour so common and inexpensive that even the lowliest grisettes
can make this expenditure as abundantly as a person of the highest rank”.[4] IT is important to note here that Cochin’s
disdain for vermillion may be as a result of a larger debate concerning the use
of colour and style that was circulating at the time in which the flickering effect
of light, or papillotage, was closely associated with the flirtatious
batting of eyelashes as well as the style of rococo painting, something which,
at least in his public role as an academie official Cochin was trying to move
away from, prompting (alongside Marginy) a more serious mode of engagement and
themes such as that of Greuze’s work.[5] Thus
make-up began to be used by various classes and genders for different uses
including to confound rather than confirm classes distinction. Whereas the
bourgeois sensibility with maquillage was to improve upon nature, it was
still for the aristocracy a status symbol leading Louis XV to declare that his
daughters are allowed to adopt the habit when they come of age, implying face
paint as a marker of both branching into adulthood as well as the respect that
comes with that age and station in society.
However with the small addition of powder to the rouge that the
bourgeois favoured the currency of make-up could be transformed from a marker
of aristocratic birth to device used to confound class as Melissa Hyde notes,
and it became a more general symbol of deceit, particularly feminine duplicity.[6]
What then, are
the implications of this understanding and use of make-up when it is seen in
the context of The cup of chocolate? The
image depicts a mother or a nuclear family serving her child hot chocolate or
coffee and having adorned herself with rouge.[7] She has adorned herself only with rouge and has
powered her hair and face very delicately.
In this light her use of make-up needs to be considered not as a marker
of aristocratic identity but as another element that confuses her class
identity the same way the tension between the presence of the coffee
(specifically middle class) and the alluding to chocolate (specifically
aristocratic) does. The women’s le
beau fard contributes no additional information or conclusion of her class
status that was confounded by the hot drink.[8]
Furthermore,
the presence of the rouge is also a reference, albeit an oblique one, to
previous use of objects of the labour of leisure. This re-affirms the child’s lesson is not
blandly or generally about the move towards adulthood but the self-fashioning
that accompanies it. The child
(importantly, a female child) literally ingests an uncertain drink – though
probably chocolate which was after all only given to children in small doses at
this time due to the understanding of it as an adult’s drink – via two examples
of a woman’s (her mother’s) self-fashioning: the delicate gesture and knowing,
physical acuity of offering the small spoon holding a mouthful of an adult beverage
as well as the mother’s own display of previous self-fashioning endeavours (the
rouge and powder).
Nicolas Lancret, The four times of day:
Evening, 1739-41, oil on copper, series of four paintings dimensions
variable, National gallery (London).
The garden as a
material object.
The work of
leisure that has been discussed above took place in specific locations that
provided a backdrop. Hellman discusses this
backdrop in terms of the interior design of the house, which increasing in the
eighteenth century in France had considerable time and expense dedicated to it
and was considered equally important as the items that furnished it. In his Tableau de Paris, for example,
Louis- Sebastian Mercier comments that the construction of the building is only
half the work and expense of building a house in the new manner.[9]
Other contemporary sources asserted that never before was the house so highly
sophisticated or the aesthetic design so considered.
This
understanding as the house as a highly contrived theatrical backdrop in which
individuals could practise self-fashioning must be further applied to the
garden. References
to highly wrought decoration of eighteenth century rooms as a theatrical
backdrop for the social ‘performances’ of certain actors that are being
inserted into the scene are numerous. Garden’s in the eighteenth century were
subjected to much the same decorative verve that buildings were. There was also a strong pastoral tradition in
art (think of Boucher) that can and should be connected to that same pastoral
tradition that occurred on the stage. In
Lancret’s work especially gardens often become sights for social exchange and
drama that would ordinarily occur within the house proper. Indeed in his work that material barriers
between garden and house are often broken down with the focus on the
pavilion. In these images the pavilions
are furnished as interiors and there is are no clear material features, such as
doors in the arches ways, to serve as a physical barrier between these two
spaces. This breakdown of material
barriers often leads to the further disintegration of ideological barriers
between the built structure of the house and the designed and manipulated
structure of the garden (see Figure 6 and Figure 10). Ultimately, in Lancret’s work, as in the work
of other painters such as Watteau whom Lancret was intimately connected with as
they shared the same patron, the garden becomes an extension of the home. Not simply even as a material structure but
as another actor that has been inserted into the scene and whom functions as
the site and also arbitrator of complex often difficult social interactions for
which it functions as a neutral, liminal zone (liminal derived from the word
threshold: particularly apt here are the garden is not only functioning as a
metaphorical threshold but also a physical one between the public space outside
the home and the private space of the house itself; it is a zone that must be
passed through). Consequently this
notion of theatrical backdrops for individuals performance may be extended to
gardens.
[1]
Melissa Hyde, ‘The “make-up” of the Marquise: Boucher’s
portrait of Pompadour at her toilette’, The art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 3
(September), 2000, 453-475.
[2] In her younger days, Pompadour favored a more naturalistic
approach favored by the middle-class from which she was born into. By the time that she was a lady in waiting
however she was more heavy handed with her application and it was commented
that she wore a layer an inch think.
[3]
Melissa Hyde, ‘The “make-up” of the Marquise: Boucher’s
portrait of Pompadour at her toilette’, The art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 3
(September), 2000, 453-475.
[4]
Melissa Hyde, ‘The “make-up” of the Marquise: Boucher’s
portrait of Pompadour at her toilette’, The art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 3
(September), 2000, 453-475.
[5] To understand the artistic project of reform that
Marginy and Cochin embarked on see James A. Leith, The idea of art
as propaganda in France, 1750-1789: a study in the history of ideas,
Toronto, 1965.. Melissa Hyde notes the link between
make-up, the rococo, and papillotage in her article ‘The “make-up” of
the Marquise: Boucher’s portrait of Pompadour at her toilette’, The art
Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 3 (September), 2000, 453-475.
[6]
Melissa Hyde, ‘The “make-up” of the Marquise: Boucher’s
portrait of Pompadour at her toilette’, The art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 3
(September), 2000, 453-475. Tassie
Gwilliam notes the association of make-up with deceit in ‘Cosmetic
poetics: colouring faces in the eighteenth century’, body and text in the
eighteenth century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. Von Mucke, Standford
(California), 1994
[7] While not the specific focus of this study the
depiction of a nuclear family as opposed to an extended family is also of
interest. The structure of families
began to transform in the eighteenth century due to the changing ties between
urban and country in turn effected by changing patterns in ownership and wealth
consolidation of the upper classes. Nuclear
families became more common and particularly middle class individuals thought
of themselves as belonging to a nuclear rather than an extended family. Hence the depiction of nuclear families
became more common. There is an
established tradition of art historical discourse on these images and Lancret’s
image here should be perhaps inserted into this discourse or at least
considered in this light. See Kevin
Chua, “Painting Paralysis: filial piety in 1763”, French genre
painting in the eighteenth century (studies in the history of art), New Haven
and London, 2007, 72, 153.
[8] Dress and textiles does also not help in this
endeavor. Her dress is the bright coloured silks favoured by both the bourgeois
and the aristocracy. Her cotton skirts
prominently displayed and occupying a large area of the canvas, though the
products of foreign (colonial labor) and international trade were similarly
favoured by both social orders in question. Read Madeleine Dobie’s. Trading
places: colonization and slavery in eighteenth-century French Culture, Ithaca
and London, 2010 for a discussion on the politics and origins of cotton. Also see Thomas Crow, Painters and public
life, 1985, New Haven.for a
discussion on how white muslin and cotton dishabille confuse class
identity in art (he speaks specifically in reference to Greuze’s The village
bride).
[9]
Mimi Hellman, Furniture, ‘Sociability, and the work of leisure in eighteenth
century France’, Eighteenth century studies, Vol.32, No.4 (summer),
1999,
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