In France, the death of
Louis XIV in September 1715 led to a period of licentious freedom commonly called the
Régence. The heir to Louis XIV, his great-grandson
Louis XV, was only 5 years old; for the next seven years France was ruled by the regent
Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. Versailles was abandoned from 1715 to 1722. Painting turned toward "
fêtes galantes", theater settings and the female nude. Painters from this period include
Antoine Watteau,
Nicolas Lancret, and
François Boucher. The
Louis XV style of decoration (although already apparent at the end of the last reign) was lighter: pastels and wood panels, smaller rooms, less gilding and fewer brocades; shells and garlands and occasional Chinese subjects predominated. Rooms were more intimate. After the return to Versailles, many of the baroque rooms of Louis XIV were redesigned. The official etiquette was also simplified and the notion of privacy was expanded: the king himself retreated from the official bed at night and conversed in private with his mistress. The latter half of the 18th century continued to see French preeminence in Europe, particularly through the arts and sciences, and the
French language was the lingua franca of the European courts. The French academic system continued to produce artists, but some, like
Jean-Honoré Fragonard and
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, explored new and increasingly impressionist styles of painting with thick brushwork. Although the hierarchy of genres continued to be respected officially,
genre painting,
landscape,
portrait and
still life were extremely fashionable. The writer
Denis Diderot wrote a number of times on the annual
Salons of the Académie of painting and sculpture and his comments and criticisms are a vital document on the arts of this period. One of Diderot's favorite painters was
Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Although often considered
kitsch by today's standards, his paintings of domestic scenes reveal the importance of
Sentimentalism in the European arts of the period (as also seen in the works of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Samuel Richardson.) One also finds in this period a kind of
Pre-romanticism.
Hubert Robert's images of ruins, inspired by Italian capriccio paintings, are typical in this respect. So too the change from the rational and geometrical
French garden (of
André Le Nôtre) to the
English garden, which emphasized (artificially) wild and irrational nature. One also finds in some of these gardens curious ruins of temples called
follies. The middle of the 18th century saw a turn to
Neoclassicism in France, that is to say a conscious use of Greek and Roman forms and iconography. In painting, the greatest representative of this style is
Jacques-Louis David who, mirroring the profiles of Greek vases, emphasized the use of the profile; his subject matter often involved classical history (the death of Socrates, Brutus). The dignity and subject matter of his paintings were greatly inspired by
Nicolas Poussin in the 17th century. The
Louis XVI style of furniture (once again already present in the previous reign) tended toward circles and ovals in chair backs; chair legs were grooved; Greek inspired iconography was used as decoration. ==Neoclassicism==