| This dissertation proposes that French art of the 1720s and 1730s, specifically genre scenes of elite pastimes and rococo decorative patterns, were understood in the early eighteenth century as ironic commentary on contemporary life, not illustrations of it. By reconceiving such works as ironic, I challenge their enduring reputation as embodiments of the moral failings of the Old Regime. The non-narrative, decorative quality of this art critiqued and provided the means for supplanting the passive conception of the viewer that academic norms encoded. The fashionable rococo style and genre's descriptions of familiar settings and daily ritual evoked lived experience, which enabled knowledgeable eighteenth-century beholders to participate critically---to employ their discernment, interpret the imagery, and refine their sense of self. This dissertation builds on the art historical reassessments of scholars such as Bryson, Hobson, Crow, Vidal, Scott, and Lichtenstein and is informed by theories of an enlightened public advanced by Kant, Habermas, and Foucault. The notion of a self-constituting public, discursively constructed and emerging within an absolute monarchy, made it possible to re-imagine scenes of private life and rococo ornament as politically and philosophically charged. Cultural histories of sociability and the salon pointed me to conversation as a model for the dialogic mechanisms at work in this imagery; literary theories of irony, the novel, and description, and seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century aesthetic theory aided my analysis of the dialectic between the works' undisguised artifice and the beholder's critical involvement. I offer close readings of scenes by Jean-Francois de Troy, Watteau, Lajoue, Boucher, and Mondon to demonstrate how their art, which both acknowledges and subverts academic practice, forges a new representational paradigm to elicit the beholder's discernment. I conclude that genre scenes of social interaction and the rococo style are Enlightenment works. Their ornate, decorative quality makes them neither art historically nor intellectually negligible; rather, their invocation of the beholder's empirical observation and experiential knowledge aligns them with the epistemic shift also taking place in eighteenth-century science, philosophy, and literature. |
