The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher (Paperback)

David Pullins

ISBN 10: 1606068881 / ISBN 13: 9781606068885

Published by Getty Trust Publications, Santa Monica CA, 2024

About this Item

Paperback. Reframing long-held assumptions about what distinguishes fine from decorative art, this innovative study explores a mode of making, seeing, and thinking that slices across eighteenth-century visual culture. This book provides a new way of thinking about eighteenth-century French art and visual culture by prioritizing production over reception. Abandoning the ideologically driven discourse that distinguished fine from decorative art between the 1690s and 1770s, The Mobile Image reveals how the two have been inextricably bound from the earliest stages of artistic instruction through the daily life of painters' workshops. In this study, author David Pullins defines artisanal and artistic means of learning, seeing, and making through a system of "mobile images": motifs that were effectively engineered for mobility and designed never to be definitive, always awaiting replication and circulation. He examines the careers of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and Francois Boucher, situating them against a much broader cast of actorssuch as printmakers, publishers, anonymous studio assistants, and architects, among othersto place eighteenth-century painting within a wider context of media and making. Reframing long-held assumptions about what distinguishes fine from decorative art, this innovative study explores a mode of making, seeing, and thinking that slices across eighteenth-century visual culture. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781606068885

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher (Paperback)
• Publisher: Getty Trust Publications, Santa Monica CA
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606068881
• ISBN 13: 9781606068885
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

Reframing long-held assumptions about what distinguishes fine from decorative art, this innovative study explores a mode of making, seeing, and thinking that slices across eighteenth-century visual culture.

This book provides a new way of thinking about eighteenth-century French art and visual culture by prioritizing production over reception. Abandoning the ideologically driven discourse that distinguished fine from decorative art between the 1690s and 1770s, The Mobile Image reveals how the two have been inextricably bound from the earliest stages of artistic instruction through the daily life of painters’ workshops. In this study, author David Pullins defines artisanal and artistic means of learning, seeing, and making through a system of “mobile images”: motifs that were effectively engineered for mobility and designed never to be definitive, always awaiting replication and circulation. He examines the careers of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and François Boucher, situating them against a much broader cast of actors—such as printmakers, publishers, anonymous studio assistants, and architects, among others—to place eighteenth-century painting within a wider context of media and making.

About the Author

David Pullins is Jayne Wrightsman Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is responsible for seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French, Italian, and Spanish painting.