To the Editors:
In his stimulating review of the National Gallery’s Watteau exhibition, Jed Perl takes the design department of the Gallery to task for displaying the paintings against dark backgrounds, grey-green, grey-blue and grey-plum. He suggests that this is contrary to historical precedent and that “pale green or cream [would have been] more in line with period taste.”
The popular belief that dix-huitième taste leaned toward pale, even pastel, colours seems to have arisen quite late in the nineteenth century. Evidence of how paintings were hung in eighteenth-century France (or elsewhere) is scanty. But such as there is points in the opposite direction.
That it was impossible to hang paintings on the light-toned (Perl’s “cream”) panelling picked out with gold on elaborately carved moldings, was a constantly reiterated charge against the rococo style from its inception. A few artists, Watteau and Lancret amongst them, occasionally attempted to pictorialise the surface of the panels by painting on them but the rarity of the practice suggests that it was not greatly admired.
The most complete evidence for the way a painting collection was hung in eighteenth-century Paris are the five miniatures by Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe of the various rooms in the Hôtel de Choiseul, where the greatest collection of paintings formed in France in the middle years of the century was hung. Here all the backgrounds are of strong, deep colours: a deep, almost strident magenta, a strong royal blue, and in the Cabinet à l’Octogonewhere the
