Pierre Saint-Amand
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691149271
- eISBN:
- 9781400838714
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691149271.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter analyzes the dialogue in Jean-Siméon Chardin's work between labor and leisure, between effort and laziness. Chardin is known as a painter of domestic interiors, a remarkable portraitist ...
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This chapter analyzes the dialogue in Jean-Siméon Chardin's work between labor and leisure, between effort and laziness. Chardin is known as a painter of domestic interiors, a remarkable portraitist of individuals depicted while absorbed in everyday tasks. These paintings led to the nineteenth-century perception of Chardin as a witness to his bourgeois contemporaries. It is important to note, however, that Chardin is equally capable of treating his subjects with a light touch. The chapter then turns to his Bulles de savon (Soap Bubbles). Introducing into his painting a physics of subtlety, Chardin captures matter in its change of phase: the evolution of the liquid state into the gaseous, the miracle of air, liquid, and vapor; the precarious envelope of vacuous and full.Less
This chapter analyzes the dialogue in Jean-Siméon Chardin's work between labor and leisure, between effort and laziness. Chardin is known as a painter of domestic interiors, a remarkable portraitist of individuals depicted while absorbed in everyday tasks. These paintings led to the nineteenth-century perception of Chardin as a witness to his bourgeois contemporaries. It is important to note, however, that Chardin is equally capable of treating his subjects with a light touch. The chapter then turns to his Bulles de savon (Soap Bubbles). Introducing into his painting a physics of subtlety, Chardin captures matter in its change of phase: the evolution of the liquid state into the gaseous, the miracle of air, liquid, and vapor; the precarious envelope of vacuous and full.
Susan Mokhberi
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190884796
- eISBN:
- 9780190884826
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190884796.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History, Middle East History
Missionaries and travelers presented the earliest representations of Persia. Missionaries imagined the Safavid Shiite state as open to conversion to Christianity and an ally against the Sunni ...
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Missionaries and travelers presented the earliest representations of Persia. Missionaries imagined the Safavid Shiite state as open to conversion to Christianity and an ally against the Sunni Ottomans. Through Catholic writings, Frenchmen absorbed literature that portrayed Persia as tolerant and friendly to Europeans. French contacts with Persia increased under the patronage of Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Some of these travelers drew connections between the two monarchies. One of the most famous French travelers to Persia, Jean Chardin, depicted the Persian royal court as a model of comparison for the French. He not only described Persia to Frenchmen but also used it as a means to instruct and reflect upon French political and social institutions.Less
Missionaries and travelers presented the earliest representations of Persia. Missionaries imagined the Safavid Shiite state as open to conversion to Christianity and an ally against the Sunni Ottomans. Through Catholic writings, Frenchmen absorbed literature that portrayed Persia as tolerant and friendly to Europeans. French contacts with Persia increased under the patronage of Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Some of these travelers drew connections between the two monarchies. One of the most famous French travelers to Persia, Jean Chardin, depicted the Persian royal court as a model of comparison for the French. He not only described Persia to Frenchmen but also used it as a means to instruct and reflect upon French political and social institutions.
Pierre Saint-Amand
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691149271
- eISBN:
- 9781400838714
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691149271.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry—not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the ...
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We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry—not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the unceasing improvement of self and society? This book examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin, this book explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility. Whether in the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who delayed and procrastinated or in the subjects of Chardin's paintings who delighted in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand shows how eighteenth-century works provided a strong argument for laziness. Rousseau abandoned his previous defense of labor to pursue reverie and botanical walks, Diderot emphasized a parasitic strategy of resisting work in order to liberate time, and Joubert's little-known posthumous Notebooks radically opposed the central philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely postpone work. Unsettling the stubborn view of the eighteenth century as an age of frenetic industriousness and labor, this book plumbs the texts and images of the time and uncovers deliberate yearnings for slowness and recreation.Less
We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry—not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the unceasing improvement of self and society? This book examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin, this book explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility. Whether in the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who delayed and procrastinated or in the subjects of Chardin's paintings who delighted in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand shows how eighteenth-century works provided a strong argument for laziness. Rousseau abandoned his previous defense of labor to pursue reverie and botanical walks, Diderot emphasized a parasitic strategy of resisting work in order to liberate time, and Joubert's little-known posthumous Notebooks radically opposed the central philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely postpone work. Unsettling the stubborn view of the eighteenth century as an age of frenetic industriousness and labor, this book plumbs the texts and images of the time and uncovers deliberate yearnings for slowness and recreation.
Susan Mokhberi
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190884796
- eISBN:
- 9780190884826
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190884796.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History, Middle East History
Engravings of Mohammad Reza Beg were struck for his visit to France in 1715. Many of the images highlighted his foreign clothing and habits such as smoking and bathing, which in most cases were ...
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Engravings of Mohammad Reza Beg were struck for his visit to France in 1715. Many of the images highlighted his foreign clothing and habits such as smoking and bathing, which in most cases were recognizable curiosities and already had stimulated trends in French fashion and culture. In France, consumers bought and consumed goods, such as coffee and expensive fabrics, that had been considered exotic but, by the time of the Beg’s visit in 1715, had been adapted as their own. The prints functioned to highlight his foreign tastes, but at the same time, they tempered his exoticness to make him accessible to the French and more like themselves.Less
Engravings of Mohammad Reza Beg were struck for his visit to France in 1715. Many of the images highlighted his foreign clothing and habits such as smoking and bathing, which in most cases were recognizable curiosities and already had stimulated trends in French fashion and culture. In France, consumers bought and consumed goods, such as coffee and expensive fabrics, that had been considered exotic but, by the time of the Beg’s visit in 1715, had been adapted as their own. The prints functioned to highlight his foreign tastes, but at the same time, they tempered his exoticness to make him accessible to the French and more like themselves.
Susan Mokhberi
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190884796
- eISBN:
- 9780190884826
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190884796.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History, Middle East History
The Persian Mirror explores France’s preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats, and even ordinary Parisians were ...
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The Persian Mirror explores France’s preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats, and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador’s visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction, and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of Orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.Less
The Persian Mirror explores France’s preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats, and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador’s visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction, and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of Orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.
