Powdery Love

                                                    Jean Honore Fragonard: The Love Letter                 circa 1770

         The Rococo era was the quintessence of life, an era in which people loved, and hated, and lived profusely like there was no tomorrow. Rococo society hid its rotten, smelling face behind heavy powder make-ups and wigs. They walked in a sickening perfume drift and listened to sensual music that easily opened bedroom doors. What corsets and petticoats made difficult the moral had facilitated. Fragonard, the famous French painter, was the perfect visual chronicler of the Rococo era.

         The Love letter is a lovely example of these flamboyant years, although it is not as sprawling a Rococo painting as Fragonard’s most famous work The Swing. This painting is not overflown by lustful trees and leaves but by curvy lines. The softly bending window and wall, the desk’s offset, and the drapes are all sensual in a very reserved way. These curved lines with the golden-brownish background give an enchanted, fairy-tale atmosphere to the scene.

         The young lady on the painting is not debauched yet, the moderately depicted scene and the bouquet of flowers in her hands prove it, but she is a native of Rococo too and she cannot back out of its impact. Today she is only an innocent girl, who sends a love letter to her chevalier, with her rosy cheeks – made up rosy but still – and she shares her secret with us. She looks out from the picture at the viewer as if he or she were her accomplice or the love letter carrier.

         From lecherous Rococo there is no further; it must be followed by a clearer and modest era. It was beheaded by the guillotine, and swept away by Napoleon and the neoclassic style. Rice powder melted from the pockmarked faces, and the bon vivant aristocrats evaporated.

         But as long as the world turns – until the world is the world – there will always be someone who sends a love letter.