Joseph Ducreux
Painter of the Queen, King of the Memes —
It began with this captivating portrait of Marie Antoinette:
In 1769, French portrait painter, Joseph Ducreux, traveled from Paris to Vienna on commission to create a miniature of the fourteen-year-old archduchess of Austria. The portrait was sent on to France’s King Louis XVI so he might see the face of the woman he was to marry the following year. Marie Antoinette was pleased enough with Ducreux’s likeness of her that she later made him a noble baron and First Painter to the Queen.
Ducreux had left his hometown of Nancy in the northeast of France in 1760, to study in Paris with pastelist, Maurice Quentin de la Tour.
Ducreux studied oil painting with Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
When the French Revolution started in 1789, Decreux went to London. While there, he painted the last portrait of King Louis XVI. Shortly afterward, the King was executed.
In 1793, Ducreux returned to Paris, where he picked up his official duties as portrait painter in the Royal Court. Ducreux painted portraits of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, author of Dangerous Liaison and Maria Theresa, the Holy Roman Empress (and mother of the recently beheaded Marie Antoinette).
Then, Joseph Ducreux attempted to break through the strictures of classical portraiture. The Dutch legacy from the previous century presented a sameness and somber mood from its Calvinist cultural influence. Dutch portraitist, Frans Hals, loosened the lid. His portrait of Willem Heythuijsen influenced Ducreux. It showed an informal and cheerful mood, stretching the boundary for what was acceptable in portrait painting.
A contemporary sculptor in Germany, who also did work for the Austrian Royal Court, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, made busts of characters with extreme expressions. An observer in Messerschmidt’s studio reported that Messerschmidt pinched himself hard in the ribs and studied the expressions he made from the pain.
Ducreux was further influenced by the “detailed realism” of the Dutch, and especially by the Dutch form, tronie, a genre of portrait painting depicting the head of a figure, emphasizing a facial expression of feeling or character.
Ducreux’s informal portraits reflected his interest in physiognomy, or the assessment of people’s characters and personalities through their facial or bodily characteristics and appearances. As Leonardo da Vinci declared, “Those who have deep and noticeable lines between the eyebrows are irascible.”
Here are examples of Ducreux’s well-known, less-than-formal portraits.
Joseph Ducreux’s portraits have come down to us through two hundred years of cultural history. We find Ducreux memes saturating the internet and social media sites.
For a compendium of Ducreux memes, check out:
https://www.pinterest.com/theetypie/joseph-ducreux/
The website, widewalls.ch, reports on Ducreux memes: “It was in 2009 that Self-portrait of the Artist in the Guise of a Mockingbird first penetrated into popular culture when someone archaically rewrote rap lyrics across it. The simple lyrics of Notorious B.I.G.’s 1995 song, Get Money: “Fuck Bitches, Get Money,” were applied to the painting as:
The meme exploded from there, with a range of internet dwellers superimposing antiquated translation of a range of rap songs’ lyrics, including “Who let the dogs out?” in the form of:
or “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” translated to:
In 2013, the ‘Do Not Despise the Racketeer” meme came in first place in the Tournament of Memes, hosted by Reddit.”
https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/joseph-ducreux-meme
More Ducreux memes:
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qju2l
Joseph Ducreux’s father was a painter. Three of Ducreux’s children, a son and two daughters, became painters. Ducreux partnered with painter, Jacques-Louis David (famous for his painting, “The Death of Marat”), to host a salon in Paris for artists and musicians.
Joseph Ducreux’s paintings currently are displayed in museums and art galleries worldwide, including: the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Museum in Stockholm, the Museé des Beaux-Arts de Rouen in France, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, and the Louvre Museum database and graphic art database.
