ABSTRACT
Beauty, the beauty of women, her perishable and charming material form, seems to follow human fashions and to be remoulded by every society in the Creator's hands to conform to the ideal of the day. In the eighteenth century what was that ideal? Question art, that magic mirror where the Coquetry of the past still smiles; visit museums, studies, collections; stroll through galleries, where a salon of another day, ranged along the walls, motionless, mute, seems to watch the present pass by; study prints, go through engravings where, in the gust of the paper, passes the shadow of women who are no more; go from Nattier to Drouais, from Latour to Roslin, consult the thousand and one portraits which give a body to history and a physical personality to so many personages who have disappeared; summon the woman of the eighteenth century, resuscitate her, weigh her with your eyes, feel her a presence at your side, and you will find three types expressing and resuming the three general characteristics of the beauty of the eighteenth century and its three moral expressions.
