GRE Reading Comprehension
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Source: XDF
All of Francoise Duparc's surviving paintings blend portraiture and genre. Her subjects appear to be acquaintances whom she has asked to pose; she has captured both their self-consciousness and the spontaneity of their everyday activities, the depiction of which characterizes genre painting. But genre painting, especially when it portrayed members of the humblest classes, was never popular in eighteenth-century France. The Le Nain brothers and Georges de La Tour, who also chose such themes, were largely ignored. Their present high standing is due to a different, more democratic political climate and to different aesthetic values: we no longer require artists to provide ideal images of humanity for our moral edification but rather regard such idealization as a falsification of the truth. Duparc gives no improving message and discreetly refrains from judging her subjects. In brief, her works neither elevate nor instruct. This restraint largely explains her lack of popular success during her lifetime, even if her talent did not go completely unrecog-nized by her eighteenth-century French contemporaries.
If the history of Duparc's artistic reputation were to follow that of the Le Nain brothers and Georges de La Tour, present-day assessments of her work would be likely to contain which of the following?
- A An evaluation that accords high status to her work
- B Acknowledgement of her technical expertise but dismissal of her subject matter as trivial
- C Agreement with assessments made in her own time but acknowledgements of the exceptional quality of a few of her paintings
- D Placement of her among the foremost artists of her century
- E A reclassification of her work as portraiture rather than genre painting