SCHALL, Jean-Frédéric

French painter. He studied at the École Publique de Dessin in Strasbourg c. 1768 and in 1772 was admitted to the Académie Royale in Paris, where he was a pupil of Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié between 1776 and 1779. He did not become a member of the Académie and so could not exhibit at the SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. until the French Revolution. He worked for private patrons, producing erotic and pastoralGLOSSARYRelating to a romantic or idealized image of rural life; in classical literature, to a world peopled by shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs. subjects in a style influenced by François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Pierre-Antoine Baudouin; many of these pictures achieved popularity in the form of engravings. His most distinctive paintings are single figures of dancers and young ladies in soft, picturesqueGLOSSARYTerm covering a set of attitudes towards landscape, both real and painted, that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It indicated an aesthetic approach that found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and an attempt was made to establish it as a critical category between the 'beautiful' and the 'Sublime'. Picturesque scenes were thus neither serene (like the beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime), but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures — medieval ruins were quintessentially Picturesque. Natural scenery tended to be judged in terms of how closely it approximated to the paintings of favoured artists such as Gaspard Dughet, and in 1801 the Supplement to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary by George Mason defined 'Picturesque as: 'what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.' The Picturesque Tour in search of suitable subjects was a feature of English landscape painting of the period, exemplified, for example, in the work of Girtin and (early in his career) of Turner, and the Picturesque generated a large literary output; much of it was pedantic and obsessive and it became a popular subject for satire. landscape settings

In 1793-94 he painted the Heroism of William Tell (Musée des Beax-Arts, Strasbourg) but this politically engaged subject was exceptional in his output. Although he continued to paint erotic scenes, his later paintings have a delicate, evocative character that suggests the influence of Pierre-Paul Prud'hon. The moralizing theme and detailed finish of the False Appearance (Musée des Beax-Arts, Strasbourg), which was awarded a prize in the Salon of 1798, demonstrate Schall's ability to adapt both style and content to changing tastes. He also illustrated narrative scenes from historical and literary sources, from which series of prints were made, notably by Charles-Melchior Descourtis. Despite the variety of styles in which he worked, Schall is chiefly of interest as a belated exponent of the RococoGLOSSARYA style of design, painting, and architecture dominating the 18th century, often considered the last stage of the Baroque. Developing in the Paris townhouses of the French aristocracy at the turn of the 18th century, Rococo was elegant and ornately decorative, its mood lighthearted and witty. Louis XV furniture, richly decorated with organic forms, is a typical product. Leading exponents of the Rococo sryle included the French painters Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), and the German architect Johann Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753). Rococo gave way to Neo-classicism. whose work became a major source for the Rococo Revival at the time of his death.