Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason

Claude Gillot, Three Actors in Heroic Costume, ca. 1700-12, pen and black ink, red wash. Wildenstein and Co., New York. Private Collection.

Glaude Gillot (1673-1722) designed everything from opera costumes to tapestries. Known primarily as a draftsman, Gillot specialised in scenes of satire. He found his subjects among the irreverant commedia dell’arte performances at fairground theatres, in the writings of satirists, and in the antics of vice-ridden satyrs whose bacchanals exposed human folly. Gillot’s amusing critiques and rational perspective heralded the advent of the Age of Reason while his innovative aproach attracted the most talented arists of the next generation, Antoine Watteau and Nicolas Lancret, to his studio.

With over seventy drawings, prints, and paintings, including an exceptional contingent from the Louvre, Claude Gillot Satire in the Age of Reason explores the artist’s inventive and highly original draftsmnship and places his work in the context of the artistic and intellectual activity in Paris at the dawn of a new century.