Word: rigaud
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Breaking the rules naturally became the sly ambition of the more skilled and spirited artists. One such was Hyacinthe Rigaud, portraitist of the Marquis de Dangeau. Rigaud's primary purpose was obviously to flatter, but in so doing he threw all of Le Brun's strictures out the window. Voluptuous draperies billow in the background in the manner of Rubens. The gold and glitter become a feast not for the mind but the eye; color dominates form, and classicism surrenders to baroque self-indulgence. In few works of art was Louis' age of splendor shown up more...
Strolling over the Louvre's polished parquet floors, Bazin likes to philosophize on two great portraits. Titian's Francis I (who seems to be examining the jewel of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa) and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV (loftily surveying the great expanse of the 300-yard-long Grande Galerie). Both have a right to their proprietary air. Bazin feels, since, along with Napoleon, they are among the Louvre's greatest benefactors...
...Rigaud Benoit made the Christ child in his Nativity a mulatto out of deference to Rodman, though his personal opinion is that "God is white, and the Devil is black, or else dark red, like Damballa [a voodoo deity]." Philome Obin prayed every day before going to work on the center panel above the altar, stuck a chromo cliche "Eye of God" in one corner and painted a strangely feminine, death-rigid Christ crucified in a Haitian street. Castera Bazile, the only one of the Haitian muralists with a monumental sense of figure composition, used a similar street scene...
...Strauss Goes to Boston (music by Robert Stolz & Johann Strauss Jr.; lyrics by Robert Sour; book by Leonard L. Levinson; produced by Felix Brentano) opened Broadway's 1945-46 season without letting in much fresh air. An operetta about Johann Strauss (George Rigaud) headlining the great Boston Jubilee of 1872 and breaking hearts on Beacon Hill, it muffs the three real opportunities provided by the story. Far from conveying any of the devilish Strauss charm it babbles about, the book doesn't even billow with good lush operetta sentiment; it is just crushingly dull...
...song and is destined most likely to fall into the clutches of the radio. The second act, getting off to a boring start and failing to attain the standards set by the first, featured ballet routines well danced by Harold Lang and Babs Heath. In a stirring finale Mr. Rigaud gave a ridiculous performance of Strauss conducting a 1000 piece orchestra, a chorus of 20,000 voices, and 150 clattering firemen, which had been assembled for a Peace Jubilee Concert...