Paris’s Art World in the Empire and Restoration

The institutional upheaval of the Revolutionary period stabilized rapidly during the Directory. The Directory government established the Institut de France—a meritocratic society that rewards the lifetime achievements of French citizens with lifetime membership—and established an École des Beaux-Arts. Superficially at least, this replaced the ancien régime Académie royale’s functions as a place where France’s greatest artists were celebrated and emerging artists were trained. However, neither the École des Beaux-Arts nor the Institut de France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts enjoyed the monopoly status that the Académie royale held during the reign of Louis XVI. Rather, a large share of power in determining droit d’entrée, the cursus honorum, and the direction of the progrès des arts was vested in the hands of the state and consolidated in 1802 under the aegis of a new permanent administrative post: the Directeur des Musées.²

The Rise of the Arts Administrator

At the end of the Consulate, Napoleon Bonaparte, then the Premier Consul, created the position of Directeur des Musées and named Dominique Vivant Denon, an engraver of aristocratic origins, to the post in 1802. His responsibilities included purchasing Old Master and contemporary art; populating and otherwise overseeing the Louvre Museum, which Napoleon renamed the Musée Napoléon; distributing artwork nationally across collections; making state commandes or requisitions for new artwork; organizing the Salon exhibition; and overseeing the École des Beaux-Arts, which had its own Director and set of professors. This position, which oversaw much of France’s official art system, answered primarily to the Premier Consul and, from 1804 onward, to the Emperor. In the Restoration, the position instead fell under the Maison du Roi, not unlike the ancien régime, where it fell under the Directeur Général des Bâtiments.

Denon, however, stayed on in his role, smoothly making the transition from the Napoleonic Empire to the return of the Bourbon monarchy and then back to the Napoleonic Empire during Napoleon’s Hundred Days. Stepping down only after Napoleon’s second and more devastating defeat, which resulted in the restitution of the spoils of war that had enriched the Louvre’s collections, Denon was succeeded by his general secretary, Athanase Lavallée, who briefly took on Denon’s role until Auguste de Forbin was named Directeur des Musées.³ Bonapartist and Royalist artists alike took note of what they characterized as Machiavellian maneuvers and published a series of images in 1814 and 1816 that ridiculed Denon and Lavallée.

Satirists also took this opportunity to comment on the collecting practices of the Louvre Museum. Its collections were continuously enriched by the spoliations from both the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.⁴ Denon curated these new additions to the museum. In 1807, for instance, he unveiled the “Salle de la Victoire,” which featured a colossal bronze bust of Napoleon crowned with a wreath of laurels. Sculpted by Lorenzo Bartolini, the bust was positioned to look over the cultural spoils of war that surrounded it, as captured by watercolorist and painter Benjamin Zix in his Visite de personnages étrangers dans le Museum National (Foreigners visiting the National Museum).⁵

A Royalist satirist’s untitled response celebrates the return of the Bourbon monarchy and the downfall of the Musée Napoléon and Denon, associating the former with classical Greek and Roman sculpture and the latter with “primitive” art forms such as ancient Egyptian art (Figure 3.2). The verse below the image suggests that with Napoleon’s downfall and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the latter symbolized by the lily, this wrong would be righted again:

Dans l’enfance des arts on adoroit apis,

ibis, chats. Et magots. Trop illustres de Nom.

On les fêtoit encor avec Napoleon.

Mais les arts pour fleurir, n’attendoient que les Lys.⁶

[In art’s childhood we adored Apis,

Ibis, cats and macaques. Such illustrious Names.

We celebrated them too with Napoleon.

But the arts for to flourish, awaited but the Lily.]

The image apes some of the papyri that Denon described in his 1802 publication Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte (Voyage in Lower and Upper Egypt) but pictures Denon as a satyr who presents incense to a monumental sculpture of Isis suckling Horus as he steps on a classical torso in his scramble to idolize ancient Egyptian statuary. The satire accuses Napoleon of having permitted works of classical antiquity to languish in ruins behind Denon’s burning incense and a drop wall.

This satire reappears in the background of an image titled Le figaro de La Valée (Figure 3.3), which pictures Denon, with the same balding pattern, seated for a shave from Figaro, the barber of Seville, as drawn from the successful 1772 play by Pierre Beaumarchais. The addition of La Valée in the title indicates to us that Lavallée plays the role of Figaro and is poised to shave Denon, who reminisces with Lavallée, the latter of whom will succeed him upon the former’s departure. Denon says, “Mon cher nous avons brillé ensemble dans le grand siecle” (My dear together we shined during the great century).

Lavallée reappears as Figaro in two further prints that mock the Imperial duo’s brief shift of allegiances to the Bourbon monarchy. In Saute pour Le Roy (Jump for The King, Figure 3.4), Denon is pictured as a monkey who dutifully obeys the arbitrary commands of his master, the king, as he leaps over a regal fleur-de-lis (lily flower). In the background, Lavallée as Figaro removes Bartolini’s bronze bust from the museum formerly known as the Musée Napoléon. Indeed, the name has been roughly scratched from the façade of the museum in this satirical engraving.

The saute pour le roi theme, here employed to ridicule Denon and Lavallée, was also used to mock Napoleon upon his first exile to the island of Elba in Royalist imagery that has been preserved in the Collection de Vinck, where Napoleon, pictured as a performing animal, is ordered to obediently jump onto the island upon which he was (briefly) exiled (Figure 3.5). The theme is reprised for Lavallée and Denon in L’Ane Noir et le Singe Vivant avec son Chat (Figure 3.6). A donkey here labeled as “Black Ass” and covered with the insignia of the Bourbon monarchy represents the duc de Blacas, minister of the Maison du Roi during the first Bourbon Restoration but dismissed after the Hundred Days.⁷

Lavallée, whose face and characteristic barber’s brush has been faithfully copied from earlier satires, entertains himself at Blacas’s side by toying with his Legion of Honor cross, while Denon, adorned with an array of medals, once again performs his saute pour le roi in the guise of a monkey. Denon’s relatively brief service to the Bourbon monarchy evidently prompted a hefty satirical response from Monarchists and Republicans alike. His and Lavallée’s satirical representations render them amongst the most caricatured individuals within this corpus.

It is evident too that Royalist and Bonapartist artists alike took advantage of these moments of political turbulence to publish satires that directly lampooned administrative figures, signaling to us that artists were both extremely attentive to administrative shifts but also very cautious and restrained in how and when they commented on them. It is important, then, that we consider the effects of other significant structural shifts on the art world so that we can be attentive to the ways in which artists obliquely commented on them, as we will see later in this chapter.

Replacing the Academic and Corporate System

In 1803, the Consulate reshuffled the Institut de France to designate a fine arts class—the Fourth and last class. In 1816, the Bourbon monarchy retitled these classes “Académies,” thus renaming the Fourth Class the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts, not to be confused with the ancien régime Académie royale, whose membership included artists at many stages of their career whereas the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ members were extremely senior and established in their careers.⁸ This newfound Académie des Beaux-Arts shared little but the moniker of “academy” with the Académie royale, the latter of which was artist-administered and retained widespread jurisdiction over the practice, exhibition, and patronage of its artists and, indeed, any artiste libre operating in Paris.

The Académie des Beaux-Arts retained control over the Académie de France à Rome, judged the Prix de Rome at the École des Beaux-Arts (EBA), and recommended all of the latter’s professors, almost all of whom, across this period, were either current members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts or for mer pensioners of the Académie de France à Rome.⁹ They selected their own membership to fill vacancies when they arose, tending to award prior winners of the Prix de Rome.¹⁰ They thus retained control over a very limited and narrow path within the cursus honorum that applied exclusively to aspiring history painters. They administered the institution where winners of the Prix de Rome stayed and trained, and rewarded the winners with membership in their institutional body. They also awarded winners with professorships at the adjacent EBA. Considering that the EBA prepared students to compete for the Prix de Rome, this formed a rather closed and quite nepotistic loop. The École des Beaux-Arts was populated with professors drawn from the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ ranks and served more as a “finishing school” than a provider of full artistic formation.

The EBA’s Prix de Rome—the most prestigious and competitive of its contests—promised a career trajectory of greatness and glory, insofar as one could not really expect to be awarded membership to the Institut de France without it. The EBA’s other concours or contests, however, could not promise a similarly illustrious trajectory though winners of these concours received their medals at the Salon exhibition.¹¹ Only the most exceptional success at the EBA Salon promised the possibility of being elected a member of the École des Beaux-Arts. This rather narrow and unlikely path contributed to the EBA’s growing redundancy within Paris’s artistic landscape, which, as we will discuss further, quickly reoriented its center of gravity to the Salon exhibition, presided over by the Directeur des Musées. Though only a quarter of artists who exhibited at the Salon ever enrolled at the EBA, enrollment in a private studio, where the “nuts and bolts” of artistic practice were passed on to students, remained indisputably important.¹²

Completing our ouroboric loop, Institut membership also served as a beacon, signaling which private studios students ought to join if they aspired to national artistic renown.¹³ Indeed, young artists who trained in the studios of Académie des Beaux-Arts members were most likely to win the Prix de Rome. Under the Empire, François Vincent’s (elected in 1795) and Jacques-Louis David’s (elected in 1803) studios had a near monopoly on the Prix de Rome. Under the Restoration, after David fled Paris, Gros became the leading producer of pensionnaires (resident [of the Académie de France à Rome]), followed by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Girodet (all elected in 1816), and Jean-Baptiste Regnault (elected in 1795). The studios most likely to secure a Prix contracted slightly, but not significantly, in the July Monarchy.¹⁴

It is important that we lay this groundwork here. The Académie des Beaux-Arts’s specific and ouroboric domain of influence on only the most prestigious of artists—those practicing in the grand genre—opened these artists up to what would be a damning criticism: that an artistic aristocracy existed and separated the artists who had from the artists who had not. Empire and Res toration satirists evidenced a burgeoning awareness of these inequities and articulated their frustrations indirectly in art-world satire. Later, July Monarchy artists criticized these same inequities more directly, in part because their political language was more Republican and proto-socialist, and in part because Empire and Restoration art-world satire laid the essential groundwork for future criticism.

Unlike the former Académie royale, the Institut exercised very little control over the art presented to Parisian publics in the Salon exhibition throughout the Empire and Restoration, nor did they gain significant influence in determining how the Directeur des Musées rewarded or patronized artists on behalf of the Empire or Bourbon monarchy. Only in the July Monarchy did the Académie des Beaux-Arts gain any foothold in influencing contemporary art exhibitions or state encouragement when they began judging the Salon exhibition, as we will explore in Chapter 4.

The Emergence of the Salon System

The Salon exhibition lost significant ground during the Salon libres of the Revolutionary period. Under Denon and his Restoration successor de Forbin, the Directeur des Musées transformed the Salon exhibition into the major droit d’entrée (cost of entry) for artists active in Paris. During the Revolutionary Period, the Salon exhibition was largely ignored by Paris’s most celebrated artists, who claimed that they preferred to be represented instead by their students. Accordingly, the Salon attracted few visitors, especially when compared to ancien régime and Imperial Salons, as indicated by the number of livrets sold. In 1802, the Minister of the Interior sought to re-establish the Salon as the premier art-world event by circulating a letter to leading artists, including David, Vincent, Gérard, Guérin, Girodet, and Jean-Baptiste Isabey, notifying them that Napoleon himself would be visiting the show.¹⁵

Denon, who was appointed Directeur des Musées just after the Salon of 1802, instituted policies that placed the Salon exhibition at the center of Paris’s art world, and as such rendered the Directeur des Musées and the head of state to whom he reported the chief gatekeepers in moderating this droit d’entrée to professional artistic practice. This was effected via a system of encouragements where artistic achievement was recognized and rewarded by the Directeur des Musées without consultation with the Académie des Beaux-Arts’s members. Recognition of artistic achievement occurred at the Salon alone.¹⁶ This system of encouragements awarded cash prizes equivalent to the price of small-or large-format paintings to artists who displayed exemplary artworks at the Salon, essentially paying artists for material and labor costs without withdrawing their artworks from the private market. Occasionally Medals of Honor and, during the Bourbon Restoration, the Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, were awarded in recognition of significant career achievements. Young artists might receive a prix d’encouragement (incentive award) that commissioned them to produce copies of religious artwork or royal portraits destined for provincial churches or for diplomatic purposes. Importantly, the Directeur des Musées required that state commissions and purchases be issued only to artists who had displayed at the Salon that year.¹⁷ As such, established artists such as David and Vincent, who had long histories of receiving state patronage yet had largely refrained from Salon exhibition for the better part of a decade, could now no longer avoid Salon exhibition if they hoped to benefit from official recognition or future state commissions and purchases.¹⁸

Denon effectively created an art world that orbited around admission to the Salon exhibition.¹⁹ As a result, the number of visitors who attended the exhibit increased steadily during the Empire, with almost ten thousand more livrets sold between the Salon of 1802 and the Salon of 1804—the first Salon after the creation of the role of Directeur des Musées.²⁰ Consequently, artists and the public closely scrutinized the constitution of the Salon’s jury and the choices made in artwork and artist admissions.²¹ Under the Empire and Restoration, the Salon jury was composed of museum administrators, amateurs, and artists—often selected from the ranks of the Académie des Beaux-Arts—with the latter outnumbered by this new bureaucratic class.²² They refused a substantial number of works: in the Salon of 1806, 20 percent of artists who submitted artworks were refused, and in 1827, 46 percent of artworks were excluded by the jury.²³ Although critics accused the Salon jury of displaying favoritism toward their own students or of participating unfairly in the Classic-Romantic debates of the 1820s, the jury’s seemingly harsh decisions are most accurately explained by the overwhelming number of artworks submitted in relation to the limited places available to exhibit them.

The gap between artists who submitted works and artists who had work admitted widened considerably over the course of this period (Table 3.1). In 1806, 431 artists submitted work and 367 had work accepted; whereas in the last Restoration Salon of 1827, 1,226 artists submitted work and 732 had work admitted. The number of artists who submitted work nearly tripled in these twenty-one years, whereas the number of artists with work on display in the Salon only doubled.

In 1806 and 1827, artists advocated for a parallel Salon of refusés (refused) on the model of the former Expositions de la Jeunesses of the Place Dauphine under the ancien régime. One was staged in 1806, and again in 1827 at the Galerie Lebrun to very poor reception.²⁴ These generally unsuccessful alternate exhibitions demonstrate the extent to which Denon’s attempts to render both himself and the Salon central gatekeepers were extremely successful. Denon could maintain such an orbit because the Salon also determined artists’ material well-being. In the early nineteenth century, only about 6 percent of artists who exhibited artwork received a medal; however, almost all of those who did eventually had artwork purchased by the state. 42 percent of non-medaled artists also had work purchased, but no purchases were made of artists who did not show artwork at the Salon. Every artist was motivated to attempt to show at the Salon and virtually all did at least submit works to jury.²⁵

As the largest and most (relatively) regular exhibition of contemporary art, the Salon provided a crucial opportunity for artists to expose their work to new buying audiences, and the private market favored the genre mineurs.²⁶ Denon aspired to develop, and his Restoration successor de Forbin succeeded in developing, an encouragements policy that promoted these genres, which included genre painting, landscape painting, and the style now known as Troubadour painting but known by contemporaries as genre historique (historical genre) or genre anecdotique (anecdotal genre).²⁷ In the Salon exhibition of 1827, for instance, the most dominant genres mineures on display were portraiture (272 paintings), genre (341 paintings), and landscape (383) in comparison to fifty-two history paintings, seventy-one religious paintings, and twenty-nine mythological paintings.²⁸ However, the Restoration public not privy to the total numbers of works admitted in relation to those refused were instead presented with a startling visual effect that conveyed, mistakenly, the jury’s disdain for the grand genre. In the Salon of 1827, 14 percent or roughly one in seven paintings on display at the Salon exhibition were in the grand genre.

Imperial and Restoration Salon exhibitions thus became an art-world battleground of sorts—a centerpiece in the political economy of the art world. But we have yet to address an obvious early nineteenth-century contest: between the already dominant Neoclassical style and steadily emerging sometimes expressive, colorist, and painterly, sometimes fan tastical, tempestuous, and otherworldly Romantic styles. Art-world satire commented rather ambivalently on the Classic-Romantic debates that erupted amongst critics of the 1824 and 1827 Salons.²⁹ Restoration satirical imagery that targeted the Classic-Romantic debates merely noted and mocked the existence of the debates rather than taking sides.

Alexandre-Joseph Desenne’s pair of lithographs, published in 1825 and again in 1826, picture Le Peintre Classique (The Classic Painter, Figure 3.7) and Le Peintre Romantique (The Romantic Painter, Figure 3.8). Both painters differ in age and dress. The Classical painter is an older man who sports pincenez and leans into his painting, refining microscopic details. His mode of dress recalls the ancien régime, as he is bewigged and in culottes with a decorated vest. However, he lives in destitution in a dirty attic apartment infested with mice. The Romantic painter is significantly younger and more modern in his dress. He works a larger canvas and leans forward, indicating a more spirited, engaged, and emotive approach to painterly gesture. Though his apartment is better furnished, it is still a mess and he has absentmindedly mistaken a cleaning lady for a model. Desenne sneaks in a jab at the recently deceased Théodore Géricault, who had enlisted in Louis XVIII’s short-lived musketeers. The satire’s Romantic painter wears the emblazoned cross and riding pants characteristic of the Restoration musketeer uniform.³⁰

The 1828 Album Classico-Romantique, printed by Marlet and published by Chaillou Potrelle, pictures an elderly Classical painter and a young Romantic painter jousting with their mahlsticks.³¹ The album otherwise invents a series of subjects and compares their Classical and Romantic permutations, for instance Achilles dragging the body of Hector triumphantly behind his chariot (Figures 3.9 and 3.10).³² The treatment in the ancienne école (former school) is neurotically staged and ordered: the horses gallop in perfect unison, Achilles pulls at their reigns calmly, standing perfectly erect, and Horace, though he is being dragged, maintains an impossibly elegant posture. Even Achilles’s army cheers in perfect unison, neatly arranged along the horizon and conveniently gathered in the single corner visible to the viewer from this angle. The nouvelle école (new school) differs in every conceivable way. The perfectly flat scene presented in the ancienne école image has been rotated to strike the picture plane at a diagonal. Achilles’s horses are so frantic and excited that it is unlikely Achilles could maintain any control of his chariot. And Hector has been so contorted and twisted by being dragged that his behind is now humiliatingly bared to the viewer.

Though art-world satire was disinterested in siding with either Classic or Romantic styles, it did find innovative ways of responding to the emergence of a Salon-dominated arts system. Notably, the Salon became an important deus ex machina, overtaking the intervention of a connoisseur in earlier narrative representations. When connoisseurs interceded, they did so primarily as judges of a prize or contest in parallel to the emergence of a robust système d’encouragements in the Empire and Restoration’s Salon-dominated art system.

In Angela, ou L’Atelier de Jean-Cousin (Angela, or The Studio of Jean-Cousin, 1814) and L’Atelier de peinture (The Painting Studio, 1823), both protagonists overcome the obstacles to their love by winning a drawing prize or the Prix de Rome itself.³³ Similarly, in the 1814 vaudeville Monsieur Crouton, discussed below, Crouton and Jules apply to the connoisseur de Blainville for admission to the Salon exhibition. Jules’s petition is motivated by his love for Colette, the daughter of his master Lacolle, who is a paper decorator. In Les Dames peintres, ou l’Atelier à la mode (The Lady Painters, or The Fashionable Workshop, 1827), a different Jules behaves similarly. One of the only male students of a studio run by a Madame Palmer, Jules hopes to earn Madame Palmer’s approval by winning the Prix de Rome so that she will give him the hand of Lucile, a student over whom she is guardian. Jules wins the Prix de Rome and thus earns Lucile’s hand, again because this contest either ensures or reveals that he has a promising future artistic career.³⁴

In these plays, is winning proof of artistic ability and genius and thus simply symptomatic of it? Or does it actually cause and determine future success, and thus, regardless of the presence or absence of genius, ensure a profitable career and future glory and renown? Derban, when justifying his desire to give his daughter’s hand to the winner of the Prix de Rome, sings:

Il faut avoir les talens, la science,

Pour se monter un jour avec éclat;

Par son génie ou bien par sa vaillance,

Autant qu’on peut il faut servire l’état.

· · ·

Pour être artiste, un bon coeur avant tout.³⁵

[One must have talent, learning,

To rise one day with brilliance;

By one’s genius or else by one’s courage,

As much as one can one must serve the state.

· · ·

To be an artist, (one must have) a good heart before all else.]

For Derban, genius, goodness, and service to the state are all entangled with one another and success is simply outward proof of the presence of those characteristics and proclivities.

Similarly, when Jules appeals to Madame Palmer for permission to marry Lucile, she interrupts him, reminding him of his reputation in the studio as lazy and prone to playing pranks on his classmates. She will only accept as proof of transformation and of future success the procurement of a Prix de Rome.³⁶ In both cases, winning prizes and contests is solicited as proof of character, virtue, future success, and genius. The relationship between prizes and genius is, however, weaker than the relationship between prizes and success.

A. Barincou encapsulates the ambiguity of the cursus honorum poignantly in his 1824 Vive la Peinture!!! (Figure 3.1). In Barincou’s image, the Salon of 1824 is depicted as an arena in which the glory and obscurity of artists are decided. But Apollo, atop the building, is the only element that suggests that the battle in this arena is dignified, or at least meant to be.³⁷ The scene below Apollo sharply contrasts these pretenses. The Salon-as-arena is rendered a baker’s furnace that doles out meaningless and misleading accolades and condemnations. This furnace does not produce true glory but rather a facsimile in the baked wreaths of laurels. And the byproduct of this furnace—the smoke it generates—buoys up the already glorious, such as David and his students.

A Diversifying Market for Contemporary Art

Barincou’s image alerts us to the inadequacy of the système d’encouragements and the Salon system in the face of Paris’s burgeoning population of artists. But it was not until 1818, upon the establishment of a second new museum, that Paris’s private market for art began blossoming in unprecedented ways. That museum was the Musée des Artistes Vivants (Museum of Living Artists), housed at the Luxembourg Palace.³⁸ After its establishment, contemporary French artists began fetching record prices at auction, and investors increasingly employed speculative purchasing tactics, buying up works that enjoyed critical success at the Salon before the Directeur des Musées could purchase works for the State at the close of the Salon.³⁹

The Musée des Artistes Vivants only displayed the works of living painters. Once deceased, their artworks were transferred to the Louvre Museum. Works by established painters were displayed in the highest quantities: for instance, under Louis XVIII, David and Guérin were the best represented artists of their generation, though younger artists such as Horace Vernet were also well represented.⁴⁰ Though little work has been done on the acquisitions and display strategies of the Restoration and July Monarchy Musée des Artistes Vivants, we do know that acquisitions were made, of course, at the Salon exhibition.⁴¹

Empire and especially Restoration art-world satire became more and more vocal about the private market for art, inventing new tropes and elaborating existing ones to express concerns about the dominance of the genres mineures in the private market for art. A distinctive social type emerged in graphic satire exclusively: the well-to-do portraitist who prostitutes his artistic creation at the expense of his glory but to the benefit of his financial well-being. The prostituting portraitist succumbs to market demand and toils in mediocrity, suffering absurd sitters and patrons but in a comfortable abode and dressed in fine clothing. As we will discuss, the Crouton type briefly overlaps with the prostituting portraitist in the 1815 Lady-Formité et Fidèle. Otherwise, this type recurs with startling regularity: a caricatured set of sitters happily pose for a well-dressed painter, as in Paul-André Basset’s 1806 Le Tableau de Famille (The Family Piece), which counterfeits and appropriates the 1781 English satire by Henry Bunbury, A Family Piece.⁴²

And who would commission a portrait but a bourgeois patron? The ancien régime and Revolution’s connoisseur-as-patron disappears from the stage, replaced instead by the anonymous doling out of prizes and winning of contests. In graphic satire, the connoisseur persists, but is transformed from the elderly, bewigged, chapeau bras and sword-sporting connoisseur with loupe, to the middle-aged bourgeois fashionably dressed connoisseur and art buyer. The means by which their ineptitude is visualized remains consistent: they look too closely, wielding magnifying devices; they exhibit inappropriate enthusiasm for lewd imagery; or they are easily duped by brocanteurs into regarding debased refuse as works of genius. Increasingly, at the end of the Restoration and with greater frequency into the July Monarchy, the bourgeois connoisseur was depicted not only as a judge whose opinion is irrelevant or dangerous, but also as shallow and inept, incapable of exclaiming anything but a deeply affected “cha’mant!” (cha’ming!, i.e. charming) before unworthy works of art.

The bourgeois connoisseurs of graphic satire are presented more as charlatans who confuse their wealth with class. They are speculators rather than inheritors of wealth, and thus cultural capital does not accompany their social capital. Not coincidentally, this is the first instance in which women feature among our connoisseurs, all otherwise previously exclusively male. Connoisseurship becomes a characteristic of the new bourgeois class, and in this process, the connoisseur becomes more inept and noisome than ever. For instance, in an 1824 image by Edmé-Jean Pigal, an elderly middle-class man adopts a connoisseurial demeanor to impart advice to a painter—a painter of doors (Figure 3.11).

This trend is particularly evident in Hippolyte Bellangé’s 1825 image of an elderly and scruffy painter in his drafty mansarde who paints right next to his furnace (Figure 3.12). He has a visitor: an immaculately dressed and coiffed dandy whose dress is reminiscent of the fashionable calicots, with a cinched waist that dramatically contrasts his puffed chest and flowing coattails.⁴³ Either a connoisseur or the patron of the portrait, the visitor adopts the affectations of connoisseurship, saddling up to the painting and wielding a monocle to peer at it more closely. The painter behind him holds his hand pensively to his chin, prepared to receive the wisdom of this connoisseurial figure. However, the caption, which contains the punchline to this image’s joke, ventriloquizes the faux connoisseur’s vacuous commentary: “Mon cher! . . . c’est cha’mant!” (“My dear! . . . it’s cha’ming!”).

The vacuity of the bourgeois connoisseur reappears in Jules-Joseph-Guillaume Bourdet’s 1828 C’est un Morceau Capital (Figure 3.13).⁴⁴ A fashionable and devilish painter, again with the overly cinched waist of the calicots, leans against a tiny landscape encased in an absurdly large and ornate frame that overpowers his artwork both in terms of its scale and its gaudiness. A bourgeois connoisseur, having lifted his monocle to his eye, is delighted by the painting and deems that “il fera le plus grand effet au salon” (it will have the greatest impact at the salon). Interestingly, he is accompanied by a fashionable and beautiful young woman—a recurrent figure throughout Restoration imagery who figures as the bourgeois connoisseur’s attractive companion, as in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Les amateurs de tableaux (Painting amateurs), where the woman is associated with the distorted and maligned bourgeois speculator beside her (Figure 3.14).

Accordingly, Restoration art dealers greatly increased in number in the 1820s, notable examples including Alphonse Giroux, Rittner and Goupil, and Durand-Ruel, for whom art dealing was a secondary and incidental aspect of their commercial practices. Each was, primarily, a publisher of images, a seller of art supplies, or a merchant of papeteries or stationery.⁴⁵ In the Restoration, the market for contemporary artworks was thus largely subsidiary to a bourgeois-targeted market for luxury commodities and supplies concentrated around the neighborhood of the new bourse (stock market)—not coincidentally, the very same neighborhood that housed the publication and staging of popular imagery and theater.

The Artist’s Relationship to Popular Culture

Popular and satirical imagery became far more commercial and accessible from circa 1795 onward as the materiality of and environment for the printed image changed. Around 1795, several of Paris’s leading image publishers adapted their Revolutionary publishing models to suit new audiences and environments. Retaining the cheapness and timeliness normalized by Revolutionary print production, their subject matter shifted toward categories we might label entertaining: satires of morals and manners, fashion plates, images depicting scenes from popular theater, representations of military campaigns in the Revolutionary Wars, and so on.⁴⁶

Censorship conditions for the publication of graphic satire remained, however, quite tense, encouraging satirists to continue seeking safe places, such as cultural critique, to embed politically controversial stances. During the Consulate, a Bureau de la presse (Press office) was established to monitor the presses’ activities, and a few years later, an 1809 notice from the Préfecture de police (Police prefect) revealed that this monitoring was effected via a mandatory dépôt légal (legal deposit), which publishers of satirical imagery tended to avoid.⁴⁷ Though the Directory briefly dropped censorship restrictions in order to impose publication taxes, a new system was introduced in 1810 that allowed for images to be censored before publication: the dépôt légal of the Bureau de l’Imprimerie (Print office) required all image publishers to submit several copies of their images both for censorship review and to enrich state collections.⁴⁸ While the Restoration monarchy attempted to curry favor by instating freedom of the press—most likely a carryover from Napoleon’s Hundred Days, when he also dropped censorship—1820 and 1822 laws quickly reinstated the dépôt légal and autorisation préalable (prior authorization) requirement.⁴⁹ Those who failed to comply risked penalties including seizure, fines, and imprisonment for all involved in the publication of non-authorized images.⁵⁰

Theater’s censorship realities were similarly circuitous. Shortly after Napoleon named himself Emperor of the French, Paris’s proliferating nonofficial theaters were rapidly shuttered. The historically privileged and official theaters, to which was added the Théâtre de l’Impératrice, retained their rights to stage performances. However, after 1806, only five private theaters were invested with the privilege to stage performances: the Variétés, Vaudeville, Porte-Saint-Martin, Gaîté, and Variétés-Étrangères. The Restoration Monarchy upheld this return to the privilege system, which was only abolished in 1830 under the July Monarchy. However, Restoration enforcement of this system was much looser than under the Empire, and private theaters began to proliferate along the boulevards once more.⁵¹ Accordingly, I have found fourteen performances between 1808 and 1828 that represent Paris’s visual arts milieu.⁵²

The popular printed image also rapidly commercialized despite the dépôt legal requirement. At the turn of the century, paper—the most expensive part of producing printed images—was increasingly industrially produced by the roll rather than by the sheet.⁵³ And an entirely new, cheaper, and more direct printing medium was invented and gradually made its way to Paris: lithography.⁵⁴ Invented by Aloys Senefelder in 1796 to print sheet music more easily and cheaply, the technology traveled from Munich to London in 1801, and then to Paris in 1802, although for various reasons, the benefits of lithography were not immediately apparent to French publishers until 1816.⁵⁵ Around 1816, Gros began encouraging his students to learn lithography, making a lithographic press and tools available in his studio. His studio’s membership included many future leading lithographic publishers and illustrators. Many of these students were regular contributors to art-world graphic satire: Henry Monnier, Edmé-Jean Pigal, Auguste Raffet, Hippolyte Bellangé, Julien-Léopold Boilly, Fréderic Bouchot, Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, and Charles Philipon.⁵⁶

Art-world satire mirrored these broader shifts in the world of the printed image (Table 3.2). Intaglio methods, which include aquatint, mezzotint, etching, and engraving, dominated art-world satire until the end of the Empire, when lithography rapidly overtook intaglio as the medium of choice for graphic satire and art-world satire. But this shift of mediums brought much more with it than growing commercial availability. From 1817 onward, a brevet (certificate) was required to be a lithographic printer.⁵⁷ The brevets paint a portrait of early nineteenth-century lithographic printers: they were young (under thirty-five is the best represented demographic); overwhelmingly relocated to Paris from the provinces; and were mostly new to the business, with less than 10 percent born to parents in the image-making or printing industries.⁵⁸ Accordingly, they continued to effect the move from left bank to right inaugurated by the publisher Aaron Martinet’s print shop.⁵⁹

With the commercialization of satirical imagery came changes to its format.⁶⁰ Image publishers increasingly relied on serialization, that is, they published loosely related satirical images, many of which included a caption to help elaborate the joke of the image and were accompanied by a shared title and serial numbers.⁶¹ Martinet, located on rue du Coq, boasted a successful cabinet de lecture or reading room and a window full of his most recent images. He began marketing his images in series, including a Petite Galerie dramatique that, over the course of several years eventually ran in the thousands (Figure 2.3), and his ubiquitous Suprême Bon Ton series of satirical and fashionable street scenes.⁶²

The advent of lithography ushered in a new and often overlooked publishing format: the annual lithographic album. Published most notably by the frères Gihaut, these albums gathered together images on a variety of subjects (military, landscape, satirical) that ranged from sketched to pol ished work, often produced by a single artist. They were submitted to the legal deposit in December or January and likely targeted the New Year’s gift-giving market. They were also relatively inexpensive, priced at one franc per image, and, befitting their New Year’s gift-giving purposes, often included precisely twelve images.⁶³

The frontispieces to these lithographic albums in fact become a site for the evolution of the trope of the charlatan artist, where artists-turned-caricaturists self-reflexively mocked themselves, the circumstances driving them to moonlight as illustrators, and the potential impact of their print careers on their lofty artistic aspirations.⁶⁴ These images also satirize the ravenous audiences of lithographic illustrations, pictured as young bourgeois men, and the greedy publishers of these frontispieces. The Gihaut brothers and their most successful illustrators, Raffet and Charlet, produced scathing satires of the artist-caricaturist and their publishers in the 1820s, at the height of the Gihaut brothers’ success.⁶⁵

Of special note is the frontispiece of Bellangé’s 1824 album (Figure 3.15). It pictures the Gihaut brothers as street performers, playing trumpet and gesturing to a series of crowd-stopping images. They have just pulled the curtains back on a series of automata who, upon closer inspection, are all young artists slaving over lithographic stones to produce annual albums. The image’s long caption imagines that the lithographic illustrators are exotic foreign individuals who are the basis for the masses’ attraction to this spectacle: “Entrez Messieurs et Dames, C’est ici là dedans que se fait voir la famille des fameux Lithographantoccini apporté du Sénégal par le célèbre Capitaine Crayonizinkhvtzp! Ces petits animaux sont parvenues à force de privations de sommeil et surtout de nourriture à former une très belle collection d’Albums, Recueil de Croquis, Paysages, Sujets civil et militaires, Carricatures, Scènes populaires, Idem de Sociétés, Principes de dessins, Portrait au grainé doux, à l’hachure, au pointillé. Entrez Messieurs et Dames. C’est le moment de leurs exercices” (Enter Sirs and Madames, It is in here that one can find the famous Lithographantoccini family brought from Senegal by the famous Captain Crayonizinkhvtzp! These little animals have managed by dint of sleep and especially food privation to create a very lovely collection of Albums, Sketch Collections, Landscapes, civilian and military Subjects, Caricatures, Popular and Society scenes, Drawing principals, Portraits in fine grain, crosshatching, and pointillism. Enter Sirs and Madames. It is time for their exercises). Similarly, Raffet’s 1828 album for Chabert pictures a printer and his shop hand lighting a mortar that is packed with lithographic albums and evil spirits blowing trumpets of fame (Figure 3.16). A bourgeois and working-class audience ogles at the spectacle and a drunkard in the foreground steals an album. In the background, we can make out the distinctive cupolas of the Institut de France and the Pantheon.

Bellangé and Raffet’s images suggest that lithographic illustration is the ultimate form of artistic prostitution, surpassing even portraiture. This prostitution, as in Bellangé’s image, extends so far as to render the artist a puppet of the publishers that profit from him, bastardizing the artist’s originality, debasing him to the servile execution of mechanical and technical expertise—like a trade, rather than a vocation. Raffet’s image explores the ramifications of engaging in such illustration, suggesting, on the one hand, that lithographic imagery and comic albums are in and of themselves offenses to the world of fine arts as represented and reified by the Institut and Pantheon. Interpreted more pessimistically, his image also suggests that artists destroy their own chances of gaining membership or receiving accolades from either institution when they contribute to comic albums.

The charlatan painter type nuanced and fragmented across the Empire and Restoration and became associated with the descriptor sans souci or carefree. This type was often, but not always, associated with the illustration of caricature in the Restoration, including in popular theater. This carefree artist presents us with an alternative to the dissipated or noble artist, both of whom lust after glory by either virtuous or deceptive means. Rather, the sans souci delights in the culture and lifestyle of the artist, which allows for looser social mores, inappropriate relations with women, and, for the first time, a disregard for securing one’s financial well-being. They are equally nonplussed regarding the attainment of artistic glory, or even the production of artworks at all.

The late Empire and Restoration theatrical charlatan painter is a painter in disguise whose surreptitious means to attain artistic glory are revealed during the play. In 1818, the character Monsieur Sans-Souci appeared in M. Sans-Souci, ou Le peintre en prison (Mr. Care-Free, or The painter in prison).⁶⁶ This is the first theatrical instance in which an artist is described as a caricaturist.⁶⁷ M. Sans-Souci is characterized by his indifference to his own fate, his general nonchalance, and his levity. The prison’s concierge, de la Rapinière, links these characteristics to Sans-Souci’s irresponsible and unpatriotic caricaturing.⁶⁸ He is in debtor’s prison, where we are told he frequently finds him self, and has been wooing the daughter of the prison’s concierge, Agathe. Despite his unsuitability as a future husband, M. Sans-Souci woos her with confidence. Eventually, he wins Agathe’s hand by deception, impersonating an older rich veteran who was supposed to marry her and forging their wedding contract before finally revealing himself.

Not all sans souci characters are linked to graphic satire, however. The character Ducroquis in M. Ducroquis, ou Le peintre en voyage (M. Ducroquis, or The painter on a trip, 1828) is characterized very similarly to the earlier M. Sans-Souci.⁶⁹ Ducroquis, who is a chronic gambler, is described as facétieux (mischievous).⁷⁰ He plays the same charlatan role as M. Sans-Souci, though he does not realize for most of the play that he has been mistaken for a rich amateur named Norlis. When he discovers that his identity has been mistaken, Ducroquis takes advantage of this opportunity to marry the aging model, Henriette. Though Ducroquis claims he desires renown, his actions demonstrate that he spends most of his time chasing women, gambling, and taking advantage of any opportunity to cheaply enjoy himself, explaining to his interlocutors that “le plaisir, j’aime ça moi . . . surtout quand ça ne coûte rien” (pleasure, me, I love it . . . especially when it costs nothing).⁷¹

Similarly, in the Cheyère and A.B. (perhaps A. Barincou) lithographic series of 1824, the comical noble artist and the charlatan blend together. The artist we follow throughout the series is a coy and dissipate womanizer in plate 3, Premiers amours, sidling up to the beautiful model of his portrait under the pretense of better representing her (Figure 3.17). In the following plate, he attempts to seduce his laundress when she brings him his linens, though she rebuffs him, aware that young artists like himself are inclined to seduce women without making any guarantees (Figure 3.18).

These characters live their lives on the edge of acceptable society, employing opportunism and trickery to make ends meet. Their lives orbit around pleasure, carousing, womanizing, and failing to prioritize the production of serious artworks above their loose and free lifestyles. Artists and playwrights alike associated the sans souci figure to the production of satirical imagery in this time, evidencing their struggle to incorporate the popularity of lithographic satirical imagery into extant notions of genius and success.

Buoyed by the popularity and accessibility of lithography, and further motivated by extensive shifts in the landscape of Paris’s art world, the figure of the inglorious artist underwent massive satirical transformations in the Empire and Restoration. During these political regimes, the figure of the starving artist branched into many subtypes that collectively expressed both a deep-seated concern about the dominance of bourgeois tastes in the French art world, and anxieties about gatekeeping who can crown themselves an artist.

All Artists are Poor

From the Revolution onward, and certainly from the Empire, all artists as represented in popular theater were impoverished, indebted, and living in attic apartments. Whether they supported families or were young and unmarried, by the Empire, artists in both theater and satirical imagery signaled their poverty to audiences in some way. The artist’s destitution became more pervasive around the Restoration. For instance, in Eugène Scribe’s play La Mansarde des artistes (The Artists’ attic apartment, 1824), the painter Victor claims “être artiste, et mourir de faim . . . j’aime à vivre comme cela” (being an artist, and dying of hunger . . . I love living like that).⁷² Artists’ inability to pay for any thing, to feed themselves, or to live in luxurious settings was, in the Empire, treated as a given, as in Le Lithographe, ou les Scènes populaires (The Lithograph, or Popular scenes, 1823) when the artist and illustrator Charles wants to purchase a portrait from the image merchant Normand but, lacking any funds, has to make an exchange instead, promising to produce drawings and caricatures as payment.⁷³ Whereas in earlier popular theater the artist’s poverty also pro vided the intrigue or obstacle for the play that was overcome by play’s end, in Empire and Restoration theater the artist’s poverty was simply a feature of the character’s material well-being and playwrights looked elsewhere for those obstacles that the lovers must surmount to be together.

We notice a similar shift in satirical images of artists in the Empire and Restoration. Ancien régime imagery introduced us to the struggling artist, and Revolutionary imagery developed and multiplied representational types and tropes. Thereafter, the poor artist became a quantitatively dominant trope among art-world caricature. Here, the artist’s poverty and indebtedness were taken as a given, and a variety of tropes were developed to mock the artist’s desperation and destitution, the most popular of which was to present him as a shop sign painter, which recalled and developed the 1789 Je suis comme le tems au Gagne-Petit. The destitute shop sign painter appeared in such great numbers in graphic satire that it requires that we consider it as a separate social type. Here, I will discuss other ways in which the artist’s poverty was visualized and mocked.

In Revolutionary to Consulate imagery, we saw how the artist’s poverty earned him membership among those that solicited the attention of the great money devil, Mammon. The artist went on to join the debtors responsible for the death of credit in Crédit est Mort (Credit is Dead) imagery, notably an 1817 print published by Genty, which pictures a painter to the left, a musician and composer in the center, and a fencing master on the right (Figure 3.19). All of them employ the tools of their trade to strike at a dying figure splayed on the ground beneath them—credit. The painter winds up to spear credit through with his mahlstick, the composer will use his violin to deal a blow, and the fencing master sticks credit through with his foil. In the background, a knife-grinder toils away with a duck by his side.

This crédit est mort image type, Jules Champfleury later claimed, appeared from the seventeenth century onward in connection to financial crashes, and was reproduced in the 1840s by the Épinal printhouse founded by Nicolas Pellerin.⁷⁴ It is, however, unclear whether the knife-grinder participates in the destruction of credit or continues his banal trade without participating in financial speculation or becoming indebted. The duck that accompanies him, however, carries a small bourse or purse in his mouth. In other permutations of this popular image type, it is not a duck but a goose that is pictured for the purpose of a clever pun: “Mon oie fait tout.” “Mon oie” meaning either my goose or money, claims that money solves all, whereas in the foreground, arts, culture, and recreation are identified as perpetually insolvent yet likely to borrow and never repay, and are thus linked to whichever financial collapse the image’s publication references.

Surviving examples of the crédit est mort type show that the cast of characters responsible for the death of credit changed over time. A seventeenth-century crédit est mort engraving in the Hennin Collection features middle-class merchants as credit’s debtors (Figure 3.20). Alexis Piron, a celebrated playwright of the Opéra-Comique at the théâtres du foire in the early eighteenth century staged a crédit est mort play in 1726.⁷⁵ In it, the characters directly responsible for the death of credit are writers, actresses, middle-class merchants, and a rich Marquis. It was only after the French Revolution that painters figured among this stock cast of characters. The indebted artist reappeared in the 1824 lithographic series La Vie d’un Artiste (The Life of an Artist). In plate 11, an artist, identifiable by his palette and easel, arrives at the Commissionnaire au Mont-de-Piété—a commission agent service that lent money to the destitute, established in Paris in the fifteenth century and active through the twentieth century.⁷⁶

The trope of the artist forced to move because he could not pay his rent persisted on stage and in imagery, recalling its early ancien régime appearance at the hand of Étienne Jeaurat (Figure 2.9). The series La vie d’un Artiste (1824) pictures as one of its stages in the life of the artist a finely dressed young man with top hat moving in the dead of the night, hoping, as the caption indicates, that “Personne ne m’a vu” (“No one saw me,” Figure 3.21). Almost all of his personal effects, which are limited to the tools of his trade, are being carried by a hired mover, signaling that the painter has been evicted and is moving in the dead of night to conceal his insolvency. Similarly, the image from the Miroir Grotesque published by Traviès and printed by Ratier in 1829, and likely illustrated by J.J. Grandville, pictures a rabbit-artist startled in his apartment when a braying donkey-porter pounds angrily at his door (Figure 3.22). The image’s caption, partnered with the rolled document in the porter’s hand, implies that the artist will be evicted for failure to pay rent and that the porter has finally come to collect the proprietor’s dues.

In contrast, Edmé-Jean Pigal’s well-known image of 1822, Chien de métier!, pictures the same subject matter in a tragicomic mode (Figure 1.3). A carefully drawn artist has leapt up from his stool in a fit of rage. He has already broken his palette in two, dismantled his easel, and overturned his box of pigments. His face is distorted with a complex expression of anger pushed to the point of insanity. He wields his palette knife as a weapon. In his hand, he holds a small painting and is poised to slice it through having already carved out several healthy gashes in the canvas. Upon closer inspection, we can guess what pushed the artist over the edge: he has been toiling over a rather small portrait. Importantly, the satire’s caption refers to painting not as a vocation, but a trade (métier), further implying a debasement of the artist’s social status as he works on small, unambitious images produced purely for private bourgeois consumption.

The Delusional Shop Sign Painter: Monsieur Crouton

While the term crouton appears in popular theater as early as the 1776 La confession publique du brocanteur, we encounter it as a character’s name for the first time in the 1814 vaudeville Monsieur Crouton, ou L’aspirant au Salon (Mr. Crouton, or The Salon hopeful).⁷⁷ This figure, who appears regularly on stage and in imagery from 1814 onward, draws upon some of the other artistic types here elaborated but possesses not a shred of artistic nobility or virtue. Crouton is a shop sign painter who believes his works to be worthy of the upper echelons of fine artistic production and aspires to glory via this much lower medium. He lives in an attic apartment and is pursued by his creditors, all of whom are merchants—fruit sellers, wine merchants, color merchants, and so on. Though Crouton only paints golden arms, he still feels that Rubens, Raphael, and Poussin should be invoked to inspire his artistic production and also feels his work should be exhibited in the Salon, though the jury has never admitted him.⁷⁸

Crouton later benefits from the same forms of (albeit accidental) trickery as the sans souci. The difference, however, is that until the play’s end, Crouton is entirely unaware that his success is the result of a deception. Crouton and the sincere protagonist both submit their work to a Salon exhibition judged by a connoisseur named de Blainville, who mistakes Jules, a talented landscape painter, for Crouton and his golden arms. He erroneously admits Crouton to the Salon. Once the error is righted, Crouton finally confronts his own incompetence and immediately renounces art-making. After Jules generously pays off Crouton’s many debts, the latter submits himself to lifelong servitude to Jules—Crouton’s only truly noble gesture.⁷⁹

Crouton’s error is eventually revealed, but not before he performs the function of pastiching the idea of “the glorious artist.” Before his incompetence is revealed, Crouton invokes the canon of Old Masters, demands deference from those around him, and expects his work to be exhibited in a privileged milieu. The satiric transformation can be found in his subject matter: in a liberalized market for art, no one can convince Crouton that shop signs of repetitive golden indexical markers are categorically different from fine art. Alongside concerns that noble artists are forced to prostitute their artistic production to avoid starvation, the Crouton type expresses a related but opposing concern: that the liberalization of the category of the artist following the shuttering of the corporate model has opened the floodgates of the art world to the talentless, who are incapable of recognizing their own mediocrity.

Crouton first appears in imagery in Hippolyte Flandrin’s 1815 satire Lady-Formité et Fidele en séance chez Mr. Crouton (Figure 3.23).⁸⁰ In this case, the name Crouton has been applied to describe the portraitist who produces croutes (crusts), forced as he is to paint ugly and ignoble models. The same is true of the 1822 L’amateur chez Crouton, where a middle-aged painter produces lewd artwork as an amateur peers at this croûte over his shoulder.⁸¹ In these images, “Crouton” is the name assigned to any artist whose work is unworthy of the attention it is given by either the artist himself or the connoisseur.

The Crouton type is alternatively invoked, as in the 1814 vaudeville, to satirize the noble painter debased to the act of shop sign painting. For instance, the 1814 image Le désarroi (Disarray) pictures a bewigged shop sign painter whose mahlstick gives away his academic training (Figure 3.24). His ladder has been knocked over by a carriage that has spun out of control while trying to avoid a connoisseur ogling the painter’s debased creation through his loupe. The Crouton type articulated in the 1814 vaudeville was faithfully captured in 1816 by Martinet, whose publications, as we have established, frequently drew on popular theater (Figure 3.25). This bedraggled Monsieur Crouton has set up an atelier in his mansarde, complete with plaster casts of classical statuary, however he produces shop sign after shop sign, only capable of drawing golden arms that shepherd audiences into boutiques and stores.

The name “Crouton” thus only briefly sits at the intersection of two satirical representations of the artist type. Broadly, the name refers to aspiring yet untalented artists who capitalize upon the naïveté of connoisseurs unable to recognize the poverty of their artistic production. Briefly, Crouton figures as a shop sign painter, crystallizing the trope by marrying it to a distinctly commercial public genre of imagery still afforded creative latitude. It is this second type that proliferated from 1822 onward and into the July Monarchy.

This image type captures both the disillusioned artist, aware of his prostitution and deeply discomfited by it, and the delusional artist who fails to recognize his own mediocrity. For instance, the 1822 L’Homme de l’art dans l’embarras de son métier (The Man of art in the embarrassment of his trade) captures a well-dressed and content young artist carrying shop signs for butchers under his arm.⁸² Similarly, the 1822 La dernière touche (The last touch) depicts an eccentric and long-haired artist who steps back from his artwork triumphantly, dramatically contemplating it from afar, though his pride is disproportionate to the base nature of his work—a simple shop sign, which he has painted drunk, at that (Figure 3.26). Both artists buoyantly ignore the prostitution of their vocation and take pride in the debased works that circumstance has forced them to produce.

Later permutations of this image type enmesh destitution and delusion with the poor artist turned shop sign painter. Charlet, in 1823, represented a veteran shop sign painter with bicorn hat nearby who proclaims J’aime la couleur (I love color) as he lifts a glass full of wine to his mouth (Figure 3.27). Barincou, in an 1824 image entitled Les Arts et la Misère (The Arts and Misery), shows an eccentric painter in his robe, again perhaps a veteran with a bicorn hat draped over his easel.⁸³ He has turned to ask a young street crier behind him about the chambre garnie (furnished room) she is advertising. In both cases, the ruddy and weather-worn artist seems content with his lot or at least accepting of his precarity, though, the artist’s dress and his physiology indicate his destitution. An image by Charles Joseph Traviès from 1825 captures a healthy young artist, similar to that of A.B.’s La Vie de l’Artiste series, who paints in the street (Figure 3.28). We can just make out a ladder behind him, indicating that he is painting a shop sign. A vagrant peers out of his one good eye and makes recommendations to improve both the painting and the material condition of the artist. In a subtle wordplay, he says “Mais j’crois que j’aurais de l’idée pour vot état” (I believe I have an idea for your profession/state). Referring both to his painting and to his social status, the vagrant serves many foreboding functions: as a portent of the shop sign painter’s lot, as a reminder of the liminality of the artist, and as the streetwise version of the bourgeois Salon connoisseur.

The Noble Artist as Dissipate and Comical

The noble, struggling artist who we began to explore as an outgrowth of Revolutionary satirical imagery split into a series of different social types in the world of theater from the Empire onward. Nobility could still be found in his resolve not to prostitute his artistic creation to market demands and for financial gain, but the moral purity that previously accompanied these principles frayed. The Consulate character Maurice of the play Le peintre français à Londres (1802) sets the stage for us: despite his noble resolve not to prostitute his art, he has begun to gamble in order to pay off an unexplained list of debts. The playwrights represent Maurice’s poor choice rather sympathetically, as a short-sighted but nonetheless somewhat reasonable attempt to repay the kindness of his hostess and love interest, Mme. St Clair.⁸⁴

The Empire and Restoration treatments of the noble artist who becomes insolvent or dissipate were much less sympathetic. The artists’ dissipation rendered them increasingly comical, obliterating the sympathy and even reverence with which they were previously treated. This was in large part effected through the revived and mythologized biographies of a pair of early and mid-eighteenth-century artists: Alexis Grimou (1678–1733) and Simon-Mathurin Lantara (1729–1778).⁸⁵ Forty years after Grimou’s death, mythical constructions of his personality began to emerge. He was characterized as drunken, constantly in debt, with no respect for social decorum, incorrigibly aloof, unpredictable and eccentric, inefficient, extremely independent, and delusionally self-confident. Stories circulated in which he destroyed unfinished paintings out of boredom.⁸⁶ Grimou’s characterization had little to do with the painter himself and more to do with an accidental conflation of his actual personality with representational tropes he employed in self-portraiture. Grimou portrayed himself painting and drinking, echoing seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.

This mythical presentation of Grimou’s life coincided with the death of the landscape painter Lantar, a whose biographies also imagined him as a vice-ridden smoker and drinker, much like Grimou. Lantara’s works were posthumously exhibited in the 1780s at the Salon de la Correspondance, and Pahin de la Blancherie accompanied them with a biographical representation of Lantara as a poor, unrecognized genius and autodidact.⁸⁷ He reappeared in graphic satire and popular theater. In 1778, just after his death, an engraving with verse below it pictured Lantara in his studio (Figure 3.29). A consummate gourmand, he is surrounded by appetizing food and drink and is well-dressed with a chapeau bras and bag-wig. He marvels at two formerly caged birds that he has freed in his studio, suggesting that Lantara values his own freedom above all else, thus explaining his libertine lifestyle.

Lantara was resuscitated a generation later in an 1804 play Le Peintre Lantara, which was staged at the Théâtre Montansier-Variétés.⁸⁸ This representation of Lantara as an insolvent, eccentric, yet noble artist who refuses to compromise his freedom and prostitute his art persisted across the early nineteenth century and constituted the first major articulation of protobohemianism in the representation of the artist. For instance, in the 1809 Lantara, ou Le peintre au cabaret, Lantara, an eighteenth-century impoverished artist (“Oh! L’argent, qu’est-ce que l’argent?” [Oh! Money, what is money?])⁸⁹ discovers that his daughter Thérèse has fallen in love with a young man named Victor, who is the son of a greedy art seller named Jacob. The play revolves around Lantara’s attempt to convince Jacob to let their children marry; how ever, Lantara is set back by his own gourmand tendencies and racks up a hefty debt before the audience’s eyes by drinking and eating beyond his means in order to forget his sorrows. To repay this newly accumulated debt, he attempts to sell drawings to Jacob and his cabal of brocanteurs.

At first, Lantara sends a drawing of his model, Belletête, which fails to fetch his asking price. Lantara rips up the drawing in rage, shocking bystanders who realize that this is the equivalent of tearing up money. His second drawing whips Jacob and his fellow art sellers up into a frenzy. They begin bidding for the drawing, but Lantara, who has already evaluated his own work, refuses to sell it for more than he personally estimates it is worth. In these cases, Lantara’s nobility is expressed by his disinterest in financial gain since he refuses to falsely inflate the exchange value of his artworks. However, at each turn, his principles are rendered comically: bystanders gawk at Lantara’s terrible business acumen and disinterestedness, and though it wins him the day, it does so accidentally and not deliberately. Lantara is thus depicted simultaneously as a noble and inglorious artist who refuses to prostitute his artworks but lives an impoverished and dissipate life for it, which he underlines when he declares:

Des connaisseurs je cherche les suffrages;

Pour eux seuls je veux réussir.

Plutôt cent fois détruire mes ouvrages

Qu’un instant les voir avilir.⁹⁰

[From connoisseurs I search for approval;

For them alone I want to succeed.

[I would] rather destroy my artwork one hundred times

Than for one moment see them debased.]

Lantara’s gourmandise is emphasized when he is added to Martinet’s Petit Galerie Dramatique (Figure 3.30). Lantara’s dress is half-modernized, since he wears a waistcoat and a cravat (necktie). But he still has buckled shoes, a bow-wig, lace sleeve ruffles, and a sword dangling from his waist. He adopts a contemplative pose as he inspects his red wine, with the detritus of his debauchery scattered about him: a cork lies on the ground and we can see that the table is covered in bottles and plates as his traiteur (roughly, caterer) strolls by in the background. The vaudeville verse selected to accompany this comical image highlights the discrepancy between Lantara’s lofty and noble values as a liberal artist, and his recourse to wine to sweeten his mood.

Similarly, the 1824 La vie d’un Artiste presents the noble and youthful modern artist in this same ironic and lightly hypocritical way. In plate 10, Le feu de la Composition, the artist sits in his apartment in his bedclothes (Figure 3.31).⁹¹ He sketches on a desk that hides his chamber pot and pauses to evoke Raphael, asking him to lend his genius. A smiling studio assistant in tat tered clothing dutifully crushes pigments in anticipation of the artist’s future masterpiece. The image’s humor derives from the discrepancy between the artist’s ignoble condition and his suggestion that he is the inheritor of the Old Masters’ legacy. The noble artist, here, only believes himself to be such. Similarly, the last image in the series, Misère et Famine (Misery and Famine), pictures a young artist who beckons the allegorical figure of Glory to open the door of his mansarde to Misery and Famine, whom he accepts as necessary partners to renown and glorious artistic production (Figure 3.32). Though we cannot see what the artist is working on, the great size of the canvas indicates that he is practicing the grand genre.

On the other hand, an 1827 image by Auguste Raffet pictures an eccentric artist dressed up in layers of clothing with a toque on (Figure 3.33). Nestled by his furnace and a pot au feu, he works on a much smaller easel painting. He is surrounded by plaster casts of antique models but works on small military paintings that he refers to as “croûtes” in the caption below the painting, explaining that “Ces Croûtes là en font manger d’autres” (These crusts here will let me eat other [crusts]). Behind the painting to which our eccentric, exhausted, wrinkled, and rough artist refers, a young boy snacks on said edible croûtes for which the painted croûtes will be exchanged. This last image is characteristic of what is to follow: whereas in 1824, the young artist of Misère et Famine is willing to accept his destitution as the price for producing grand genre art, Raffet’s eccentric artist happily prostitutes his production to defray his destitution, though his surroundings indicate to us that he is poor and needy nonetheless.

Invisibly Marginalized: Women Artists

In general, satirical imagery employs women’s infiltration into the art world as a device that signals the vulgarization and bourgeoisification of art appreciation, as is the case with the appearance of fashionable and attractive young women who accompany bourgeois connoisseurs, themselves functioning as commodities. But women artists are conspicuously absent from art-world satirical imagery and only begin to make a rare appearance in the Restoration and July Monarchy. In relation to male painters, female painters account for less than 5 percent of those painters depicted (Table 3.3).

We know that these numbers are completely at odds with the actual relative proportion of male to female painters active and visible within Paris’s art world. Women artists flourished as institutional barriers to their participation in the Salon were dismantled first by the 1776 liberalization of the category of the artist and then, by the 1791 dissolution of the corporate system.⁹² But art-world satire is vocal in its omissions and, where women artists are included, they are represented as either a distraction or their talent is dismissed.⁹³

In the 1826 series Anciens et Modernes illustrated by A.S., and in the 1829 series Les Inspirés du Musée by Camille G.F., for instance, women invade the Louvre as amateur artists or copyists, set up to study from great artworks.⁹⁴ Their engagement in more sustained artistic practice is also elsewhere ridiculed. Women’s study of the male model is employed by satirists to suggest the corrupting effects of exposure to the naked male body. In the 1815 Atelier de Peinture, printed by Langlumé, an ancien régime connoisseur offers instruction to a beautiful young woman who paints in a studio (Figure 3.34). He counsels her to “Songez bien que vous peignez l’histoire” (Please assure that you are painting history) and gestures to the genitalia, hidden from our view but exposed to the young lady, of a grotesquely rendered nude male model with protruding belly. In an anonymous image from the same year, the studio of a dame peintre (lady painter) is depicted for us, again with a nude male who exposes himself to the woman painter’s two younger students (Figure 3.35). This image satirizes Angélique Mongez, masculinizing her as she spreads her legs confidently. Mongez was a history painter and we find her here preparing sketches for her Theseus and Pirithous, exhibited at the Salon of 1806.⁹⁵ Barincou’s 1824 Les arts et la décence reinforces this theme.⁹⁶ He pictures a governess and her chaperone at the Louvre Museum with her beautiful teenage daughter, whose face betrays confusion as the governess covers the genitalia of a Roman discus thrower.⁹⁷ Across this smattering of images that deign to picture women as artists, the consensus is clear: women’s participation in the art world is corrupting.

In comparison, women’s appearance in popular theater is much less condemnatory. We witnessed a similar discrepancy in Revolutionary to Consulate image and stage representation, where women appeared in the studio as assistants to their fathers, offering a pretense for an acceptable relationship between a young male stranger and a young woman. In the Empire and Restoration, women played a more active role as artists in popular theater than they did in graphic satire, even producing artwork on stage. Nonetheless, they never aspired to artistic glory, nor was any mention made of the possibility of their having an independent career. While the world of popular theater was more likely to acknowledge women’s presence in the studio, this was arguably largely for the sake of conforming to requirements of the opéra comique and vaudeville genres, which orbited around young heterosexual romance.

In the play M. Dupinceau, Dupinceau’s daughter, Manette, and niece, Gogo, who are also the love objects of the play, are shown on stage assisting with shop sign installation and retouching.⁹⁸ Similarly, in Lantara, his daughter Thérèse appears in the Jardin des Plantes and is seen sketching flowers, though as a pretense to invite her lover Victor to assist her. The first female art students who paint on stage take longer to emerge: Angela, of Angela (1814), retouches her instructor Jean Cousin’s paintings. In fact, Angela’s talent is a central component of the play’s plot and is the means by which she finally seduces her instructor. Les Dames peintres’s significant subtitle, L’Atelier à la mode (The fashionable studio), hints to us that the play will minimize women’s motivations for pursuing painting, dismissing it as a trend. Jules, a male student, is the only artist considered to have a potential future career. In con trast, the male model Beaubuste dismisses the career aspirations of all of Madame Palmer’s other female students. Hortense in particular wishes to make the Grand Tour and study from Raphael and Titian. Clara and Virginie desire the same, and to learn different languages. Beaubuste, mumbling under his breath in response, asks “Que f’ront-ell’s de tout’ ces lang’s-là” (What’re they gonna do with all them there languages).⁹⁹ Beaubuste, in this moment, stands in for the audience, who mock Madame Palmer’s students for mistaking their training in polite sociability for a pathway to a career.¹⁰⁰ Similarly, Angela’s eponymous heroine never dreams of a career. Her sole object is to demonstrate her love to Jean Cousin using the only language that he recognizes: visual art.

Art-world satire deployed the multifaceted trope of the starving artist to protest the emergence of a private market for art, its impact on the material well-being of artists, and its effect on the artwork that was produced. Yet, we must also take note of the ways in which art-world satire itself participated in gatekeeping the art world. The trope of the charlatan artist, sans souci, and Monsieur Crouton collectively expressed concerns about the dangerous breadth of the category of the artiste libre. But women artists received markedly different treatment that minimized their place in the art world just as their presence was becoming increasingly and uncontestably visible.

With relatively few exceptions, artists in Imperial and Restoration imagery are depicted as impoverished and indebted, living in cheap attic apartments; as dissipated drunks, gamblers, or womanizers; as preyed upon by art sellers or image publishers; and as waging war against the inevitable prostitution of their artwork as they succumb to portraiture, shop sign painting, or the production of political caricatures. Increasingly, we are introduced to the formation of an artist type that we will later come to know as “bohemian.”

Rather than weigh in on Classic-Romantic debates or engage in attempts to dispute the dominant position of the school of David, satirical imagery and popular theater was much more interested in capturing the struggling, unexceptional artist—a category quite distinct from the unrecognized genius, who is remarkably absent as a type from all of the satirical images here presented. The inglorious artist, the protagonist of our imagery, struggles and fails to enter Paris’s art world and instead toils on its margins, becoming a visible sign of urban anomie and social blight. Meanwhile, the inglorious artist encounters competitors within his already overfilled art world, including women artists—although satirists are loathe to honor their presence even with satirical representation, and untalented artists who, in an earlier regime, would have been appropriately classified by the corporate system.

The Imperial and Restoration transition to a Salon-dominated art system is of central significance to the shape of art-world satire. In the July Monarchy, the concerns initially expressed in Imperial and Restoration satire ossified and entrenched themselves. They combined with the evolution of Republican values, the emergence of proto-socialism, and the reification of the status of the inglorious artist in the figure of the bohemian. As we will see, however, an important point of contention emerged—one so irreconcilable that we arguably still struggle with it today.