Call: The Structures of the Art World

Within the broad range of approaches to art historical study grouped under the umbrella of “social history of art,” we can discern two major strands. There are institutional histories that flesh out those structural elements of art worlds that determine where and how artists and artworks are produced, consumed, and exchanged. And there are cultural approaches to the social history of art that explore, for instance, the discourses, ideologies, and forms of representation of topics or figures. My goal in this and the following chapters is to straddle both of these strands. Art-world satire is particularly well-suited to these aims since this intermedial corpus of image, theater, and writing found representational means by which to interrogate the structural relations of Paris’s art world. In other words, the majority of satirical images on artistic life in Paris sought to make visible the invisible structural relations of their milieu. Across this book, I demonstrate that the strategies for making these structural relations visible multiplied, accumulated, branched, and in general, became more urgent and effective.

The images here overwhelmingly target position-taking within the economy of the artistic field. Position-taking describes the means by which incumbents seek membership in a field and continue to negotiate the terms of their membership and success within that field once admitted. This is a central component of Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments around the notion of a field of cultural production.⁶ Membership to a cultural field is adjudicated and the terms of belonging and position-taking within that field are in constant debate. Bourdieu acknowledges, in his essay on the topic, that in liberal professions, these positions and the means by which they are taken are particularly “ill-defined [ . . . ] elastic” and dispersed.⁷ From the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, political and economic upheaval deeply affected the structural relations of Paris’s art world and, as such, processes of position-taking were thoroughly destabilized as new systems emerged. Importantly, art-world satire focuses our attention on the apparent opacity and arbitrariness of this position-taking to artists themselves.

As I will explore below, art-world satire draws our attention to core structural questions related to position-taking. These relate, of course, to artists’ concerns about how they might become a successful artist. However, art-world satire couched these concerns within the framework of loftier preoccupations around the progress of the arts: How is fine art distinguished from other visual practices, and how can we create structures that foster conditions for the infinite improvement of both artists and their artworks? Who should steward these processes, the officers of the Académie royale (Royal Academy), the patrons of the Direction Générale des Bâtiments (Director General of Buildings), art critics of the biennial Salon exhibition, or the private market and its participants? And how do we create the conditions for infinite improvement? By doling out prizes? Through patronage? Through membership in a corporation? Through the financial success of market prosperity? And so on.

In order to excavate the trees and waves of art-world satire’s arsenal of types and tropes as they unfurled over time, I must provide an overview of the institutional history of Paris’s art world—one that does not limit itself to the Académie royale. The account that follows is not exhaustive but is comprehensive, painting a coherent and sorely needed portrait of Paris’s rich and dense cultural world at the end of the ancien régime that challenges a disciplinary tendency to focus on only one of several institutional stakeholders. Indeed, each chapter begins with such a survey, in large part because the absence of such a synthetic treatment has contributed to the invisibility of art-world satire as a choice vehicle for the delivery of artistic criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Art-world satire, as we will see, is not particularly interested in how we have structured art history as a field and does not focus exclusively on France’s most celebrated artists or artworks, nor on the Académie royale. To understand art-world satire, we must in turn expand our understanding of Paris’s art world to entertain its many moving parts and the complex institutional changes they underwent across an age of political revolution. This discussion, most digestible when presented chronologically, lays the foundation for art-world satire’s critical response, which we will turn to afterward.

The Privilege of Fine Art in Ancien Régime Paris

The Académie royale and its adjoining Academies were largely established as anti-frondeur measures circa 1648, and thus represented a strategy for the king, as personal protector of his academies, to introduce a privilege that circumvented the increasingly and dangerously powerful corporations, their juridical enforcers (the Châtelet), and their Parlementaire allegiances. The Académie royale was in fact founded in response to a petition from the Corporation des maîtres peintres (Corporation of Master Painters) in 1647 protesting the doling out of individual privileges by the Maison du Roi (King’s Household) to peintres du roi (king’s painters). These privileges enabled peintres du roi to conduct their trade throughout the kingdom, whereas they otherwise could only do so if they possessed membership in the Corporation. These peintres du roi responded to the Corporation’s petition by submitting a request to the Maison du Roi that they should be permitted to establish a semi-autonomous Académie royale, which would be much more restricted in its admission of membership and administered by the most talented of these peintres du roi, which included Charles Le Brun.⁸ This request was granted, and the Académie royale’s administrative structures and royal funding were established between 1652 and 1654, at the end of the Fronde.⁹

From this moment onward, the Académie royale and the Corporation were locked into a jurisdictional and juridical battle that only ended in 1776, over a century later. Art historians have tended to overlook the preexistence of the Corporation, which we can trace back to 1391.¹⁰ The Académie and Corporation’s struggle for jurisdiction and superiority was, essentially, over who should determine the structural relations of Paris’s, and by extension France’s, art world. The Académie, in its inception, represented a circumvention of Corporate privileges.

This circumvention was permitted on the basis that some visual art should be distinguished from the rest and thus be considered a liberal art. As such, the Académie royale modeled itself on the Campagnia di San Luca, revived in Florence in 1560 (though, in 1571, it released its artists from requiring guild membership).¹¹ The project of establishing the visual arts as a liberal art was relatively new and a hard-won battle. Historically, the visual arts were not included in the medieval quadrivium or trivium of the liberal arts and belonged instead to the mechanical arts—much more manual in their labor.¹² It is through the notion of disegno (drawing or design), as elaborated by Giorgio Vasari in his sixteenth-century writings, that the Campagnia di San Luca and subsequent academies of fine arts, such as the Académie royale, could retool themselves as institutions of intellectual and not manual arts, and thus deserving of membership amongst the liberal arts. Disegno reframed the manual labor of drawing in loftier intellectual terms: drawing was a means by which the artist came to understand the design of nature, to look beyond the material world.¹³ To reify this relatively new justification for the visual arts as a liberal art, the Académie royale proposed to host public lectures to foster amateur aesthetic expertise, and to facilitate study from the nude model, and privileged patronage from the Maison du Roi to adorn the homes of royals and aristocrats, which thusly encouraged non-commercial, non-luxe (luxury) artwork produced in the greatest and most intellectual of genres, the grand genre (great or noble genre)—history painting.

As a result, the status of artists and of those experts guiding them was transformed from mechanical to liberal, or from artisanal to professional, following the narrative given by Nathalie Heinich as outlined in the introduction.¹⁴ In this newfound category of distinction, the Académie’s membership was thus prohibited from tenir boutique (keeping a shop), meaning that while they could transact to sell their own artwork, they could not sell any other works of art but their own. Conventionally, scholars have presented this measure as a means by which Academicians differentiated themselves from the commercial world of luxe.¹⁵ However, it could equally be presented as a concession to the Corporation, which retained this one remarkable juridical advantage over the Académie until the French Revolution: any artist aspiring to participate in the art market beyond the role of practitioner required corporate, or guild, membership, most often in the Corporation des maîtres peintres. One competitor emerged during the eighteenth century—the Corporation of marchand-merciers (Corporation of merchant-haberdashers), of which Edmé Gersaint is a famous example. With a privilege from this latter corporation, one could sell decorative objects, paintings, sculpture, furniture, and so on.¹⁶

The Académie royale’s goals, however, were largely aspirational. Their school, housed in the then Louvre Palace, was poorly kept and subjects haphazardly taught, with many of the liberal arts courses in mathematics and perspective chronically not on offer, and instructors regularly absent from their own classes.¹⁷ A 1654 arrêt (decree) required the delivery of lectures to form experts in aesthetics, but these lectures were extremely short-lived. And art exhibitions, a necessary criterion if the Académie royale’s contribution to the progrès des arts (progress of the arts) was to benefit a broader public, were only regularized in 1737, with annual exhibitions mounted in the salon carré (square room) of the Louvre.¹⁸ In many ways, the Académie was unable or uninterested in following through on the programming that would truly distinguish it from the mechanical arts.

What has been studied far less is the extent to which the Corporation challenged the Académie royale’s exclusive claims to the practice of the visual arts as a liberal art. A perpetual but powerful competitor to the Académie royale, the Corporation took every opportunity to demonstrate that, if the king wanted to designate an institution to act on his behalf as ward of the progrès des arts, then it, possessing powerful protection and wealth, could serve this purpose even better than the chronically underfunded Académie. The Corporation founded the Académie de Saint-Luc (Saint Luke’s Academy), a semi-autonomous corporate substructure with its own drawing school, exhibition, process of admission, and officers.¹⁹ Further, in their capacity as liberal artists, they secured tax exemptions for their members in the 1740s that brought them closer and closer to the status of the Académie royale, and from 1751 to 1776, they secured permission to exhibit their members’ artworks. These exhibitions, held on alternate years from those of the then-biennial Académie royale Salon, were also titled a “Salon” and opened on the very same day—Saint Louis Day, August 25.²⁰

A series of internal conflicts between the Académie de Saint-Luc and the Corporation des maîtres peintres plagued the 1760s and 1770s. From 1766 to 1776, the Académie de Saint-Luc’s officers complained that they were underrepresented among the Corporation’s administrators. Since they were artists and not artisans, they argued, they were categorically better qualified to lead in policymaking. A set of factums that flew between both parties proposed markedly different approaches to the organization of labor: the Académie de Saint-Luc accused the Corporation of valuing commercial success over merit, whereas the Corporation characterized the Saint-Luc Academicians as insubordinate journeymen, attempting to buck the natural and virtuous hierarchy of order so carefully preserved among all trade guilds in early modern France.²¹ Most importantly, the Academicians of the Académie de Saint-Luc mobilized pre-Revolutionary vocabulary such as despotism, enslavement, and tyranny. They accused the Corporation of denying them the emancipation and autonomy entitled to them as practitioners of a categorically different and superior practice. In so doing, the Saint-Luc Academicians’ arguments equated the liberal arts and liberalization.²²

The Académie royale, which had been struggling to establish a monopoly on fine arts privilege for over a century, capitalized upon this opportunity to dissolve their principal competitor. They entered the fray in 1775, publishing a mémoire (statement of case) and accompanying petition. They also championed the liberty of the liberal arts, to which the Corporation responded that this form of liberty would unleash greed, competition, and the breakdown of community and values of honor as every individual sought after their own gain rather than contributing to the advancement of their entire trade.²³

This three-way debate between the Corporation, the guild’s Académie, and the Académie royale, occurred in parallel with, and was indeed influenced by, broader reforms of the structure of labor in French social life.²⁴ Louis XVI’s 1774 ascension to the throne brought radical reform. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was appointed Controller-General of Finances and the position of Directeur Général des Bâtiments went to the comte d’Angivillier, Charles Claude Flahaut. But the Académie royale’s position of supremacy within the French art landscape was not reified until 1776, when it was given sole rights to determine the ambiguous and ill-defined notion of fine art as a category distinct from decorative or luxury artistic production.²⁵ This short-lived, as we will see, post-1776 monopoly was a direct consequence of Turgot’s Six Edicts of 1776, which briefly abolished all of Paris’s corporations, including the Corporation des maîtres peintres. The re-establishment of corporate privileges later that year brought with it substantial reforms to the corporations.²⁶ For instance, the Corporation des maîtres peintres was not permitted to restore the Académie de Saint-Luc.

Most importantly, the long-standing jurisdictional overlap between the Corporation and the Académie royale was eradicated in the Académie’s favor. This did not mean, however, that fine artists had to be a member of the Académie royale to practice and traffic their trade. In the spirit of the failed Turgot reforms, the 1776 reforms of the corporations liberated all artists from needing corporate or academic membership to practice by creating the category of the artiste libre (free artist). The Académie royale and Académie Saint-Luc had equated the liberal arts with liberalization in their published mémoires and this equation was actualized, allowing fine arts to become a fully free market practice and reversing centuries of corporate law.

The Académie royale’s victory was complex: it did not win a monopoly over corporate privileges to practice fine arts. Rather, it became the sole arbiters of who was, in fact, a fine artist and thus worthy of freely practicing without corporate membership. The terms of this distinction, as ratified in a Déclaration royale (royal proclamation) of March 15, 1777, were very unclear: those that were painters or sculptors of historical subjects, portraiture, landscape, flowers, miniatures, or any other genre of art-making for which an understanding of drawing and study of nature is the basis and is esteemed of a talent considerable enough for admission to the Académie royale did not have to seek membership from the Corporation des maîtres peintres, nor, even, from the Académie royale.²⁷ Artists who felt they belonged to this new category, which Séverine Sofio terms the artiste libre, could and did appeal to the Académie royale when the Corporation contested their right to free practice, but were otherwise not required to seek membership in the Académie to practice freely. Commerce, or to tenir boutique, was still prohibited and remained a privilege of the Corporation and the marchands-merciers (merchants-haberdashers). It thus became intrinsic to the definition of fine arts that they should exclude commoditization, conforming to Bourdieu’s notion that economies of symbolic goods adopt strategies of negation, in this case “the disavowal of the ‘economic.’”²⁸ Such a strategy, Bourdieu offered, renders prestige and authority the most effective capital, i.e., symbolic capital.

This gesture likely disenfranchised hundreds of Parisian artists. Fine artists who had previously had membership in the Corporation and were not members of the exclusive Académie royale found themselves sud denly devoid of a pivotal biennial exhibition opportunity. Only one in four artists active in ancien régime Paris was a member of the Académie and its Salon exhibition was restricted to its membership.²⁹ Otherwise, young and foreign non-corporatized artists could exhibit works at the Expositions de la Jeunesse (Young Artist Exhibitions) in the Place Dauphine on the Sunday of Fête-Dieu, and at the foires (fairs), which were home not only to non-privileged theatrical spectacle but also to an illicit foreign art market.

It is here that the structural history of the French art world entwines with the material history of satirical popular culture in Paris. Louis XV and XVI’s differing approaches to the gatekeeping of royal privileges and censorship affected the availability of the art-world satire that I am studying here. The free market shifts that elicited a critical response from French artists also increased the accessibility to the popular media through which they responded.

Those ancien régime theaters about which we know the most were official institutions, meaning that they held a royal privilege to play comedy or tragedy and to feature singing on stage. The Académie royale de musique, also known as the Théâtre de l’Opéra, as well as the Comédie-Française, often called the Théâtre-Français, enjoyed these privileges and assiduously defended them, attempting to exclude others from performing on stage.³⁰ However, Paris’s seasonal religious fairs, presided over by the Church and its monasteries in particular, had secured long-standing but short-term exemptions from these privileges.³¹ They became safe havens for commercial traffic in Flemish and Dutch contemporary paintings, and for the establishment of théâtres de la foire (the fair’s theaters), the most notable of which was the troupe, and genre, referred to as the Opéra Comique, whose comedians, often Italian, were known as troupes foraines (foreign performers or company).³²

The two most popular seasonal fairs were the Foire Saint-Germain and Foire Saint-Laurent, both established in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to accommodate and entertain pilgrims. At these seasonal fairs, the théâtre forain (foreign theater) eschewed the Comédie-Française and Opéra privileges by either avoiding song and speech entirely (for instance, by pantomiming), or by innovating hybrid and satirical theatrical genres. Two enduring genres very important to this study were created in this context: comic opera, wherein verse or prose comedy alternates with new vocal compositions; and vaudeville, wherein the vocal compositions are written to well-known tunes or airs.³³

In 1752, Louis XV re-established the Comédie-Italienne, and that same year, privately owned theaters operating without royal privilege were permitted to proliferate and flourished on the Boulevard du Temple, near the location of the Foire Saint-Laurent. They were run by entrepreneurial directors of various troupes and venues at the seasonal foires.³⁴ In 1762, the Foire Saint-Germain burned down and the Opéra Comique and Comédie-Italienne joined forces under a new banner, the Théâtre-Italien, joining the ranks of France’s official institutions. Meanwhile, the popular theaters that populate our corpus of art-world satire multiplied along the Boulevard du Temple and its environs: the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique, the Théâtre Français Comique (later renamed the Théâtre des Jeunes-Artistes), and the Théâtre de la demoiselle Montansier (later renamed Théâtre des Variétés).³⁵

Meanwhile, printed images fell under the same censorship regulations as the book trade—the lieutenant-general of the police was charged with surveying literature and satirical images for any grievances against the monarch or those institutions under his protection. Clandestinity is thus signaled to us in the printed image in the same way as it is signaled in printed text: publisher and authorship are concealed from the published object, and that object’s political content is obscured so that it can only be accessed obliquely (Table 1.1).³⁶ Pre-Revolutionary graphic satire was, by necessity, often loose-leaf, anonymous, distributed clandestinely, and thus difficult to obtain. It overwhelmingly employed the cheaper and easier medium, etching, over the more skilled and laborious one, engraving.³⁷

Returning to the question of “official” art, d’Angivillier’s reign as Directeur Général des Bâtiments can be understood as an attempt to tighten up what critics found to be the increasingly lax and unimpressive state of the grand genre. Looked at differently, d’Angivillier sought to resist the growing dominance of a private market for French artistic production given that it favored portraiture, miniature, sculpture, and lower genre easel painting (still life, landscape, etc.).³⁸ He, for instance, established a pro gram of annual history painting commissions from promising young and established Académie royale painters from 1774 onward.³⁹

D’Angivillier and the Académie royale struggled to retain their newfound but limited monopoly. Their last substantial remaining advantage—a popular biennial exhibition of contemporary artwork—was jealously guarded by d’Angivillier in the face of proliferating alternative exhibition opportunities for contemporary art.⁴⁰ Simultaneously, the Parisian private art market experienced unprecedented growth. Nobles and financiers came to perceive their property as an exchangeable commodity and became interested in artwork as a bien mobile (mobile asset). Accordingly, a record number of art auctions were held in the 1770s.⁴¹ Further, aspiring artists would have enjoyed an unprecedented freedom to practice, since from 1776 onward, they were, for the first time, permitted to do so freely in Paris. All that was denied then were exhibition opportunities at the Académie royale’s Salon and the Salons of the now defunct Académie de Saint-Luc.

Alternative exhibition opportunities multiplied from 1775 onward, around when the Académie Saint-Luc’s exhibitions were definitively shuttered. For instance, Marcenay de Ghuy and Jean Antoine de Peters organized exhibits at the Colisée in 1776 that primarily attracted former members of the Académie de Saint-Luc. D’Angivillier managed to suppress the second exhibition in 1777.⁴² Pahin de la Blancherie picked up where de Ghuy and de Peters left off, founding his Salon de la Correspondance in 1777 as an offshoot of his already successful circulating letter called Les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Arts.⁴³ These alternative exhibition opportunities even attracted high profile Academic artists who increasingly eschewed the Salon exhibition in favor of the private market from the 1770s onward, including Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste Greuze.⁴⁴

In summary, the questions raised over the course of the ancien régime, in its fluctuating political economy of art, pertain to who exactly should determine the progrès des arts in France: the guild, the academy, or the private market. Ultimately, all battles over primary gatekeeper status were destabilized by the establishment of the artiste libre status. Just before the Turgot reforms, however, the Académie de Saint-Luc and the Académie royale were unified in their support of what Christophe Charle has categorized as a contradictory notion: liberalization as a means to support the liberal arts.⁴⁵ Consequently, the growing market for easel painting over ambitious painted schemes accelerated, exacerbating the anti-luxe debates of French moralists and fomenting anxieties among participants in the private market who remarked on an influx of fresh blood and speculative interests.⁴⁶

Response: The Artiste Libre on Page, Stage, and Image

Art-world satire follows the arc of these structural changes, responding to them by creatively modifying its arsenal of favored tropes and types, employing the timeliness of the satirical image to rapidly respond to changing conditions and concerns within Paris’s art landscape. These types and tropes and their modifications reveal an adaptive cultural response to structural evolutions—a critical reaction previously entirely overlooked. A closer analysis reveals the extent to which visual artists were not only cognizant of, but also anxious about and disdainful of, the growing importance of the private art market in gatekeeping success and the progress of the arts.

These findings occur across a smaller number of objects of popular culture than in subsequent chapters, but that smaller number is in keeping with broader trends in the development of graphic satire writ large. In sum, I have found fourteen pieces of short pamphlet fiction, five theatrical screen plays, and sixty-four satirical images that satirized contemporary artistic life in Paris in the ancien régime.⁴⁷

The Artist Enjoys an Elevated Social Status

Visual artists and painters in particular are frequently at the center of narratives as the privileged protagonists of art-world satire (Table 1.2). Even as the quantity of art-world satires rose from political regime to political regime, the quantity of visual artists represented in graphic satire dominated this imagery and most of those visual artists were, in fact, painters. What differed over time is largely how painters were figured: their social status, their antagonists, their material wealth.

On the stage, painters figured in Louis Anséaume’s 1757 play Le peintre amoureux de son modéle (The painter who is in love with his model), which was represented frequently over the course of the eighteenth century, in Antoine-Alexandre-Henri Poinsinet’s 1758 Gilles, garçon peintre, z’amoureuxt-et rival (Gilles, boy painter, lover, and rival), and Claude-Henri Watelet’s 1784 La maison de campagne à la mode, ou La comédie d’après nature (The country house à la mode, or Comedy after nature, originally written in 1777).⁴⁸ In each of these three plays, the artist is characterized differently, and each of these characterizations plants the seed of a tree that will grow and branch from the Revolution onward, developing into a discernable trope for the representation of the artist. These types include the charlatan art student and the shop sign painter with unattainable aspirations in Gilles, garçon peintre; the romancing artist in Le peintre amoureux; and the narcissistic artist in La maison de campagne, emotionally disconnected and disengaged from the turmoil that surrounds him, thinking only of how it will translate onto canvas. While these types would be developed further in later theater and short fiction, their ancien régime representations differ markedly from what follows in one significant respect: the artist, in all of these cases, enjoys an elevated or comfortable social status.

We find the same in humorous and satirical imagery of the artist in the ancien régime. A distinct cluster of nine satirical images show us artists, almost always easel painters, who are well dressed and in relatively comfortable environs. They are ridiculed occasionally through transformation into a monkey, participating in the mid-century vogue for singeries and criticisms of modes of transmission and artistic education in Academic instruction for its privileging of copying.⁴⁹ For instance, Antoine Watteau’s images of the Singe Peintre (Monkey Painter) and Singe Sculpteur (Monkey Sculptor) from around 1710 were reprised by Jean-Siméon Chardin in 1739 and then Jean-Baptiste Deshays.⁵⁰ Around the same time, Jean-Baptiste Guélard engraved Christophe Huet’s series of monkey artisans and artists, including his Le Me. Peintre (Mr. Painter, 1742).⁵¹ Through the medium of the monkey-painter, where Chardin first aped Watteau and then Deshays aped Chardin, artists engaged in a cheeky debate around the concept of disegno: were imitative practices in the arts truly a means to understand and translate the designs of nature, or were they simply a means to thoughtlessly copy the style and mannerisms of other artists?

The questions and concerns surrounding mid-century art-world satire were quite different from those that were to follow. Importantly, we can discern that earlier eighteenth-century satirical objects take for granted the material well-being of the artist. In all of these instances, the artist is presented in a state of fine dress or semi-undress, sporting the ennobling clothing of an elevated status with silk habit and culottes, and often bewigged. While the artist’s occasional transformation into the monkey evoked questions that joyfully prodded at the concept of disegno, an essential basis of arguments for the inclusion of the visual arts amongst the liberal arts, the modality of this prodding was none theless conducted in a tone closer to humor than satire; it was play over criticism. The evocation of the artist as monkey draws from the image of the ape of man—a flattering reference that assigns artists a key mediatory role between the physical and the metaphysical.⁵² From mid-century onward, the singe-peintre conceit was largely abandoned in art-world satire, with humor instead found in the addition of verse below the image to create an amusing text-image correspondence.⁵³ Like the singe-peintre images, these are relatively gentle in their critiques and primarily question the artist’s talent but not his social status.

Revisiting the satirical elements of the aforementioned La Peinture (1763), a young painter produces an image of a small bambochade of putti lounging on a bank in an Italianate forest (Figure 1.1). The verse below the image, attributed to Watelet, mocks the painter’s desire to imitate nature, suggesting that the exercise is useless if he does not possess any talent. The verse is adapted from Watelet’s L’art de peindre (The Art of Painting), in particular a poem contained therein, which reads:

Vous qu’un secret desir d’imiter la nature,

Dans l’empire des Arts, attache à la Peinture;

Vous, qui brûlez d’offrir à mes yeux satisfaite,

Les formes, les couleurs, les plans et les effets:

D’un penchant qui vous flatte examinez la source;

Le desir, sans talens, offre peu de ressource:

Il faut être né Peintre; ei [sic] ce don précieux,

Comme celui des vers, est un présent des Cieux.

[You for whom a secret desire to imitate nature,

In that empire of the Arts, attached to Painting;

You, who burns to offer to my satisfied eyes,

The forms, the colors, the backgrounds and effects:

From an inclination to flatter yourself examine the source;

Desire, without talent, offers few resources:

One must be born Painter; and this precious gift,

Like those in verse, is a gift from the Heavens.] ⁵⁴

Significantly, the finely dressed painter in La Peinture works in a windowless studio space though he paints a landscape. When we pair this with the verse below the image, some of its satirical layers begin to reveal themselves, and in so doing, point to the critical preoccupations of art-world satire at mid-century, helping us to appreciate the suddenness with which the inglorious artist takes center stage in subsequent satire. While the verse below the image underlines the importance of imitating nature and examining the source, our young gentlemanly painter works with no visible reference to guide him in contradiction both of Watelet’s advice and broadly held preoccupations around the distinction between copying and imitation, the latter of which was central to painting as a liberal or intellectual practice.⁵⁵ La Peinture interprets Watelet’s text’s meaning as a cautionary verse and applies it to the young painter pictured. Watelet shepherds the painter toward the faithful copying of nature and away from a preoccupation with dazzling showmanship, likely targeting François Boucher and his legacy—“les formes, les couleurs, les plans et les effets.”

The image’s subtly articulated satirical intent is further enhanced by the appearance of another image: a graphic satire from the Mercure de France in 1743, conspicuously pinned to the door in the background, which satirizes a little-known Dean of the Corporation des maîtres peintres’s Académie Saint-Luc—Nicolas Bolureau (Figure 1.4). This image against Bolureau is the very definition of “old and washed up.” It imagines him bedraggled, his clothing worn through and torn. Though he is elderly, needs a walking stick, and cannot stop the mucus that dribbles from his nose, he still carries his canvas around with him, though the frame and canvas itself have been several times broken and repaired. The designer of the image, Jean-Jacques Spoëde, was also a master painter of the Académie Saint-Luc and, given that he exhibited in the Salon exhibitions of the 1750s, appears to have acquired Académie royale membership as well, perhaps around 1743.⁵⁶

La Peinture seemingly piggybacks on Spoëde’s satire against a member of the Académie Saint-Luc, leaning into the divisions between the mechanical and liberal practice of visual art, the former embodied by Bolureau’s membership in the Corporation.⁵⁷ Our young gentlemanly painter finds himself unknowingly caught between the ridiculed Bolureau at his back and the advisory verses from Watelet that frame the engraving. Both of these influences pull him in different directions, one toward a contrived, mechanical practice of visual art and the other toward a liberal practice framed as more conducive to the expression of genius. Importantly, La Peinture uses a satire against a member of the Corporation, insinuating that one’s reputation suffers if one chooses the same path.

Le Peintre de Paysage (The Landscape Painter, 1765) is more direct in its criticism of the easel painter presented to us, who is also finely dressed with an elaborate powdered wig and lace ruffles poking out from underneath his heavy painter’s robe (Figure 1.5). Our painter, however, upon closer inspection, is hunched as he gazes too intently at his landscape painting, and when we closely examine his face we can see he has been rendered with pathognomonic distortion that caricatures him. He frets over his painting and expresses his worries with his posture and facial expression, having entirely abandoned his stabilizing mahlstick, which languishes in his other hand. This artist’s environs are comfortable—he seems to have repurposed a finely furnished room to use as a studio. The verse below the image similarly suggests that though he aspires to copy nature, he lacks the talent of renowned geniuses:

Son attention fait comprendre

Que la nature est son objet;

Mais pour la saisir et la rendre,

Il faut être [Claude Joseph] Vernet.

[His attention makes it clear

That nature is his object;

Put to grasp it and render it,

One must be Vernet.]

These images largely participate in aesthetic discourse, finding satirical manifestations for the expression of concerns about the best means by which to foster the flame of genius. They are not preoccupied with the precarity of the artist’s material well-being, which they take for granted. Rather, the precarity that concerns them is the status of visual art and the security of its membership amongst the liberal arts. These images largely participate in a sort of gatekeeping that served as popular and humorous reminders that the Académie royale’s model of artistic emulation and imitation was the pathway to a more esteemed and professional status for the artist.

In addition to themes of imitation versus copying, the materially comfortable gentleman artist appeared elsewhere on stage and image at mid-century in the figure of the romancing artist—a trope or association that was retained and later carefully adapted to befit the inglorious artist. Underscoring the axiomatic mid-century presentation of the artist as materially comfortable, the romancing artist was more humorous than satirical in the ancien régime.

Anséaume, author of Le Peintre Amoureux, initially presented at the Foire Saint-Laurent, was appointed sub-director to the Opéra Comique upon its reopening in 1752 under Jean Monnet, positioning him as a powerful figure within this burgeoning environment for unofficial commercial theater.⁵⁸ His play features a painting student, Zerbin, who steals Laurette, a beautiful model, away from the older painter Alberti, who is courting her, and is illustrated in an undated engraving that may be clipped from one of the play’s livret (booklet).⁵⁹ Anséaume’s wildly successful play and the image after it, which represents the scene in which Zerbin woos Laurette as she poses for Alberti, transports pseudo-pornographic petit cabinet imagery to the artist’s studio.

The romancing artist who takes advantage of the vulnerability of women in a space that sidesteps social codes was elaborated more lasciviously in imagery for which there was no theatrical or fictional equivalent. For instance, Henri Bonnart’s much earlier circa 1680 Gallant Peintre (Gallant Painter) shows us a fashionably dressed young man with long flowing wig and large cuff sleeves (Figure 1.6). The rhyming couplets below the image enhance its humor, relating the portraitist’s youth and fine dress to the image’s title:

Tandis que de couleurs ma palette est remplie

Vous dames qui voules qu’on vous voie en tableau

Approches vous de moy ma maniere est jolie

Je vous satisferay des coups de mon pinceau.

[Although with colors my palette is full

You ladies who want us to see you in painting

Get close to me I am good looking

I will satisfy you with strokes from my brush.]

The wordplay here, which employs phrases like “je vous satisferay” and “approches vous de moy,” suggest that the artist’s goal, while flattering his female sitter, is to take advantage of this unusually intimate setting to woo her.

These representations share one striking characteristic: visual artists enjoy a comfortable and elevated professional social status. This status is not flagged; it is treated as a given and presented casually. It is only in retrospect, after an examination of the art-world satire that postdates it, that this social and material status becomes striking. It is especially significant that these images and plays all pre-date 1776, the year in which the Académie de Saint-Luc was definitively closed and the new category of artiste libre created. Before this watershed date, the artist, even when presented satirically, enjoyed an unquestionably professional status.

The Connoisseur-Critic-Nouvelliste

Who antagonizes the professional artist in mid-eighteenth century art-world satire? At no other time in the history of art-world satire was the art critic satirized more than during the ancien régime, especially at mid-century. Both renowned Académie royale artists and amateurs took up the etching needle to slander them. Art critics such as La Font de Saint Yenne, who embodied a particularly disconcerting hybrid of connoisseur and nouvelliste (news writer), lured Boucher, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Watelet, and the Comte de Caylus to the genre of satirical imagery. However, art critics were generally absent from panoramic writing and popular theater, signaling that concerns about them remained the purview of visual artists who occasionally took up the etching needle to inscribe their counterattacks.

Art-world satirical imagery is anchored in the Salon exhibition and the art criticism that it suddenly began to attract, birthing a new genre of critical engagement and one that had the power to obliquely challenge the crown, thus requiring the anonymity of its authors and the clandestinity of its publication.⁶⁰ Perhaps unsurprisingly, La Font de Saint Yenne was a favored target of mid-century art-world satire in response to his careful and thorough criticism of the direction of the arts in France, which he articulated in his responses to the Salons of 1746 and 1752.⁶¹

In 1747, François Boucher illustrated a frontispiece to the abbé Leblanc’s Lettre sur l’exposition (Letter on the exhibition). Conventionally titled Painting mocked by Envy, Stupidity and Drunkenness, it pictures emblems of ignorance, wrath, and stupidity with Bacchic figures, a fury, and, in this larger copy of it, a spectacled connoisseur. They mock and deride a canvas and deriding a canvas as the allegory of painting, unable to speak for herself, holds her head in her hands pensively (Figure 1.7).⁶² The arts are presented as though they are being assailed by hostile and vitriolic criticism delivered by the patently inexpert. Boucher imagines the arts as a victim of an idiotic public.

La Font’s L’Ombre du grand Colbert (The Shadow of the Great Colbert, 1752) prompted a more urgent response from Academicians. An image attributed to Watelet and dated to 1753 pictures La Font as a blind Jesuit with walking cane and dog who criticizes artwork at the Salon despite his inability to see (Figure 1.8). An image attributed to the Comte de Caylus and also produced in response to La Font’s 1752 work, La Fon Taine de St. Innocent pictures La Font as a gallant connoisseur who pauses in the streets of Paris to admire the Louvre, whose state of disrepair La Font harshly criticized in L’Ombre du grand Colbert (Figure 1.9). In his over-attention to detail, La Font is oblivious to the bustling streets behind him, and to the dog that pees on his shoe.

An undated and previously unknown image, Les Nouvellistes, is more biting: it pictures La Font alongside a group of gossiping and prominent nouvellistes lounging in a park, perhaps near the infamous tree of Cracow, a popular center for gossip (Figure 1.10).⁶³ Their faces are distorted to reflect their malicious nature and nasty conversation, with brows furrowed and mouths gaping and frowning.⁶⁴ La Font can be spotted in the center of the second row of people, prematurely aged with a now unfashionable and outdated wig, leaning forward to argue.

Lastly, the vignettes to Cochin’s Les Misotechnites aux enfers (1763) imagine a dialogue between the character Ardelion, La Font, and a younger more rambunctious art critic, Phylakei, who is the anonymous author of a 1759 article on the Salon in L’Observateur littéraire.⁶⁵ Les Misotechniques aux enfers is the second of Cochin’s responses to Phylakei, his first response appearing in Le Mercure de France in 1760. But his 1763 satirical piece expands his target to all critics, who, he argues, have increased in avarice and decadence since La Font’s initial incendiary writings. In the vignettes to Les Misotechnites, the art critic is represented as victim of his own oblivion (Figure 1.11): he is sur rounded by the adornments of foolishness (insects) and vanity (peacock feathers) (Figure 1.12), or his writing is inspired by an evil spirit (Figure 1.13).

Satire against art critics represents a careful policing of boundaries on the part, primarily, of the Académie royale and its affiliates. Whereas the Académie royale had long since begun to absorb connoisseurs into their numbers as experts, and the Corporation’s art merchants were billed as experts in their auction pamphlets, Cochin, then the historiographer of the Académie royale, argued that one must possess an intimate knowledge of the practice of art-making in order to judge it. This sentiment is echoed most strongly in Boucher’s earlier satire, which accuses art critics of envy for not being able to practice what they criticize. Via art-world satire, Academicians were retorting the critics’ claims to authority. Anonymous, clandestine critics claimed that they embodied a non-specialist’s goût naturel (natural taste) and, as such, were ventriloquizing a previously voiceless public. These were politically loaded and significant claims in pre-Revolutionary France, as growing numbers of libelous pamphlets accused the state and its institutions of despotism and decadence.⁶⁶

At the very least, those connoisseurs and amateurs admitted to the Académie royale were vetted by an administrative body of artists, as the Académie, like the guild, did not possess a managerial class of non-practitioners. Understandably, at mid-century, art-world satire was largely preoccupied with defending its still relatively recent and somewhat precarious membership amongst the liberal arts as well as the concomitant professionalization of the artist’s social status. What was of concern to mid-century satirists was the division between the practice of art as mechanical versus liberal, and who should feel empowered to exercise expertise within the art world.

From the 1770s onward, however, a different set of concerns dominated the contents of art-world satire, shifting the trajectory of our narrative dramatically toward one centered on the emergence of an increasingly liberalized market for art. We witness a decisive shift in the presentation of art-world satire’s protagonist and the preoccupations that underpinned who was selected as antagonist.

A Wave of Struggling Artists

The association of the artist with poverty was not purely a product of the creation of the category of the artiste libre in 1776. However, the 1770s mark a clear demarcation in the treatment of artists and their relationship to poverty. Earlier instances of struggling artists appeared in 1757 and 1760 but their manifestation differed markedly from the art-world satire that followed, signaling to us both the gravity of the 1776 Déclaration for artistic community, and the latter’s careful attention to structural shifts in their status.

Étienne Jeaurat and the anonymous author of an Arbre de Cracovie print (Tree of Krakow) show us the artist whose financial struggles peek through their public veneer of gentility (Figure 1.14). Jeaurat presented the now lost painting after which the surviving image was engraved in 1755. Claude Duflos engraved it in 1757 and added amusing verse. It shows us a well-heeled and fashionable painter and his wife moving out of their attic apartment presumably for failure to pay rent, having only rescued furniture relevant to his painterly trade. A bread maker and wine merchant yell angrily at them as they depart and are perhaps the unpaid creditors of the unfortunate couple. The painter and his wife are both finely dressed, with the painter’s sword—an emblem of nobility—dangling between his legs.⁶⁷ They hold their arms out, unable to pay the artisans who scold them as bystanders laugh. The humor in this image is contingent upon the apparent difference in social status between the artisans and the artist, and how this difference is inverted by the latter’s financial destitution. In other words, the artist’s status is “all show.” The verse below the image enhances its irony, playing upon the artist’s pursuit of glory at the expense of his finances:

Léger d’Or et d’Argent, ainsi que de Cervelle,

Sur ce char de triomphe un confrère d’Apelle

Dans un grenier nouveau va prendre appartement:

Ravi d’avoir sauvé son cher ameublement.

Il sembleroit qu’il a gagné quelque victoire;

Cequi rabat pourtant un peu son air hautain,

C’est que la Boulangère et le Marchand de vin

Ne chantent pas tous deux des hymnes à sa gloire.

[Light in Gold and Silver, as well as Brains,

On this triumphal chariot a confrere of Apelles

In a new attic will take up a new apartment:

Delighted to have saved his dear furniture.

It would seem he has won some kind of victory;

What debases however his somewhat haughty airs,

Is that the Baker and the Wine merchant

Do not either of them sing hymns to his glory.]

In L’Arbre de Cracovie (Figure 1.15), we find an array of gossiping figures. Among them is the young artist with a painting tucked under his arm. His clothing shows many signs of wear: the elbows of his habit are blown out, its hem is frayed, and his silk stockings sag. Though the artist maintains a veneer of elevated status, with a sword dangling from his waist, his destitution is apparent nonetheless. Further, of the figures here presented—an astrologer, a dancer, students, a musician, and the portly and finely dressed engraver to the artist’s right, only the painter’s clothing shows any signs of wear.

In the 1770s, we observe a shift where the artist’s poverty becomes entirely axiomatic and pretenses to gentility disappear. The ancien régime’s best known panoramic writer, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, wrote frequently on artists, art education, and the art market in his expanded twelve-volume 1782 edition of Le Tableau de Paris. This text reflects Mercier’s pre-Revolutionary interpretation of the practice of the visual arts, where, in his article on “Vente de Tableaux” (“Sales of Paintings”), he rehearses Platonic critiques of art-making as an imitation of nature.⁶⁸ His critiques often erupt into bilious exclamations, for instance, “Eh! Que d’or n’a-til pas fallu pour payer ces malheureux artistes, & leurs insipides images!” (Ha! What money have we needed to pay these miserable artists, & their insipid images!) In the same vein, he excoriates the newfound École gratuite du Dessin (Free school for Drawing) on the premise that “elle ne fera que multiplier ces inutiles artisans d’un luxe ruineux” (it will do nothing but multiply these useless artisans of ruinous luxury).⁶⁹

Occasionally, Mercier strayed from deriding the growing number of artists and their decadence, instead championing the nobility of art-making. That nobility, he argued, was only possible if market incentives were separate from art-making. Mercier constructed an image of the noble struggling artist to encapsulate this precondition for greatness, and in this joined a chorus of art-world satire that promoted a similar starving but noble artist. Significantly, these representations were concentrated at the end of the ancien régime, in the 1770s and 1780s—notably around the 1776 creation of the artiste libre category.

In his article on “Les Greniers” (“The Attics”), which Anton Balthasar Dunker later (unofficially) illustrated in 1787 (Figure 1.16), Mercier describes the many types of impoverished inhabitants of the attics of Parisian apartments. His estimation of artists themselves, whether writer, painter, or poet, is high, especially when they toil in ignobility and poverty: “Comme dans la machine humain le sommet renferme la plus noble partie de l’homme, l’organe pensant, ainsi dans cette capitale le génie, l’industrie, l’application, la vertu occupent la région la plus élevée. Là, se forme en silence le peintre; là, le poëte fait ses premiers vers; là sont les enfans des arts, pauvres & laborieux, contemplateurs assidus des merveilles de la nature” (As with the human machine where the summit contains the most noble part of man, the thinking organ, thusly in this capital genius, industry, effort, [and] virtue occupies the highest region. There, the painter is formed in silence; there, the poet creates his first verses; there are the children of the arts, poor and hardworking, dedicated contemplators of the marvels of nature).⁷⁰

Dunker’s rendering of Mercier’s “Les Greniers” article visually bridges the humorous images of the noble and professional artist, described above, with the many images of the struggling artist that would follow. Sharing an attic apartment, with the chimneys of other buildings visible from the window, a painter has crammed his easel and prints in amongst the per sonal effects of the author of Les Bijoux Indiscrets (here, Dunker seems to have leveled a jab at Denis Diderot). The artist and author demonstrate that they can still look presentable in public: the artist is bewigged, and the author’s bag-wig is pinned high on the wall. The artist in particular seems perfectly happy with his situation, though he toils in destitution and is only able to maintain a thin pretense of financial comfort.

In keeping with other contemporary criticism, Mercier frequently railed against portraiture. He felt only the lazy and idle would commission them and that they were inappropriately displayed in the Salon to a public that had no reason to care for the sitter, nor did the sitter provide the public with any notable example of virtue, talent, or service to the state.⁷¹ In an article, he singles out the “Peintres en portraits” (“Portrait painters”), and accuses them of profiting from vanity.⁷² Mercier here defines an exception to what he, after the invention of the artiste libre, treats as a rule: that all artists are poor. Though his disdain of portraiture is very in keeping with decades of salon criticism, by blaming portraitists for profiteering, Mercier introduced a new type to art-world satire that I will call the prostituting portraitist. As such, he laid the groundwork for decades of art-world satire that blamed the growing wealth of bourgeois patrons for derailing the progress of the arts. Mercier’s complaints about portraiture are in keeping with his last major target of criticism—the art market—which he feels prices rather use less objects astronomically high, promotes speculation, and creates opportunities for scheming art sellers.⁷³

Mercier’s fears that artists will be lured into prostituting their genius for short-term gains is echoed in the circa 1771 article “Abjuration d’un Vieux Peintre” by Marchand, writing under the pen name R. de S. J. Pingebat (Figure 1.2).⁷⁴ Marchand’s text, as we have discussed, is accompanied by an image of the fictional artist of his text, who complains that visual art is “le plus noble de tous les arts, [et] le plus proxénète de tous les métiers” (the most noble of all the arts, [and] the most pimp-like of all occupations).⁷⁵ Cramped in his studio, likely also in an attic, the artist’s fine accoutrements are hung on the wall behind him and he has begun to draft his “Abjuration d’un Vieux Peintre” as he destroys the canvas before him. This image is the unrecognized first of several that show the artist destroying his own artwork, overcome with frustration and anger at the prostitution of his art and the unattainability of success.

The noble artist who enjoys an elevated status tapered off entirely from the stage and page by 1776 and was replaced by images of the struggling artist in graphic satire and panoramic writing. In earlier permutations of these images, the artist’s social status was revealed as entirely aspirational, leveling a biting critique at both the Académie royale and Académie de Saint-Luc’s attempts to solidify the visual arts’ membership amongst the liberal arts. This shift was effected gradually: the finely dressed artist whose financial reality conflicts with his aspirations gave way to the dressed down and destitute artist toiling in a cheap mansarde apartment.

The artist underwent a further transformation by Dunker and Parizeau: he became, by eighteenth-century standards, ugly. In Jeaurat and the Arbre de Cracovie figurations, the artist behaves badly or dresses badly but is still a handsome young man. Parizeau and Dunker’s figurations age and bloat the young artist, removing from him those features that Johann Lavater would associate with moral purity, nobility, and genius, and associating the artist instead with liminality and criminality.⁷⁶ Lavater’s correlation between physiognomic beauty and genius, which is negatively evoked in these late ancien régime satires, was taken quite seriously within the Parisian art world. For instance, when d’Angivillier founded a school in 1777 to further encourage very promising young artists up to fifteen years old, the selection of youngsters was made based on their ability, their social status, and their body, both in terms of health and beauty.⁷⁷

The association made here between physical beauty, social status, and genius was reinforced by a genre of panoramic image prevalent in early modern Europe, the Cris de Paris (Cries of Paris). This image type captured those street trades or petits métiers called, variably, gagne-deniers or gagne-petits—trades for which there was no guild. As Vincent Milliot has established, the gagnedeniers captured in the Cris de Paris were objects of fascination. They were visibly poor, and given their lack of corporate association, were also assumed to have escaped the social and moral order of urban life that largely relied on trade organizations to enforce modes of moral social behavior.⁷⁸

Closer examination reveals that the faces of these liminal figures were in fact caricatured, corresponding to Lavater’s descriptions of the physiognomic signs of stupidity, weakness, depravity, and criminality, which he described largely in terms of caricatural deformations and visualizations of meanness and nastiness, as in Jean-Baptiste Bonnart’s circa 1680 image Revandeuse.⁷⁹ These subtle deformations introduced a shift in the visual vocabulary around the satirized artiste libre, who, from the 1770s onward, is pictured with features borrowed from the gagne-petits—their non-guilded brethren.

This mid-century shift in the satirical representation of the artist responded to a significant but often overlooked structural shift in the French world of labor, which liberalized the practice of fine art in unprecedented ways, anticipating revolutionary transformations over a decade before the Revolution itself. If we think of the artist as the protagonist of art-world satire, then we must also turn our attention toward the evolution of its antagonist: the connoisseur, or, more aptly, the connoisseur’s susceptibility to illicit art market schemes.

The Connoisseur in Text and Image

Art-world satire privileged visual artists as favored protagonists in all media. In fact, art-world graphic satire narrowed its focus over time: in the ancien régime about 50 percent of images featured a visual artist, but this proportion gradually increased to 80 percent in the July Monarchy (Table 1.3). But the visual artist is far from the only type of art-world actor (in the sociological sense) present in graphic satire. In the ancien régime, connoisseurs made regular appearances and were the second most prevalent type present in this imagery (Table 1.4). As we will see, connoisseurs remained in second place until the Restoration, when they were matched and then eclipsed by the bourgeois art buyer and the artist’s model as figures who appeared in art-world satire, often alongside the inglorious artist.

In ancien régime art-world satire, connoisseurs universally appear as nuisances at best, and antagonists at worst. The theatrical connoisseur tends to appear as bumbling rather than threatening—in striking contrast to its parallels in graphic satire—with a characteristic myopia used to typify this figure across a century of art-world satire. In Guillaume-René Le Fébure’s Le Connoisseur of 1773 (which was plagiarized in 1789 by Antoine Louis Rouillé and in 1793 by Benoit-Joseph Marsollier des Vivetères), connoisseurs are scathingly represented as myopic, disloyal, and vain.⁸⁰ They look too closely at everything, speak in absurd detail about insignificant topics, and are overly confident in their good taste and the truth of their judgments. Agathe, the niece of the play’s leading connoisseur Fintac, wishes desperately that her uncle would abandon his connoisseurial and amateur pastime for his own health, which he does, eventually, when all of his friends scorn a play he has written and published. The equally benign “faux connoisseur” also appears in Watelet’s La maison de campagne in a character named Le Marquis. As the competitor to the preferred object of the heroine’s affections, Watelet represents him unfavorably. Le Marquis overestimates his own taste and gives unsolicited advice that is rarely heeded. In these representations, the connoisseur is a noisome but benign pest who harangues but never actually harms his family and friends. He has not the ability, the connections, nor the power to actually participate in the art world. Ancien régime art-world graphic satire, however, characterizes the connoisseur quite differently.

Overconfidence and myopia are consistent features in satirical representations of the connoisseur on stage, but in graphic satire, these traits lead to disastrous consequences. In satirical imagery, the connoisseur falls prey to the nefarious forces of decadence and dissipation in the art world: the market and art criticism. The most well-known example of this is the Comte de Caylus’s 1727 Assemblée de Brocanteurs, which pictures connoisseurs as donkeys—allegorical manifestations of ignorance—and applies the derisive title of brocanteur (properly, a second-hand goods dealer or bric-a-brac dealer) to them, associating them to lowly street speculation and bartering in trinkets (Figure 1.17).⁸¹ The line between the well-dressed connoisseur who closely inspects artworks, and the speculative trade of relatively valueless objects is here blurred.

A similar criticism is mounted of the connoisseur, but with bawdier humor, in Della Valle’s undated but likely late eighteenth-century image, Le Fin Connoisseur (The Fine Connoisseur, Figure 1.18). An elderly and noble connoisseur, complete with chapeau bras, sword, and a large wig bow, is on his Grand Tour in Rome.⁸² He marvels at a painting he has discovered in the street shop of actual brocanteurs, and is unconcerned that this image depicts a working-class woman baring her rear and flatulating. The verse below the image underlines the connoisseur’s delusional self-confidence:

Sur cette Borne, au coin de cette Rue.

Un Raphael! Ah la bonne recrue!

Le Brun l’auroit manqué quoique grand Connoisseur.

Il n’a que de bons yeux, je les sens à l’odeur.

[On this curb, at the corner of this Street.

A Raphael! Ah a good recruit!

Le Brun would have missed it although (he is) a great Connoisseur.

He has but good eyes, I have a good sense of smell.]

The verse refers to Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s husband, who enjoyed a successful career selling and auctioning artwork and lending his expertise for the conservation and evaluation of works.⁸³ This elderly and anachronistically dressed connoisseur’s overconfidence in his taste and judgment is rendered especially absurd through this comparison to Paris’s most successful marchand de tableaux (painting merchant). More importantly, the line between connoisseur and market practice is, again, blurred. The connoisseur has betrayed his ambitions of jockeying in a speculative marketplace for artwork, which he does in a dangerously ignorant way, given his gullibility.

In a drawn satirical image, dated to circa 1774, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin satirizes another connoisseur-turned-market expert, Pierre-Jean Mariette.⁸⁴ Upon Mariette’s death in 1774, the state offered to buy his collection for one hundred thousand écus, which is referenced in Saint-Aubin’s caption. Mariette’s family elected to sell the collection at private auction instead, believing they could better profit from its sale. Mariette is here pictured as a connoisseur shopping for images in the streets of Paris. He looks in the lower right-hand corners of each image, concerned only with the artist’s signature and not with the merit of the artwork—a theme that recurs in ancien régime art-world satire. Mariette, of modest bookseller origins, is here accused of speculative practices as he greedily drapes himself in artwork. It is equally possible, that and would be equally effective if, Saint-Aubin was lampooning not the deceased Mariette but the greedy audiences of Mariette’s estate sale, incapable of appreciating artwork but knowing which names they ought to recognize.

The connoisseur was elsewhere imagined as particularly vulnerable to speculative market practices, either through greed or ignorance. The anonymous author of the 1776 La confession publique du brocanteur (The public confession of the second-hand goods dealer) employed the conceit of a fictitious travel narrative to reveal the unfair games that a group of art sellers played on unsuspecting amateurs.⁸⁵ In the story, an auctioneer (commissairepriseur), originally from Paris, is sailing back from the Americas and has been roomed with what he calls a brocanteur—a term often applied to ignorant and dishonest art merchants. The brocanteur’s name further indicates that he will be the target of this fictional travel narrative’s bile: Ferre-la-Mule is a French proverb that literally means to shoe a mule, but figuratively indicates that one has charged much more for their work than its worth.

When Ferre-la-Mule is fatally injured during a surprise attack off the coast of Newfoundland, he urgently confesses all of his sins, fearing death. For the next forty pages of La confession publique, Ferre-la-Mule inventories the many ways in which he and a secret association of art merchants conspired to seduce enthusiastic connoisseurs into spending ten to thirty times the value of the artwork they purchased. For example, they simulated public auctions and planted members of their association in the audience to up-bid the value of terrible artworks in order to drive connoisseurs into a frenzy. The connoisseurs would then appeal to the brocanteurs to help them secure these works.⁸⁶ If a connoisseur attempted to buy artwork directly from a brocanteur in this association, he would be refused. This catalyzed a scheme in which this artwork would be talked up persistently to the connoisseur, who would go off in search of it. He would be sent from brocanteur to brocanteur, who would claim to have just sold the work, until the connoisseur was driven to such a state of desperation that he would offer at least thirty times its actual value.⁸⁷

Ferre-la-Mule recounts about a dozen increasingly elaborate speculative schemes during his near-death confessions. To make matters worse, this brocanteur is exposed as ignorant: another passenger on their ship, Madame de Saint-Firmin, discovers Ferre-la-Mule’s lack of learning early on, suspecting his ignorance before everyone else, as her connoisseur husband was often swindled by such brocanteurs. We thus discover that apart from the names of a few famous Dutch and Italian Old Master painters, Ferre-la-Mule knows nothing about art in general, nor the oeuvres of the few famous Old Masters he does know, nor about the specific artworks he traffics. He says, “nous nous bornons uniquement à vendre & à acheter très-cher, une infinité de noms” (we limit ourselves to only selling & buying very expensively, countless names).⁸⁸

It is unsurprising then that during the 1770s, as the private market for artworks and the auction market in particular were experiencing a visible boom, satirical writing and imagery discovered a new target: the gullible connoisseur swindled by the vulgar brocanteur. The concerns, as they were articulated, were in fact at this point quite disconnected from art-world satire’s parallel preoccupation with the impoverished material status of the artist. Only later would we begin to see the two entwined with some measure of blame or causality being assigned. In the ancien régime, as the connoisseur emerged as an antagonist, he was mostly represented in his impotence, victim only to his own uninformed enthusiasm, and not a threat to anyone but himself.

Art critics, in contrast, were lampooned with the venom reserved for threats. And this contrast is extremely informative. The Académie royale was already established in its practice of admitting wealthy and studied amateurs amongst their ranks, carving out roles for certain experts among them in pseudo-administrative and pseudo-patronage roles, and accepting the aesthetic direction of those with vetted expertise.⁸⁹ Their inclusion in the art world was not of concern so much as the potential susceptibility of the more inexpert connoisseurs to the selfish, private interests that could proliferate in a free market. This concern found prolific voice outside of satire as well, namely in the 1786 Réflexions sur la peinture et la gravure (Reflections on painting and engraving) by François Charles Joullain, an art merchant from an art-world dynasty. There, he expressed his concerns that avarice, decadence, and the selfish and private interests of art sellers and artists would break down the bonds of trust they shared in their commercial relations with buyers, and that the sudden growth of art enthusiasm and proliferation of amateurs and connoisseurs would supply these avaricious sellers with exploitable buyers.⁹⁰

Joullain does, in fact, identify an artist who is guilty of taking advantage of enthusiastic amateurs: Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Joullain’s 1786 criticisms echo an earlier art-world satire. Anonymous, undated, clandestine, and untitled, the Allegory against Greuze, likely published circa 1782, viciously attacks Greuze’s reputation and his trade relations with his reproductive engravers (Figure 1.19).⁹¹ This image—the first art-world satire I discovered and the catalyst for this study—is the single most ornate in its hostility, specific in its critiques, and personal in its attacks of any object of art-world satire across all 532 images I found.⁹²

Greuze is accused of having abandoned the public by withdrawing from exhibiting at the Salon after the failure of his Septimius Severus and Caracalla history painting at the Salon of 1769, of deceiving buyers of his engravings by pulling false proofs and charging exorbitant prices for them, and of exploiting the reproductive engravers with which he has recently worked. Allegory against Greuze is overdetermined in the iconographic connections it draws to highlight the moral depravity of Greuze’s commercial relations, effectively warning off other artists from following his leadership. Greuze’s embrace of a free market and abandonment of the Académie royale and its exhibition opportunities elicited a response so fierce that Allegory against Greuze was re-etched and re-printed after the original satire’s copper plate was exhausted.

In the context of eighteenth-century debates around the liberalization of markets, we have uncovered rampant skepticism and concern amongst art-world actors, many of whom voiced their anxiety in the medium of art-world satire. From 1770s factums and mémoires debating the status of the Académie de Saint-Luc to panoramic fiction about the status of the struggling artist, an apparent consensus seems to have emerged across ancien régime art-world satire that the moral practice of fine art is incompatible with competitive individualism. To appreciate this conclusion, we also have to understand that France’s world of work was structured via guilds, otherwise known as the corporate system. While they served a regulatory function akin to economic protectionism, corporations also safeguarded and encouraged the moral standing of their membership and its relationship to the broader community.⁹³ The fine arts were caught up in broader seismic shifts that were the product of intellectual debates around whether or not regulations and guild structures were necessary for markets to remain moral in nature. Could individuals be entrusted to compete with one another without being exploitative and immoral?⁹⁴

The liberalization of the status of the artist in and around 1776 made such questions very urgent. Accordingly, around this date, the artist became unquestionably poor and the connoisseur easily duped, both apparent victims of an exploitative and immoral art market. From a satirical environment pre-occupied with the emergence of art criticism and the intricacies of artistic formation, art-world satire was rapidly overtaken by a new concern which dominates the remainder of our study: how can the fine arts coexist that competitive individualism in an increasingly free market environment without compromising on its relatively recent gains as a liberal art whose practitioners benefited from a professional and vocational status? These concerns took center stage within Revolutionary debates, when the French art world was given an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine itself from the ground up.