Académie Royale: A History in Portraits 9781409457428, 9781138295599

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académie royale From its establishment in 1648 until its disbanding in 1793 after the French Revolution, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was the centre of the Parisian art world. Taking the reader behind the scenes of this elite bastion of French art theory, education, and practice, this engaging study uncovers the fascinating histories – official and unofficial – of that artistic community. Through an innovative approach to portraits – their values, functions, and lives as objects – this book explores two faces of the Académie. Official portraits grant us insider access to institutional hierarchies, ideologies, rituals, customs, and everyday experiences in the Académie’s Louvre apartments. Unofficial portraits in turn reveal hidden histories of artists’ personal relationships: family networks, intimate friendships, and bitter rivalries. Drawing on both art-historical and anthropological frames of analysis, this book offers insightful interpretations of portraits read through and against documentary evidence from the archives to create a rich story of people, places, and objects. Theoretically informed, rigorously researched, and historically grounded, this book sheds new light on the inner workings of the Académie. Its discoveries and compelling narrative make an invaluable and accessible contribution to our understanding of this pre-eminent European institution and the social lives of artists in early modern Paris. Hannah Williams is Junior Research Fellow in Art History at St John’s College, University of Oxford.

Académie Royale A History in Portraits

Hannah Williams University of Oxford

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Hannah Williams 2015 Hannah Williams has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Williams, Hannah, 1980Académie royale : a history in portraits / By Hannah Williams. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-5742-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Académie royale d’architecture (France)--History. 2. Académie royale d’architecture (France)--Biography--Portraits. 3. Artists--France--Portraits. 4. Artists--France--Social conditions. 5. Portraits, French--17th century. 6. Portraits, French--18th century. 7. Paris (France)--Civilization--17th century. 8. Paris (France)--Civilization--18th century. I. Title. N332.F83P395 2015 706’.044--dc23

ISBN 9781409457428 (hbk)

2014037344

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Face-to-Face with the Académie Royale

vii xv xvii xix 1

PART I: THE OFFICIAL FACE 1

An Institutional Image: Portrait of the Artist as an Academician

17

2

Rituals of Initiation: Becoming and Being in the Académie

77

3

On the Wall: Portraits, Spaces, and Everyday Encounters at the Académie

119

PART II: THE UNOFFICIAL FACE 4

Bloodlines: Portraits of Family

159

5

Reciprocal Acts: Portraits of Friendship

209

6

Facing Off: Portraits of Rivalry

251

Epilogue: The End of an Institution

301

APPENDICES Appendix 1: Portraits submitted as morceaux de réception (1648–1793) Appendix 2: Inventory of portraits in the salle des portraits (c.1794) Appendix 3: Self-portraits exhibited at the Salons (1673–1793)

313 319 321

Bibliography Index

323 341

Illustrations

Colour Plates 1 Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron, SelfPortrait, 88 × 73 cm, oil on canvas, 1672, Musée du Louvre, Paris 2 Marie-Suzanne Giroust, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, 90 × 73 cm, pastel, 1770, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris 3 Adolf-Ulric Wertmüller, Jean-Jacques Caffieri, 129 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1784, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund 4 Jean Tiger, Henri Testelin, 116 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1675, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 5 Pierre Gobert, Louis II de Boullogne, 115 × 88 cm, oil on canvas, 1701, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

9 Alexandre Roslin, Self-Portrait with his wife, Marie-Suzanne Giroust, painting the portrait of Henrik Vilhem Peill, 131 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1767, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 10 Charles-Antoine Coypel, SelfPortrait, 148 × 113 cm, oil on canvas, 1746, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 11 Louis-Michel Van Loo, Carle Van Loo and his family, 200 × 156 cm, oil on canvas, 1757, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 12 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Louis de Silvestre, 63 × 51 cm, pastel, 1753, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin

6 Etienne Aubry, Louis-Claude Vassé, 129 × 97.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1775, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

13 Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne et Nicolas de Plattemontagne, Double Self-Portrait, 132 × 185 cm, oil on canvas, 1654, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

7 Alexandre Roslin, Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont, 128 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1753, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

14 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Johann-Georg Wille, 59 × 49 cm, oil on canvas, 1763, Musée Jacquemart André – Institut de France, Paris

8 Joseph Vivien, François Girardon, 88 × 72 cm, oil on canvas, pastel, 1701, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris

15 Pierre Mignard, Self-Portrait, 235 × 188 cm, oil on canvas, c.1690, Musée du Louvre, Paris

viii académie royale: a history in portraits

16 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, SelfPortrait with Two Students, 210.8 × 151.1 cm, oil on canvas, 1785, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Black and White Figures Introduction: Face-to-Face with the Académie Royale 0.1 Gustave Lundberg, François Boucher, 65 × 50 cm, pastel, 1742, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris 0.2 Alexandre Roslin, François Boucher, 65 × 54 cm, oil on canvas 1760, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1 An Institutional Image: Portrait of the Artist as an Academician 1.1 François Lemaire, Jacques Sarazin, 104 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1657, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.2 Jacob Van Loo, Michel I Corneille, 116 × 86.7 cm, oil on canvas, 1662, Musée du Louvre, Paris 1.3 Antoine Berthélemy, Louis du Guernier, 101 × 81 cm, oil on canvas, 1663, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.4 Claude Lefebvre, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 138 × 113 cm, oil on canvas, 1666, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.7 Jean Tiger, Nicolas Loir, 155 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1675, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.8 Martin Lambert, Charles and Henri Beaubrun, 146 × 180 cm, oil on canvas, 1675, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.9 Florent de La Mare-Richart, Noël Coypel, 117 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1677, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.10 Antoine Benoist, Jacques Buirette, 118 × 92 cm, oil on canvas, 1681, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.11 Antoine Vestier, Nicolas-Guy Brenet, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1786, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.12 Jean-Laurent Mosnier, CharlesAntoine Bridan, 130 × 100 cm, oil on canvas, 1788, ENSBA, Paris 1.13 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Augustin Pajou, 71 × 58 cm, pastel, 1783, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris 1.14 Philippe Vignon, Philippe de Buyster, 117 × 92 cm, oil on canvas, 1687, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.5 Paul Mignard, Nicolas Mignard, 159 × 126 cm, oil on canvas, 1672, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

1.15 Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis, Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1774, Musée du Louvre, Paris

1.6 Jean-Charles Nocret, Jean Nocret, 150 × 125 cm, oil on canvas, 1674, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.16 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Charles-Amédée-Philippe Van Loo, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1785, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

illustrations

1.17 Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis, JosephMarie Vien, 133 × 100 cm, oil on canvas, 1785, Musée du Louvre, Paris

ix

portrait of his wife, 47 × 34 cm, engraving, 1742, British Museum, London

1.18 Nicolas de Largillière, Charles Lebrun, 232 × 187 cm, oil on canvas, 1686, Musée du Louvre, Paris

1.28 Manuel-Salvador Carmona (after Alexandre Roslin), François Boucher, 39 × 27.3 cm, engraving, 1761, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.19 Donat Nonnotte, Sébastien II Leclerc, 129 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1741, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.29 Noël-Nicolas Coypel, Simon Guillain, 100 × 80 cm, oil on canvas, 1732, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.20 Guillaume Voiriot, Jean-Joseph Sue, 127 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, c.1789, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.30 Nicolas Loir, Allegory of the foundation of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, 141 × 185.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1663, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

1.21 Jean Ranc, François Verdier, 130 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1703, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.22 Jean Le Gros, Claude-Guy Hallé, 116 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1725, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.23 Guillaume Voiriot, Jean-Marc Nattier, 130.5 × 97.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1759, Musée du Louvre, Paris 1.24 Antoine Benoist, Louis-Gabriel Blanchard, 112 × 93 cm, oil on canvas, 1681, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.25 Jacques Carré, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, 116 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1682, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.26 Simon-Henri Thomassin (after Louis II de Boullogne), Louis XIV Protecting the Arts – frontispice for the Recueil, 38 × 31.7 cm, engraving, 1728, Musée du Louvre, Chalcographie, Paris 1.27 Jean Daullé (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), Hyacinthe Rigaud painting the

1.31 Jacques Buirette, Union of Painting and Sculpture, 78 × 76 × 8 cm, marble, 1663, Musée du Louvre, Paris 1.32 Charles-François Poerson, Apollo presiding over the union of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture and the Académie de Saint-Luc in Rome, 136 × 178 cm, oil on canvas, 1682, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 1.33 Henri Testelin, Colbert presenting the members of the Académie Royale des Sciences to Louis XIV, 348 × 590 cm, oil on canvas, 1667, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 2 Rituals of Initiation: Becoming and Being in the Académie 2.1 Charles-Etienne Geuslain, Nicolas de Largillière, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1723, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 2.2 Charles-Etienne Geuslain, François Barrois, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1723,

x

académie royale: a history in portraits

Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 2.3 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Martin Desjardins, 141 × 106 cm, oil on canvas, 1700, Musée du Louvre, Paris 2.4 Alexandre Roslin, Etienne Jeaurat, 128 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1753, Musée du Louvre, Paris 2.5 Jean Ranc, Nicolas de Plattemontagne, 130 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1703, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 2.6 Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, JeanBaptiste Oudry, 131 × 105 cm, oil on canvas, 1753, Musée du Louvre, Paris 2.7 Etienne Aubry, Noël Hallé, 126 × 95 cm, oil on canvas, 1775, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 3 On the Wall: Portraits, Spaces, and Everyday Encounters at the Académie 3.1 Pierre-Antoine Demachy, View of the Colonnade of the Louvre, 76 × 131 cm, oil on canvas, 1772, Musée du Louvre, Paris 3.2 Locations of the Académie and other key sites. Guillaume de l’Isle, Le plan de Paris, ses faubourgs et ses environs, 56 × 75 cm, 1742, David Rumsey Map Collection 3.3 Location of the Académie Royale after 1721 on first floor of Louvre. Detail of Plate 6 from François Blondel, Architecture Françoise, vol. 4 (Paris, 1752–1756), British Library, London 3.4 Jean-Baptiste Martin, A General Meeting of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture at the Louvre, 30 × 43 cm, oil on canvas, c.1712, Musée du Louvre, Paris

3.5 Charles-Joseph Natoire, Life class at the Académie, 45.3 × 32.3 cm, black chalk and watercolour, 1746, The Courtauld Gallery, London 3.6 Plan and elevation of the école du modèle. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London 3.7 Plan and elevation of ‘le Salon, première pièce de l’Appartement’. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London 3.8 Plan and elevation of ‘la seconde salle où se tiennent ordinairement les assemblées’ showing the location of the artists’ portraits displayed in this room. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London 3.9 Alexandre-François Desportes, Self-Portrait as a huntsman, 197 × 163 cm, oil on canvas, 1699, Musée du Louvre, Paris 3.10 Plan and elevation of ‘la troisième Salle de l’Académie où sont les Vases de Medicis’. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London 3.11 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Pierre Mignard, 140 × 111 cm, oil on canvas, 1691, Musée national du Château de Versailles 3.12 Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait, 89 × 70 cm, oil on canvas, 1715, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 3.13 Martin Desjardins, Monument à la gloire de Louis XIV et de la Paix de Nimègue, 220 × 200 × 170 cm, oil on canvas, bronze, c.1679–1685, Musée du Louvre, Paris

illustrations

3.14 Document Casket of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, leather with gilt bronze, ENSBA, Paris

xi

cm, oil on canvas, 1763, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

4 Bloodlines: Portraits of Family

4.10 Jean-Marc Nattier, Self-Portrait with his wife and children, 149 × 165 cm, oil on canvas, 1730–1762, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

4.1 Nicolas-Alexis-Simon Belle, François de Troy, 130 × 99 cm, oil on canvas, 1703, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

4.11 Jean-Marc Nattier, Louis Tocqué, 82 × 64.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1739, Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian-Museu, Lisbon

4.2 Jacques-Antoine-Joseph Aved, Jean-François de Troy, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1734, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

4.12 Jean-Marc Nattier, Louis Tocqué, 81.1 × 62.8 cm, oil on canvas, c.1759– 1762, Akademiraadet (Det Kongelige Akademi for der Skønne Kunster), Copenhagen

4.3 Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait with his son, Charles-Antoine, 59 × 42 cm, oil on canvas, 1698, Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie, Besançon 4.4 Charles-Antoine Coypel, SelfPortrait, 65 × 53 cm, pastel, 1739, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans 4.5 Charles-Antoine Coypel, SelfPortrait, 97.8 × 80.1 cm, pastel, 1734, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 4.6 Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, Noël-Nicolas Coypel, 65 × 36 × 43 cm, terracotta, 1730, Musée du Louvre, Paris 4.7 Pierre Le Sueur, Carle Van Loo, 130 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1747, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 4.8 Louis-Michel Van Loo, Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father, Jean-Baptiste Van Loo, 129.5 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1762, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 4.9 Louis-Michel Van Loo, Self-Portrait with his sister, Marie-Anne, and a portrait of his father, Jean-Baptiste, 245 × 162

4.13 Louis Tocqué, Jean-Marc Nattier, 83 × 68 cm, oil on canvas, 1762, Akademiraadet (Det Kongelige Akademi for der Skønne Kunster), Copenhagen 4.14 Louis-Jacques Cathelin (after Jean-Marc Nattier), Louis Tocqué, 37.6 × 26.1 cm, engraving, 1773, British Museum, London 5 Reciprocal Acts: Portraits of Friendship 5.1 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, JeanBaptiste II Lemoyne, 44 × 35 cm, pastel, 1747, Private Collection. Image after Albert Besnard, La Tour, la vie et l’œuvre (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1928) 5.2 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, René Frémin, 91 × 73 cm, pastel, 1743, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris 5.3 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Charles Parrocel, 56 × 44 cm, pastel, 1743, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, SaintQuentin

xii

académie royale: a history in portraits

5.4 Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, MauriceQuentin de La Tour, 65 cm, terracotta 1747, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, SaintQuentin

× 54.8 cm, oil on canvas, 1763, National Gallery, London

5.5 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, JeanBaptiste II Lemoyne, 46.4 × 38.8 cm, pastel, 1763, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris

6.1 Pierre Mignard, Tent of Darius, 298 × 453 cm, oil on canvas, c.1689, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

5.6 Nicolas de Plattemontagne, Portrait of Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne and his wife, 26 × 20.8 cm, black, red and white chalk, 1677, British Museum, London 5.7 Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, SelfPortrait with his wife, after Plattemontagne, 22.5 × 16.5 cm, black and red chalk, 1677, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe 5.8 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Self-Portrait in a red cloak, 42 × 34.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1692, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe 5.9 Gérard Edelinck (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), Self-Portrait in a red cloak, 47.5 × 35.8 cm, engraving, 1698, British Museum, London 5.10 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Gérard Edelinck, 71 × 59 cm, oil on canvas, 1698, Musée du Louvre, Paris 5.11 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Self-Portrait in a turban, 83 × 66 cm, oil on canvas, 1700, Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan / Giraudon 5.12 Pierre Drevet (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), Self-Portrait in a turban, 49.8 × 35 cm, oil on canvas, engraving, 1700, British Museum, London 5.13 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Pierre Drevet, 116.5 × 89.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1700, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon 5.14 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of a Man (probably Monsieur Bacherach), 64.7

6 Facing Off: Portraits of Rivalry

6.2 Charles Lebrun, Tent of Darius, 298 × 453 cm, oil on canvas, c.1660, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles 6.3 Pierre Mignard, Christ Carrying the Cross, 150 × 198 cm, oil on canvas, 1684, Musée du Louvre, Paris 6.4 Charles Lebrun, Christ Carrying the Cross, 153 × 214 cm, oil on canvas, 1688, Musée du Louvre, Paris 6.5 Gérard Edelinck (after Nicolas de Largillière), Charles Lebrun, 51.8 × 39.6 cm, engraving, 1683–1690, British Museum, London 6.6 Cornelis Vermeulen (after Pierre Mignard), Self-Portrait, 42.6 × 34.6 cm, engraving, 1690, British Museum, London 6.7 Antoine Coysevox, Charles Lebrun, 63.7 × 58 × 34 cm, marble, 1679, Musée du Louvre, Paris 6.8 Martin Desjardins, Pierre Mignard, 85.1 × 56.5 × 34.5 cm, marble, before 1694, Musée du Louvre, Paris 6.9 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Charles Lebrun and Pierre Mignard, 130 × 140 cm, oil on canvas, 1730, Musée du Louvre, Paris 6.10 Nicolas de Largillière, SelfPortrait, 80 × 65 cm, oil on canvas, 1711, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

illustrations xiii

6.11 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Self-Portrait, 81 × 65 cm, oil on canvas, c.1710, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles

6.18 Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis, SelfPortrait, 60 × 50 cm, oil on canvas, 1780, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Carpentras

6.12 François Chéreau (after Nicolas de Largillière), Self-Portrait, 46.9 × 33.5 cm, engraving, 1715, British Museum, London

6.19 Alexandre Roslin, Self-Portrait, 80 × 67 cm, oil on canvas, 1783, Musée Jacquemart-André – Institut de France, Paris

6.13 Pierre Drevet (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), Self-Portrait, 47.1 × 34.3 cm, engraving, c.1714, British Museum, London

6.20 Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, 97.8 × 70.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1782, National Gallery, London

6.14 Studio of Nicolas de Largillière, Louis d’Assenay, 66 × 53.3 cm, oil on canvas, after 1715, Private Collection

6.21 Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait with her daughter, Julie, 105 × 84 cm, oil on canvas, 1786, Musée du Louvre, Paris

6.15 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Self-Portrait (laughing), 59 × 49 cm, pastel, 1737, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris 6.16 Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, 56 × 48 cm, pastel, 1750, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin 6.17 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Self-Portrait, 64.5 × 53.5 cm, pastel, c.1750, Musée de Picardie, Amiens

6.22 Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Hubert Robert, 105 × 84 cm, oil on canvas, 1788, Musée du Louvre, Paris Epilogue: The End of an Institution E.1 Louis-Léopold Boilly, Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio, 71.5 × 111 cm, oil on canvas, 1798, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Tables

1 An Institutional Image: Portrait of the Artist as an Academician 1.1 Directeurs of the Académie 1.2 Secrétaires and historiographes of the Académie 2 Rituals of Initiation: Becoming and Being in the Académie 2.1 Hierarchy of ranks at the Académie 2.2 Académie’s admission process shown as a ritual of initiation 2.3 Women artists admitted to the Académie (1648–1793)

4 Bloodlines: Portraits of Family 4.1 Family tree showing the Coypel, Hérault, and Dumont families 4.2 Family tree of the Van Loos 4.3 Family tree of the Nattier, Tocqué, and Challe families

Acknowledgements

This book is a product of the generous intellectual, financial, and moral support given by many over several years of research and writing. It was made possible by funding received at various stages, initially from the Courtauld Institute of Art, with a scholarship from the Garfield Weston Foundation, and from the University of Sydney, with a Hannah Fullerton Travelling Scholarship. A fellowship at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris (co-funded by the Centre and the Courtauld) provided an invaluable year of research in France along with formative and fascinating discussions with the scholars I met there. Subsequent research in France was made possible by a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, to whom I am also grateful for providing an engaging and supportive scholarly environment in which to complete the manuscript. Great thanks is also due to the Fondation Marianne & Roland Michel and the Institut de France, who funded the illustrations through award of the Prix Marianne Roland Michel. Along the way I have benefitted enormously from the intellectual stimulation and critical feedback of colleagues and friends. First and foremost, I owe a heartfelt debt of gratitude to Katie Scott, friend, mentor, and guide to eighteenth-century France, whose incisive readings, depth of knowledge, and creative and rigorous approach to historical inquiry have provided a model of scholarship. Special thanks are due to the scholars who generously read chapters or full manuscripts, offering advice that has shaped arguments and led to new discoveries and fresh ways of thinking: Mechthild Fend, Dena Goodman, Keren Hammerschlag, Melissa Hyde, Gay McAuley, Christian Michel, Mia Ridge, Katie Scott, Sam Williams, and Richard Wrigley. The book is undoubtedly the better for their insights. Various parts of the book have been tested at conferences and seminars, whose participants I would like to thanks for their valuable comments. I am indebted to the community of art historians at the Courtauld Institute of Art (especially the early modern workshop team) and members of the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford, who provided receptive and supportive spaces in which to play with ideas and nuance

xviii académie royale: a history in portraits

arguments. I am especially grateful for conversations about portraits, social networks, and the eighteenth century with Esther Bell, John Chu, Craig Clunas, Hanneke Grootenboer, Mia Jackson, Sarah Monks, Satish Padiyar, Edward Payne, David Pullins, Mélanie Vandenbrouck, and Joanna Woodall. Every attempt has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made, copyright holders are invited to inform the author of the oversight. Finally I owe a vast debt of gratitude to friends and family. For much needed perspective, distractions, and advice, I thank especially Hyana Kim and Yvette Costi. For supporting me always in all ways, I thank Mia Ridge, interlocutor and partner. And last but in no way least, I thank my family, who have inspired, provoked, and encouraged from the very beginning. This book is for my mother and my brother, and in memory of my father.

Abbreviations

AAF

Archives de l’art français

AN

Archives nationales

BM

British Museum

BnF

Bibliothèque nationale de France

BSHAF

Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français

CD

Collection Deloynes

DAG

Département des arts graphiques

DKDK

Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi

ENSBA

École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts

MC

Minutier Central

NAAF

Nouvelles archives de l’art français

PV

Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture

RMN

Réunion des musées nationaux

For my mother and brother

Introduction: Face-to-Face with the Académie Royale

The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture is perhaps the most ubiquitous art institution of early modern Europe. It features in nearly every book on French art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, playing as dominant a role in art history as it did in the art world of ancien-régime Paris. Yet almost paradoxically the Académie is also one of the least studied aspects of art from this period. What should be a familiar organisation remains in fact largely a mystery. We know of the Académie’s undisputed pre-eminence as the leading force in art theory, that it was the foremost school for art education, and the elite centre of art practice. But what of the lived experience of this artistic community? What of its day-to-day affairs and activities, its internal structure, and the relationships and interactions that took place between its members? What is still missing, in short, is an understanding of life behind-the-scenes. This book starts to fill in these gaps by looking at the Académie differently. First, by thinking about the Académie not as an inanimate institution, but as a community of people. Second, by taking as its primary sources the portraits and self-portraits made by Académie members. Throughout the course of this book, my intention is to retrieve the human story of the Académie, using portraits to gain access to the collective culture of this institution and to the experience of everyday life behind its doors. Informed by anthropological and microhistorical approaches, I take the ethnographer’s position as outsider to ask what it was like to be an insider. How did academicians understand the Académie? What did they do? Why did they do it? And what did it mean to be a member? Portraits become enlightening sources in the pursuit of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed a ‘thick description’ of the Académie.1 By interrogating how and why academicians painted themselves, who painted whom, what happened to the objects, and how they were experienced, I use portraits to examine how this community defined itself, to understand the official structures that organised them as a social group, and to trace the personal relationships that formed inside and outside its boundaries. Portraits are crucial to a history of the Académie because they were crucial during its lifetime. Inside, official portraits were actively commissioned in key institutional practices, over time forming a cumulative collective

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0.1 Gustave Lundberg, François Boucher, 65 × 50 cm, pastel, 1742, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Droits réservés)

representation of the Académie’s members displayed on its walls. They were thought of, even then, as an institutional history. Outside, unofficial portraits played alternative roles in the negotiation of artists’ personal relationships, as objects that became a social currency circulating between colleagues – made, given, bought, sold, exchanged, and displayed. In a study of the Académie as an artistic community, portraits make ideal objects of inquiry, because portraits get us back to the people. Even a cursory glance through the images in this book is enough to convey that. Each portrait of an academician offers an encounter with a person. Just reading an artist’s name – ‘François Boucher’ – does not give much sense of the man behind it. Learning some biographical facts – that he was born in Paris in 1703, joined the Académie in 1734, and died in 1770 – provides a historical context in which to locate his life. Knowing some specific details – that he

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0.2 Alexandre Roslin, François Boucher, 65 × 54 cm, oil on canvas 1760, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

was a history painter and leading figure in the rococo style, who worked for some of the most prominent patrons of his day including Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour – provides more texture, a richer sense of his career and social networks. But in an attempt to get to know this individual, nothing is as immediate or intimate as seeing Boucher in Gustave Lundberg’s portrait (Figure 0.1).2 Slightly podgy faced with bulging eyes, a large aquiline nose, and moist red lips, Boucher’s average physiognomy is effaced by the elegance of his gestures, the luxury of his lace cuffs and dashing wig, and the delicate skin of his hand. Nearly 20 years later another colleague at the Académie, Alexandre Roslin, painted a 57-year-old Boucher at the other end of his career (Figure 0.2). His face now drawn, the flesh around his eyes sagged into wrinkles and bags, his nose bulbous, and his lips thinned, Boucher has lost the flamboyant energy of his youth for the sobriety of middle-age, but

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his elegance remains in those lace-framed delicate hands. Meeting Boucher’s gaze as a beholder of these portraits is as close as it gets to meeting the man: an introduction to the distinctive personality of a young artist who knew how to make the most of what he had; and a re-encounter with the mature artist who made it. Portraits put a face to the name. As sentimental as it sounds, it is true: seeing these portraits turns Boucher from an idea into a person. But that is not all that portraits do. Along with the answers they provide, it is the questions these objects raise that offer the most profound access to Boucher’s life. Why are there so few portraits of this famous painter?3 Why were these portraits made when they were? What was Boucher’s relationship with Lundberg and Roslin? Did Boucher have a particular connection with the community of Swedish artists in Paris, of whom these were two prominent members? For whom were these portraits made? Where did they hang and who saw them? It is by pursuing answers to questions like these that this book edges its way into the artistic community in which Boucher, Lundberg, and Roslin lived, seeking out the secret or hidden connections, the workaday routines, and casual interactions. Lundberg’s portrait of Boucher, made as a morceau de réception to negotiate the former’s entry into the Académie, leads us, for instance, to encounters with official protocols and institutional relationships. While Roslin’s portrait of Boucher, a pendant to one of Mme Boucher (Bayreuth, Neues Schloss) that shares the format of another pair portraying Joseph-Marie Vien (Château de Versailles) and his wife Marie-Thérèse Reboul (Château de Versailles), leads us into the more personal world of artists’ families and friendships, in particular the network of friendship that existed between Roslin, Boucher, and Vien. This book is thus an attempt to put faces to the Académie’s name – to create a vivid collective ‘portrait’ of this institution – but it is not merely a character analysis of any academician of whom there is a portrait. It is an effort to go beyond the conventional treatment of portraits as simply constructions of identity, by attending also to the materiality, presence, and social lives of these objects. This involves something of an experiment with portraiture.4 Building on the rich scholarship on early modern portraiture, I want to suggest six properties – six things that portraits are or do – which together not only account for their uniqueness as objects, but also make them invaluable sources for exploring the culture of this community and the social networks of artists.5 First, as works of art, portraits are objects with an aesthetic value; like any other genre (landscape, still life, etc.), they are skilfully composed and wrought with formal and stylistic concerns. Second, as effigies, portraits are representations of real people (rather than fictional subjects or inanimate things); unlike most other art works, they offer an intersubjective experience, putting the beholder in the ‘presence’ of a once-living individual. Third, portraits are readable images, visual texts iconographically encoded with the ideological motives of those who made them; they are objects offering images for interpretation. Fourth, as historical documents executed at a certain point

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in time, portraits are primary sources, providing evidence of that moment through their direct connection to the past. Fifth, as used objects, portraits are material things which became part of the rituals of everyday life – given, taken, cherished, forgotten, honoured, or destroyed; their histories offer insights into how people lived and (crucially for this inquiry) who else was part of their lives. Finally and perhaps most importantly for the historical ethnographer, as indexical objects, portraits are the physical products of encounters between makers and sitters; they are material traces of social interactions that once took place between at least two people. This taxonomy goes some way towards defining the complex range of historical, material, aesthetic, ritual, and social values that portraits possess. Keeping the polyvalency of these objects alive, my analysis throughout this book switches constantly between these different ways of approaching portraits in order to elicit as much information as possible from the objects and the objects’ lives. In many cases the portraits do not contain all the information themselves and so I also make extensive use of archival material, from the rich records kept by the Académie (minutes of meetings, rules and regulations, registers of members), to the more sporadically kept documents relating to individuals (account books, wills, marriage contracts, journals, letters, etc.). The stories, however, always begin with and are recounted through portraits. Though using the portraits as a source for historical inquiry, these objects never become just a means to an end; they are at all times both the means and the end. Throughout I ensure that the aesthetic integrity of these artworks is not compromised by the historical analysis, indeed, it is my aim to reveal as much about the portraits as I do by using them. A history of the Académie told through artists’ portraits has advantages and limitations in terms of scope. Telling the story of the Académie means that this is not a general survey of the art world of early modern Paris, but rather a concentrated study of the central institution within that world. It also means that the narrative recounted is largely dominated by male protagonists. Recent scholarship has been instrumental in bringing to light the experiences of early modern women artists and their efforts to gain recognition, but though the Académie may feature prominently in the stories of these women, women artists do not feature prominently in the story of the Académie.6 Over nearly a century and a half, women accounted for only 14 out of over 600 members, and these women were, moreover, systematically denied the right to participate in almost all its official activities. My intention has been to include the experiences of women in the Académie while avoiding any tokenistic overemphasis. Where women artists become part of the narrative, it is not merely because they are women, but rather for the same reason any other artist does: because of the way they used portraiture to negotiate personal or professional relationships. Telling all these stories through portraits also poses a problem, as the narrative necessarily focuses on artists who were either sitters or makers of these objects. Landscapists, still life painters, and miniaturists, for example, do not feature as frequently

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as portraitists, engravers, history painters, and sculptors. But though more stories remain to be told, the advantages of the inquiry outweigh these limitations. Analysing portraits to reconstruct artists’ lives and relationships is conceived as an art-historical response to what Robert Darnton has called ‘history in the ethnographic grain’.7 Finding the rare sources that permit anthropological history is always a challenge, but artists’ portraits provide, for the Académie, that elusive insider perspective. As effigies of real people and indices that trace the encounters between those people, as historical documents and readable images that elicit interpretation, and as used objects that bear witness to their own material lives, portraits are, to use Geertz’s phrase, stories these people ‘tell themselves about themselves’.8 But more than this, as works of art, portraits are stories told in a language particular to that culture. Inspired by the vivid and attentive narratives achieved in microhistory and anthropological art history, this book uses portraits to unearth an alternative history of the Académie.9 In the histories of early modern French art, the Académie has become an inanimate megalith of theoretical ideals and artistic discourses. Art theories, rather than art objects, have come to be seen as the institution’s major cultural production, as the conférences (the Académie’s lectures) have become the dominant context for understanding academic art.10 Crucial as histories of art theory are, this has led to a tendency to detach the Académie’s theories from the people and cultural practices that produced them. This book’s alternative story of a community told through people and objects not only offers a more intimate acquaintance with these people, their beliefs, hopes, desires, frustrations, and the ordinary course of their daily lives, but also different insights into the objects they produced, placing the ideological principles of academic art in a social and cultural context. Art theory is not ignored but rather approached as the beliefs of a community, the systems by which its members lived, in order to understand how theory played out in practice. A ready example is to be found in perhaps the most enduring academic theory – the hierarchy of genres – which emphasised the importance of history painting over portraiture, genre painting, landscape, and still life. I argue that the fundamental impact this hierarchy had on French art came from the social and cultural practices it instigated, as genre became a quasi-class structure within the Académie and history painters were accorded real authority over their ‘minor genre’ colleagues. By focusing on portraiture, this book reveals a more complicated picture of the hierarchy, looking at the social tensions it triggered, as well as the practical ways that objects themselves negotiated their boundaries. In its search for a ‘thick description’ of the Académie, this book is heavily indebted to the invaluable research of many art historians, upon whose scholarship it builds to create a complementary narrative. Two recent books by Christian Michel and Gudrun Valerius have provided the first comprehensive histories of the institution since the nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries, both offering indispensable detailed chronological descriptions, and Michel’s in particular offering an important account of the relationship between the Académie and the state in ancien-régime France.11 In returning the focus to objects, my study has been informed by the stimulating re-examinations of the Académie’s material culture undertaken in innovative exhibitions like L’École de la liberté (2009) at ENSBA in Paris, and two shows devoted to the institution’s art collection: Les peintres du Roi (2000) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours and the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, and Les morceaux de réception gravés de l’Académie (1982) at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Ontario.12 In returning the focus to life behindthe-scenes, my study has been inspired by many animated discussions of day-to-day activities and social interactions found in works like Reed Benhamou’s writings on the Académie as a teaching facility, Humphrey Wine’s study of academic families, and Thomas Crow, Katie Scott, and Nicolas Mirzoeff’s discussions of institutional politics.13 In returning the focus to people, I am indebted to numerous enlightening explorations of the Académie’s members found in books on individual artists that address their interactions with the institution.14 More than anything, however, this study takes its cue from the evocative human stories found in the Académie’s own versions of its histories. From people-driven narratives like the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’Académie Royale and the stirring anecdotal Lives of its members; to the fascinating minutes of the Procès-Verbaux detailing 145 years of company meetings; to the incidental details and back-room machinations found in letters sent to the Académie’s state protectors.15 Without these meticulous records and the tireless efforts of archivists from the nineteenth century to today, the rich history of the Académie would be impossible to retrieve. But of all the Académie’s productions, it is the portraits that provide the most vivid stories of its members, as objects that bring us face-to-face with the people of this community. Portraits become those rare sources that permit ethnographic historical inquiry, granting access to the unchronicled actions of ordinary people and, in the words of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, to ‘their experience of relationships and their experience of life in general’.16 Portraits help us find, to paraphrase anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff, the poetics of history transacted beyond the official record and explicit narrative.17 The story of the Académie unfolds here in two parts, each presenting an alternative face – official and unofficial – to explore two different sides of academic life. Part I explores the ‘official face’ of the Académie through the institution’s official portraits. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, portraitists seeking admission to the Académie were required to paint portraits of senior members as reception pieces – morceaux de réception – that demonstrated sufficient skill to earn the rank of académicien. Accumulated over a century and a half of institutional life, these objects together form a remarkable collection of over a hundred artists’ portraits. In

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the chapters of Part I, I analyse the morceau-de-réception portraits from three different perspectives – sitter, painter, beholder – to investigate what this body of objects can reveal about the Académie’s formal life: its internal social structures, its cultural ideologies, its ritual activities, and the hierarchical relationships between its members. Chapter 1 explores the history of the Académie through the history of its official portraits and the image of the artist they created. Tracing the origins of the institution through the development of the form and iconography of the morceau-de-réception portraits, I argue that these objects present a narrative of the Académie’s history, not only as a record of membership, but because of the active part they played in formulating a definition of the academician. With the founding of the Académie in 1648, the new social category of ‘academician’ made the artist into a legitimate subject for representation – elevating the artist’s status from craftsman to gentleman – but the definition of the new company and its members took many years to emerge. Portraiture played a formative role in visualising this institutional image. Considering the morceau-de-réception portraits both individually and as a collection, I explore how the Académie’s prevailing ideologies were cemented in a consciously historicising project of portrait representation, that is, how an institutional self-image was collectively imagined through the bodies of individual sitters. In so doing, this chapter also reveals the ambiguities in the lived experience of the hierarchy of genres. For whatever minor role portraiture was given in art theory, it was called upon to play a leading part in the Académie’s cultural practices. In Chapter 2 the focus shifts from sitter to painter by recontextualising the morceau-de-réception portraits within the institution’s rituals of initiation. Through a rich archival record of rules, regulations, and the minutes of company meetings, I reconstruct the stages and ceremonies involved in artists’ admissions to the Académie and their progression through the ranks, a complex and sometimes irregular system that has confused many. In an argument informed by anthropological theories of ‘rites of passage’, I discuss how these objects ‘made’ academicians, both for the young initiands who painted them, and for the senior members who sat for them. For the initiands, painting the morceau-de-réception portrait was the principal act in a multi-stage process of becoming a full member, while for long-standing members, being the subject of a portrait was an affirmation of their position in the community, a tangible and enduring sign that immortalised them as part of a historyin-effigy. In addition to exploring the ritual value of morceaux de réception, I also attend to the social interactions involved in this process, investigating the dynamics of institutional relationships and the tensions provoked by the Académie’s strict hierarchical structure. These ceremonial activities entailed interactions not only across ranks, but also across genres: between the portraitists who painted the works, and the history painters and sculptors who became their subjects. A close analysis of the portraits reveals how these experiences became inscribed in the objects themselves.

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Chapter 3 turns to the experience of the beholder by returning the morceaude-réception portraits to the walls of the Académie’s apartments in the Louvre. Bringing together visual and written sources, including floor plans, descriptions, and paintings, I reconstruct where the portraits were displayed, how the arrangement of objects changed over time, and what kinds of encounters the portraits elicited in these spaces. Through a phenomenological analysis of the Académie’s rooms, I explore the effects of portraits as an additional corporeal presence in a space, and investigate the ongoing ritual significance of the portraits as objects that defined the physical boundaries of the institution. As artists went about their daily business in the Académie, they moved through rooms filled with effigies of their academic forebears. Tracing the conversations, real and metaphorical, that took place between people and portraits in the Académie, I use anthropological theories to understand the totemic value that the morceau-de-réception portraits came to possess through their display. From their vantage point on the walls, portraits were no mere decoration, but rather active participants in everyday life: demarcating space, symbolising collective identity, and perpetuating relationships between past, present, and future members of the community. In counterpoint to the first half of the book, Part II explores the ‘unofficial face’ of the Académie through unofficial portraits. The morceau-de-réception portraits offer exceptional insights into the culture and social order of the institution as it existed in the collective imagination, but this is only part of the story. Academicians did not just relate to each other according to officially prescribed roles, but through all kinds of interpersonal relationships, some that pre-existed their membership, and others that formed within the institution. Students, academicians, and senior officers all held ranks within a strict hierarchy, but any of these colleagues could also be members of the same family, close friends, or bitter rivals. This ‘unofficial face’ was an essential part of life at the Académie, but it is much more difficult to access through institutional records that foreground official ideals. Portraits and self-portraits produced by academicians in informal contexts provide an invaluable source of evidence for unearthing these elusive personal connections. From Part I’s focus on the collective experience, Part II shifts to the experiences of individuals. The chapters examine three different relationships – family, friendship, rivalry – through microhistorical case studies that tell the stories of particular artists. These individual stories do not presume to stand in for universal experience, but rather offer vignettes through which to glimpse instances of the alternative social networks laced through this community. Chapter 4 looks at families in the Académie. From its earliest days, the institution accommodated relatives in its membership. Brothers (Louis and Henri Testelin) and cousins (Charles and Henri Beaubrun) were soon joined by fathers and sons (Nicolas and Paul Mignard), fathers and daughters (Louis and Geneviève de Boullogne), and husbands and wives (François Girardon and Catherine Duchemin), over time incorporating long dynasties and vast

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extended networks. Whether by blood or marriage, kinship in early modern France invoked prescribed conventions of behaviour, but the Académie had its own system of privileges and responsibilities that were supposed to be determined by skill rather than birthright. Nevertheless, in the culture of the Académie, family was always unofficially present, affecting decisions, practices, and everyday interactions. This chapter explores the experience of being related to colleagues and the impact of kinship ties on institutional life. Through the portraits they painted of themselves and each other, I retrieve the relations of three different academic families: the patrilineal dynasty of the Coypels, the extended household of the Van Loos, and the marriage alliance between the Nattiers and Tocqués. Uncovering a web of bloodlines weaving their way through the Académie, these case studies reveal the tensions between the personal and professional, but also the harmonies, as the structure of the family became a palimpsest through which institutional hierarchies could be understood. Chapter 5 looks at friendship in the Académie. Without a fixed definition, friendship is perhaps the most ambiguous of all the relationships examined in Part II, for it is sometimes difficult to determine where collegiality ended and friendship began. While family ties were predetermined or entered into via contracts, friendships emerged more organically through social interactions that drew artists into spaces of sociability beyond the institution, like the home or studio. Through portraits exchanged between artists who called themselves ‘friends’, this chapter explores some perplexing questions about the subjective experience of friendship. Who could be friends in the Académie? What did it mean to call a colleague a friend? And why did some academic friendships work while others failed? Examining different kinds of friendships – from unique bonds to sociable groups – at different moments in the Académie’s history, this chapter retrieves the varied experiences of individuals: the intimate attachment of Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne and Nicolas de Plattemontagne; the unexpected connection between the pastellist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour and the sculptor Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne; the studio network of Hyacinthe Rigaud and his engravers; and the ultimately doomed association of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Johann-Georg Wille. Informed by anthropological theories of the gift, I argue that artists’ reciprocal acts of portraiture were not merely signs of friendship, but objects fundamental to its negotiation. Chapter 6 looks at rivalry in the Académie, a relationship less affectionate than friendship but just as intimate. With a pedagogic system founded on the notion of ‘emulation’, competition was the cornerstone of academic culture. But rivalry, its inevitable by-product, was considered detrimental to institutional ideals, appropriate only when directed against the rival company of artists in the guild. When relations between academicians nevertheless slipped from competition to rivalry, their antagonism frequently played out through confrontations of objects that became proxies for their makers, nowhere more palpably than in the face-offs between artists’ self-portraits. In

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this chapter I analyse the visual rhetoric of rivalry and the dynamic contests of skill that artists staged through self-representations. These portraits are not only witnesses to the existence of rivalries, but also to the complex emotions they entailed: fear and resentment were often born of respect and admiration; rivalry could be both productive and destructive. From Charles Lebrun and Pierre Mignard’s infamous conflict during the Académie’s earliest years, to Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s confrontations in its final years, this chapter looks at the changing face of rivalry across the life of the institution, exploring its different arenas and shifting prerogatives. In particular I highlight the impact of the Salons from the 1730s, which provided new spaces, audiences, and criteria in and by which artistic competition would be judged, and the role of the guild as the Académie’s constant institutional competitor until its demise in the 1770s. Finally, the Epilogue to this book brings the story to a close with the Académie’s demise after the French Revolution. As political events catalysed an already fractured and disenfranchised body of members, new artistic communities emerged to take the place of the Académie after it was officially shut down in 1793. At this moment, I return to the morceau-de-réception portraits – that collection of objects made to represent the ancien-régime institution – tracing the journey of the works after their removal from the Académie’s walls. The afterlives of these objects, and the new representations of artists that replaced them, become a final vignette through which to reflect on what the Académie had been and what it would become in the new art world and art histories of modern Paris. As this outline of chapters suggests, the historical narrative of this book is intentionally more synchronic than diachronic, offering an ethnographic description of a community rather than a chronological record. This is not a ‘what happened when’ kind of history, detailing key events year-by-year or decade-by-decade over the century and a half of the institution’s existence. Nevertheless my narrative is attentive to the historical shifts in this human story, to a sense of the changing personality of the Académie at various moments due to both the personalities of its individual members and to the transformations, internal and external, that affected institutional culture. This book starts at the beginning of the Académie’s life and finishes with its institutional endings, and along the way explores the people who made this community and the culture by which they lived.

Notes 1

Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture’, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), pp. 3–30.

2

On seeking Boucher through his images, see Melissa Hyde, ‘Getting into the Picture: Boucher’s Self-Portraits of Others’, in Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury (eds), Rethinking Boucher (Los Angeles, 2006), pp. 13–38.

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3

For a detailed discussion of the portraits of Boucher see Hyde, ‘Getting into the Picture’, pp. 34–35.

4

The following taxonomy of portraits is outlined in Hannah Williams, ‘Academic Intimacies: Portraits of Family, Friendship, and Rivalry at the Académie Royale’, Art History, 36/2 (2013), p. 341.

5

My approach has been informed by the phenomenological, semiotic, and socially engaged writings of many art historians including: Harry Berger Jr, ‘Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze in Early Modern Portraiture’, Representations, 46 (1994), pp. 87–120; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of SelfPortraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993); Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1993); Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford, 2004); and Joanna Woodall, Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority (Zwolle, 2007). On the ‘presence’ and ‘lives’ of material things, influences here range from Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), to Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986).

6

Among these crucially important works on women artists see: Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago, 1996); Laura Auricchio, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution (Los Angeles, 2009); Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam (eds), Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century France (Aldershot, 2003); Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections, exh. cat. (Washington, 2012).

7

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985), p. 3. Other groundbreaking microhistorical works include Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA, 1983); and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John and Anne Tadeschi (Baltimore, 1980). For recent debates around microhistory and anthropological history see Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 30–48; and John Brewer, ‘Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life’, Cultural and Social History, 7/1 (2010), pp. 87–109.

8

Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), p. 448.

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Formative art-historical studies engaged with anthropological approaches include: Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, 1470–1559 (London, 2004); Genevieve Warwick, The Arts of Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta and the Market for Drawings in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000); Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (eds), Furnishing the Eighteenth-Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past (New York, 2006).

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For example, Paul Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting in SeventeenthCentury France (Cambridge, 1997); Bernard Teyssèdre, Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1965); Nicholas Mirzoeff, Pictorial Sign and Social Order: L’Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture 1638–1752, PhD Thesis (University of Warwick, 1990); and Carl Goldstein, ‘The Platonic Beginnings of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris’, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 5–6 (1986–1987), pp. 186–202. The invaluable archival work of retrieving the conférences is ongoing in Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Christian Michel (eds), Les conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, 5 vols (Paris, 2007–2012), following the more selective volume of Alain Mérot (ed.), Les conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1996).

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Christian Michel, L’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1648–1793): La naissance de l’école française (Geneva, 2012); Gudrun Valerius, Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1648–1793: Geschichte, Organisation, Mitgleider (Norderstedt, 2010). Earlier accounts of the Académie’s history were to be found in, for example, Louis Vitet, L’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture: Étude historique (Paris, 1861) and Jean Locquin, La peinture d’histoire en France de 1747 à 1785 (Paris, 1912).

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L’École de la liberté: Être artiste à Paris 1648–1817 (Paris, 2009); Les peintres du roi: 1648–1793, exh. cat. (Paris, 2000); William McAllister Johnson, Les morceaux de réception gravés de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1672–1789 (Kingston, 1982). A recent study of sculptors’ reception pieces is Ursula Ströbele, Die Bildhaueraufnahmestücke der Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris 1700–1730 (Petersberg, 2012).

13

Reed Benhamou, ‘Public and Private Art Education in France 1648–1793’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 308 (1993), pp. 46–89; Humphrey Mayer Wine, Painting as a Career in Eighteenth-Century Paris, PhD Thesis (University of Essex, 1993); Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1985); Katie Scott, ‘Hierarchy, Liberty and Order: Languages of Art and Institutional Conflict in Paris (1766–1776)’, Oxford Art Journal, 12/2 (1989), pp. 59–70; Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Revolution, Representation, Equality: Gender, Genre and Emulation in the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, 1785–93’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31/2 (1997–1998), pp. 153–174.

14

There are many excellent studies devoted to individual artists, including: Bénédicte Gady, L’Ascension de Charles Le Brun: Liens sociaux et production artistique (Paris, 2010); Mark Ledbury, Sedaine, Greuze and the Boundaries of Genre (Oxford, 2004); Christian Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et l’art des Lumières (Rome, 1993); Thomas Gaehtgens and Jacques Lugand, Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809) (Paris, 1988). On the composition of the Académie’s membership see also Sharon Lindahl Boedo, Reception and Membership at the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture 1648–1793, PhD Thesis (Cornell University, 2005).

15

Transcribed and published volumes of such documents include: Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture depuis 1648 jusqu’en 1664, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon, 2 vols (Paris, 1853); Mémoires inédits sur la vie et les ouvrages des membres de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, ed. Louis Dussieux, Eudore Soulié, Philippe de Chennevières, Paul Mantz, and Anatole de Montaiglon, 2 vols (Paris, 1854); Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture (1648–1793), ed. Anatole de Montaiglon, 10 vols (Paris, 1875–1892) (henceforth PV); Correspondance des directeurs de l’Académie de France à Rome avec les Surintendants des Bâtiments (1666–1804), ed. Anatole de Montaiglon, Jules Guiffrey, and Paul Cornu, 18 vols (Paris, 1887–1912). On the attribution of the Mémoires pour servir see Michel, L’Académie, pp. 16–19. Another recent transcription project is Benhamou’s useful compilation of the institution’s statutes: Reed Benhamou, Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in Ancien Régime France (Oxford, 2009).

16

Zemon Davis, Return, p. 1.

17

John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder and Oxford, 1992), p. 35.

PART I The OFFICIAl FACe

1.1 François Lemaire, Jacques Sarazin, 104 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1657, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

1 An Institutional Image: Portrait of the Artist as an Academician

In 1657, when François Lemaire painted the sculptor Jacques Sarazin (Figure 1.1), he had just painted the first portrait of an academician. Although the Académie had been formed almost ten years earlier, this was the first time an artist in the new corps had been represented as a member of that corps.1 Lemaire’s portrait thus unwittingly inaugurated a programme of visual definition that would continue until the end of the eighteenth century. Like most of the Académie’s official portraits, which would be displayed throughout its apartments, the portrait of Sarazin began as a morceau de réception, submitted by Lemaire in order to be admitted as a member.2 The regulations regarding the morceaux de réception were at this moment still at a nascent stage, but by the end of the Académie’s life a total of 66 aspiring artists would have together submitted 111 morceau-de-réception portraits, 97 of them representing artists who had been members of the Académie (Appendix 1). As paintings that quite literally provided access to the Académie, these objects offer us a conceptual initiation. Painted of and by artists in this community, the morceau-de-réception portraits provide a view from within, an image of the institution seen through the eyes of its members. I say an image of the institution because while each portrait represents an individual, the relationship between academician and Académie was one of mutual definition. From 1648, the Académie provided its members with a new model of corporate identity, but just what that identity comprised was conceived, determined, and debated by the people who composed this community over its 145 years. On one hand then, the morceau-de-réception portraits offer a visual who’s who – a record of membership (albeit partial) that gives faces to the lists of individual names found in written documents. On the other hand, viewed together these official portraits relate a narrative of something larger, for in the visual iconographies that developed through this chronological engagement with self-definition, we find a history of collective institutional ideals.

18

académie royale: a history in portraits

This chapter explores the history of the Académie as recounted through its official portraits, but it also shows how these portraits were part of that history: not just a passive record of its development, but an active part of that institutional formation; not just representations of the Académie and academicians, but images that contributed to the evolving definitions of these ideas. The origins of the Académie and the origins of its official portraits are so intertwined that it almost becomes a case of the chicken or the egg: which came first? It may seem obvious – the Académie was founded several years before Sarazin was painted in the first portrait – but it is actually more complicated. The Académie did not emerge fully formed at foundation but took years (even decades) to develop a distinct and secure identity. It was in such self-defining acts as painting these official portraits or writing the official Statuts that the embryonic Académie would eventually evolve into its mature form.

Institutional Beginnings Portraits of artists had a long tradition in Europe developed especially during the Italian and Northern Renaissance, but in France the artist did not constitute a category of portraiture until the seventeenth century.3 It was only with the Académie – and the concomitant elevation of status from craftsman to academician – that the artist became a subject worthy of consistent portrait-representation. The academicisation of the arts, following the model established in sixteenth-century Rome with the Accademia di San Luca, prompted a shift in the social position of the artist – members of this new French Académie were bestowed with what Natalie Heinich has described as ‘cultural title’, not true nobility exactly, but a kind of intellectual ennoblement.4 During this moment of transition in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, as theoretical discourses permitted manual trades to become (or at least to be seen as) liberal arts, art-making and art-makers were redefined professionally and socially. This evolution was captured in-process in the tentative origins of the Académie’s morceau-de-réception portraits, in which Lemaire’s portrait of Sarazin took the fledgling steps. From this first representation of a French artist as an academician, however, it would be difficult to guess the sitter’s occupation unless one already knew Sarazin was a sculptor. His solemn expression and voluminous black robe with white collar recall portraits of magistrates, échevins (city officials), or the ecclesiastics and men of letters in the Académie Française.5 In Sarazin’s sparse setting we find few indications of the sculptor’s work, no traces of clay or marble dust, no works of art, finished or otherwise, and his only tools are a drawing board and the book upon which he supports himself. Privileging the word over the chisel, as it were, all suggestions of the sculptor’s manual practice are absented and Sarazin is recast as a learned gentleman.

an institutional image: portrait of the artist as an academician

19

This was the ideal imagined by the small group of artists who established the new Académie as an alternative way of being in seventeenth-century Paris. Until 1648, there had been only two options for artists in the capital: either they followed the majority and became artists in the city Maîtrise (guild); or they sought refuge under the Court as brevetaires (artists possessing royal privileges who could work independently of the guild).6 While drawn primarily from this latter cohort, the original academicians nevertheless distinguished themselves from other brevetaires, who they regarded as obsequious opportunists ‘without skill or merit’.7 But their disregard for the other brevetaires was nothing compared with their disdain for the Maîtrise, against which the Académie came categorically to define itself. For the academicians, the guild was a ‘low-life and avaricious cabal’, filled with reprehensible, immoral tradesmen, whose sole intentions were to make money and maintain the stranglehold they had exercised over painting and sculpture for centuries, no matter the ‘misery and devastation’ that this brought upon the arts.8 Nowhere is the Académie’s opposition to the Maîtrise more evident than in the first set of Statuts et Règlements (1648). To counter the envisaged impropriety of the maîtres, the academicians banned the festivals and banquets well-known in guild practices, along with all drunkenness and gambling, and made blasphemy punishable by expulsion.9 To elevate the arts themselves, academicians would undertake only painting and sculpture, thus distinguishing themselves from the maîtres who also admitted book illuminators, gilders, and marble masons.10 In opposition to the guild’s unworthy activities, the Académie dedicated itself instead to ‘virtue’; the academicians were ‘the true artists’, superior in skill and morals and characterised by ‘the loftiness of their minds, the abundance of their talents, the refinement of their feelings, and their total dedication to the pursuit of knowledge and beauty’.11 Visual definition of these ‘true artists’ continued in the next two morceaude-réception portraits of artists – Jacob Van Loo’s Michel Corneille (1662) (Figure 1.2) and Antoine Berthélemy’s Louis du Guernier (1663) (Figure 1.3). Like the sculptor, these painters were dressed in black cloaks with white collars, drawing again on the sartorial customs of learned gentlemen, and once again the artist’s occupation is construed as liberal art not mechanical trade. Executed in limited palettes and dominated by dark costumes, the treatment of colour and light focuses attention on the heads and hands, particularly in the portrait of the miniaturist, Du Guernier, with its dramatic spotlighting and stark chromatic contrasts. With the scarcity of additional objects, these interdependent parts of the body become the artists’ primary attributes. Sarazin may have a drawing board and Corneille an easel with half-finished canvas, but neither is given tools to mark these surfaces. Instead head and hand become the visual rhetoric of genius and skill, the intrinsic qualities that distinguished academicians from their counterparts in the guild. Both maîtres and academicians made art, but only academicians made art with the mind.

1.2 Jacob Van Loo, Michel I Corneille, 116 × 86.7 cm, oil on canvas, 1662, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Thierry Le Mage)

1.3 Antoine Berthélemy, Louis du Guernier, 101 × 81 cm, oil on canvas, 1663, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

22

académie royale: a history in portraits

By 1663 an institutional image had clearly started to emerge, but only just. Fifteen years after the Académie’s foundation, there were still only three portraits of academicians. Why did it take so long? And why did the story begin here, with Sarazin, Corneille, and Du Guernier, who, of the original 22 academicians, were perhaps not the most obvious protagonists?12 With the benefit of hindsight, more illustrious figures stand out: Charles Lebrun, the company’s first chancelier and mythologised founding father; Charles Errard, who would be the first artist to hold the rank of directeur; or artists like Sébastien Bourdon, Eustache Le Sueur, and Laurent de La Hyre, now considered among the greats of the period.13 These subjects would certainly have provided a more auspicious starting point for the Académie’s collection of portraits, but the institution’s history was never that neat. Indeed the slow and haphazard evolution of the academician’s portrait is characteristic of the tentative beginnings of the Académie itself. In other words, it took nearly two decades for the image of the academician to emerge because it took that long for academicians themselves to develop into something representable. As long as the academician was an unstable category there could be no visual definition, and in the Académie’s early years things were far from stable. To begin with, the Académie was not a place. It was in fact quasi-itinerant, with meetings and classes held in nearly ten different locations during those first 15 years (Figure 3.2).14 In 1648 alone it moved three times: the first assemblée (meeting) took place in February at the home of the painter and ancien, Henri Beaubrun; after this, it relocated to a house on rue Traînée, near the church of Saint-Eustache, borrowed from a friend of Martin de Charmois, conseiller d’État and early influential patron. But these were only temporary solutions. In March the company decided to rent apartments in the Hôtel de Clisson on rue des Deux-Boules, where they remained until the beginning of 1653, when more spacious lodgings were rented in a house known as Sainte-Catherine on rue des Déchargeurs near a tavern called les Carneaux.15 After being promised and then denied a more official location in the Collège Royal of the University of Paris, the Académie made its first move to the Louvre in 1656, when Sarazin gave up his logement to accommodate the homeless institution, which had been meeting at different locations for some months.16 Sarazin’s logement, number 19 of 27 in the long Galerie du Louvre, was a single studio, too cramped in reality for the activities of the Académie, but at least in this royal palace they had found a site unequivocally outside the jurisdiction of the city guild.17 The following year, the Académie moved further along the Galerie to one of the more commodious ateliers, but four years later that space was requisitioned for the Imprimerie Royale.18 So in 1661, the Académie was relocated to the Palais Brion, part of the Palais Royal, where they would settle for 30 years, until finally taking up permanent residence in the Louvre in 1692.19 Perhaps even more unsettling during these early decades was the dire financial crisis that the Académie faced. Without state funding, the new

an institutional image: portrait of the artist as an academician

23

corps was entirely reliant on contributions from its members and patrons. At the inaugural assemblée in 1648, Lebrun presented a report on expenditures already dispensed for administrative necessities like a table and chairs, paper for the register, and a lamp.20 At the next meeting, a record was made of the academicians who had paid their one pistole (ten livres) joining fee to cover these costs, but soon the coffers were running low again. A decision was taken that all members would make equal contributions whenever money was needed, starting a custom that continued with varying success for some years. As debts mounted, new members were asked to pay joining fees of anywhere from 20 to 200 livres, but the revenue was insufficient and minutes of early meetings reveal, as Antoine Schnapper notes, a desperate obsession with cash-flow.21 Along with rent and coal (for heat and light), the most regular cost was paying the model for drawing classes, to which end the Académie eventually imposed a fee on the students of ten sols per week.22 Initially this was a sound solution – accounts from September 1650 show the student fees accumulating between seven and ten livres a week, easily covering the six livres needed for the model.23 But the charges led to serious discontent among the student-body, who turned away from the Académie in droves (by April 1651 fee revenue had almost halved) and the very continuation of the school came under threat.24 Physical and fiscal instability made it difficult in these early years to say with certainty what the Académie was or even for how much longer it would exist. But what impeded the developing identity of the academician more than anything were the dramatic shifts in the composition of membership. In 1651, facing financial desperation and the guild’s growing antipathy, Errard took the drastic step of proposing a coalition between Académie and Maîtrise, leading to the turbulent passage known as the jonction (1651–1654).25 This uneasy merger not only caused internal friction (Lebrun, Sarazin, and La Hyre were strongly opposed from the outset), but also confusion, as suddenly the ‘Académie’ was incorporating members of the very corps against which it had sought to define itself.26 The jonction lasted until 1654 when, unable to cope any longer with the disruptive maîtres (many of whom never relinquished their loyalty to the guild), the academicians staged a coup under Lebrun, with the aid of Antoine de Ratabon (surintendant des Bâtiments, 1656–1664), to extricate themselves from the unhappy union. It was in the aftermath of this tumultuous period that the Académie commissioned its first artist’s portrait. Not coincidentally, for despite the confusion of the jonction, its termination would prove decisive for the Académie’s developing identity. Lebrun’s coup involved the ratification of three fundamental documents: a brevet from the king granting the Académie an annual income of 1,000 livres and new lodgings in a royal building (initially to be the Collège Royal, but ultimately Sarazin’s Louvre logement); lettres patentes granting other privileges including the sole right to exercise life drawing classes; and a new set of Statuts et Règlements (1654), drafted in secret by the academicians, eliminating rights given to maîtres under the Statuts et Règlements

24

académie royale: a history in portraits

(1651) of the jonction.27 These new Statuts effected a complete overhaul of the inner workings of the institution, expanding the Académie to admit engravers along with painters and sculptors (Article XV), and establishing the complex hierarchy of ranks that prevailed (with some modifications) until the end of the eighteenth century. The former guild-inspired role of ancien was replaced with a tiered system of officiers, and a clear seating order was stipulated for meetings (Articles I–IX, XI, XII, XIV, XVI, XVIII). At the top, a protecteur and vice-protecteur (first held by Cardinal Mazarin and Chancellor Séguier, two of the most powerful statesmen in France), followed by a directeur, a chancelier, four recteurs, 12 professeurs, a secrétaire, a trésorier, and two huissiers to replace the former care-taker role of syndic. With this resounding victory over the guild, financial security, state patronage, and the promise of permanent official lodgings, the Académie finally started planning a future history and material legacy. In October 1655, the compagnie (committee of officiers) discussed the idea of collecting academicians’ portraits – ‘to place in the Académie’s room, as a mark of honour, portraits of those who have honourably executed their charges’.28 Four months later, Lemaire was ordered to paint his portrait of Sarazin. Sarazin’s munificent personal donation of his logement to the Académie was recorded in the minutes the following month, suggesting that the impetus behind his choice as subject was a gesture of appreciation from a grateful compagnie, as well as a conscious inauguration of that longer-term portrait project.29 Post-jonction, the ‘academician’ became a distinct category in the Paris art world. But it was not until 1663, with yet another momentous shift in membership, that the academicians came to dominate that stage. While the pressing problem of the guild had been solved (at least temporarily), this drew attention to the risk still posed by the remaining brevetaires, whose royal imprimatur threatened the Académie’s desired supremacy as artists to the king. Lebrun personally solicited several to join the Académie, but received a metaphorical slap in the face from two of the most renowned, Pierre Mignard and Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy, who sent a pointed refusal.30 Lebrun retaliated with the support of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (surintendant des Bâtiments, 1664–1683), convincing the king to issue an arrêt revoking the existing brevets of painters and sculptors and requiring all brevetaires to become members of the Académie or else, without royal protection, fall back under the jurisdiction of the guild.31 Reduced to this stark choice, the majority joined the Académie, whose ranks swelled dramatically. Up to this point, new members had been few and far between. Since 1648 (with the exception of maîtres during the jonction) a trickle of around 19 artists had joined over 14 years. In 1663, the Académie tripled that in a single year, with a staggering 57 new recruits comprising former brevetaires and defecting maîtres.32 Once again it was in the aftermath of a resounding victory and shift in membership that the Académie added its next artists’ portraits to the

an institutional image: portrait of the artist as an academician

25

collection. Van Loo’s Corneille (Figure 1.2) had been ordered and completed the year before, but Berthélemy was one of the new recruits and his portrait of Du Guernier (Figure 1.3), along with Nicolas Hallier’s Louis Testelin (now lost), were the first of several academicians’ portraits commissioned as morceaux de réception in this triumphant Académie of the 1660s and 1670s.33 Under the patronage of Colbert as vice-protecteur, the Académie reached an unprecedented peak of stability. Among his reforms, referred to laudingly as ‘the great restoration’, Colbert’s most significant achievement was securing state funding to the tune of 4,000 livres, sufficient to cover not only the institution’s running costs (500 livres for oil, coal, and the model; 100 livres for building maintenance) but also stipends for the officers (1,200 livres divided between the four recteurs; 1,200 livres between the 12 professeurs; and 600 livres between the professors of anatomy, geometry, and perspective), with 400 livres left over for student prizes.34 These changes were ratified in new Statuts et Règlements (1663), which also reflected the Académie’s increasing size and authority. Adjunct positions were introduced to aid administration (two adjoints à recteur and six adjoints à professeur) along with six conseillers, initially roles for non-artists like Berbier du Metz and André Félibien, whose association brought further prestige.35 Both the Statuts and the academicians’ portraits are official representations that reveal the shifting self-image of the Académie during its turbulent first decades. In 1648, the Statuts focused their attention outside the nascent corps to define the Académie against the culture of the guild. Meanwhile the diplomatic Statuts of the 1651 jonction attempted to accommodate the presence of those outsiders, without entirely conceding the Académie’s independence.36 By contrast, the Statuts of 1654 and 1663 looked not outside but in. With elaborate internal hierarchies, new initiatives like student prizes, and a refining of specific rules, the Académie for the first time defined what it was instead of defining itself against what it was not. This was the moment when the first academicians’ portraits were produced, when finally the corps was firmly enough established to warrant such substantial material objects. After all, the investment in a portrait is different from that of a written document. Portraits had nothing like the legal status of the ratified Statuts, brevets, or lettres patentes signed by Louis XIV, without which the Académie was nothing within the bureaucratic structure of ancien-régime France. But portraits have a much greater object-status than a few written pages. If the Statuts became irrelevant or contested, articles could be crossed out or amended; if changes were significant, they could be re-written entirely, as they were on four occasions during those first 15 years. But it is much more difficult (and threatens more hubris) to do the equivalent with a life-sized painted body on a framed canvas. As an effigy, a portrait stands for a person: more than a signature, which commits the legal self, a portrait commits the entire self. Before making such a substantial material and emotional investment, academicians had to be sure what the Académie was and that it was going to remain so.

1.4 Claude Lefebvre, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 138 × 113 cm, oil on canvas, 1666, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

an institutional image: portrait of the artist as an academician

27

Evolution of the Morceau-de-Réception Portrait For most historians of the Académie, 1663 is seen as the decisive moment in the narrative. Having passed through its various states, the Académie had now acquired what Henri van Hulst’s Mémoires described as ‘that perfect and stable form and consistency which endures to this day’.37 But a history of the morceau-de-réception portraits suggests that the Académie’s progressive phase of evolution actually continued well into the 1670s. Between 1648 and 1674, 17 portraits were submitted as morceaux de réception, but only seven were portraits of artists, the majority being royal or state figures who had served as the Académie’s patrons and protectors (Appendix 1).38 First to enter the collection was the young Louis XIV (1649) (Château de Versailles) painted by Henri Testelin. He was followed some years after the jonction by Antoine de Ratabon (1660) (Château de Versailles) and later by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1666) (Figure 1.4), the Académie’s important early advocates. As portraits of royal and state bodies, these paintings conformed easily to established conventions for official portraiture in seventeenth-century France. Whether in the full-length state portrait of Louis XIV or the threequarter portraits d’apparat of Ratabon and Colbert, the sitters were legibly inscribed with costume and symbols that codified rank and role, from the king’s royal fleur de lys to Colbert’s Order of Saint-Esprit. The seven portraits of artists from these years have none of this clarity or consistency, ranging in size, shape, format, and iconography. The formal unity which would later characterise the morceau-de-réception portrait-type was still a work in progress. Most irregular of all was the only portrait of a female ‘académicienne’ ever to be submitted as a morceau de réception – Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron’s Self-Portrait (Plate 1) – presented in 1672. Anomalous not only because of her gender, Chéron’s portrait also stands out as a self-representation rather than a portrait of a senior member, making her conspicuous also due to her age – her fresh 24-year-old face incongruous alongside those 50- and 60-year-old men. Sizes were irregular but Chéron’s portrait was significantly smaller than the others, almost half the size of the largest which was Paul Mignard’s portrait of Nicolas Mignard (1672) (Figure 1.5). Formats also varied. Most were rectangular, but Van Loo’s Corneille was more elongated than Jean-Charles Nocret’s squarer portrait of Jean Nocret (1674) (Figure 1.6), while Chéron’s, ever the exception, was uncharacteristically oval. In terms of iconography, a difference emerges between those early portraits of Sarazin, Corneille, and Du Guernier, which suppressed all but the merest reference to the manual processes of art-making, and the portraits of the 1670s, which began using tools and art works as attributes. Chéron and Nocret both hold drawings displayed prominently towards the viewer, while Mignard is shown in the very act. Holding palette and brushes he applies paint to a canvas that even has a preparatory drawing attached at the top, revealing the artist’s working methods. Like Nocret, Mignard still wears the learned gentleman’s costume

1.5 Paul Mignard, Nicolas Mignard, 159 × 126 cm, oil on canvas, 1672, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. (Photo: © Lyon MBA – Photo Alain Basset)

1.6 Jean-Charles Nocret, Jean Nocret, 150 × 125 cm, oil on canvas, 1674, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Droits réservés)

30

1.7 Jean Tiger, Nicolas Loir, 155 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1675, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / image RMN-GP)

académie royale: a history in portraits

of black gown and white collar, his erudition confirmed by the book on the table, but there is no attempt to disguise the manual requirements of art-making. As their status became more secure, the academicians’ need to dissociate themselves from manual practice became less pressing: art-making itself was being acknowledged as a worthy academic pursuit. Whatever their shared ideological concerns, a handful of portraits was clearly not enough to develop formal consistency. And though a sense of collective self-definition had begun, the institution’s greater concern in the 1660s and early 1670s was still with soliciting the patronage of powerful outsiders. Portraits of kings, queens, and ministers marked the company’s gratitude to these auspicious individuals. Having their effigies constantly present in the Académie’s apartments validated the institution’s status via an external source of elite authority. Around 1675, however, something changed. On 27 July, Jacques d’Agar became the first portraitist to submit two portraits of artists for his reception: the sculptors François Girardon (1675) and Michel Anguier (1675) (both Château de Versailles).39 Only a few months later, Jean Tiger became the second, submitting portraits of the painters Henri Testelin (1675) (Plate 4) and Nicolas Loir (1675) (Figure 1.7).40 All four of these portraits, moreover, display the emergent form and iconography that would become the defining traits of the morceau-de-réception portrait-type. What looks like a clear shift regarding the role of the portrait collection, was, as ever, more a process of gradual and haphazard change. Indeed, the steps that led to Agar painting Girardon and Anguier make for a convoluted tale. Agar had originally been asked to paint Philippe d’Orléans, the king’s brother (yet another powerful patron for the Académie to collect), but Agar’s sketch was rejected in 1672 and the portrait never completed.41 Reapplying in 1675, Agar was initially asked to paint only Girardon. The requirement of a second portrait was added at the following assemblée, not because of any change in admissions policy, but rather because Lebrun, who had been absent at the last meeting, complained about not having been consulted.42 To soothe the chancelier’s ego, it was determined that Agar would also paint Errard, who was then replaced by Anguier presumably for practical reasons as Errard was in Rome. In the case of Tiger, the request and the outcome were more straightforward: he was given his subjects – Loir and Testelin – in March and duly submitted the portraits in October.43 But still the system was not consistent. Marc Nattier was assigned his

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subjects in the same assemblée as Tiger, yet he was told to paint a portrait of Colbert’s son, the Marquis de Seignelay (1676) (Château de Versailles), who would become vice-protecteur a few months later.44 In the end, Nattier did submit two portraits and one of them was an artist, for the compagnie decided the following month that he should also paint Gilbert de Sève (1676) (Château de Versailles).45 Though an untidy process, this moment in the mid-1670s marks a turning point. After Nattier’s portrait of Seignelay, right up until the Académie was disbanded in 1793, all except two of the 86 morceau-deréception portraits submitted were portraits of artists.46 Furthermore, each of the 43 portraitists admitted after 1676 was required to paint at least one portrait of an artist; the majority (36 of them) painted two; five artists painted only one; while two artists – Nicolas-Alexis-Simon Belle (1703) and Gilles Allou (1711) – submitted three.47 There was still the occasional anomaly like Martin Lambert’s horizontal double-portrait of the cousins Charles and Henri Beaubrun (1675) (Figure 1.8) but such deviations from the norm became rare. No official change took place in the Académie’s rules in 1675, not even an amendment to the rather general articles in the Statuts relating to admission, which merely stated that an aspirant had to submit ‘a work’, specified only as a painting or sculpture.48 But increasing stability, self-confidence, and self-containment were having an impact – institutional customs were being established and their effects materialised in the morceau-de-réception portraits.

1.8 Martin Lambert, Charles and Henri Beaubrun, 146 × 180 cm, oil on canvas, 1675, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

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1.9 Florent de La Mare-Richart, Noël Coypel, 117 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1677, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

During the 1670s and 1680s, form and iconography also became consistent as the growing numbers of portraits began to develop the distinctive morceaude-réception type. Florent de La Mare-Richart’s portrait of Noël Coypel (1677) (Figure 1.9) and Antoine Benoist’s portrait of the sculptor Jacques Buirette (1681) (Figure 1.10), for example, both bear features that would characterise the institution’s portraits for the next century: regular sized canvases; threequarter format; relatively sparse interior settings; formal attire (but no longer restricted to black cloak and white collar) usually with wigs; and professional attributes of tools or art works. From here in, with very few deviations, this became the standard form. Quite remarkably it appears practically unchanged

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1.10 Antoine Benoist, Jacques Buirette, 118 × 92 cm, oil on canvas, 1681, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

over a hundred years later in the last morceau-de-réception portraits submitted before the Académie’s closure. Apart from the differences in fashion, Antoine Vestier’s Nicolas-Guy Brenet (1786) (Figure 1.11) and Jean-Laurent Mosnier’s Charles-Antoine Bridan (1788) (Figure 1.12) bear a striking formal resemblance to their academic forebears. Both painters, Coypel and Brenet, are posed by canvases, ready to paint with palettes and brushes, while the sculptors, Buirette and Bridan, are portrayed with marble sculptures of their own production, and with hammers, chisels, and other tools in or near at hand. Swap their wigs and outfits, and the eighteenth-century sitters could almost change places with their long-departed colleagues.

1.11 Antoine Vestier, Nicolas-Guy Brenet, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1786, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

1.12 Jean-Laurent Mosnier, Charles-Antoine Bridan, 130 × 100 cm, oil on canvas, 1788, ENSBA, Paris. (Photo: © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Beaux-arts de Paris)

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Comparison of the 87 extant morceau-de-réception portraits of artists submitted from 1675 reveals some striking uniformity.49 A statistical analysis shows that 84 (97 per cent) include attributes of tools and/or art works, 80 (92 per cent) have the sitter dressed formally in a wig, and 71 (82 per cent) locate the sitter within a sparse interior setting. A further 77 (89 per cent) adhere to the three-quarter format and 72 (83 per cent) are painted on regular sized canvases, although at the turn of the century there was a shift in what constituted this size (approximately 115 × 90cm up to 1702; then 130 × 97cm after 1703). The percentages for size and format are reduced somewhat by the eight pastel portraits – works like Marie-Suzanne Giroust’s Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1770) (Plate 2) and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Augustin Pajou (1783) (Figure 1.13) – which, due to the greater fragility of the paper support, were smaller than oil portraits and usually represented the sitter at half-length. Other features, however, remained consistent even in the pastels, such that Pigalle and Pajou are still recognisably academicians – wigged gentlemen in sparse interiors accompanied by sculpted objects.

1.13 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Augustin Pajou, 71 × 58 cm, pastel, 1783, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Tony Querrec)

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Notwithstanding the standardisation of this morceau-de-réception type, the Académie’s portraits did not lose sight of the individual. A range of artful variations differentiate each academician from his (or her, in the case of Chéron) colleagues. Some artists sit and some stand; some face left, others right; some make eye-contact, others look to the side; some, like Brenet, engage actively in the process of art-making, while others, like Buirette, pose at a moment of inaction. Above all, each sitter is distinguished by unique physical characteristics – physiognomy, body size and shape, attitude, colouring – which, along with clothing and personal objects, served to specify and individuate. Ressemblance (likeness) was, after all, the quality most sought in the art of portraiture – ‘the ultimate perfection’ – in the words of Roger de Piles (conseiller honoraire from 1699).50 In his Cours de peinture par principes, presented as a conférence in February 1708, de Piles defined the portrait as a representation not of any man in general, but of a certain man in particular, a man, that is, distinguished from all others.51 As objects used to assess the skills of aspiring artists, the morceaude-réception portraits therefore quite crucially had to resemble the individuals they represented, for this was a central criterion upon which they were judged. And as sitters were usually current academicians present at the judging, direct comparison between the living artist and his painted image was inevitable. Likeness, moreover, was vital to the role the portraits played as objects honouring individuals. First noted in 1655, this function was elaborated again in 1659: And in order to encourage those with roles in the Académie to execute their tasks well, the Académie has also decided that, to honour their memory, portraits of those individuals, both past and present, will be placed in the Académie.52

The portraits were envisaged as a reward, a sign of commemoration that would endure beyond the life of the individual to mark that particular academician’s contribution to the community. Individuation was thus paramount. As a result, each portrait grants an immediate and often intimate encounter with the character and physical qualities of an individual artist. Louis II de Boullogne’s (Plate 5) fresh youthfulness contrasts, for example, with the pinched old-age of Philippe de Buyster (Figure 1.14). Buirette’s large nose, narrowed eyes and round, shaved face cannot be confused with the angular, wide-eyed, moustachioed face of Noël Coypel. Likewise the wiry frame of Christophe Allegrain (Figure 1.15), whose aging vigour is humorously juxtaposed with the elegant marble legs he sculpts, presents a vastly different physique from the corpulent Amédée Van Loo (Figure 1.16), whose roundness keeps him wedged awkwardly in his chair. Costume is perhaps even more revelatory of artists’ personalities, for though the dress code was formal there was clearly flexibility within the parameters. Some chose attire that conveyed a sense of the working life – like Jacques Dumont le Romain (1750) (Musée du Louvre, DAG) in striped cap and gown, or Augustin Pajou (Figure 1.13) with shirt sleeves rolled up. Others meanwhile flaunted their status – like Pigalle (Plate 2) and Joseph-Marie Vien (Figure 1.17), both wearing the insignia of the

1.14 Philippe Vignon, Philippe de Buyster, 117 × 92 cm, oil on canvas, 1687, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Franck Raux)

1.15 Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis, Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1774, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Thierry Le Mage)

1.16 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Charles-Amédée-Philippe Van Loo, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1785, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Droits réservés)

1.17 Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis, Joseph-Marie Vien, 133 × 100 cm, oil on canvas, 1785, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Michel Urtado)

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Order of Saint Michel; and others made overt displays of wealth – like Brenet (Figure 1.11) and Carle Van Loo (Figure 4.7) in their sumptuous fur-trimmed coats, or Jean-Jacques Caffieri (Plate 3) with his jewel-encrusted sword hilt.53 These are the details that capture the personalities of the Académie. The morceau-de-réception portrait-type and the variations within it thus communicated identity in two different ways. On one hand, each portrait represented a particular person, differentiating physical features and distinguishing character to present the artist’s individual identity. On the other hand, each portrait also represented the same thing, time and time again. Shared formal and iconographic features became a uniform, turning individual sitters into ‘academicians’, all with a recognisable look identifying them as members of a group. Repetition of form thus created a collective identity: wigs and formal attire conferred status but also indicated that these were public presentations – official institutional images; artistic attributes signified the professional domain of this academy of painting and sculpture; the sparse interior setting ensured spatial continuity between the works, as though each figure were located in the same fictive setting, separated from the others by only a frame; and the regular canvas size turned the objects into elements of a collection. Individuation and uniformity were activated simultaneously, as the morceau-de-réception portraits conveyed both personal and corporate identities: different people who belonged together.

Institutional Ideologies and Iconographies While the form of the Académie’s official portraits claimed each sitter as members of an institution, their iconographies defined the identity of that institution to which they belonged. No other morceau-de-réception portrait offered a more comprehensive idea of this collective self-image than that of Charles Lebrun (1686) (Figure 1.18), but then no other artist embodied such a profound relationship with the Académie. Lebrun was not only a founding member but the force which had been, in the Académie’s own imagining of its history, the conceptual source of the entire institution. Of course, this institutional history was, as Bénédicte Gady notes, largely written by those in Lebrun’s inner circle, and narrated later by those who had intoned the legends.54 But it is precisely the Académie’s self-perception that is the focus of this inquiry – what the academicians believed and the institutional image they constructed for themselves. Official representations of the great Lebrun certainly told a compelling story, embellishing his actions into institutional myths that merged artist and Académie together. Claude-François Desportes’s Life of the artist envisaged Lebrun as the institution’s ‘soul’.55 In the minutes recording Lebrun’s death, the compagnie declared that his loss to the Académie could never be sufficiently mourned, and the inscription on his tomb in SaintNicolas-du-Chardonnet was at once a memorial to the artist and a monument to the institution, slipping seamlessly from one to the other and back again.56

1.18 Nicolas de Largillière, Charles Lebrun, 232 × 187 cm, oil on canvas, 1686, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / René-Gabriel Ojéda)

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In his morceau-de-réception portrait, Nicolas de Largillière found a visual rhetoric to represent this singular relationship between academician and Académie. Lebrun’s unique status is evident immediately in Largillière’s deviations from the established type. Even before he started painting, the portrait was destined to be out of the ordinary following an unprecedented and unrepeated decision that the size of the work could be determined by Largillière.57 On a canvas almost four times the normal size, Lebrun’s full-length portrayal was formally more akin to royal portraits, and was larger even than the Académie’s portrait of Louis XIV (1649). Described by Guillet de SaintGeorges, the Académie’s first historiographe, as ‘a historicised painting’ and later by Anthony Blunt as a ‘state portrait of an artist’, its unusual grandeur was indeed its most striking characteristic.58 Yet despite the differences between this exceptional artist’s portrait and the other morceaux de réception, it is nevertheless a useful starting point for understanding how a visual definition of the institution could be codified in the painted bodies of individual artists. As Lebrun himself was a veritable embodiment of the Académie, Largillière’s portrait of Lebrun became a visualisation of institutional ideals. Lebrun’s imposing form directs the viewer’s attention through three gestures: his right hand points with an extended index finger; his left hand with a bunch of brushes; and his right leg with an elegantly flexed foot. On the right side of the canvas we find the triad of assembled objects to which Lebrun gestures: a sketch for Lebrun’s Franche-Comté conquered for the second time; two small models of classical sculptures – Antinoüs and the Fighting Gladiator; and two engravings on a table, one of them Gérard Edelinck’s copy after Lebrun’s Tent of Darius.59 These objects signify on two different levels. Iconically, the art works are signs of Lebrun’s artistic creations and aesthetic influences. Symbolically, however, they are synecdoches for the three arts admitted by the Académie – painting, sculpture, and engraving – and thus together constitute a sign for the institution itself. Compositionally and tonally, Lebrun is united with these objects: through the arc of the Franche-Compté canvas continuing into the curve of Lebrun’s shoulder, academician and Académie are merged into a single compositional group; against the sombre browns of the setting, they are defined further through a bright palette of reds, golds, and blues that make up the garments of Lebrun’s costume, play prominently across the surface of the easel painting, and fashion the design of the cloth underneath the sculptures and engravings. Through this legible codification of body and objects, Lebrun and the Académie become one. Size, format, and compositional grandeur made Largillière’s portrait of Lebrun unique, but in other ways it was still clearly a morceau-de-réception portrait. Like many other sitters, Lebrun was presented in terms of his official position within the Académie’s hierarchical ranks. Enthroned in his chair, Lebrun looks commandingly out of the painting as the Académie’s directeur, as though addressing his institutional subjects. Largillière was requested to paint Lebrun’s portrait in March 1683, only a few months before Lebrun was officially elected directeur in September; by the time Largillière submitted

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the portrait in 1686, Lebrun was well and truly inhabiting the role which he had been performing de-facto since Ratabon’s death in the 1660s and Errard’s departure for Rome in the 1670s (Table 1.1).60 The principal tasks of the directeur were laid out in the Statuts: as ‘head’ of the Académie, his role was to preside at assemblées and maintain order within the institution.61 Lebrun’s commanding pose in Largillière’s portrait mimetically conveys this presiding role, but there is also a metaphorical narrative in Lebrun’s corporeal organisation of those objects symbolising the Académie, unified through his gestures and given an internal order that placed painting and sculpture above engraving, in accordance with the hierarchy of the arts practised by the institution.62 Table 1.1 Directeurs of the Académie 1655–1670

Antoine de Ratabon

1675–1683

Charles Errard

1683–1690

Charles Lebrun

1690–1695

Pierre Mignard

1695–1699

Noël Coypel

1699–1702

Charles de La Fosse

1702–1705

Antoine Coysevox

1705–1708

Jean Jouvenet

1708–1711

François de Troy

1711–1714

Corneille Van Clève

1714–1722

Antoine Coypel

1722–1733

Louis II de Boullogne

1733–1735

Claude-Guy Hallé Nicolas de Largillière Guillaume I Coustou Hyacinthe Rigaud

1735–1738

Guillaume I Coustou

1738–1742

Nicolas de Largillière

1742–1744

René Frémin

1744–1747

Pierre-Jacques Cazes

1747–1752

Charles-Antoine Coypel

1752–1760

Louis II de Silvestre

1760–1763

Jean Restout

1763–1763

Jacques Dumont le Romain

1763–1765

Carle Van Loo

1765–1768

François Boucher

1768–1770

Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne

1770–1789

Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre

1789–1793

Joseph-Marie Vien

(The four recteurs took it in turn to act as directeur)

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Directeur was not a rank attained by many artists and it was certainly not a prerequisite for being portrayed in a morceau de réception, an honour that could be accorded to any senior officier (usually those of professeur and above). At the other end of this hierarchical spectrum was, for example, Henri Testelin (Plate 4), presented inhabiting his role as secrétaire, sitting at a table with the Statuts et Règlements spread before him. According to those very Statuts, one of the primary responsibilities of the secrétaire was the safeguard of all the papers and documents concerning the Académie, kept in the casket visible by Testelin’s right hand.63 According to the Académie’s Mémoires, this ornate casket (Figure 3.14) was introduced as a ceremonial object during the grand assemblée officially ending the jonction on 3 July 1655. Testelin as secrétaire had processed with the casket into the rooms and during proceedings had withdrawn from it the three founding documents – lettres patentes, brevet and Statuts – to read aloud to the assembled company.64 Its presence beside Testelin some 20 years after that ceremony suggests that the casket remained a material ritual feature, continuing to function as the vessel for the company’s official papers. The practice of reading aloud the Statuts also continued, becoming, by the 1680s, an annual rite performed at the first assemblée each year by all subsequent secrétaires (Table 1.2).65 Other roles represented in the portraits relate to the Académie’s objectives as a teaching institution. Louis II de Boullogne (Plate 5) is presented performing his educational duties as professeur, a post to which he had been elected seven years earlier.66 Sitting in that sparse interior of the morceau-de-réception portraits, Boullogne gestures back to a doorway that breaks through into a space behind, where two young men are seated on the floor hunched over drawing boards, sketching two models posed in combat. According to the description of officiers’ tasks, each of the 12 professeurs was responsible for teaching duties during one month of the year. In his nominated month, the professeur was required to come to the Académie every day except Sunday, ‘at the given hour, to open the Académie, pose the model, and draw or sculpt it so to serve as an example for the students’.67 With his drawing portfolio and porte-crayon in hand, Boullogne fulfils his duties to the letter, gesturing to the models he has posed and to the young étudiant for whom Boullogne’s own drawing will serve as an example to be emulated. One such drawing is to be found in the portrait of another professeur, Nicolas Loir (Figure 1.7), who displays his life study – known as an académie – to the beholder. Pushed to the front of the picture plane and emphasised with a pointing index finger and porte-crayon, the study of the male nude is foregrounded as a fundamental academic practice. Another teaching role is found in Donat Nonnotte’s portrayal of Sébastien II Leclerc (Figure 1.19), who, holding a pair of compasses and gesturing to his geometrical drawings, is shown as professeur de géometrie et perspective. An additional pedagogic curriculum of geometry, perspective, and anatomy had been in place at the Académie from very early on. Perspective was already being taught in 1648 under the first incumbent of the post, Abraham

1.19 Donat Nonnotte, Sébastien II Leclerc, 129 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1741, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

1.20 Guillaume Voiriot, Jean-Joseph Sue, 127 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, c.1789, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

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Bosse, while anatomy lessons were introduced in 1651 under the tutelage of François Quadroulx, who brought a human skeleton for the purpose.68 The men who held these posts were not always artists so their status in the Académie was somewhat ambiguous – technically they held officier ranks, but while they had access to assemblées, they had no, or restricted, voting rights, and were not usually of sufficient rank to become subjects of morceau-de-réception portraits.69 Leclerc, however, who taught geometry and perspective at the Académie between 1717 and 1758, was also a history painter and had been elected to the honorary rank of ancien professeur in 1735.70 Another painting paying tribute to these teaching roles entered the collection in 1789 in the form of Guillaume Voiriot’s portrait of the surgeon, Jean-Joseph Sue (Figure 1.20), who taught anatomy classes for nearly 50 years.71 Though not a morceau de réception, this portrait nevertheless adheres closely to the established type, replacing the conventional artistic attributes with the anatomy teacher’s tool of the plaster écorché (made by the sculptor, Jean-Antoine Houdon). The high esteem in which Sue was held is evident in the minutes recording Voiriot’s donation, noting that the work was to hang ‘among the portraits of the officiers’.72 The representation of these institutional roles in morceau-de-réception portraits appears to suggest on emphasis on educational practices. Teaching was after all, at least in theory, the Académie’s raison d’être. From the outset, when Charles Lebrun inaugurated classes on 1 February 1648, drawing from live models had been the distinguishing feature of the Académie’s training programme.73 Later, with the 1663 reforms, drawing had taken on even greater significance as the new lettres patentes prohibited life-drawing classes anywhere else, on pain of a 2,000 livres fine, making it the institution’s particular preserve.74 Yet overall, portraits like those of Loir, Boullogne, and Leclerc with references to educational practices are actually a minority. Throughout the eighteenth century, teaching only really found its way into the portraits through the pervasive sense of the sitters being examples for emulation, an allusion made perhaps most explicitly in Labille-Guiard’s depiction of a master–student relationship in her portrait of Pajou (Figure 1.13), who sculpts a bust of his former master, Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne. This is not to say that the Académie lost interest in teaching. Indeed in the second half of the eighteenth century, teaching was often a driving force behind institutional initiatives, most notably during Charles-Antoine Coypel’s directeur-ship, which saw the establishment of the École Royale des Elèves Protégés (1749) for grand prix recipients to receive extra training before going to Rome.75 New student prizes were also introduced – the annual grand prix (founded in 1662) and the quarterly médailles du quartier (founded in 1684) were joined by specialist prizes funded by donation – including the comte de Caylus’ prix d’expression (founded in 1753), prix de perspective and prix d’ostéologie (both in 1764), and four prizes proposed by MauriceQuentin de La Tour: prix d’anatomie, prix de perspective et architecture, prix pour une tête peinte, and prix pour une académie (1776).76 In the Académie’s official

1.21 Jean Ranc, François Verdier, 130 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1703, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

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portraits, however, education became merely part of the Académie’s greater purpose. Sitters in these portraits were rarely represented exclusively as teachers and if teaching was incorporated into their portrayal it was nearly always secondary to their primary role as skilled, successful, and socially elite artists. In the Académie’s self-portrayals, its purpose remained throughout what it had been from the start: an institution for raising the status of the arts (and the artist), defined in opposition to commercial and artisanal practices, that privileged the intellectual dimensions of painting and sculpture as liberal arts.77 Status, intellectual and social, was emphasised in iconographies that conveyed erudition and standing. The formal dress codes (and their often sumptuous interpretations) presented every academician as a well-to-do gentleman, whatever their actual fiscal state or social origins. Through lavish silks, satins, velvets, embroidery, and expensive powdered wigs, the Académie was marked as an elite preserve. Elevation of a different kind was foregrounded in the consistent highlighting of the sitter’s head and hands. This dual emphasis on the enlightened mind and manual skill, which had featured even in those earliest portraits of Sarazin, Corneille, and Du Guernier, became an almost universal motif in the morceau-de-réception portraits. Encapsulating a key principle of academic ideology, this referred visually to the two principal components of art-making noted by Félibien: ‘one relating to reason or theory, the other relating to the hand or practice’.78 In the portrait of François Verdier (Figure 1.21), a dramatic shaft of light illuminates the artist’s face and hands, one of which holds his palette and brushes. With his arm dynamically foreshortened, Verdier appears to reach up and out, raising the artist’s tools towards the level of his head, while pushing this gesture towards the beholder to ensure the symbolic association is unmistakeable. Even the messy task of the sculptor could be salvaged in this way. In the portraits of François Barrois (Figure 2.2) and Louis-Claude Vassé (Plate 6), light creates a naturalised interdependence of head and hands at the very moment of making, such that even manipulating clay with one’s fingers becomes an act of intellectual creativity. Academic erudition was also evident in the emphasis on drawing, which was not only associated with educational practices, but also with the Académie’s intellectualisation of the arts through theoretical debate. Jean Le Gros’ portrait of Claude-Guy Hallé (1725) (Figure 1.22) is one of many portraits where drawing is made the painter’s primary act. As Hallé’s portfolio of sketches literally separates his canvas from his palette and brushes, drawing becomes the process that mediates between the idea and the manual production of an artwork. In the context of the Académie’s vigorous aesthetic debates, this recalls the argument for the supremacy of line over colour. In a conférence delivered in 1672, Lebrun claimed drawing as a product of the intellect, an art form that could visualise words and theorise pictorially. A pencil, he argued, could imitate all visible things and express the passions of the soul; colour, meanwhile, was only needed to

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1.22 Jean Le Gros, Claude-Guy Hallé, 116 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1725, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

suggest rosiness or pallor.79 As though supporting this theoretical position, drawing tools (portfolios, porte-crayons, paper) are omnipresent in the morceau-de-réception portraits. Meanwhile the majority of portraits with a canvas show it either blank or, like Hallé’s, with a composition drawn in chalk (Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont [Plate 7] is shown holding a porte-crayon before his canvas, while his palette and brushes rest dry and unused). A handful of portraits gesture to the counter-position in favour of colour, but only gently, suggesting that the institutional party-line remained on the side of dessein. In Voiriot’s portrait of Jean-Marc Nattier (1759) (Figure 1.23), the renowned colourist sits before a painterly canvas but holds his porte-crayon and portfolio before him. And even with Louis-Gabriel Blanchard (1681) (Figure 1.24) – where one might expect dramatic opposition given that it was Blanchard’s conférence in favour of couleur that had prompted

1.23 Guillaume Voiriot, Jean-Marc Nattier, 130.5 × 97.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1759, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / René-Gabriel Ojéda)

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1.24 Antoine Benoist, LouisGabriel Blanchard, 112 × 93 cm, oil on canvas, 1681, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

Lebrun’s response – there is only a quiet suggestion of colour’s superiority, as Blanchard applies his brush directly onto a blank canvas without any trace of drawing as a guide.80 Intellectualising painting and sculpture allowed the Académie to claim a place for the arts among other academic pursuits. The Statuts of 1654 had allocated officiers equal rights and privileges to members of the Académie Française.81 The artists’ desire to demonstrate this intellectual brotherhood and to claim their equivalent learned status is evident in the recurrence throughout the portraits of the book or written word. Once again this signifier of erudition was evident from the very beginning with Sarazin, but it continued to make an appearance, sometimes prominently, as in François-Hubert Drouais’s portrait of Edmé Bouchardon (1758) (Musée du Louvre) where it occupies the

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1.25 Jacques Carré, JeanBaptiste de Champaigne, 116 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1682, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Droits réservés)

foreground, and sometimes more inadvertently, as in Voiriot’s portrait of Nattier (Figure 1.23) where a book provides support for his elbow. Perhaps the most direct claim for the fundamental relationship between word and image is made in the portrait of Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (Figure 1.25). Holding a large bible and chalk in his right hand, Champaigne points to the drawing held in his left. In the narrative formed by body and objects, Champaigne shows the drawn image as a visual translation of the word contained within the book, legibly arguing for the primacy of the text in the production of great art. If the collected portraits offer a life-long engagement with the culture and beliefs that defined the Académie, then the abiding image is a forum of elites, where the activity of art-making was raised far above that of merely plying an artistic trade. In other ways, however, the portraits reveal an institution

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defined by its complex hierarchy of ranks and roles, where pedagogic duties were performed, self-reflexive rituals enacted, and theoretical ideas debated. Reading the portraits as a corporate self-image has involved seeking out the common threads and intersections, along with single instances from various moments, and working around chronology to tell a more synchronic story about the institution: what it was, and how it saw itself. But there is another story in these portraits that was self-consciously conceived and actively pursued in their production and reproduction.

An Official history in Official Portraits Official portraits of academicians may have started as marks of honour to memorialise individuals, but as the objects accumulated over the years, forming a visual record of members, an additional role emerged. The collection began to be envisaged as a ‘history’ of the Académie. Mobilised in different ways by successive generations, the portraits’ historicising role in turn came to determine aspects of their production, display, and even reproduction, as their narrative potential triggered a separate collection of engraved portraits which themselves became the source for some of the Académie’s most elaborate historical projects. In 1684, the compagnie decided to rehang the portrait collection in the Palais Royal apartments. This new installation was to accommodate two changes: first, to include all the portraits in the collection (previously only those of deceased members were displayed); and second, to arrange the works in order of the artists’ receptions.82 While the chronological imperative here suggests an awareness of the historical narrative the portraits formed, the incorporation of current members suggests a desire to make that narrative connect past with present. No longer merely honouring former academicians, the portraits were now charged with relating a history-to-date of the institution. Display, however, was just one method for presenting that narrative in a readable form. Another came just over a decade later, when the compagnie commissioned a mémoire recording all the artists represented in portraits (around 30 at this stage) along with the dates of their receptions and deaths, from which the idea was to create inscriptions (presumably in the form of plaques) to be attached to their frames.83 Half a century after the Académie’s founding and well into its second and third generations, this was an effort to preserve the memory of individuals from future loss. Artists admitted in the 1690s and 1700s (Alexandre Desportes, Hyacinthe Rigaud, François Jouvenet, Jean Ranc, etc.) had been mere infants when sitters like Sarazin, Corneille, Nicolas Mignard, and Nocret had died. The portraits commemorated these long-gone elders, but image alone was not enough. Through inscriptions, word and image would together ensure an identifying name was always present, preventing that otherwise imminent threat of being forgotten in a wall of anonymous faces. Including dates, however, also ensured preservation of

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the chronological narrative. Every figure was historically situated, their dates bracketing the life of each member within the ongoing life of the Académie, which continued through the lives of those still present and those to come. In the Académie’s theoretical discourses, word (in the form of historical texts) was privileged as the ideal source for painting, but here, in a reversal of their expected relationship, image became the source for composing history. The idea of using portraits to generate a written history had in fact been initiated in a different way some 20 years earlier, though it would not come to fruition until the early decades of the eighteenth century. In 1674, the compagnie proposed that aspiring engravers should also submit portraits as morceaux de réception, beginning with portraits of the king, the institution’s protectors and benefactors, and the original founding members. Reproduced in engraved form, these portraits would form the basis for a ‘livre de l’Histoire de l’Académie’. It seems unlikely that this particular project ever materialised as only three engraved portraits were submitted as morceaux de réception over the next 30 years.84 However both ideas – engraving the portraits and writing an official history – remained connected and were revived in different initiatives throughout the first half of the eighteenth century under the secrétaires and historiographes charged with that vital task of preserving (and creating) the Académie’s history (Table 1.2). Table 1.2 Secrétaires and historiographes of the Académie

Secrétaires

Historiographes

1650–1681 Henri Testelin 1681–1705 Nicolas Guérin

1682–1705 Guillet de Saint-Georges

(roles merged following Saint-Georges’ death) 1705–1714 Nicolas Guérin 1714–1725 François Tavernier 1725–1737 Dubois de Saint-Gelais 1737–1755 Bernard Lépicié 1755–1776 Charles-Nicolas Cochin 1776–1803 Antoine Renou (adjoint 1776–1790)

Henri Testelin was the first to undertake a written history of the Académie but his project was left unfinished after he was forced to leave the institution with the banning of Protestant artists in the 1680s. A draft must have survived, however, for his text became the basis for several later histories: Piganiol de La Force’s account in his Description historique de la ville de Paris; the Mémoires

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pour servir à l’histoire de l’Académie (compiled by Henri van Hulst); and the Relation de ce qui s’est passé en l’établissement de l’Académie, penned by Testelin’s successor, Nicolas Guérin (first to hold the combined role of secrétairehistoriographe).85 Guérin presented his text (described as a continuation of ‘l’Histoire de l’Académie’) in assemblées between 1706 and 1708, coinciding with a moment of renewed interest in the project of engraving the Académie’s portraits. In 1704, the morceau-de-réception process for engravers had been formalised with a decision that each would have to produce two portraits of precisely designated size and format.86 Then from 1707, engravers started regularly submitting artists’ portraits, the first to fulfil the requirements being Gaspard Duchange with portraits of Charles de La Fosse and François Girardon, and Antoine Trouvain with René-Antoine Houasse and Jean Jouvenet.87 Over the following decades, with the collection of engraved portraits growing, the Académie revived the still-resonating idea of using them to create a printed history. In 1724, when the collection mounted to around 20 portraits (14 representing artists), the compagnie set about producing a ‘Recueil des portraits gravéz de Messieurs les Officiers de l’Académie’. To this end Duchange was engaged to print all the portraits of officiers from the collection of morceau-de-réception plates, and the directeur, Louis II de Boullogne, designed an allegorical frontispiece for the beginning of the volume, which Simon-Henri Thomassin engraved as his morceau de réception (Figure 1.26).88 When Boullogne presented his painting in 1725 – an allegory of Painting and Sculpture with Minerva holding a portrait of Louis XIV – the project had undergone a name change: from ‘Recueil des portraits’ to ‘l’Histoire et [ … ] la Vie des Peintres et Sculpteurs de l’Académie’, the name it retained when Thomassin eventually submitted his engraving in 1728.89 In 1729 it was again a ‘recueil’, when the new secrétaire-historiographe, Dubois de Saint-Gelais, presented a ‘discours historique’ on the establishment of the Académie to serve as a preface, coming after the frontispiece and before the collected portraits.90 Clearly the project had always been historicising, but the interchangeability of the words – recueil (portfolio of prints) and histoire (written history) – is suggestive both of its envisaged material form and the narrative potential of the portraits. This ‘history’ of the Académie would begin textually in a written account of its origins, and continue visually in chronologically arranged images of its members. Whether or not this recueil was ever produced as a bound volume is unclear. Perhaps it was too difficult to determine an end point for an institutional history that had no intention of coming to an end. What is clear is that it became an ongoing project, though more conceptual than material: a modifiable historical record in which new portraits could represent passing years. Before his death in 1737, Saint-Gelais began supplementing the recueil, itemising the engraved plates that had been added to the collection in an inventory that presumably went on to inform the activities of his successor.91 In 1739, the next incumbent of the secrétaire-historiographe post, Bernard Lépicié, presented a manuscript entitled: ‘Portraits des Peintres et Sculpteurs de l’Académie Roïale, avec l’abrégé

1.26 Simon-Henri Thomassin (after Louis II de Boullogne), Louis XIV Protecting the Arts – frontispiece for the Recueil, 38 × 31.7 cm, engraving, 1728, Musée du Louvre, Chalcographie, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Thierry Le Mage)

1.27 Jean Daullé (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), Hyacinthe Rigaud painting the portrait of his wife, 47 × 34 cm, engraving, 1742, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

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de leurs vies, précédé d’un Discours historique sur l’établissement de cette Académie’.92 Whether an updated version of Saint-Gelais’ recueil or a new document, conceptually Lépicié’s manuscript was a continuation of the earlier project. Once again, word and image worked together to relate a history, but text this time was not limited to the preface, continuing throughout in written Lives that accompanied each portrait. The composition of short biographical notices about former members had begun under Guillet de Saint-Georges in the 1680s and was taken up assiduously in the 1720s and 1730s by Saint-Gelais, who took to reading them aloud as conférences, establishing a practice that would continue with varying degrees of intensity throughout the century.93 In Lépicié’s version, all of these historicising acts – discursive essay, portraiture, and biography – came together, but his title suggests that the portraits received top billing. Looking at the afterlives of the engraved portraits reveals the extent to which the Académie’s official portraits came to be envisaged as an official history. Interestingly, however, though the painted portraits (and the story they told as a collection) had prompted the idea of making a printed portrait-history, the engraved morceau-de-réception portraits were never strictly required to be reproductions of painted morceau-de-réception portraits. Of the 14 engraved portraits submitted before 1730, only three were derived from painted morceaux de réception, and although the trend reversed from this point, there were always exceptions, be they self-portraits like Jean Daullé’s engraving of Hyacinthe Rigaud (Figure 1.27), or portraits sourced from elsewhere, like Manuel-Salvador Carmona’s engraving of François Boucher (Figure 1.28), made not after Lundberg’s morceau de réception (Figure 0.1), but after Roslin’s later portrait (Figure 0.2). Whether the sitters selected their favoured portraits, or whether engravers preferred not to reproduce works painted by artists at their career beginnings, the result was a complementary portrait record. This occasionally even included members who never found their way into a painting, like Charles-François Poerson (engraved by Étienne Desrochers in 1723). Overall, however, it was the painted morceau-de-réception portraits that offered the most substantial record in terms of academicians represented. Even though the Académie admitted comparable numbers of engravers and portrait painters, the reception process for the engravers was formalised so much later (c.1704 as opposed to c.1675) that a third had been admitted before the portrait requirement was in place.94

1.28 ManuelSalvador Carmona (after Alexandre Roslin), François Boucher, 39 × 27.3 cm, engraving, 1761, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Château de Versailles)

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That the painted morceau-de-réception portraits continued to be conceived as a forum for preserving institutional history is nowhere more evident than in the decisions regarding subjects for these works. Though criteria for becoming a sitter were never officially dictated, customs nevertheless evolved, such that throughout the eighteenth century nearly all academicians who had at least held the rank of adjoint à recteur were eventually selected. Rarely was any artist below the rank of professeur chosen, though not everyone who achieved that rank ended up as a sitter. Occasionally quite prominent artists slipped between the cracks: some, like Charles Errard or Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, were selected but for various reasons the portraits were not completed; while other seemingly eligible subjects, like Charles Parrocel or Étienne-Maurice Falconet, were never even commissioned.95 Perhaps more strangely, some artists were selected more than once: Antoine Coysevox was painted twice (by François Jouvenet [1701] and Gilles Allou [1711]); while François Girardon topped everyone with three portraits (by Jacques d’Agar [1675], Gabriel Revel [1683], and Joseph Vivien [1701] [Plate 8]).96 Despite occasional omissions and extras, however, the collection was fairly consistent. When gaps in the record were noticed, the compagnie’s desire to complete their history prompted immediate action. If the missing member was deceased, a morceau-de-réception portrait was not usually an option – part of the portraitist’s assessment being to paint from life. At such moments, the collection would be supplemented by donations or commissions sourced outside the admission practices. In 1699, for instance, they realised the collection lacked a portrait of Sébastien Bourdon, one of the original anciens.97 To prevent Bourdon being lost from the memory of the future institution, Jean Jouvenet (a history painter) was commissioned to make a posthumous copy after Bourdon’s self-portrait.98 This prompted further realisations of missing founding members, for next Nicolas de Plattemontagne (another history painter) volunteered to copy a portrait of Eustache Le Sueur, and the Boullogne brothers (Louis II and Bon) promised a copy of a portrait of their father, Louis I de Boullogne.99 In 1732, Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne commissioned Noël-Nicolas Coypel to paint a portrait of Simon Guillain (Figure 1.29), another of the missing anciens, who was also Lemoyne’s great-great-grandfather.100 In the 1770s and 1780s, the sculptor Jean-Jacques Caffieri, one of the most generous donors, made several gifts, among them Roslin’s portrait of Dandré-Bardon (1756) (Château de Versailles), Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s portrait of JeanSiméon Chardin (1761) (Musée du Louvre), and a self-portrait by André Bouys (1713) (Château de Versailles), along with dozens of engraved portraits and sculpted busts of artists.101 None of these were morceaux de réception, but many (particularly those made for the purpose) adhered to the established type, fitting seamlessly into the official collection, like the three-quarter Guillain in his sparse interior, seated before a sculpted bas-relief. As members donated works from their own collections, descendants offered portraits of forebears, new works were commissioned and old ones copied, the Académie’s history was fleshed out in the ongoing and ever-

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1.29 NoëlNicolas Coypel, Simon Guillain, 100 × 80 cm, oil on canvas, 1732, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

growing portrait narrative. What is perhaps most striking, however, is that it was portraiture, not history painting, which became the Académie’s chosen genre for narrating its history. In the context of morceau-de-réception practices, no other genre was given such a formalised self-reflexive role as portraiture. Among the aspiring history painters and sculptors, a handful were asked to produce institutional allegories, like Loir’s Allegory of the foundation of the Académie (Figure 1.30) and Buirette’s marble bas-relief showing the Union of Painting and Sculpture (Figure 1.31) (which appears behind Buirette in his official portrait [Figure 1.10]). Both of these allegories were submitted in 1663, notably around the same time as those early portraits of Corneille and Du Guernier, following Colbert’s restoration and those renewed efforts at self-definition.102 At this decisive moment, both portraiture

1.30 Nicolas Loir, Allegory of the foundation of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, 141 × 185.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1663, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

1.31 Jacques Buirette, Union of Painting and Sculpture, 78 × 76 × 8 cm, marble, 1663, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Hervé Lewandowski)

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and history painting were being mobilised to fulfil that imperative task of defining the Académie. Yet while portraits of academicians became a tradition that continued through to the 1780s, self-reflexive morceau-de-réception history paintings were rarely commissioned thereafter. In 1682, Charles-François Poerson was asked to paint Apollo presiding over the union of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture and the Académie de Saint-Luc in Rome (Figure 1.32) and in 1753, Charles-Michel-Ange Challe produced Painting and Sculpture United by Drawing under the Protection of Louis XV as a ceiling painting for the salle d’assemblée, but these were exceptions that broke the rule.103 Most aspiring history painters and sculptors were given classical or religious narratives, subjects that the Académie intended as its primary productions. In a sense, as the genre given the task of recording institutional history, portraiture looks to have been accorded a higher status in practice than it was in art theory. But though portraitists painted the Académie’s history, it was the history painters and sculptors who became the subjects of that history: theirs were the bodies in the frames, theirs were the names remembered. Only senior officiers were represented in portraits, and only history painters and sculptors could attain those ranks, leaving academicians practising secondary genres or media not only excluded from the visual record, but essentially put into its service. In terms of the morceau-de-réception practices, landscape, genre, and still life painters were given no role whatsoever in the glorification of the Académie, and only one other group – medal engravers – were called upon to create self-reflexive admission pieces. So few were received overall that their admission process was never standardised, but in general they submitted

1.32 CharlesFrançois Poerson, Apollo presiding over the union of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture and the Académie de Saint-Luc in Rome, 136 × 178 cm, oil on canvas, 1682, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

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objects not for display, but for functional use within the Académie: seals (e.g. Pierre-Simon-Benjamin Duvivier [1776]); medals for prix (e.g. Joseph-Charles Roettiers [1717]); or jetons (tokens) to indicate attendance at meetings (e.g. Charles-Norbert Roettiers [1764]).104 Through practices like these, genre and media thus became social markers in the lived experience of the Académie, structuring one’s status or value into roles performed. The choice of portraiture as the genre for recording institutional history actually reveals something fascinating about the Académie’s self-image, for the history envisaged was one that history painting could never achieve. History

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1.33 Henri Testelin, Colbert presenting the members of the Académie Royale des Sciences to Louis XIV, 348 × 590 cm, oil on canvas, 1667, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

painting could abstract the Académie into an idea through allegory, obviously crucial for representational tasks that required succinct summation, like a frontispiece or seal. History painting could also represent key events, like the Académie’s founding, but it could not narrate the lived history of the institution. Only portraiture could represent an institution that was, in their eyes, composed of and experienced as a community of individuals. Only portraiture could represent an animate institution with a past, present, and anticipated future. A telling comparison is found in Testelin’s painting of another academic institution: Académie Royale des Sciences (1667) (Figure 1.33). Commissioned

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for the tapestry series L’Histoire du Roi, it depicts the founding members of the Académie des Sciences being presented by Colbert to Louis XIV in a setting filled with scientific attributes of globes, animal skeletons, books, and instruments.105 At first glance, Testelin’s painting appears to be a representation of the new academy as a ‘group portrait’ along the lines of Alois Riegl’s definition: ‘members of a voluntary corporation [depicted] as a series of portraits of individuals’.106 On closer inspection, however, it clearly is not. Testelin’s painting was, in both form and function, a history painting. Like the other subjects in the Histoire du Roi series – battles, diplomatic alliances, or events like his coronation and marriage – this was an illustration of a glorious moment from Louis XIV’s reign.107 Testelin’s painting of the Académie des Sciences was not a portrait of its members but a celebration of Louis XIV’s action of founding it, a history painting that accorded with Félibien’s contemporaneous definition of the genre: a representation of ‘great deeds’ revealing ‘the virtues of great men’.108 It is obviously difficult to compare a single history painting with a collection of portraits. But Testelin’s painting nevertheless highlights the limitations of history painting for the kind of collective representation sought by the Académie. The language and imperatives of history painting have two significant effects. First, with its focus on the king, Testelin’s painting is not really about this community of academicians. Though nominally present, the scientists are compositionally secondary, becoming extras or even props (like the skeletons and globes) in a narrative revolving around the great deed of its central royal protagonist.109 Second, as a representation of a particular event, Testelin’s painting could only ever portray a static image fixed at a single moment in time. Showing only the members of 1667, its efficacy as a representation of the community would diminish with the natural shifts in membership brought about through deaths and new admissions. In the pursuit of an institutional image, portraiture circumnavigated all these problems. As a genre devoted to the individual, portraiture made the academicians – the community members – into the subjects of their own collective self-representation. As a collection of separate objects, the morceaude-réception portraits also offered a flexible visual platform to accommodate the constantly changing membership of the Académie through the simple act of adding new works. While history painting could only represent fixed, past events, the morceau-de-réception portraits were able to represent an ongoing, living institution. Portraiture could even fulfil the symbolic functions of Testelin’s painting. Collected together in the Académie’s apartments along with portraits of the king, Colbert and other official figures, the morceaude-réception portraits enacted a three-dimensional version of Testelin’s Académie des Sciences, with the artists’ effigies staged en masse around the state effigies. But this dramatised version achieved two things that Testelin’s painting did not: it accommodated historical shifts in the narrative of royal patronage (for example, with the addition of François Stiémart’s portrait of

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the new king, Louis XV, in 1720); and it kept the emphasis on the community members, rather than on that external authority. Made by, for, and of the Académie’s members, the morceau-de-réception portraits were in every way community objects. They may have been official objects in a state institution, but they were actually local productions coming out of academicians’ personal experiences of this institution. Testelin’s painting was, for the Académie des Sciences, a representation of a community outsider (the king), made by an outsider (Testelin, not a member of this Academy) for an outside audience (the state). But the morceau-de-réception portraits were, for our Académie, representations of community insiders (senior officiers), made by insiders (aspiring academicians) for an inside audience (the collective Académie). Thus the morceau-de-réception portraits narrated a history of the institution through the lives of individual members. However self-mythologising the Académie could be, this desire to record its history in portraiture rather than abstracted allegories suggests an experience of the institution in terms of people: the Académie was, in an everyday sense, the artists who composed it. This human story of the Académie, created by and retrieved here through the morceau-de-réception portraits, has shown how a small group of people became an institution, how that institution evolved as the original members died and new ones joined, and how these people collectively imagined themselves as a community. Through form and iconography, portraits constructed an image of the ‘academician’ defining members through a distinctive and uniform portrait-type. These individual effigies also defined the principles, ideals, and discourses of the ‘Académie’, providing a history of the institution through the bodies of those who lived according to its culture. Collective representation in portraiture became fundamental to the Académie’s historicising sense of self, but as we shall see, this institutional image was far from the only purpose the portraits served.

Notes 1 In 1648, Sébastien Bourdon painted Martin de Charmois (Château de Versailles), the Académie’s first ‘chef’ (before the post of directeur existed), but Charmois was not an artist so his portrait falls into a different category of representation. 2 Lemaire was admitted on 5 August 1657 (PV, vol. 1, p. 134). 3 Some portraits of artists were made before this point but not enough for conventions to develop. On early modern French artists’ portraits see: Thierry Bajou, ‘Le portrait de l’artiste dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle’, Visages du Grand Siècle, exh. cat. (Nantes and Toulouse, 1997), pp. 107–118; Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, Das Künstlerbildnis des Grand Siècle in Malerei und Graphik (Munich, 2002); Claudia Denk, Artiste, Citoyen & Philosophe: Der Künstler und sein Bildnis im Zeitalter der französischen Aufklärung (Munich, 1998). On the historical development of self-portraiture see Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance SelfPortraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist

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(New Haven, 1998); Omar Calabrese, Artists’ Self-Portraits, trans. Marguerite Shore (New York, 2006). 4 Nathalie Heinich, Du peintre à l’artiste: artisans et académiciens à l’âge classique (Paris, 1993), p. 12. See also Antoine Schnapper, Le métier de peintre au Grand Siècle (Paris, 2004). 5 On the Académie Française see Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Des siecles d’immortalité. L’Académie française, 1635–… (Paris, 2011). 6 On professional alternatives to the guild see Jacques Thuillier, ‘Académie et classicisme en France: les débuts de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1648–1663), in Stefano Bottari (ed.), Il mito del classicismo nel seicento (Messina, 1964), pp. 184–187; and Schnapper, Métier, pp. 24–52. 7 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 11. 8 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 11. 9 Articles I and III, Statuts et Règlements (1648). See also Schnapper, Métier, p. 88; Benhamou, Regulating, p. 5. 10 Article II, Statuts et Règlements (1648). On the Maîtrise see Jules Guiffrey, Histoire de l’Académie de Saint-Luc, AAF, 9 (Paris, 1915). 11 Article I, Statuts et Règlements (1648). Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 12. 12 The original 12 anciens and 10 other academicians were recorded in Dubois de Saint-Gelais’ Vies (commenced in 1726): Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 289. 13 Lebrun became chancelier on 6 July 1655 (PV, vol. 1, p. 102); Errard became directeur on 11 May 1775 (PV, vol. 2, p. 50). 14 A summary of the Académie’s major relocations is to be found in Valerius, Académie, pp. 207–227. 15 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, pp. 36, 41, 140; PV, vol. 1, pp. 68–70. See also Abraham du Pradel (Nicolas de Blegny), Le livre commode des adresses de Paris pour 1692, ed. Édouard Fournier (Paris: 1878), vol. 1, pp. 314–315. 16 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 2, pp. 1–6; PV, vol. 1, pp. 113–114, 118. 17 Georges Huard, ‘Les logements des artisans dans la grande galerie du Louvre sous Henri IV et Louis XIII’, BSHAF (1939), p. 29. 18 16 April 1657 (PV, vol. 1, p. 128); 13 September 1661 (PV, vol. 1, p. 185). Huard, ‘Les logements’, p. 35. 19 15 March 1692 (PV, vol. 3, p. 83). The Académie’s Louvre apartments are discussed in Chapter 3. See also Udolpho van de Sandt, ‘Note sur les collections de tableaux et leur présentation dans les salles de l’Académie, in Les peintres du Roi, pp. 69–76. 20 February 1648 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 13–15). 21 Lemaire paid 200 livres while Gaspard de Marsy, reçu on the same day, paid 100 livres: 5 August 1657 (PV, vol. 1, p. 134). Antoine Schnapper, ‘The Debut of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture’, in June Hargrove (ed.), The French Academy: Classicism and its Antagonists (Newark, 1990), p. 30. 22 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, pp. 71–72. 23 September 1650 (PV, vol. 1, p. 36).

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24 April 1651 (PV, vol. 1, p. 43). For an overview of the Académie’s finances see Valerius, Académie, pp. 155–174. 25 13 July 1651 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 50–51). On the jonction, see: Vitet, Académie, pp. 92–94; Schnapper, Métier, pp. 132–141, 303–308; Michel, L’Académie, pp. 32–35. 26 2 September 1651 (PV, vol. 1, p. 53). 27 The legal machinations of ending the jonction are recounted in Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, pp. 163–187. For the Statuts et Règlements see Benhamou, Regulating, pp. 103–106, 108–113. 28 30 October 1655 (PV, vol. 1, p. 105). 29 4 March and 15 April 1656 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 112–114). 30 Their letter to Lebrun is transcribed in Mémoires pour servir, vol. 2, p. 103; their refusal was noted in the minutes on 30 June 1663 (PV, vol. 1, p. 232). 31 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 2, pp. 103–106; Vitet, Académie, pp. 134–138. 32 Louis-Étienne Dussieux, ‘Liste chronologique des membres de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture’, AAF, vol. 1 (1851), pp. 357–424; Vitet, Académie, pp. 327–381. 33 Van Loo delivered his portrait on 6 May 1662 but was not admitted until 1663 (see Chapter 2); Berthélemy was admitted on 26 May and Hallier on 30 June 1663 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 192, 228, 231). Hallier delivered his portrait on 4 January 1665, the same assemblée in which Nicolas Dumoustier was ordered to paint Charles Errard, a reception piece which was never completed (PV, vol. 1, p. 276). 34 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 17; vol. 2, pp. 87–88. 35 Statuts et Règlements (1663). 36 See especially Articles I, IV and VII, Statuts et Règlements (1651); and Benhamou, Regulating, pp. 103–106. 37 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 16. Henri van Hulst was appointed honoraire associé libre in 1747 and honoraire amateur in 1753. He became an important institutional historiographer, writing several texts on the Académie’s history including this updated version of the Académie’s official history. 38 There were eight portraits of artists but I have excluded François Tortebat’s copy of Simon Vouet (1665) because Vouet was never a member of the Académie. 39 Agar submitted his portraits on 27 July and was reçu on 3 August 1675 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 53–54). 40 5 October 1675 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 56–57). 41 4 and 5 April 1671, 30 April 1672 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 360–361, 384). 42 9 and 16 February 1675 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 41–42). 43 Tiger was agréé on 2 March and his subjects allocated on 27 March 1675 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 43–44). 44 Like Tiger, Nattier was agréé on 2 March and his subjects allocated on 27 March 1675. Seignelay was confirmed as vice-protecteur on 4 May 1675 (PV, vol. 2, p. 49). 45 Nattier submitted both portraits for his réception on 27 June 1676 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 46, 86).

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46 The two non-artists’ portraits were: Joseph Vivien, Robert de Cotte, premier architecte du roi, 1701 (Paris, Musée du Louvre); and François Stiémart (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), Louis XV, 1720 (Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts). 47 After 1675, 45 artists submitted portraits as morceaux de réception, but two of them – Alexandres Desportes and François Stiémart – were not admitted as portraitists. 48 Articles XVIII and XXIII, Statuts et Règlements (1663). 49 Ninety-three portraits were submitted as morceaux de réception between 1675 and 1793. The six portraits omitted here are: three portraits of non-artists (Marc Nattier, Marquis de Seignelay [1676]; Joseph Vivien, Robert de Cotte [1701]; François Stiémart [after Hyacinthe Rigaud], Louis XV [1720]); one painting submitted as a still life (Alexandre Desportes, Self-Portrait as hunter with still life, 1699); and two now lost (Gabriel Revel, Michel Anguier, 1683; and Louis Autereau, Henri de Favanne, 1741). 50 Roger de Piles, ‘Sur la manière de faire les portraits’, Cours de peinture par principes (1708) (Paris, 1989), p. 127. 51 De Piles, Cours, p. 127. 52 9 May 1659 (PV, vol. 1, p. 154). 53 For artists awarded the Order of Saint Michel see: Jules Guiffrey, Lettres de noblesse accordées aux artistes français (XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles) (Paris, 1873), pp. 40–44. 54 Gady, L’ascension, pp. 233–264. 55 Claude-François Desportes, ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’ (1749), in Bernard Lépicié, Vies des premier-peintres du roi (Paris, 1752), p. 15. 56 13 February 1690 (PV, vol. 3, p. 27). Alexandre Lenoir, Description historique et chronologique des monuments de sculpture réunis au Musée des Monuments Français, 7th edn (Paris, 1803), p. 240. 57 6 March 1683 (PV, vol. 2, p. 242). 58 Guillet de Saint-Georges, ‘Charles Lebrun’, in Mémoires inédits, vol. 1, p. 48. Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700 (New Haven and London, 1999), p. 269. 59 On Lebrun’s paintings see Charles Le Brun 1619–1690, Peintre et Dessinateur, exh. cat. (Versailles, 1963), pp. 70–73; and Duro, Academy, pp. 204–206. On Largillière’s portrait see Myra N. Rosenfeld (ed.), Largillierre and the EighteenthCentury Portrait, exh. cat. (Montreal, 1982), pp. 183–186. 60 6 March 1683; 11 September 1683; 30 March 1686 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 242, 253–255, 322). 61 Article II, Statuts et Règlements (1654); Articles IX and X, Statuts et Règlements (1663). 62 On engravers in the Académie see McAllister Johnson, Morceaux, pp. 1–33. 63 Article XVII, Statuts et Règlements (1663). On the role of secrétaire see Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, p. 82. 64 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, pp. 181–185. 65 It is described as a rite performed ‘as per the custom at the beginning of the year’ (13 January 1685, PV, vol. 2, p. 295) or ‘in the usual manner’ (4 January 1687, PV, vol. 2, p. 343).

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66 30 October 1694 (PV, vol. 3, p. 150). 67 Article XI, Statuts et Règlements (1663). 68 Bosse was appointed on 9 May 1648 (PV, vol. 1, p. 17); see also Sheila McTighe, ‘Abraham Bosse and the Language of Artisans: Genre and Perspective in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1648–1670’, Oxford Art Journal, 21/1 (1998), pp. 3–26. Quadroulx was appointed in December 1651 (PV, vol. 1, p. 59); see also Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 56. On teaching anatomy to artists see Mathias Duval and Édouard Cuyer, Histoire de l’anatomie plastique: les maîtres, les livres et les écorchés (Paris, 1898). 69 Quadroulx attended assemblées but had no voting rights, while Étienne Migon, professeur de perspective after Bosse, was given restricted voting rights (PV, vol. 1, pp. 59, 203). 70 Leclerc became adjunct to the professeur de géometrie et perspective in 1717, taking on the full professorship in 1721 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 244, 313). He became ancien professeur in 1735 (PV, vol. 5, p. 156). 71 Sue was adjoint (1746–1772) and later full professeur d’anatomie (1772–1792) (PV, vol. 6, p. 39; vol. 8, p. 99). 72 31 October 1789 (PV, vol. 10, p. 32). 73 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, pp. 38–39. 74 The prohibition of life classes was prompted by the rival school set up by Abraham Bosse and shut down in 1662. The prohibition was ratified in the Statuts et Règlements (1663). Mémoires pour servir, vol. 2, pp. 81–86, 111–112. 75 Hargrove argues that this revival followed a period of pedagogic neglect during the first half of the century. June Hargrove, ‘Introduction’, The French Academy: Classicism and its Antagonists (Newark, 1990), p. 16. On the new École see Louis Courajod, L’École Royale des Élèves Protégés (Paris, 1874). 76 9 December 1662 (PV, vol. 1, p. 204); 24 March 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 274); 6 October 1753 (PV, vol. 6, p. 366); 28 January 1764 (PV, vol. 7, p. 241); 28 April 1764 (PV, vol. 7, p. 249); 30 March 1776 (PV, vol. 8, p. 214). 77 On the relationship between Académie and guild during the eighteenth century see: Scott, ‘Hierarchy, Liberty and Order’, pp. 59–70; Charlotte Guichard, ‘Arts libéraux et arts libres à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: peintres et sculpteurs entre corporation et Académie royale’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 49/3 (2002), pp. 54–68; and Valerius, ‘Die Académie de Saint-Luc als Rivalin der Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 73 (2010), pp. 115–126. 78 André Félibien, ‘Préface’, Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris, 1669), n.p. 79 Charles Lebrun, ‘Sentiments sur le discours du mérite de la couleur’ (1672), in Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 450. 80 Gabriel Blanchard, ‘Sur la mérite de la couleur’ (1671), in Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 433–440. 81 Article XX, Statuts et Règlements (1654). 82 25 November 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 290).

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83 30 June 1696 (PV, vol. 3, p. 190). Plaques had already been suggested in 1655 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 105–106) but presumably the decision was not implemented. 84 31 March 1674 (PV, vol. 2, p. 27). The three portraits were: Etienne Baudet, Perrault (after Charles Lebrun), 1675; Gérard Edelinck, Louis XIV (after Charles Lebrun), 1677; and Louis Simonneau, Martin de Charmois (after Sébastien Bourdon), 1706. On the engravers’ morceaux de réception see Maxime Préaud (ed.), Les morceaux de réception des graveurs à l’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (1655–1789), exh. cat. (Paris, 1982), and McAllister Johnson, Morceaux. 85 Jean-Aimar Piganiol de la Force, Description historique de la ville de Paris et ses environs, nouvelle edn, vol. 1 (Paris, 1765), pp. 208–263; Mémoires pour servir, 2 vols; Nicolas Guérin, Relation de ce qui s’est passé en l‘établissement de l’Académie, in Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences, vol. 3, pp. 183–258. I am grateful to Christian Michel for clarification on the history of these histories. 86 25 October 1704 (PV, vol. 3, p. 406). 87 Duchange and Trouvain were admitted on 30 July 1707 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 47–48). 88 4 March, 29 July, 5 August 1724 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 373, 379, 380). The project seems to have been initiated earlier in 1718 when Duchange was first requested to print the portraits (with the assistance of Benoît Audran) but it came to fruition in 1724 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 268, 272). 89 28 July 1725 (PV, vol. 4, p. 398) and 27 November 1728 (PV, vol. 5, p. 50). 90 Saint-Gelais’ discours was presumably based on Guérin’s version. 5 March 1729 (PV, vol. 5, pp. 56–57). 91 5 January 1737 (PV, vol. 5, p. 192). 92 2 March 1739 (PV, vol. 5, p. 248). 93 Guillet’s first Life was ‘Jean Nocret’ in 1689 (PV, vol. 3, p. 4). On Saint-Gelais’ numerous Lives see Lichtenstein and Michel, Conférences, vol. 4. 94 For admission records see: Dussieux, ‘Liste chronologique’ and Vitet, Académie. 95 Errard was assigned to Agar (see above), but the portrait was not completed. Dandré-Bardon was assigned to François-Bruno Deshays in 1771, but the Académie cancelled the order after Dandré-Bardon donated his portrait painted by Roslin later that year (PV, vol. 8, pp. 67, 75). 96 Revel was given Agar’s subjects when Agar was excluded as a Protestant. 31 January 1682 (PV, vol. 2, p. 215). 97 4 April 1699 (PV, vol. 3, p. 256). 98 Jean Jouvenet was reçu on 27 March 1675 (PV, vol. 2, p. 44). 99 4 April 1699 (PV, vol. 3, pp. 256–257). 100 31 December 1732 (PV, vol. 5, p. 111). 101 7 January 1775 and 5 July 1777 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 175, 271). 102 Loir was reçu on 31 March 1663 (PV, vol. 1, p. 219); Buirette was reçu on 2 June 1663 (PV, vol. 1, p. 228). 103 26 May 1753 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 350–351). 104 28 December 1776 (PV, vol. 8, p. 253); 31 December 1717 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 257–258); 1 September and 31 December 1764 (PV, vol. 7, pp. 263, 284).

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105 On the Académie des Sciences see: David J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge, 1995). 106 Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902) (Los Angeles, 1999), p. 62. 107 On the tapestry series see Daniel Meyer, L’histoire du Roy (Paris, 1980). 108 Félibien, Conférences, n.p. 109 On the identities of some of the scientists see Thierry Bajou, Painting at Versailles – XVIIth Century (Paris, 1998), p. 112.

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2.1 Charles-Etienne Geuslain, Nicolas de Largillière, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1723, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

2 Rituals of Initiation: Becoming and Being in the Académie

On 30 May 1722, a student called Charles-Etienne Geuslain brought a selection of paintings to the assemblée, hoping to be judged worthy of becoming a member.1 After viewing his works, the academicians gathered and voted, those in favour placing a white fève (bean) into a container and those against a black fève. Receiving a majority of white, Geuslain was approved and ordered to paint for his reception the portraits of Nicolas de Largillière (Figure 2.1), recently elected recteur, and François Barrois (Figure 2.2), adjoint à recteur. Fourteen months later, Geuslain returned with his two completed portraits.2 Once again the officiers judged his works and once again he was deemed successful; his portraits were accessioned into the collection, and the directeur led Geuslain in his oath of membership. Normal business resumed quickly as attention turned to the other matters of the day: judging the student prizes (first place going to Boucher) and electing a substitute professeur for the following month as Rigaud announced he was too busy to perform his regular duties. When the meeting was over, all present signed their names in the register and for the first time Geuslain, the Académie’s newest recruit, signed too. This account of a relatively ordinary admission of a portraitist to the Académie returns the morceau-de-réception portraits to the ritual practices that created them. In Chapter 1, these works were encountered iconographically, their sitters read individually and collectively as an institutional image that defined the academician and the Académie. In this chapter, however, makers rather than sitters become the subjects in an exploration of the ritual values and social interactions embodied in these objects. Even from the brief description above, we see the crucial role the portraits played as objects that negotiated Geuslain’s entry as a full member of the community.3 But we also start to notice other objects and actions integral to this process, not to mention all the people involved, and the ritual roles performed. For Boullogne, the directeur who led Geuslain in the oath, or Rigaud, an officier who cast his fève, these profound events in one artist’s career were simply routine tasks slotted

2.2 Charles-Etienne Geuslain, François Barrois, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1723, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Daniel Arnaudet)

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in amid other items on a busy agenda. For two of the officiers – Barrois and Largillière – it was something more. Becoming the portraits’ subjects marked another profound moment, this time at the other end of their careers, signalling their achievements as long-standing members of the community. We need only recall Largillière’s own réception some 40 years earlier, with his portrait of Charles Lebrun (1686) (Figure 1.18), to get a sense of the cyclical experience afforded by these ceremonies: a 67-year-old Largillière now finding himself on the other side of the canvas, painted by an artist just starting his academic career. Geuslain’s réception was a normal part of community life – for some, a symbolic moment, for others, a duty to be performed, but for all, a lived experience that confirmed their sense of belonging within the Académie. Through all the stages of the ritual, the objects used and created, the actions carried out, and the roles performed, these practices reiterated, for the participants, exactly what their institution was, its structure, its purpose, and above all the relationships of its members: from the eminent directeur, Boullogne, to the most junior recruit, Geuslain; through the hierarchy of academicians who had all been through this ritual themselves, right down to the student Boucher, winner of the grand prix, who would present for his réception in 11 years time.4 Back in their ceremonial setting, the morceau-de-réception portraits were imbued with values beyond form and content, as ritual objects that marked the passage of individuals through community life, and as material traces of social interactions between makers and sitters. By reconstructing the admission process and the role of morceaux de réception within these practices, this chapter offers a deeper understanding of the culture of the Académie, exploring how people became members and what it meant to be a part of this community. In the shift of focus from sitter to maker, this chapter also offers an alternative perspective on academic relationships. Where Chapter 1 related a historical narrative through history painters and sculptors (the Académie’s key players and canonical names), this chapter describes the Académie through the experiences of its less eminent and often less familiar portraitists. Viewing the portraits as encounters between young portraitists and senior officiers, this chapter explores relations across institutional ranks and genre hierarchies to uncover the practical tensions arising from the Académie’s theoretical principles.

Art-historical ‘Field Notes’ Before commencing the admission process, a brief explanation is required of the firsthand sources used to reconstruct it. The artist’s passage through the grades and hierarchies of the Académie has been pieced together here from various rules regarding admission and from details of actual ceremonies recorded by the secrétaires in the Procès-Verbaux. Between 1648

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and 1793, the regulations controlling admission were outlined and revised on at least eight occasions. First in the four sets of Statuts et Règlements (1648, 1651, 1655, 1663); next in the Règlement sur la forme des présentations des Aspirans (1702), which sought to regulate the procedures for the early stages of the process; next in the Ordre de la présentation des Aspirans (1712), an attempt to summarise the entire process in one set of guidelines; then in the general Règlement (1751) ratifying all changes made to procedures under Lenormant de Tournehem’s protecteur-ship; and finally in the new Statuts et Règlements (1777) issued under the comte d’Angiviller.5 As dry as official regulations may at first appear, these rules offer a fascinating sense of the structure of the admission process, its complex stages, and all their conditions and requirements. When compared, the different sets of rules also reveal how procedures evolved over time, with elements added, omitted, refined, and modified. While the rules read like immovable edicts, in effect they functioned more as guidelines, usually produced post-facto to summarise what could be a flexible process. Rules were not set at one moment and then abruptly altered a few years later, rather, like most things at the Académie, they developed gradually and haphazardly when occasion demanded. Changes in practice determined changes in theory, as the introduction to the Ordre of 1712 made clear: these rules were a collection of decisions taken at different times, summarised in a single document, so they could be executed to the letter.6 Rules, however, do not tell us everything. This becomes quickly apparent when reading the records of agréments and réceptions documented in the Procès-Verbaux. Things did not always go neatly according to the set structure: allowances were constantly made, extra conditions were frequently added, and sometimes things were inexplicably left out. The admission process was, after all, a human process, dependent on the personalities and characteristics of those involved, such as whether the current directeur was a stickler for regulations (like Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre), or whether the candidate was an insider (the son of a cherished colleague) or an outsider (a foreigner or a woman). While rules provide the ideal scenario, accounts of individual admissions offer a fuller, if messier picture. They also give details of customs and conventions otherwise left out. The rules, for instance, give little indication of how morceau-de-réception subjects were allocated, except that the choice was made by the directeur or other officiers.7 From the Procès-Verbaux, we know that candidates were given subjects in particular genres, which in turn determined their academic category: sculptors and history painters were given historical subjects, genre painters painted genre scenes, landscapists painted landscapes, still life painters painted still lifes. Portraitists, as we know, not only painted portraits, but quite specifically two portraits of senior academicians. This was not a formal rule but the works themselves are evidence of the custom, and the Académie’s understanding of it as a requirement is confirmed in a casual line in the record of Allou’s

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agrément in 1710. Allou was ‘by exceptional decree’ requested to paint the portraits of three artists despite ‘the ruling being to paint only two’.8 Convention clearly begat condition, for such a ‘ruling’ had never been made. Minutes of agréments and réceptions thus permit a more comprehensive reconstruction of the admission process: we see how the ritual played out in real life, not just in theory, with extra details filling in gaps, and with actual people occupying hypothetical roles. The advantage of the Procès-Verbaux lies in its insider perspective: written by academicians at the time the events were taking place, these accounts offer a glimpse into the private affairs of the Académie. But they also have shortcomings. First, the entries record only what occurred in assemblées (in agrément and réception ceremonies) so offer few insights into what happened before, after, and in-between. Second, like the official minutes of any state institution, the Procès-Verbaux are sanitised summaries, glossing over numerous incidents to leave a clean version of events. Third, the very ‘insiderness’ of the minutes brings problems of its own, for as a text intended only for the eyes of those well-versed in the Académie’s culture and customs (its members and state protectors), there is a weight of assumed knowledge that frustrates the uninitiated. Many practices are left unelaborated because they were everyday occurrences taken for granted by their participants, now vexingly obscured under the generic description that events proceeded ‘as per usual’ or ‘in the customary manner’. Despite their limitations, the rules and minutes are rich sources for an inquiry seeking a description of academic life written by those who lived it. These documents show us how they understood the process, how they spoke about it, and how they experienced it. Using the Académie’s own language is in keeping with the intention of this study to create, in Kenneth Pike’s linguistic terminology, an emic account of the culture and behaviour of the Académie, one that comes from within and is told in terms meaningful to the insiders.9 Accordingly, where possible I employ the actual words used by academicians to describe objects, actions, and ceremonies. As for the gaps left by these documents, some can be filled by artists’ writings (journals, letters, etc.) describing personal admission experiences, but these are too few to provide a comprehensive picture. Beyond words, however, the portraits provide some of the most crucial insights, as objects constituting a material record of what happened in-between the ceremonies. Though not narrative accounts, they nevertheless relate something of the experiences and interactions that took place. Indeed the portraits provide perhaps the most ‘insider’ perspective imaginable: as products of these rituals, they are not only witnesses to, but objects imbued with the symbolism of initiation practices. The morceau-deréception portraits are thus approached here as the ultimate emic account, investigated, somewhat speculatively at times, as images that index the experience of their makers and tell us about the ritual processes from the perspectives of those most intimately involved.

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Getting into the Académie Admission was conceived by the Académie as a process ideally involving three stages: a progression from étudiant, to agréé, and finally to académicien. The two ceremonial events marking the movement between these stages were the agrément and the réception.10 This section maps out the experience of admission by examining each stage and ceremony in turn, considering what life was like for artists at different levels and how candidates advanced through the ranks.11 Table 2.1 Hierarchy of ranks at the Académie

The Étudiant and the Agrément Étudiants were at the very bottom of the Académie’s social structure, as evident in this diagram based on the description of ranks in the Statuts of 1777 (Table 2.1). Lowest of the low, étudiants were subordinate to anyone else they encountered and had little agency within the institution: they were not allowed to attend assemblées, where all administrative decisions were made; they had no advisory role or voting rights; and they were not allowed to exhibit works at the Salons. Although their bulk of numbers could be influential if they rebelled en masse, this rarely happened after the early decades, suggesting that the student body for the most part felt the authoritative weight of their

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superiors.12 Occasionally, étudiants did transgress hierarchical boundaries, but such behaviour was quickly and severely punished. In 1708, for instance, Nicolas Lancret and François Lemoyne were expelled for hitting a fellow student with batons and swords, an insolence made more disgraceful because it was committed in the presence of officiers.13 Fortunately for Lancret and Lemoyne, their exclusion was lifted the following year, but others were not so lucky.14 In 1770, Dandré-Bardon complained that an étudiant had committed the indecency of throwing balls of modelling clay in class, some of which had actually hit him.15 Outraged, the academicians threatened all the étudiants with a general suspension unless they named the culprit, and eventually one Nicolas Brard was ‘banished in perpetuity’ for his misdemeanour.16 When not hitting each other or throwing clay, and behaving instead as they were supposed to, the responsibilities of the étudiants were essentially to train and compete. Every evening except Sunday they could attend drawing classes in which the professeur posed the model and instructed them as they drew their académies. Twice a week the étudiants attended classes in anatomy, geometry, and perspective.17 Every three months they could compete for the médaille de quartier, one of which was awarded to each of the three ‘classes’ (divided according to ability) for the best académie.18 And each year those who showed sufficient proficiency could compete for the annual grand prix, either in history painting or in sculpture. A subject for the grand prix was nominated at the beginning of April and then in August the completed works were displayed in the apartments for judging so the prize could be awarded on the feast of Saint Louis.19 In all their interactions at the Académie, étudiants constantly had their inferior position reinforced. Apart from fellow étudiants (against whom they were frequently competing), the people around them were always above them: masters who taught and corrected, disciplinarians who threatened and punished, and judges who assessed their abilities and determined their professional success. To move beyond this level, étudiants had to graduate, which meant successfully completing the agrément. Before the ceremony, however, certain requirements had to be met. An étudiant could only begin preparing for the agrément after competing for the grand prix, a condition ratified in the Règlement (1702), presumably to assure that aspirants (candidates), as they were often called, had appropriate skills and experience.20 After reaching this stage, the aspirant had to prepare a selection of works to present at the agrément. These were usually works of one genre, although occasionally artists who had not yet decided would present a combination. Desportes, for instance, presented both portraits and animal paintings for his agrément, eventually choosing to be received in the latter genre.21 Unusually Desportes’ morceau de réception, ‘a huntsman surrounded by animals’ (Figure 3.9), also demonstrated his combination of skills by incorporating a self-portrait into a still life.22 For most aspirants, this was the moment in their academic careers when genre specialisation was decided. This choice was emphasised in the next

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requirement of the pre-agrément stage, namely the selection of an introducteur, who had to be an officier in the same genre to which the candidate was aspiring.23 The role of the introducteur (also known as presentateur) varied during the eighteenth century perhaps more than any other aspect of the admission process.24 In general, the introducteur acted as mentor and patron. They were tasked with making an initial assessment of the aspirant’s works and then arranging introductions in a kind of in-house networking, which, at the beginning of the century, usually involved taking the aspirant on visites to meet the directeur and officiers en exercice (officers currently in charge).25 By the middle of the century the protocol had changed. In a more formalised process, the introducteur now nominated the aspirant without publicly stating his/her name, whereupon four senior officiers were dispatched as commissaires to assess the aspirant’s works.26 Only if the candidate were approved would the name be recorded. For example, on 31 October 1750, Tocqué, acting as introducteur, proposed an anonymous portraiture candidate (Jean Valade) and Louis Silvestre, Carle Van Loo, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and Lambert-Sigisbert Adam were nominated as commissaires.27 Following their favourable report at the next assemblée, it was decided that the aspirant (still anonymous) could present for his agrément at the end of the month.28 Only at the agrément itself was Valade first named in the minutes, a measure presumably taken to avoid humiliation for candidates not approved to proceed.29 Networking at this pre-agrément stage was crucial. The choice of introducteur was far from incidental as recommendation by an influential officier could be a great advantage. Names of introducteurs were seldom recorded before the 1770s so it is difficult to unravel how patronage networks formed, but certainly by this stage they usually extended beyond the studio. Some aspirants were presented by their masters, like Jean-Joseph Taillasson presented by his teacher Joseph-Marie Vien, but most sought alternative connections, like François-André Vincent, another student of Vien who was instead presented by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée.30 Such choices could tactically maximise the vote (ensuring recommendations by both master and introducteur) and also minimise the likelihood of opposition due to factions among the officiers. Powerful supporters in the upper echelons of the Académie could prove decisive, as in the case of Vien’s own agrément. A rare insight into this process from the candidate’s perspective is to be found in Vien’s mémoires, where he recorded the delicate art of networking required and the painful and demoralising experiences suffered when it went wrong. Vien began his campaign by making informal visits to every painter in the Académie and several amateurs (such as the comte de Caylus), ostensibly to seek their opinion of his works, but really to get them on side in what could be a factionalised political process.31 Despite Vien’s efforts he failed at the first hurdle. The commissaires – Jean-Marc Nattier, Jean Restout, Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont, and Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre – dashed his hopes with a damning report. The problem, it turns out, was not Vien’s artistic abilities but, as Caylus explained to him, professional jealousies that certain colleagues

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harboured against Vien’s introducteur, Charles-Joseph Natoire, who had just been elected directeur of the Academy in Rome.32 Nattier is cast as the real culprit in Vien’s narrative – Pierre had disagreed with the report, Collin de Vermont was indecisive and easily-led, and Restout was convinced second time around – but Nattier went to lengths to keep an increasingly angry and disheartened Vien from applying. In fact it was only the patronage of Caylus, who solicited Boucher and Dumont le Romain to make independent and extremely supportive counter-assessments that prevented Vien giving up altogether to join the guild. In the end, Vien was agréé unanimously and the official records bear no trace of these back-room machinations.33 Artistic skill was thus important, but as with most things at the Académie, the networking was vital. When all went well in these preliminary stages, a date would then be selected and the candidate’s agrément added to the billet d’assemblée (agenda). As the agrément approached, aspirants would often conduct more networking visites to officiers, then on the day itself, a selection of their best works were displayed for the academicians to assess.34 The agrément could take place at any time during an assemblée, but by convention, if a réception was scheduled for the same day, that ceremony was held first (the étudiant thus ceding precedence to the more highly ranked agréé).35 Once it commenced, the actual agrément was quite straightforward. The assembled officiers, having already assessed the aspirant’s works, cast votes by anonymous ballot using coloured fèves as tokens.36 In order for the aspirant to succeed, there had to be at least a two-third majority of white fèves from a quorum of 14 officiers.37 The tally for the ballot was occasionally recorded in the minutes, as in the case of Etienne Aubry whose resounding score of 30:1 was noted in the margin.38 Voix délibérative (voting rights) belonged only to the compagnie of officiers, namely: directeur, chancelier, recteurs, professeurs, all anciens and adjoints, the secrétaire, trésorier, and conseillers (Table 2.1). In the Statuts of 1663, voix délibératives were also given to certain ‘nobles and amateurs’ chosen by the Académie for such an honour.39 By the Statuts of 1777, this rather vague description had been refined to extend voting rights to the eight amateurs, but not the eight associés-libres.40 Voting rights were also denied to académiciens, who formed the bulk of the community’s membership. Académiciens and associés libres were present during the ceremonies but accorded only voix consultative (advisory rights) and even this privilege had to be exercised though the proxy of an officer who would speak on their behalf.41 Decisionmaking authority thus rested almost entirely with the history painters and sculptors to whom the majority of officier positions were restricted. Artists of secondary genres and media could attain voting rights as conseillers, secrétaire, or trésorier, but their representation was limited to these ten votes. Women, meanwhile, went completely unrepresented as no female artist was ever granted voix délibérative. While the pre-agrément stage was constantly being modified, the agrément ceremony remained remarkably consistent. The wording of agrément

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ceremonies in the Procès-Verbaux had already started to follow a formulaic pattern by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and if consistency in language suggests consistency in the ritual itself, then the agrément seems to have become a fairly uniform experience. Perronneau’s agrément in 1746 was, for example, almost identical to Ranc’s agrément nearly 50 years earlier, each entry recording the same details of name, birthplace, and genre, and recording the events of the agrément in the same order.42 The only notable difference is that Ranc, according to the conventions in the early part of the century, was given the subjects for his reception pieces during the ceremony, while Perronneau, according to the later custom (ratified in the Règlement [1751]), was requested to make a subsequent appointment with the directeur in order to receive his subjects. In both cases, however, this marked the final point in the agrément ceremony, after which the aspirant was accorded the new title of agréé, thus climbing one step up the Académie’s hierarchical ladder. The Agréé and the Réception Life as an agréé was very different from life as an étudiant. As soon as an artist had successfully passed the agrément, his or her status within the Académie shifted considerably. In fact, agréés were accorded nearly the same rights as académiciens: Agrées will enjoy […] all privileges accorded to the rank of académicien, with the exception of the right to attend assemblées and other internal advantages determined at the pleasure of the Académie.43

Thus while still excluded from certain core community practices – attendance of assemblées and ‘internal advantages’ (like the right to vote on the grand prix) – agréés were close to becoming fully initiated members. Unlike étudiants, they no longer had to attend classes or compete for prix, but could instead pursue careers as academic artists in all but name. For most agréés, the greatest advantage was the right to exhibit works in the Salons, held regularly from 1737. The opportunities afforded by these public exhibitions and the freedom to accept commissions from clients meant that agréés could start creating a name for themselves in a broader sphere, and many pursued extremely successful careers. Rigaud, for instance, operated a lucrative portrait studio throughout the 1690s, attracting elite clients like the king’s brother and the duchesse de Montpensier, both painted long before his réception in 1700.44 Some decades later, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour proved an even more successful agréé, securing a popular following in the Salons and a profile so respected that he had painted portraits of the king and dauphin a year before his réception.45 With possibilities for making a living and even achieving professional success, some artists remained agréés for many years. Rigaud was an agréé for 16 years, La Tour for nine, and the portraitist Alexis Loir for 33.46 This, however, was not desirable behaviour. The Académie conceived of the agréé

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stage as a short transitional phase held for a restricted period of time – namely as long as it took to complete the morceaux de réception. In the agréments, a limit was often set on how long agréés had to complete their works. JacquesFrançois Delyen, for instance, was requested to produce his within six months, but many found it difficult to comply with these deadlines, Delyen included, who ended up taking 15 months.47 Aware of the diversions that could side-track an agréé from the primary objective, the Académie sought to prevent this by setting a maximum limit (dependent on medium) and threatened severe consequences for those who overran: As this rank once obtained can lead certain artists to a slackening that is as detrimental to themselves as to the arts, all agréé painters will be required, within three years of their admission, to present for their receptions as académiciens, under the pain of losing their rank of agréé and all its privileges, without the possibility of regaining it except on submission of new works and a new examination.48

Engravers and sculptors were given an additional extension of ‘some years’ due to lengthier execution times, but they were warned of the same fate: being stripped of their agrément and returned to the level of étudiant. While the compagnie consistently kept pressure on agréés to complete within a timely period, in practice, this punishment was only rarely carried out. When Largillière had still not submitted his portrait of Lebrun a year after his agrément (1683), the compagnie dispatched Blanchard and Etienne Le Hongre to investigate and speed his progress. This was obviously not intimidating enough, for seven months later Largillière had still not submitted, at which point the compagnie called Largillière to an assemblée to ‘explain his heedlessness’.49 Despite these measures, Largillière did not present for his réception until three years after his agrément, and he suffered no serious repercussions because of it. Not everyone, however, was so lucky, or so well supported by the administration. Some, like Alexis Grimou, who could not (or chose not to) explain their ‘negligence’, had their agréments annulled and lost all rights within the Académie.50 Drastic measures were, however, a rare occurrence, being not in the best interests of either agréé or institution. In theory, the only thing agréés were supposed to do was produce their morceaux de réception. According to the Ordre (1712), agréés were to enter a sort of confinement during this time.51 Separated from their peers and the rest of the community, they were to complete their work ‘in a space within the Académie’, having contact with only a small number of designated officiers: within this space at the Académie, they can only be seen by the two officiers nominated by the Académie for this purpose, and by the officiers currently in charge, none of whom will provide any advice on [the candidate’s] works.52

Enforced seclusion during the making of the objects was a practical measure to avoid accusations of cheating. The Règlement (1751) makes this quite clear, stipulating that agréés had to execute their paintings in the Académie

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and nowhere else, warning that anyone found to have been assisted with their morceau de réception would be immediately stripped of the rank of agréé. Margareta Haverman, for example, had been admitted in 1722 on condition that she produce a still life as reception piece, but when she did not do so doubt was cast over the authorship of the work presented at her agrément (with allegations that it was in fact painted by her teacher Jan van Huysum) and she was expelled from the Académie the following year.53 Confinement gave the whole exercise an aura of examination conditions. Through isolation and surveillance, the intention was to emphasise the agréé’s probationary status and demarcate the authority of those to whom the agréé was still subordinate. For portraiture agréés – who had to paint two portraits of senior academicians – there were two more people permitted access to this closely monitored environment. Morceau-de-réception portraits were supposed to be ‘painted from life’, which meant a series of sittings with the chosen portraitsubjects.54 These sitters performed a very different role in the agréé’s experience from that of the supervisory academicians. Indeed, portrait-subjects were never selected as the officiers who checked-up or reported on the progress of the agréé, no matter how practical that might have been. As an additional human presence in what was otherwise a very controlled process, sitters had a significant impact on the agréé’s experience. For portraiture-agréés, making their morceaux de réception was not just an encounter with an inert canvas, but a live encounter with another person. As with any social interaction, the portrait-painting process thus had an emotional dimension determined by their relationship – whether maker and sitter knew each other beforehand, whether they liked each other, respected each other, or otherwise. There is little trace of these emotional factors in the Académie’s written records, where the only people-problems registered are to do with the absence of portrait-subjects rather than their presence. Portraiture-agréés’ ability to complete their morceaux de réception depended as much on their sitters’ schedules as their own, and this was often blamed as cause for delay. Rigaud, for example, who had been allocated portraits of Martin Desjardins (adjoint à recteur) and Henri de Bessé (conseiller-honoraire), complained about the difficulties of getting the latter to sit.55 As a result, it was agreed that Rigaud would only have to paint Desjardins. At his réception, Rigaud presented two portraits of the sculptor and the compagnie selected one to serve as his reception piece (Figure 2.3).56 Likewise, Duplessis, who was assigned Allegrain and Vien, had great difficulties with Vien. In 1774, Duplessis wrote to the compagnie explaining various obstacles that ‘through no fault of his own’ had prevented him from promptly executing his task, and asking if he might be received with his already completed portrait of Allegrain (Figure 1.15).57 The secrétaire’s record of Duplessis’ deferential request seems pointedly to lay the blame with Vien. The compagnie approved Duplessis’ request, accepting his portrait of Allegrain on condition that he complete that of Vien (Figure 1.17) when possible (a promise that took 11 years to fulfil).58

2.3 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Martin Desjardins, 141 × 106 cm, oil on canvas, 1700, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / René-Gabriel Ojéda)

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Réception ceremonies proceeded in a similar fashion to agréments. First, the morceaux de réception were displayed for judging. Then during the assemblée those with voix délibératives cast their vote by fève-ballot, from which again a two-third majority was required. If successful, the candidate was asked to pay the présent pécuniaire (joining fee), the amount of which was decided in each case by the entire assemblée, not just officiers.59 The présent pécuniaire could also be waived entirely, particularly when the candidate was related to a current or former member (e.g. Jean Le Gros, who was relieved of the fee as the son of a former professeur), or, in the case of Allou, because he had already painted a third portrait for the collection.60 Payment of the présent pécuniaire originated, as we saw in Chapter 1, as a necessary measure in the seventeenth century when the solvency of the institution was dependent on its members. Though the Académie had since attained economic security, the custom of paying a joining fee continued into the eighteenth century, until 1745 when it was eventually abolished to distinguish academic culture from guild-like practices. On 27 February, the assemblée began with Bouchardon’s réception, his présent pécuniaire set at 100 livres, but at the end of the meeting the compagnie voted to abandon the condition of payment, claiming it ‘contrary to the dignity and glory of the compagnie’.61 The line in the register stipulating Bouchardon’s fee was crossed out and the words ‘Droit pécunier supprimé’ (‘joining fee abolished’) noted in the margin. Once the morceaux de réception had been judged and the présent pécuniaire decided, one more action was required for the candidate’s official admission. The final act was the swearing of the serment (oath), pledging fidelity to king and company, and promising to uphold the rules and regulations of the institution. The oath was always taken ‘entre les mains’ (‘in the hands’) of the current directeur, or whoever was presiding, who addressed the candidate with the following words: Directeur: Désiré vous estre de l’Académie? La Compagnie vous en recognois digne; mais, advent de vous y recevoire, elle requiert de vous le serment convenable. Levé la main. Ne prometé vous pas de servir fidèlement le Roy dans la callité que vous embrassé, de meintenir et advancer, autant qu’il vous sera possible, l’honneur de l’Académie, de garder et observer religieusement ces Status et Règlement[s] et de vous assujétir à tous ces ordres? Candidate: Ouy.62

With the swearing of the serment, the candidate was officially reçu (received) and from that point accorded the titre (rank) of académicien. If, however, the candidate failed the réception, the Règlement (1751) stated that instead of resuming the status of agréé, the entire process would have to be re-endured from the beginning, with another agrément, new morceaux de réception, and a restaged réception.63 This was also the case for artists expelled from the Académie who later sought re-admission. Martin Lambert, for example, was admitted in

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1663 then excluded for incivility in 1665 and had his reception piece returned. Ten years later he was agréé and reçu again with his new morceau-de-réception portrait of the Beaubrun cousins (Figure 1.8).64 The Académicien Full membership brought new rights and advantages. Académiciens could now attend assemblées and ‘enjoy the privileges, honours and prerogatives accorded to this rank’ (meaning voix consultative and the right to vote in the annual grand prix contest).65 Change in status was marked by an exchange of objects between artist and Académie. On the candidate’s part, the offering came in the form of the morceaux de réception, which were accessioned into the Académie’s collection to remain there for perpetuity, prohibited from being ‘removed or substituted for another work’ (although many experienced a short public sojourn before or after the réception when exhibited in the Salon).66 On the Académie’s part, these artworks were exchanged for lettres de provisions or lettres de réception, the official document given to the artist testifying to his or her admission.67 Rigaud’s surviving lettres de réception offer some sense of the role this legal document played.68 The lettres attest not only to Rigaud’s new rank of académicien but also to his status as painter to the king – ‘Peintre […] de Sa Majesté’ – thus ratifying his position both within the institution and beyond. These pages laid out the terms of Rigaud’s admission in a contractual form, offering him certain ‘privileges, honours, pensions, and rights’ in exchange for his strict observance of the Statuts and his agreement to submit to all future decisions taken. In addition, the lettres also recorded the artist’s genre, though in Rigaud’s case this was not straightforward. Rigaud’s lettres are those of a History Painter, but his morceau de réception was a portrait (Figure 2.3) so he was admitted ‘in the genres of both History and Portraiture’. The Académie’s rules sought to regiment genre categorisation, but in practice the hierarchies could be more fluid. The in-betweenness of Rigaud’s position was negotiated linguistically by the designation of his morceau de réception as a ‘historicised portrait’. Finally, the lettres also recorded the names of those who had participated in Rigaud’s réception, from ‘feu Monsieur Desjardins’, the deceased subject of his portrait, and the directeur Charles de La Fosse who led Rigaud in his oath, to Antoine Coypel, Jean Jouvenet, François Girardon, and Nicolas Guérin, who ratified the document in their official capacities as officiers en exercise, chancelier, and secrétaire. These signatories thus became official witnesses to Rigaud’s transformation into an académicien. The first act undertaken by any académicien took place in the same assemblée as their réception. At the end of the meeting, following any remaining business on the agenda, the newly received académicien was invited to sign the register. This act of signing was reserved for and performed by all academicians – recording their presence at the assemblée – so the new recruit’s signature at the bottom of the page became another tangible manifestation (like the accessioned

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portraits and the lettres de réception) of the change in status. Yet what is also evident from these pages is the new position that the artist now occupied within the community. For the tiered social structure of the Académie did not stop at the grade of academician – this was just the beginning of another whole series of ranks and hierarchies into which members were organised. Académiciens were a grade below all officiers, who were themselves ranked into various levels of seniority from conseiller up to directeur. Even within each of these grades, artists were not considered equal, but were ranked according to their ancienneté – the length of time since their réception. Upon admission, the newest académicien took up their place at the bottom of this order, and signed their name symbolically at the end of the list. With this final act of signing, the assemblée was brought to a close and with it the final stages of the entire admission process.

An Academic Rite of Passage From this reconstruction of the Académie’s admission practices, two things are immediately evident. First, every stage of the process reiterated the community’s hierarchies and the different relationships between its members. Second, the morceaux de réception played a key role in the dramatic structure of the process. If the admission procedures are considered as an instance of what Arnold van Gennep termed a ‘rite of passage’ – rituals of initiation accompanying any change in state or social position – then we can understand this emphasis on hierarchy and institutional relationships as a crucial part of the young initiand’s introduction into the community.69 Through the shifts in personal privileges and the new relationships forged, the initiation ritual marked the candidate’s professional progress, both for himself and for those around him.70 This interpretation also sheds light on the pivotal role played by morceaux de réception, as objects that both negotiated and marked the profound transformations in identity that took place, particularly during the probationary stage after the agrément. In anthropological studies of community initiations, the rituals that orchestrate these processes are conventionally understood as being marked by three phases of transition, all evident in the Académie’s admission process (Table 2.2). Victor Turner describes these rituals as involving: a preliminary process of separation from an earlier condition (here, the agrément that separated the artist from the cohort of étudiants); followed by a liminal stage in which the state of the individual is often ambiguous (here, the transitional phase experienced by the agréé); and a concluding phase of incorporation that introduces the individual into a new system of conditions (here, the réception of the artist into the community as an académicien).71 At each stage hierarchy was emphasised in the roles people played, roles that ritualistically demarcated boundaries of authority. Power dynamics of dominance and submission were built into every ritual and practice: in

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Table 2.2 Académie’s admission process shown as a ritual of initiation

the master/student relationship between professeurs and étudiants; in the supervisor/supervised relationship between officiers and the agréés they monitored; in the judging/judged relationship between voting officiers and candidates in agrément and réception ceremonies; in the order of precedence giving agréé-candidates priority over étudiant-candidates in the assemblée agenda; and even, when it was all over, in the signing of names in rank order. These hierarchical practices reinforced social cohesion, establishing personal relationships (that between an étudiant and his or her mentoring introducteur; or between a portraiture-agréé and the senior academician assigned as portraitsubject), and collective bonds (in the officiers’ group activity of voting; or the aspirant’s action of taking the oath before the entire assemblée; or the collective act of signing the register). Each phase of this rite of passage drew the artist gradually deeper ‘inside’ the community. The norms of this process reveal the significance of the Académie’s social order, but it is the exceptions to the rules that offer the clearest sense of how this rite of passage worked. For artists who were not conventional ‘insiders’, how could these rituals confer insider status, or why, in some cases, were they unable to do so? The most obvious groups of exceptions were foreigners, non-Catholics, and women, who were often (or always in the case of women) not trained in the Académie as étudiants and had thus not followed the normal trajectory. These artists were almost never agréé or reçu without significantly breaking from the established rules and practices. Indeed, the Ordre (1712) inserts a special condition just for foreigners, stating that along with the usual requirements, foreign candidates would also have to provide a certificate attesting to ‘moral standing’.72 This ratified a condition first set in the 1660s, instigated by the admission of the Flemish artist Jacob Van Loo. When Van Loo presented his portrait of Corneille (Figure 1.2), his réception was initially refused, not due to any claims of inferior ability but because of rumours regarding his moral reputation (Van Loo allegedly fled Amsterdam after killing a wine merchant during a tavern quarrel).73 He produced certification of his moral standing the following year, and the compagnie decided that this condition would be observed for all foreigners in the future.74 The singular treatment of foreigners was not outright xenophobia but was prompted by the unknown backgrounds of candidates who fell outside

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the professional networks and personal recommendations of the French art world. Prejudice against foreigners did exist, but had actually less to do with nationality than with religion or, more specifically, Protestantism. In the lead up to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the king forced the compagnie to expel any members of ‘the so-called Reformed religion’ and henceforth to admit only Catholics.75 Some of those expelled, like Louis Elle, later renounced their Protestant faith and were re-admitted, but others, like the secrétaire Henri Testelin, never returned.76 In the eighteenth century, the religious schism became less fraught, but the Académie’s condition that artists profess Catholicism was maintained.77 In 1740, the Swedish artist Lundberg thus had to circumnavigate the admission process by approaching Philibert Orry (directeur général des bâtiments, 1736–1745) directly. Orry wrote to Largillière (directeur) requesting an exception for Lundberg, who was then agréé and reçu in a single ceremony, admitted ‘as a foreigner despite being of the so-called Reformed religion’.78 In 1753, Roslin, a Swedish Lutheran, also had to take additional measures, soliciting the minister of foreign affairs, the marquis de Saint-Contest, to intercede with the marquis de Marigny (directeur général des bâtiments, 1751– 1773) to plead for another exception.79 Roslin’s admission was orchestrated through a combination of international diplomacy and institutional politicking. His key patron, the comte de Sparre, was an attaché of the Swedish ambassador and nephew of the comte de Tessin, an influential amateur. Upon Roslin’s arrival in Paris in 1752, Sparre acted in the manner of a proxy introducteur, taking Roslin on vistes to several academicians (including Boucher, Tocqué, Vien, Pigalle, Louis de Silvestre, La Tour, Caylus). These contacts were instrumental in supporting Roslin’s admission – La Tour acted as Roslin’s official introducteur, Caylus negotiated behind the scenes, and among the works Roslin presented at his agrément was a portrait of Boucher’s wife (a diplomatic attempt at demonstrating insiderness).80 Notwithstanding some opposition, the compagnie admitted Roslin, but unlike Lundberg, Roslin was agréé and reçu (‘despite his Lutheran religion’) more conventionally in two separate ceremonies.81 Roslin it seems had successfully found a way into Parisian artistic networks and was treated more like a local. We will look more closely at Roslin’s experience as an agréé in the next section because he offers an intriguing case of someone who needed the admission process, both to become an insider and in order for others to see him as one. Admission of women was approached by the Académie with even more trepidation than that of foreigners and heretics. During the seventeenth century an almost progressive total of six women were admitted (Table 2.3), but in 1706, with at least four still in the ranks, the compagnie passed a regulation declaring it would no longer receive any académiciennes (female members).82 Total restriction was lifted 14 years later in 1720 for the celebrated pastellist Rosalba Carriera, but women were still largely absent from the Académie. Carriera did not remain in Paris so her membership was only nominal and, apart from the short-lived academic career of Margareta Haverman, no

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Table 2.3 Women artists admitted to the Académie (1648–1793)

Artist’s name

Year admitted

Relations in Académie

Catherine Duchemin (1630–1698)

1663

Wife of François Girardon

Geneviève de Boullogne (1645–1708)

1669

Daughter of Louis I de Boullogne

Madeleine de Boullogne (1646–1710)

1669

Daughter of Louis I de Boullogne

Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron (1648–1711)

1673

Cousin of Charles-François Chéron

Anne-Renée Strésor (1651–1713)

1676

Catherine Perrot (dates unknown)

1682

Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757)

1720

Margareta Haverman (died c.1795)

1722

Marie-Thérèse Reboul (1738–1805)

1757

Anne-Dorothée Therbusch (1732–1782)

1767

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818)

1770

Marie-Suzanne Giroust (1735–1772)

1770

Wife of Alexandre Roslin

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803)

1783

Later became wife of François-André Vincent (married 1800)

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842)

1783

Wife of Joseph-Marie Vien

other woman was admitted until Marie-Thérèse Reboul in 1757.83 In the later decades of the eighteenth century, a few women gradually infiltrated the ranks but their number was strictly controlled. In 1770, after two in quick succession (Anne Vallayer-Coster followed by Marie-Suzanne Giroust), the compagnie hastily made an official ruling that female members should never exceed four at any time, for ‘whatever talent they may possess’, women were nonetheless ‘somewhat foreign’ to the constitution of the Académie.84 Special conditions for women were never regulated because, as the insignificant total of 14 suggests, there was not much need to do so. Women’s

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admissions did, however, follow the precedent set with the first admission in 1663 of Catherine Duchemin.85 Female candidates experienced a kind of fast-tracking, an acceleration of the admission process that entirely omitted the stage of agréé. Condensing agrément and réception into one ceremony, women went from non-member to full member in a single assemblée. On these occasions, the female candidate (or sometimes a male academician representing her) would present a selection of works and the compagnie would vote for or against réception based on the quality of this portfolio. A few (including Carriera and Reboul) then sent morceaux de réception of their own choosing, but for the majority of académiciennes, the morceau de réception was selected from among the works presented, as in the case of Chéron’s SelfPortrait (Plate 1).86 While these alternative practices were never standardised as rules they certainly became customs. So much so in fact that some women included appropriate ‘morceau-de-réception-type’ works in their original presentations (e.g. Giroust included a portrait of Pigalle [1770] [Plate 2] and Labille-Guiard a portrait of Pajou [Figure 1.13]), seemingly in an attempt to self-impose something of the agréé’s experience.87 On the surface, it may appear that outsiders had an easier time getting into the Académie. Foreigners, non-Catholics, and women received special treatment, having conditions lifted, exceptions made, and usually undergoing a quicker and less demanding process by skipping the examination experience of the agréé. Foreigners had that additional condition of having ‘good morals’, but this would eventually be enforced for all candidates in the Statuts of 1777.88 Initiation rituals should not, however, be understood a series of hurdles, but rather a series of passages leading individuals deeper into the community. The exceptional treatment of foreigners and women therefore worked to deny genuine insider status. By collapsing agrément and réception into a single ceremony and withholding the experience of being an agréé, the Académie ensured that most foreigners and women were left quasi-outsiders. Forced into a position from which they could never become authentic academicians, they remained, to use Homi Bhabha’s phrase, ‘almost the same, but not quite’.89 Occasionally this exceptional treatment of skipping the agréé stage was bestowed not as a denial, but as a reward, offered to some of the most ‘insider’ academicians imaginable, namely the sons of esteemed officiers (like JeanFrançois de Troy and Charles-Antoine Coypel). Though intended in these instances as a mark of honour conferring special status, it sometimes had the opposite effect, as we shall see in Chapter 4 in the case of Coypel, because it left the artist feeling less legitimate. Considered in anthropological terms, the experience of being an agréé involved the most crucial events of the whole rite of passage. Characterised by Turner as an extended moment of definition, the liminal stage was when the individual progressively became a member of the group.90 Obviously there was no typical experience for an agréé – some artists skipped it entirely, others took several years to complete it; some treated it as a formality, and others took it almost too seriously (like La Tour, who years later took back his portraits of Restout and Dumont le Romain in an attempt

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to improve the works with an experimental technique that instead left them ruined).91 But there was an ideal system in place and its symbolic implications are thus worthy of examination, not least because they reveal the value with which morceaux de réception were imbued. From the moment the agrément ended and this liminal stage began, the morceau de réception became the primary focus of the entire experience. The life of the agréé was ostensibly devoted to the task of producing these works; they took centre stage in the réception ceremony in the candidate’s final trial; and were then given to the institution in exchange for the right to membership. Morceaux de réception both marked the stages of this ritual and negotiated the transformation of the individual through these stages: from inferior étudiant to partially accredited agréé (when the subjects for the works were allocated); and from agréé to fully legitimised académicien (when the works were submitted). For the Académie’s portraitists, this liminal stage was distinct and indeed intensified by the specificity of their task, that is, the requirement to paint two hierarchical superiors. As a task designed to transform an agréé into an académicien, one of its most crucial aspects was the shift in social boundaries that this entailed. This was the first time in the young artist’s experience that a senior academician occupied any role other than unequivocally superior (master, teacher, supervisor, disciplinarian, etc.). The relationship between portraitist and sitter was very different from that between professeur and étudiant. In any act of portraiture, whatever the sitter’s contribution to determining aspects of his or her portrayal, the portraitist bears ultimate agency. When the senior academician became the agréé’s portrait-subject, there was an inversion of previous hierarchical relations. As sitter and portraitist, officier and agréé were no longer master and student, but existed within a much more ambiguous power dynamic. In the specific act of making a morceau-deréception portrait, the portraitist’s agency was if anything more intensified, both because of the controlled environment and the value ascribed to the object. One might imagine that the sitter’s institutional seniority would confer additional agency in determining his image, but in fact it was the opposite. The condition of confinement – requiring the agréé to produce the work alone without any input or advice – meant that even those members sitting for the portraits were to remain silent. Though it is unlikely that senior academicians had no say whatsoever in how they appeared, the degree to which they could control their representations was, in theory at least, strictly limited. Yet the morceau-de-réception portrait was in many ways as significant to the sitter as it was to the agréé. Making the portrait may have transformed the young initiand into a full member, but it also secured the senior academician a place in that painted history of the institution and a physical presence on its walls. This honour was most often accorded to professeurs of long-standing, usually a year or two before they were promoted to the rank of adjoint à recteur (Appendix 1). On most occasions the portraits were much more eagerly anticipated as effigies of officiers than as material offerings of agréés. This was certainly evident when professeurs Etienne Jeaurat and Hyacinthe Collin de

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Vermont were awarded the honour of becoming portrait subjects, allocated to Alexis Loir at his agrément in 1746.92 Unfortunately for Jeaurat and Collin de Vermont, Loir then went to work in England, delaying his réception for many years and leaving the portraits unpainted. After waiting seven years to attain the honour they had been accorded, and with no sign of Loir’s réception in the near future, Jeaurat and Collin de Vermont would wait no longer. In 1753, on the occasion of Roslin’s agrément (the first portraitist agréé in six years), the professeurs successfully petitioned the compagnie to re-allocate them as his subjects instead.93 So when Roslin submitted his two portraits, he was simultaneously completing his own ritual of initiation and fulfilling at long last the honour due to Jeaurat (Figure 2.4) and Collin de Vermont (Plate 7).94 The value placed on these objects by senior academicians thus created an inverted relationship of dependence on junior colleagues. As agréés and officiers relied on each other to facilitate these significant moments in their respective careers, there was, for the first time, an acknowledged reciprocity.

Portraits of Becoming and Being Vexingly (though perhaps not coincidentally) it is the crucial liminal stage of the agréé that is most obscured by accounts retrievable from written sources. There is very little, for example, that allows us to reconstruct the four months between Roslin’s agrément and his réception. The Statuts tell us what was required of him and the Procès-Verbaux record the results, but there is no official record of what actually took place during this most classified stage of the ritual. No text reveals Roslin’s experience or the nature of his interactions with Jeaurat and Collin de Vermont. In the portraits, however, we find sources that not only offer insight into what happened during the intervening period (as objects produced during it), but also that witness Roslin’s relationships with these officiers (as objects that index his interactions with the sitters). Interpreting interactions between maker and sitter through traces left behind in a portrait is a speculative act open to all manner of subjective response. All we find in the object are the results of an encounter, without any evidence of the intentions or, what Randall Collins calls, the emotional ‘entrainment’ that produced them.95 But Roslin’s different approaches to the bodies of Jeaurat and Collin de Vermont must be ascribed to something. If considered as a trace of the interactions between agréé and officier, the morceau-de-réception portraits become invaluable visual records of these encounters, registering all the social complexities each agent brought to the situation.96 Collin de Vermont (Plate 7) meets the beholder with a confident yet dour expression, an ambiguous countenance that reads simultaneously as confrontation and as invitation to engage, but only up to a certain point. Standing nearly the full length of the canvas, Collin de Vermont could look down at his interlocutor from a superior height, but instead he looks out directly, seeking engagement on his own level, and holding it with a compelling gaze.

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Finding himself in the foreground of this pictorial space in close proximity to his beholder, he turns away from his canvas as though to address his audience more openly, but at the same time draws his coat around him to create a protective barrier of folds. His right arm extends to rest nonchalantly on his canvas, but any sense of relaxation is betrayed by the tension in his firmly clenched jaw and his left hand clutching so tightly at the fabric that his veins create turgid blue ridges. Collin de Vermont’s interaction with his beholder appears in a state of constant give and take: self-assured but self-protective, tense but relaxed. Even his waistcoat, half open and half closed, elicits an initial invitation to informality and then closes it off before the beholder goes too far. If Collin de Vermont’s interaction with his beholder is envisaged as the sitter’s interaction with the maker, or at any rate, Roslin’s perception of that interaction, then this encounter evokes the agréé’s liminal experience of hierarchical barriers dissolving through gradual invitations into the intimacy of the inner circle. Following his agrément, Roslin had entered that stage of partial legitimacy, possessing nearly all the privileges of an académicien, but without any of the status. Teetering on the verge, Roslin was no longer unambiguously Collin de Vermont’s subordinate, but nor was he yet an equal. His portrait captures something of Roslin’s experience on this threshold, a trace of the changing relationship between agréé and officier. Collin de Vermont extends Roslin an invitation through his receptive gaze, but retracts it with his fabric partition; he looks at Roslin, rather than down on him; his body almost relaxes as though in the presence of a colleague, but then refuses to let go of that slightly tense formal distance. In the Académie’s theoretical social structure (Table 2.1), an agréé was lower than an académicien and categorically lower than a professeur like Collin de Vermont, but in practice there was often ambiguity in these relations. Collin de Vermont’s hesitance to declare outright superiority is a symptom of such power-play, manifest in Roslin’s confident self-declaration as the work’s creative agent. In addition to the confrontation of bodies (maker versus sitter) there is also a clash of canvases, as Collin de Vermont’s fictive canvas is brought directly into relation with the picture plane of the portrait. Over a brown ground, a female figure has been sketched ostensibly with the white chalk in Collin de Vermont’s hand. But while the sitter’s gesture tries to claim authorship, Roslin, with a metapictorial twist, reminds us that the creative act is his. For the lines on this fictive canvas are not traced with chalk but with paint. Paint that had nothing whatsoever to do with the hand of Collin de Vermont, whose brushes sit teasingly before the canvas, resolutely dry and unused. In juxtaposing the thin white brushstrokes and these dry brushes, Roslin asserts himself as creator of the entire illusion. The agréé then hammers it home just a little bit harder in the contrast between the dull two-dimensional outline on Collin de Vermont’s canvas and the dynamic three-dimensionality in the folds, open drawer, and rich textures of silk, velvet, and polished wood conjured on his own canvas. Roslin’s bold assertion of skill proclaims the reciprocity intrinsic to their relationship as participants in this morceau-de-réception ritual.

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It is Roslin’s skills as an artist that create Collin de Vermont; Roslin’s morceau de réception that turns Collin de Vermont into a memorialised effigy. Roslin may have needed to paint Collin de Vermont to become an académicien, but Collin de Vermont needed Roslin in order to be remembered as one. Painting an academician’s portrait entailed a shift for the agréé in how institutional roles and categories were perceived. As the gap between ranks narrowed, the liminal agréé – neither inside nor outside – started to see the officier he was painting in a different way. At one level this shift was specific, occurring in the personal exchange between maker and sitter, that is, as Roslin began to see himself as Collin de Vermont’s equal. At another level the shift was more general. As the agréé painted an officier’s portrait to hang with all the others he had seen in the Académie’s collection, he was no longer imagining the sitter in the context of their previous personal encounters (e.g. as the professeur who had instructed him), but rather as an institutional identity akin to all past and current members, now taking his place in the Académie’s ancestry. In other words, the agréé was imagining the sitter as that very category of ‘academician’ to which he himself was aspiring and which he would imminently achieve through completion of this task. Roslin was not just starting to see himself as equal to Collin de Vermont and Jeaurat, he was starting to see himself as the category that these persons represented. At Jacques Carré’s agrément, the secrétaire referred to the agréé’s sitters as ‘the subjects of his experience’, a strange turn of phrase that reveals an appreciation of the ritual significance.97 An ‘experience’ is exactly what a liminal phase is, usually characterised by a structured meditation on the thing-you-are-becoming. This is what Turner calls the ‘stage of reflection’, a period for initiands to contemplate their society, its structure, and their future role in it.98 Painting an academician’s portrait required just such a reflective engagement. That striking formal consistency of the portraits noted in Chapter 1 can also be understood as a result of their ritual origins, each object created under the same conditions to serve the same symbolic function. For agréés, part of this experience involved studying the other morceau-de-réception portraits hanging on the walls, interpreting the uniform visual language as a representation of institutional identity, and conceptualising their own sitter in the same pictorial terms as all who had gone before. As a result of these conditions, the process of painting morceau-de-réception portraits took on an introspective intensity for the young agréé. These portraits were meditative engagements with a future self, or, perhaps more accurately, a collective-selfportrait wherein one member could represent the entire community. While the previous chapter showed how the bodies of sitters in these portraits constructed definitions of academic identity, here academic identity is actually revealed in both sitter and maker. In other words, in a morceau-de-réception portrait, the ‘academic artist’ is present both in the subject matter of the painting and in its substance. When we look, for instance, at Roslin’s portrait of Etienne Jeaurat (Figure 2.4), we come face-toface not only with the artistic identity of the professeur, the figure portrayed,

2.4 Alexandre Roslin, Etienne Jeaurat, 128 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1753, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Michel Urtado)

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but also with that of the agréé, present in Roslin’s material trace on the canvas. Jeaurat may be whom we see, but what we see is Roslin. Indeed, if we were unaware of its authorship, with so many tropes that normally characterise self-representations, it would be quite easy to mistake for a self-portrait. Jeaurat sits before his canvas in the act of painting, turning to engage with the beholder, but with brush pressed against palette ready to return imminently to the task of representation. His direct gaze, actions, and studio setting all recall the self-reflexivity of self-portraiture. But this was self-reflexivity of a different kind. This was not Jeaurat projecting himself onto a canvas, but rather Roslin projecting himself onto Jeaurat. Everything in the painting metapictorially refers to the process of painting it. In everything that Jeaurat does, we experience an immediate sense of Roslin’s comparable actions. Jeaurat’s fictive touch of brush on palette is an index of Roslin’s real touch on the surface of the painting. The bent bristles draw us to the fictive point of contact between Jeaurat’s ‘brush’ and ‘palette’, but superimposed against its ground, the brush-tip re-focuses the eye on the canvas – the actual location of this fictive touch. In this detail of a brush applied to a surface, Roslin wittily effects a momentary vision of the painting seemingly painting itself and simultaneously draws his own presence as maker into the object. Similarly, the almost parallel alignment of fictive canvas and picture plane invites us to imagine a comparable paralleling of painted artist and real artist. Jeaurat, that is, becomes a proxy for Roslin before his own easel, painting this portrait. In this mise-en-abyme, we witness a representational ‘becoming’ across the real and fictive planes. In Jeaurat, we see the painterly actions of Roslin – the young agréé projected into the painted professeur – we encounter not just a representation of the thingRoslin-was-becoming, but a visualisation of the very process of Roslin becoming that thing. Though I refer to the agréé as ‘young’, the adjective is more a developmental description than age-related. Roslin was 38 when he submitted his reception pieces, which, despite how advanced it may sound, was around the average age for agréés beginning careers as académiciens (Appendix 1). Agréés could even be considerably older, sometimes up to 50 or 60 at the time of their réceptions, making the age-gap between ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ occasionally extremely close or even reversed: at 49 Antoine Benoist was only a year younger than one of his sitters, Jacques Buirette (Figure 1.10); and when Loir eventually submitted his morceau de réception at 67, he was ten years older than his subject, Clément Belle. These somewhat unexpected proximities and reversals in age highlight how localised the culture of the Académie was: outside on the street, Loir may have been treated deferentially by Belle as a social elder, but inside the Académie, age gave way to ancienneté, as superiority was determined not by year of birth but year of réception. Plaques attached to portraits bearing inscriptions with ‘name, reception, and death’ were intended to record an artist’s institutional age.99 Without

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the original frames it is difficult to know whether or for how long this directive was followed.100 But the decision alone indicates the precedence of institutional age over real age; within the walls of the Académie, it was not birth date that marked one’s origins, but réception date. There is a compelling correlation here with the symbolic notions of rebirth that Turner discusses as intrinsic to the liminal phases of initiation rituals, for in the Académie’s manner of ‘dating’ its members there is an implicit belief that life in this community began at the moment of réception.101 It is important to note, however, that the dates on the portraits indexing this symbolic coming-of-age moment did not refer to the maker’s réception, but the sitter’s: not Roslin’s, for instance, but Jeaurat’s. The choice of who to name and date is a compelling indication of the role these portraits played in the ‘lifecycle’ of the institution, marking both the agréé’s transformation into académicien and standing testament to the sitter’s own réception a generation earlier.102 In practice, however, this ‘lifecycle’ was not so neat because the Académie did not really follow the straightforward top-down system of ranks suggested by its Statuts (Table 2.1). Social order was internally divided in more complex ways according to several factors, not least genre and media. The honour of being chosen as the subject of a morceau-de-réception portrait was, as we know, only accorded to those who had attained the highest ranks, and the only artists who could be promoted to these ranks (adjoint à professeur and beyond) were history painters and sculptors.103 Being a sitter in a morceau-de-réception portrait was thus not an honour available to all academicians. Still life and genre painters, landscapists, portraitists, and engravers could only aspire to the rank of conseiller or positions as secrétaire or trésorier, grades high enough to confer voix délibérative, but not high enough to earn the privilege of becoming an institutional effigy.104 Only on three occasions, therefore, was the morceau-de-réception portrait ‘lifecycle’ actually completed. That is to say, only three artists both painted a portrait for their réception and then became a subject in somebody else’s: Largillière, reçu with his portrait of Lebrun (1686) (Figure 1.18), was painted by Geuslain (1723) (Figure 2.1); Rigaud, reçu with his portrait of Desjardins (1700) (Figure 2.3), was painted by Pierre Le Boutteux (1728) (Château de Versailles); and Robert Levrac (called Tournières), reçu in 1702 with portraits of Michel I Corneille and Pierre Mosnier (Château de Versailles), was painted by Pierre Le Sueur in 1747 (Château de Versailles). Largillière’s monumental portrait of Lebrun, described as a ‘tableau historique’, was apparently enough to confer history-painter status.105 Rigaud and Tournières, meanwhile, were required to submit additional historypainting morceaux de réception. Rigaud’s status as history painter/portraitist was affirmed in his lettres de réception and eventually ratified with a painting of Saint Andrew (1742) (Paris, ENSBA).106 But Tournières had two réceptions, first as a portraitist (1702) and then as a history painter (1716), for which he produced The Origin of Painting (Paris, ENSBA) showing the Corinthian Maid tracing her lover’s shadow by candlelight.107

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Once again, genre and media can be seen functioning like a class system within the Académie’s social order. This was not so much another hierarchy but, as Mark Ledbury argues, an opposition between history painters/ sculptors and the rest.108 Rank may have determined a member’s rights within the institution (e.g. whether or not they could attend assemblées, or vote), but genre and media determined what rank it was possible to achieve. Once an artist’s genre was fixed at reception, social mobility was difficult: few artists, like Tournières, changed their genre, and fewer still, like Largillière, succeeded in spite of it. Outside the Académie, genre status had less sway – portraitists especially often pursuing lucrative careers – but no matter how successful they became, inside the Académie they could never attain the prestige of history painters. Such a discriminating power hierarchy understandably led to social tension. Resentment and jealousy over the advantages of certain colleagues was common, perhaps nowhere more infamously than in the case of JeanBaptiste Greuze, whose attempt to subvert the hierarchy was met with humiliating failure (discussed further in Chapter 5). Art theory supplied the tenets of the institution’s creed, and academicians, indoctrinated from their earliest days as étudiants, certainly believed in the hierarchy of genres as a natural order. But what happened when abstract principles of theoretical discourse started to have real effects on their place in the world? How irksome must it have been for talented portraiture-agréés to be responsible for creating objects that symbolised the institutional glory which only history painters could achieve? Given the complexity of human interactions, we cannot imagine that the relationship between maker and sitter adhered to some ideal institutional model. This encounter between agréé and officier was also an encounter between portraitist and history painter, making the agréé’s meditation on the thing-you-are-becoming as much a confrontation with the thing-you-will-never-be (or will-always-be-denied). From the Académie’s written records, with their sanitised version of events and detached institutional voice, it is difficult to discern how portraitists felt towards those in the class above. The portraits, however, are firsthand witnesses to these interactions. As institutional images, morceaux de réception were necessarily honorific portraits, designed to commemorate the achievements of their sitters, not to play out the resentments of their makers. Nevertheless, as traces of social encounters, the objects register something of the emotional tensions involved.109 With Collin de Vermont and Jeaurat, for example, the difference in Roslin’s representation of his two sitters intimates a difference in his experience of the two sittings. Jeaurat is immediately more approachable than Collin de Vermont; seated rather than standing, his body reclining at ease, legs uncrossed, with no hint of tension betraying this relaxed demeanour. Jeaurat’s expression too is more gentle, his lips held together softly in a near smile with none of his colleague’s tight severity. Far from holding himself aloof or at a defensive distance, Jeaurat acknowledges his beholder with comfortable familiarity,

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so casual that his coat-tails are flung informally over the arm of his chair. For whatever reason, Roslin saw these two men differently: one encounter uncomfortably tense, the other relaxed and sociable. Both sitters were history painters, both professeurs, and Roslin had no personal history with either that might explain these subtly contrasting interactions. Perhaps Jeaurat was simply a more affable person, less awkward and intimidating in social situations than Collin de Vermont. Or perhaps Jeaurat was less intimidating to Roslin professionally. For though a history painter by reception, Jeaurat in fact practiced as readily in the secondary genres, known especially for paintings of street life, social types, and everyday scenes. While Collin de Vermont’s erudite œuvre of religious and esoteric historical subjects (like his series of 33 episodes from the seldom-represented life of Cyrus the Great) ensured a hierarchical distance over the portraitist, Jeaurat’s more mixed œuvre allowed space for greater affinity. Subtle but compelling traces of intensely-charged relationships between maker and sitter are found throughout the morceau-de-réception portraits. Ranc’s portrait of Nicolas de Plattemontagne (1703) (Figure 2.5), for example, is another work that conveys a pronounced sense of confrontation. Plattemontagne faces the viewer directly, his body strangely fixed in this unnatural frontal pose, where the only note of élan comes from the velvet cloak draped around his immobile form. From squared shoulders his arms extend to make two deliberate gestures: his right hand holds a porte-crayon over a piece of blue paper; his left points with an index finger at the edge of the painting. Within the narrative of this otherwise static scene, Plattemontagne’s direct gaze and purposeful gestures establish a selfreferential dialogue. With one hand about to create an image on a paper support and the other demarcating the limits of his own image on another support, Plattemontagne metapictorially relates what W. J. T. Mitchell calls a ‘second-order discourse’ about the object.110 Staring adamantly and holding his interlocutor in a direct address, his first hand says ‘I draw’ while the other acknowledges ‘I am drawn’. Yet in the representational space of this portrait, Plattemontagne actually has no agency to speak at all. As an effigy, Plattemontagne’s voice belongs to the author of the image: any agency Plattemontagne has is bestowed upon him by Ranc, the creative agent who composed the sitter’s body and controls his gaze and gestures. In the ritually restrictive encounter between agréé and professeur, where Plattemontagne was not permitted to advise Ranc on the image he was making, the sitter had even less control over his representation. For another artist, this was an uncharacteristic and no doubt uncomfortable position in which to find oneself. Ranc not only registers his sitter’s discomfort, but makes it the basis of his composition. In Plattemontagne’s awkward pose and stiff gestures, Ranc has created an image of a man trapped by his representation, caught in this unfamiliar space, unaccustomed to the lack of control with which he finds himself on this side of the canvas. When Plattemontagne’s gestures are re-read as

2.5 Jean Ranc, Nicolas de Plattemontagne, 130 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1703, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Daniel Arnaudet)

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movements constructed by another, forced upon Plattemontagne by Ranc, they communicate differently. His right hand hovering over an empty sheet of paper now seems impotent, unable to fulfil its habitual agency as the one who creates the art work, and his left hand explains why, indicating his position within the frame and his unfamiliar status as the object. There is no way of knowing whether the sense of opposition in Ranc’s encounter with Plattemontagne was the result of a confrontation between two artistic identities vying for agency, or whether it was intensified by something more personal, like the portraitist’s resistance of the history painter’s authority. But something about this experience of painting Plattemontagne’s portrait provoked for Ranc a keen sense of the genre-class divide. Though accepted as a portraitist at his agrément in 1700, by the time Ranc finished his morceaux de réception three years later, he had changed his mind about his chosen genre.111 On the day of his réception, Ranc presented his assigned portraits of Plattemontagne and François Verdier (Figure 1.21), but, most unconventionally, also offered an unsolicited history painting.112 Presenting a Christ on the Cross as proof of his skill, Ranc requested the Académie admit him as a history painter instead. The compagnie acquiesced, but asked for a new historical morceau de réception to be completed under the appropriate conditions, and deferred his présent pécuniaire until this point. With his history-painter status assured, Ranc, was satisfied, but four years later, when he had still not submitted the promised work, the Académie was not. In 1707, tired of waiting for their revenue, the compagnie declared that Ranc would have to pay his 150 livres and that despite the decision taken at his réception, he would from now on ‘only’ have the class of portraitist.113 Recorded as a pointed demotion in status, this was a decision intended to humiliate. In the culture of the Académie, where portraiture conferred inferior status, the morceau-de-réception portrait could become a space to negotiate the social tensions between artistic classes. This is not to ascribe emotional energies to the portraits themselves, but rather to understand them as objects created through emotional interactions, where traces of tensions were inscribed in the representation of one person by another. As with Ranc’s Plattemontagne, the portraits often emphasise the authority of the maker. Whether a result of ambitious agréés proving themselves as talented artists, or more vested discontent with social hierarchies, the effects are unmistakable. In Joseph Vivien’s François Girardon (1701) (Plate 8), for instance, the portrait becomes a kind of paragone: an anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better between pastellist and sculptor. With his left hand on a marble head and his right reaching out to indicate the bottom edge of the work, Girardon draws a comparison between the two arts, showing the beholder his art work in his space and showing himself as an art work in the beholder’s space. Under the sensitive touch of his fingers, he claims sculpture as the superior art – Girardon’s art work is tactile, embraceable, embodied. Meanwhile, his pointing finger claims that Vivien’s pastel lacks such corporeal interaction – Vivien’s art work is a surface, flatness

2.6 Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 131 × 105 cm, oil on canvas, 1753, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Hervé Lewandowski)

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contained within a frame. As maker of the object, however, it is Vivien who has the final word. He wittily proves pastel’s superiority by forcing the chalky Girardon to rebut his own argument. Through Vivien’s dramatic foreshortening of Girardon’s arms, the sitter’s attempts to demarcate the limits of pictorial space actually contradict any restriction of spatial boundaries. Pushing the sculpture forward to break through into the beholder’s space, and pointing outwards at the picture plane (rather than downwards in parallel to it), Girardon’s efforts to reinforce the pictorial limit negate it by suggesting a spatial depth going beyond the two-dimensional in both directions. Girardon may deny his corporeal presence in this flat work, but Vivien makes him prove pastel’s ability to create the illusion of corporeal presence in the first place. Metapictorial confrontations did not only occur between painters and sculptors. Other morceau-de-réception portraits found inventive ways of inferring the value of portraiture in its own right. In Perronneau’s portrayal of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1753) (Figure 2.6), for instance, Perronneau humorously transforms the history painter into a portraitist. Standing before a large canvas, Oudry’s head and shoulders are superimposed against this background making his location momentarily ambiguous. Only his left arm, just breaking out across the line, prevents Oudry from being entirely projected into this fictive surface. His brushes, moreover, turned back to rest against the brushstrokes forming his waistcoat, reinforce this self-reflexive illusion of Oudry being painted onto his own canvas. By turning Oudry’s painting into a portrait, and the professeur into a portraitist, Perronneau suggests the fluidity of genre despite the rigidity of the theoretical hierarchy, a suggestion particularly resonant in Oudry’s case. Oudry had in fact begun his career as a portraitist under Largillière, who apparently did not think much of his talents, allegedly informing him he would ‘only ever amount to a painter of dogs’.114 And in effect he was. Though received as a history painter, Oudry was essentially a still life painter, noted for his pictures of ‘animals, fruits, and flowers’, and even his historical morceau de réception, an allegory of Abundance (1719) (Château de Versailles), was more remarkable for its studies of animals and vegetables than for its human forms and symbolic content.115 Perronneau showed that an artist’s genre was not always that which was claimed. Etienne Aubry went further, asserting that no matter what their genre, every artist owed his art to portraiture. In Aubry’s Noël Hallé (1775) (Figure 2.7), the history painter sits conventionally before his easel, but Hallé’s canvas bears none of the usual chalk outlines or unfinished oil-sketches. Instead we find a silhouette of Hallé, cast by the light towards which he turns. Aubry’s depiction of the shadow on the canvas emphasises the indexical value of a portrait as the trace of a real body, but it also calls more profoundly on the myth of the origins of art, namely the story of the Corinthian Maid. According to legend, the Maid is credited with inventing the arts of drawing and painting by tracing the shadow of her lover on a wall, before her father, Dibutades, invented sculpture by filling the lines with clay.116 Hallé’s silhouette, projected onto his canvas by the glow of lamplight, invokes the apocryphal origins of

2.7 Etienne Aubry, Noël Hallé, 126 × 95 cm, oil on canvas, 1775, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Jean Popovitch)

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representation, where portraiture is shown as the genesis of all the arts. Aubry thus reminds the history painter that his art was subsequent to the original. Calling on an alternative hierarchy of genre and media through this cultural reference, Aubry claimed for portraiture an elevated, indeed foundational, status never accorded it in the culture of the Académie. Aubry’s shadow would have been a readily recognisable motif, particularly in the later decades of the eighteenth century when the theme became increasingly popular.117 It had, however, already enjoyed a long life in academic discourse, Félibien referring to the myth in his treatise De l’origine de la peinture (1660), and physically in the Académie, ever since Tournières submitted his Origin of Painting (1716) depicting the story.118 Aubry’s allusion to the myth in his portrait of Hallé casts a slightly different light on Tournières’ selection of it as the subject for the morceau de réception that transformed him from portraitist to history painter, for quite unconventionally, Tournières chose the subject himself.119 Perhaps, rather than forsaking portraiture in his move up the genre scale, Tournières was making a claim for its elevation: creating a history painting that showed the origins of representation in portraiture, while also self-reflexively revealing his own artistic origins in the Académie. The significance of Tournières’ choice certainly elicited a degree of resentment among the history painters. In Dézallier d’Argenville’s anecdotal account of Tournières’ réception, he claimed that upon leaving the room, one of the officiers quipped: ‘it is hardly very difficult to be admitted as a history painter, for here is one received for a mere candle end’, alluding to the lamp in Tournières’ scene.120 Dézallier d’Argenville attributes the comment to Jean Jouvenet, who was in fact ill and absent that day (as the minutes note), but whatever the origins of the remark, the anecdote bears witness to those tensions across the genre-class divide. This barely disguised snipe at Tournières’ unmerited movement up the social ladder reveals the lived experience of genre in the culture of the Académie. Recontextualising the morceau-de-réception portraits within their ritual origins has offered unique insights into the relationships between people in the Académie, in all the intricacy of its social structure. Those rituals of initiation reinforced social hierarchies through the structured roles that each participant played, determining the types of interactions that could take place between étudiants, agréés, académiciens, and officiers. As objects that recorded the subjective encounters between two of these participants – an agréé and an officier – the portraits suggest something of the complex experience of these social relations, as the young agréé painted a person who was at once an embodiment of the thing-he-was-becoming and a symbol of what he could never be: an academician, a history painter; a soon-to-be colleague, who would always be an institutional superior. As part of that multistage admission process, however, the portraits were significant for many more than the two people who painted and sat for them. For the directeurs who selected the subjects, for the nominated

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officiers who monitored their production, and for the members with voix délibérative who judged their quality, the morceau-de-réception portraits were constantly reaffirming people’s different experiences of being members of the community. Even when the ritual was over, however, the completed portraits did not stop negotiating social relationships. From the walls of the Académie’s apartments, as we shall see in the following chapter, the portraits continued to index those encounters between members of the community, while at the same time instigating new relationships with the beholders who experienced them in these rooms.

Notes 1 30 May 1722 (PV, vol. 4, p. 334). 2 28 August 1723 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 361–362). 3 On comparable rituals surrounding the chef d’œuvre or masterpiece see Walter Cahn, Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea (Princeton, 1979), pp. 3–22; Martina Hansmann, ‘La prevue de l’excellence: les antécédents italiens du morceau de réception’, in Hans Belting, Arthur Danto, Jean Galard, Martina Hansmann, Neil MacGregor, Werner Spies, and Matthias Waschek (eds.), Qu’estce qu’un chef d’œuvre? (Paris, 2000), pp. 155–195. 4 Boucher was reçu on 30 January 1734 (PV, vol. 5, pp. 136–137). 5 Règlement sur la forme des présentations des Aspirans (1702); Ordre de la présentation des Aspirans (1712); Règlement pour l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1751); and Statuts et Règlements (1777). On the Académie’s rules more generally see Benhamou, Regulating. 6 Ordre de la presentation, p. 151. 7 Article IX, Règlement pour l’Académie, p. 253. 8 26 July 1710 (PV, vol. 4, p. 109). 9 On the linguistic distinction between emic and etic see: Thomas N. Headland, Kenneth L. Pike and Marvin Harris (eds), Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate (Newbury Park, 1990). 10 Records sometimes refer to the agrément as the agrégation; here agrément is used throughout for clarity. 11 On the Académie’s admission process see also Boedo, Reception, pp. 72–115. 12 On the conditions of student life at the Académie see Benhamou, ‘Public and Private’, pp. 59–67. 13 6 October 1708 (PV, vol. 4, p. 70). 14 5 January 1709 (PV, vol. 4, p. 76). 15 13 January 1770 (PV, vol. 8, p. 33). 16 27 January 1770 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 33–34). 17 Article IV, Statuts et Règlements (1663).

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18 25 November 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 290). 19 Article XXXVII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 20 Règlement sur la forme, p. 334. 21 31 May 1698 (PV, vol. 3, p. 234). 22 1 August 1699 (PV, vol. 3, p. 275). 23 Article VI, Règlement pour l’Académie, p. 253. 24 Règlement sur la forme, p. 334. Article XXVIII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). The role of presentateur was momentarily eliminated in 1774 but reinstated the following month after further discussion about its value: 26 November and 3 December 1774 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 168–169). 25 Règlement sur la forme, p. 334; Ordre de la presentation, p. 152. 26 Articles VI and VII, Règlement pour l’Académie, p. 253. 27 31 October 1750 (PV, vol. 6, p. 235). 28 7 November 1750 (PV, vol. 6, p. 236). 29 28 November 1750 (PV, vol. 6, p. 236). 30 30 November 1782 (PV, vol. 9, p. 132); 31 May 1777 (PV, vol. 8, p. 265). 31 Vien’s mémoires are transcribed in Gaehtgens and Lugand, Joseph-Marie Vien, p. 302. 32 Gaehtgens and Lugand, Joseph-Marie Vien, p. 303. 33 Gaehtgens and Lugand, Joseph-Marie Vien, p. 304. 27 November 1751 (PV, vol. 6, p. 292). 34 Article XXVIII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 35 On 25 June 1701, for example, François Jouvenet’s réception took priority over Robert ‘Tournières’ Levrac’s agrément (PV, vol. 3, pp. 317–318). 36 Article VIII, Règlement pour l’Académie, p. 253. 37 The two-third majority was first stipulated in Règlement sur la forme, p. 335. The quorum of 14 officiers is noted in Article XXIII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 38 27 July 1771, PV, ENSBA Ms. 8. 39 Article XXII, Statuts et Règlements (1663). 40 Article XXIII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 41 Article XXIII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 42 30 December 1700 (PV, vol. 3, p. 306); 27 August 1746 (PV, vol. 6, p. 34). 43 Article XXX, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 44 ‘État générale des portraits et autres tableaux sortis du pinceau de l’illustre M. Rigaud’, Mémoires inédits, vol. 2, pp. 148, 150. 45 Collection des livrets des anciennes expositions depuis 1674 jusqu’en 1800 (Paris, 1869) [1745], p. 36.

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46 Rigaud: agréé 5 August 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 281), reçu on 2 January 1700 (PV, vol. 3, p. 285). La Tour: agréé 25 May 1737 (PV, vol. 5, p. 205), reçu 24 September 1746 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 35–36). Loir: agréé 30 April 1746 (PV, vol. 6, p. 28), reçu 27 February 1779 (PV, vol. 8, p. 367). 47 Delyen: agréé 26 August 1724 (PV, vol. 4, p. 382), reçu 24 November 1725 (PV, vol. 4, p. 404). 48 Article XXVII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 49 25 November 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 291). 50 Agréé on 5 September 1705 (PV, vol. 4, p. 14), Grimou was stripped of his status on 2 March 1709 (PV, vol. 4, p. 78). 51 Ordre de la presentation, p. 152. 52 Ordre de la presentation, p. 152. 53 Article X, Règlement pour l’Académie, pp. 253–254. Haverman was admitted on 31 January 1722 (PV, vol. 4, p. 328). On her exclusion see: Octave Fidière, Les femmes artistes à l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris, 1885), p. 27; Nancy Heller, Women Artists: An Illustrated History (New York and London, 2003), p. 12; and Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550–1950, exh. cat. (Los Angeles, 1978), p. 36. 54 28 August 1723 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 361–362). 55 Henri de Bessé was also known as Sieur de La Chapelle-Milon. 1 March 1687 (PV, vol. 2, p. 347). 56 2 January 1700 (PV, vol. 3, p. 285). The other version is at Musée national du Château de Versailles. 57 30 July 1774 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 154–155). 58 Duplessis was reçu on 6 August 1774 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 156–157). On the portrait of Vien see Gaehtgens and Lugand, Joseph-Marie Vien, p. 345. 59 Article XXII, Statuts et Règlements (1663). 60 29 December 1725 (PV, vol. 4, p. 406); 27 June 1711 (PV, vol. 4, p. 126). 61 27 February 1745 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 3–4). 62 ‘Director: Do you wish to be part of the Académie? The company deems you worthy, but before receiving you, it requires you to take the customary oath. Raise your hand. Do you promise to serve the king faithfully in the role that you seek, to uphold and further, as far as possible, the glory of the Académie, to keep and observe religiously the Statutes and Regulations, and to subject yourself to all its rulings? Candidate: Yes.’ PV, vol. 1, p. 11. 63 Article XII, Règlement pour l’Académie, p. 254. 64 PV, vol. 1, pp. 231, 275, 362; vol. 2, pp. 42, 62. 65 24 September 1746 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 35–36). 66 Article XXIX, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 67 The term lettres de provisions (Article XVIII, Statuts et Règlements [1663]) was later replaced by the term lettres de réception (Ordre de la presentation, p. 152). 68 ENSBA Ms. 117.

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69 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909), trans. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee (London, 1960). 70 No female artist ever went through the entire process. 71 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (New York, 1969), pp. 94–95. 72 Ordre de la présentation, p. 151. 73 6 May 1662 (PV, vol. 1, p. 192). David Mandrella, Jacob Van Loo, 1614–1670 (Paris, 2011), pp. 33–34, 242. 74 6 January 1663 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 205–206). 75 10 October 1681 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 197–198). 76 Elle was re-admitted and restored to his post on 26 January 1686 (PV, vol. 2, p. 317). 77 Ordre de la présentation, p. 151. 78 14 December 1740 (PV, vol. 5, p. 286); 28 January 1741 (PV, vol. 5, pp. 290–291). 79 28 July 1753 (PV, vol. 6, p. 355). 80 On Roslin’s patronage networks see Gunnar W. Lundberg, Roslin: liv och verk, vol. 1 (Malmö, 1957), pp. 303–304. 81 Roslin: agréé 28 July 1753 (PV, vol. 6, p. 355), reçu 24 November 1753 (PV, vol. 6, p. 369). On opposition to Roslin’s admission see Alexandre Roslin 1718–1793. Un portraitiste pour l’Europe, exh. cat. (Versailles, 2008), p. 30. 82 30 October 1706 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 33–34). 83 Carriera was admitted on 26 October 1720 (PV, vol. 4, p. 302) and Reboul on 30 July 1757 (PV, vol. 7, p. 41). 84 Vallayer-Coster was admitted on 28 July, Giroust on 1 September, and the new restriction decided on 28 September 1770 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 48, 51–52, 53). 85 Duchemin was admitted on 14 April 1663 (PV, vol. 1, p. 223). 86 11 June 1672 (PV, vol. 1, p. 388). 87 1 September 1770 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 51–52); 31 May 1783 (PV, vol. 9, pp. 152–154). Labille-Guiard submitted her second reception-piece portrait of Amédée Van Loo on 30 July 1785 (PV, vol. 9, p. 248). 88 Article XXVIII, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 89 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 2005), p. 123. 90 On the importance of the liminal phase see Victor Turner, ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’, in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, 1967), pp. 93–111. 91 Xavier Salmon, Le voleur d’âmes: Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, exh. cat. (Versailles, 2004), p. 184. 92 30 April 1746 (PV, vol. 6, p. 28). 93 28 July 1753 (PV, vol. 6, p. 355). 94 24 November 1753 (PV, vol. 6, p. 369).

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95 ‘Entrainment’ describes the mutual focus of attention in interaction rituals: Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, 2004), pp. 47–101. 96 The importance of relations between sitter and maker in artists’ portraiture is discussed in Sylvie Martin, ‘Le portrait d’artiste au XVIIIe siècle et la critique de son temps’, Histoire de l’art, 5/6 (1989), p. 66. 97 4 January 1676 (PV, vol. 2, p. 66). 98 Turner, ‘Betwixt and Between’, p. 105. 99 30 June 1696 (PV, vol. 3, p. 190). 100 For what little is known about the paintings’ frames see William McAllister Johnson, ‘Les morceaux de réception: protocole et documentation’, in Les peintres du Roi: 1648–1793, exh. cat. (Paris, 2000), p. 39. 101 Turner, ‘Betwixt and Between’, p. 96. 102 Agréés rarely signed and dated their portraits, but in the few cases when they did, both artists’ names and réceptions were thus inscribed on and in the object (e.g. Aubry’s portrait of Vassé [Plate 6]). 103 This rule was codified in Articles VI–VII, IX, XI–XII of the Statuts et Règlements (1777). 104 Women of course were exempt even from these privileges as académiciennes were not entitled to hold any officier position. 105 Guillet de Saint-Georges, ‘Charles Lebrun’ in Mémoires inédits, vol. 1, p. 48. 106 26 May 1742 (PV, vol. 5, p. 320). 107 26 May 1714 and 24 October 1716 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 181, 232). 108 Ledbury, Sedaine, pp. 15–44. 109 On emotional transactions between portraitist and sitter, and the portraitsitting as intersubjective exchange, see: Angela Rosenthal, ‘She’s Got the Look! Eighteenth-Century Female Portrait Painters and the Psychology of a Potentially “Dangerous Employment”’, in Joanna Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester, 1997), pp. 147–166; and Berger, ‘Fictions of the Pose’, pp. 87–120. 110 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London, 1994), pp. 35–82. On the self-reflexivity of paintings see also Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern MetaPainting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge, 1997). 111 30 December 1700 (PV, vol. 3, p. 306). 112 28 July 1703 (PV, vol. 3, p. 369). 113 5 November 1707 (PV, vol. 4, p. 52). 114 Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, nouvelle édition, vol. 4 (Paris, 1762), p. 411. 115 Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 410. 116 Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, vol. 14 (1754–1772), p. 820.

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117 Robert Rosenblum, ‘The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism’, Art Bulletin, 39/4 (1957), pp. 279–290; Sheriff, Exceptional Woman, pp. 232–239. 118 André Félibien, De l’origine de la peinture et des plus excellens peintres de l’antiquité (Paris, 1660), pp. 21–22. In 1781, Tournières’ painting was hanging in the Grande Salle. Antoine-Nicolas Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture et gravure exposé dans les salles de l’Académie Royale (1781), in Descriptions de l’Académie, ed. Montaiglon, p. 128. 119 26 May 1714 (PV, vol. 4, p. 181) and 3 October 1716 (PV, vol. 4, p. 232). 120 Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 362.

3 On the Wall: Portraits, Spaces, and everyday Encounters at the Académie

When the Académie moved from the Palais Royal to the Louvre in 1692, its collection of 140 morceau-de-réception paintings were packed up to be rehung in the new apartments. Twice more the institution would move within the palace, but the morceau-de-réception portraits (then totalling 43) would remain on display in the Louvre for the next hundred years, eventually expanding to a collection of 111 works (Appendix 1). These paintings formed the backdrop to the working lives of the hundreds of étudiants, agréés, académiciens, and officiers who moved through its rooms. Hanging on the walls, the portraits served their function as a visual history of the institution to be read and absorbed by its members, they symbolised the rituals that orchestrated the becoming and being of those members, but they also physically staked a claim, demarcating institutional space and actively performing roles within it. This chapter reconstructs how and where the Académie’s portraits were displayed across a century of institutional life, exploring the phenomenological experience of these ideologically and ritually charged objects for the people who saw them everyday, and examining the effects of these material effigies on the community’s understanding of itself as a community. Reconstructing the Académie as it was in the eighteenth century requires imagination. After two hundred years of renovations, some of the Louvre’s rooms no longer exist, none look as they did at the time, and objects that once occupied these spaces have been dispersed beyond their walls. Creating a picture of the Académie involves gathering snippets of insight from a range of sources that offer representations or eyewitness accounts of the apartments, a task made challenging for several reasons: first, because the Académie’s relocations within the Louvre mean that sources from different periods relate to different sets of apartments; second, because the collection of art works was not static, so the displays were changing all the time to accommodate donated works and new morceaux de réception; and third, because the functions of spaces are not always evident. Rooms such as the salle d’assemblée (meeting room) or the école du modèle (drawing school) had functionality inscribed in their names, but there were other more ambiguously named spaces, which served non-specific and often varied purposes.1

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To make matters more difficult, images of the Académie’s interiors are extremely rare. For whatever reason, artists tended not to draw or paint the institutional spaces they inhabited. There are, however, written sources, some of them wonderfully detailed, that record the contents of the Académie’s apartments at different moments, among them: Guérin’s meticulous Description of 1715, complete with engravings showings the walls in elevation; Chardin’s inventory from 1775, seemingly undertaken as a stock-take after retiring from his role of trésorier; Dézallier d’Argenville’s Description sommaire of 1781, compiled by a non-member amateur; and finally, an inventory from Year II (1793–1794), taken upon the closure of the Académie after the Revolution, when papers and objects belonging to this royal institution were removed from the premises.2 Using these records in combination with various images, maps, and architectural floor-plans, this chapter offers a sense of how and where portraits were displayed within institutional spaces and how they were encountered through habitual practices. In keeping with this book’s intention to investigate the experiences of the Académie’s native inhabitants, my approach to images and documents pays close attention to authorship, balancing the different perspectives of insiders and outsiders, as well as considering the original purpose of the sources and their material forms. I take into account, for example, why Guérin, an insider, describes the Académie differently from an outsider; why an inventory undertaken for in-house administration contains different information from a published description; or what a painting tells us about a room that is different from a floor-plan. Some of these images and documents are detailed and descriptive, others impressionistic, others almost fictional, but all are primary sources that in some way act as witnesses to the Académie’s apartments. Once again, however, it is the portraits that constitute the most direct sources of all. These are firsthand witnesses of a different kind: not objects that record the interiors, but objects that were those interiors. Portraits were not alone in these rooms, taking their place among the other paintings, sculptures, and engravings in the collection, not to mention the furniture, educational tools, and administrative paraphernalia that filled the apartments. Portraits did, however, account for over a quarter of the morceaux-de-réception paintings (111 out of 399 by the end) so occupied a large proportion of the wall surfaces.3 Portraits also have unique qualities as objects that give them a distinctive presence in a space, an effect intensified in the second half of the century following the decision to create a space specifically for them. This chapter is concerned with how these unique objects worked for their initiated beholders, that is, how the placement of portraits within an institutional setting activated additional meanings and values for the artists who experienced them. Academicians’ portraits were institutional images and ritual objects, but they were also effigies, representations standing in for real people. I argue that these effigies were no mere bystanders decorating walls, but active participants in everyday life, playing a fundamental role in forming, perpetuating, and symbolising the Académie’s collective identity.

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The louvre: Site and Space When Sébastien Mercier described the Louvre at the end of the eighteenth century, he conjured an image of a heterogeneous space in constant flux, physically, with its ongoing renovations and building projects ‘condemned to be forever unfinished’, and socially, with its mixture of local inhabitants ranging from nobles to rag-sellers.4 A similar vision of the Louvre is found in the lively urban scenes depicted by the academician, Pierre-Antoine Demachy, whose paintings of everyday life around the palace reveal the same activity and diversity noted by Mercier. In his portrayal of the demolition of buildings on the rue du Petit Bourbon (Figure 3.1), Demachy captures how the exceptional co-existed with the ordinary: the Louvre’s grand Colonnade rising over the city, while someone’s washing dries across the street. Inside the Louvre it was the same. The building housed the nation’s most elite cultural institutions and some of its richest collections of art, but it was also a space where people lived and worked, conducting prosaic activities of daily life amid the extraordinary activities of artistic, scientific, and intellectual innovation.5 Even within the Académie, its apartments were as much a setting for official ceremonial occasions as for everyday encounters between colleagues coming and going about their regular business. By the time the Académie moved into the Louvre in 1692, Louis XIV and his Court had already been at Versailles for a decade, having left the Louvre

3.1 PierreAntoine Demachy, View of the Colonnade of the Louvre, 76 × 131 cm, oil on canvas, 1772, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMNGrand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Stéphane Maréchalle)

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3.2 Locations of the Académie and other key sites. Guillaume de l’Isle, Le plan de Paris, ses faubourgs et ses environs, 56 × 75 cm, 1742, David Rumsey Map Collection. (Image © 2000 by Cartography Associates)

to the artists, artisans, and men of letters who had been occupying parts of the building for years.6 In this state cultural centre, the Académie became the newest neighbour of the Académie Française (housed there since 1672) and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (since 1685), to be joined by the Académie d’Architecture (in 1692) and later by the Académie des Sciences (in 1699). After the institution’s nomadic early years, this granting of space within the Louvre offered a more established location for its affairs. It also confirmed the elevated status that the arts had achieved through their academicisation, as they took their place in a creative and scholarly hub that would also house the Imprimerie Royale, the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for royal festivities and spectacles), the royal collections of the Salle des Antiques, Cabinet des Tableaux, and Cabinet des Dessins, and play host to the popular biennial Salon exhibitions. This was, as Jacques-François Blondel described it, a royal palace turned ‘sanctuary of science, art and taste’.7 In addition to its royal, state, and institutional residents, the Louvre was also home to scores of individual academicians, most inhabiting logements in the long Galerie (Figure 3.2). Here painters and sculptors worked in studios side-by-side with artisans like goldsmiths, cabinetmakers, and set designers.8 A few academicians, like Charles-Antoine Coypel, Boucher, Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, secured apartments in the main palace sharing corridors with the nobles still living there, while others established

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themselves in the Tuileries, in the network of streets surrounding the palace, or in temporary buildings in the Cour Carré, particularly commodious for the messy labour of sculpture.9 The Louvre thus became an artistic neighbourhood, where work and home were by no means distinct, and where many academicians spent a great deal, if not most, of their time. To talk then of artists’ everyday encounters in the Louvre is no exaggeration. Not every academician inhabited this neighbourhood, some came only to attend meetings, or when it was their turn to pose the model, but for many these were the spaces of daily life. When it came to art objects, the experience in the Académie’s apartments was different from every other space in the palace. In the elite cultural centre of the Louvre, art was not surprisingly everywhere, whether in private apartments, artists’ studios, or royal and institutional collections. But as eighteenth-century guidebooks to Paris reveal, nowhere else in the palace, nor indeed in the city, did art serve such diverse and self-reflexive roles, and in such vast quantities. Guides like Germain Brice’s Description nouvelle de la ville de Paris (1706) and Dézallier d’Argenville’s Voyage pittoresque de Paris (1770) describe art works in different parts of the palace: some serving a protomuseological role, displayed to be ‘examined’ by visitors (e.g. masterpieces in the Cabinet des Tableaux like Paulo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana and Lebrun’s Battles of Alexander); others somewhere between decoration and symbol (e.g. in the Académie des Inscriptions, where allegorical scenes like Antoine Coypel’s Minerva Discovering Truth evoked institutional purpose, and royal or state portraits affirmed powerful patrons).10 But upon reaching the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, the difference was dramatic. From rooms with a few works placed in evidence, suddenly these authors found themselves in spaces utterly filled with art objects doing all kinds of different things. Having been able to describe the other spaces in detail, listing every work and even giving a brief description in a few lines or a couple of paragraphs, Dézallier d’Argenville was now confronted with a space so packed with objects of every possible size, format, and media, that he was unable to focus on individual works at all, instead resorting to managing this visual plethora with general descriptions of the kinds of objects encountered – paintings, sculptures, bas-reliefs, drawings, engravings – which covered every surface. What is most striking is not just the contrasting quantity of artworks in the Académie’s rooms, nor even the diversity of media, but the varied functions that these objects served. Like the other Louvre spaces, the Académie had masterpieces, portraits of patrons, and self-reflexive allegorical history paintings, but it also had painted morceaux de réception in all the genres, sculpted morceaux de réception, casts of antique sculptures serving as educational models, competition pieces submitted for the grand prix, terracotta bas-reliefs made by sculptors as part of their teaching exercises, and in the room where the model was posed, académies made by the professeurs in drawing classes, so numerous that the room appeared ‘papered’ with the sheets.11

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For outsiders like Brice and Dézallier d’Argenville, it was the abundance, diversity, and functionality of objects that made this space remarkable. For insiders, there was another fundamental difference: in the Académie, the inhabitants of the apartments were also the makers of the objects. As such, academicians had a distinctive relationship with the objects in their institution, one not shared by the members of other academies, and one which gave the objects themselves more complex institutional functions, whether produced through educational exercises, by students competing for prizes, or, in the case of morceau-de-réception portraits, as the very works which permitted membership of this community. Art in the Académie was not just decoration, symbolic or otherwise. It was used self-referentially by this artistic institution to create a material environment composed of the very objects it had been established to produce. Art in the Académie was at once finished and inprocess; it was emblematic, but it was used; art was not abstractly detached from the people who viewed it, but was an intimately lived extension of those maker-beholders. Each time the Académie relocated within the Louvre its collections of objects moved too, demarcating its boundaries through a material profusion that declared it a space for and of art. During its life at the Louvre, the Académie moved twice. Upon its arrival in 1692, it was located in a set of apartments on the first floor near the Galerie d’Apollon. Then from 1712, it moved to a suite

3.3 Location of the Académie Royale after 1721 on first floor of Louvre. Detail of Plate 6 from François Blondel, Architecture Françoise, vol. 4 (Paris, 1752– 1756), British Library, London. (© The British Library Board [74/557*.g])

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of rooms on the ground floor underneath its former apartments (comprising a small entry vestibule, a round salon, the salle d’assemblée, the salle où sont les Vases de Medicis, a room containing the grand prix works, the école du modèle, an additional room separated from this suite, the logement of the concierge, and some loges in which the students executed their competition pieces).12 In 1721, the Académie then returned to the first floor (Figure 3.3), where it remained until its closure after the Revolution (comprising an antichambre [P1], the école du modèle [P2], the grande salle for formal receptions [P3], the smaller salle d’assemblée for company meetings [P5], the round salle des portraits [P4], a logement for the secrétaire [Q] and a smaller logement for the concierge [P6], the Galerie d’Apollon [S], the salon carré [T], and various other logements).13

Behind the Scenes in the Académie’s Apartments Art objects differentiated the Académie from other spaces in the Louvre. But it is by looking at the relationship between objects, spaces, and people (where works were displayed, how rooms were used, who did the looking) that we can start to understand the role that the Académie’s portraits played within their institutional setting. Jean-Baptiste Martin’s A General Meeting of the Académie (c.1712–1721) (Figure 3.4) offers a rare glimpse in this regard.14 One of very few images ever made depicting the interior spaces of the Académie, it presents an informal scene: the casual moments before an assemblée, taking place in the salle d’assemblée of the ground floor apartments. The assemblées were the core of institutional life, spatially and administratively. Once or twice a month, usually on a Saturday afternoon, those with the rank of académicien and above would gather in this room to conduct the essential affairs of the institution: reports were given, information exchanged, and decisions taken. It was in this space that the compagnie voted on agréments and réceptions of aspiring étudiants and agréés, and it was here that academicians presented historical and theoretical orations, reading aloud Lives of past members or debating conférences. Academic discourses are often read in isolation, detached from these oral traditions of collective gatherings. But through Martin’s painting we retrieve some sense of that live experience. Academicians interact animatedly while taking their seats, chatting amongst themselves and preparing for the presentations and discussions that will follow. From a resolution about meeting times in 1696, we know that assemblées were always convened an hour before the meeting commenced, suggesting that members habitually gathered in this manner to enjoy a session of sociable exchange before turning to official business.15 Martin was actually the king’s battle painter, known for his scenes of royal conquests and paintings of official events like the Coronation of Louis XV (Château de Versailles). He was also not an academician. How an uninitiated individual, albeit a court painter, came to represent this private institutional moment is something of a mystery. Visitors were permitted access to this

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3.4 JeanBaptiste Martin, A General Meeting of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture at the Louvre, 30 × 43 cm, oil on canvas, c.1712, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMNGrand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / RenéGabriel Ojéda / Thierry Le Mage)

room, but rarely would an invitation have been accorded during an assemblée, which perhaps explains the ‘before’ moment that Martin has painted – the doors still open to allow those who do not belong to depart, leaving only the initiated to remain in camera. Yet for an event painter such as Martin to have depicted this scene at all gives the impression of the assemblée as a formal ceremonial occasion, even if it were one from which the author would ultimately be excluded. From his distanced almost voyeuristic viewing position, Martin looks as an outsider, his access blocked by the bank of seating and the backs of several figures in the foreground. Glimpsing with privileged insight the private affairs of this community, he depicts the group from afar, somewhere beyond even the wall of the room. Physically excluded from the experience taking place before him and unacknowledged by those involved, Martin paints this scene as witness but not participant. For our purposes Martin has something of the ethnographer’s gaze (event painters were deliberate observers albeit with a degree of artistic license), providing valuable insight into this private occasion, despite or indeed because of his conscious exclusion. No member of the community – that is, no academician – ever painted an assemblée. Perhaps participating in proceedings made it logistically difficult to represent them, or perhaps this monthly meeting was simply too habitual a happening to be thought of as an occasion to be historicised: not an ‘event’ as

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the outsider Martin saw it, just an ordinary everyday episode. Or perhaps it was the opposite. Perhaps for academicians the assemblée was too ceremonial, too in camera, an occasion too private to be reproduced on a canvas that would make it portable and accessible, effectively opening the doors to uninitiated beholders. Not all spaces and activities were so restricted. Academicians had less reservations representing teaching practices, as attested by that vignette in Gobert’s portrait of Boullogne (Plate 5) or later in Charles-Joseph Natoire’s Life class at the Académie (1746) (Figure 3.5). But then drawing lessons were much more open occasions – not the site of secret internal affairs, but the nominal enterprise of the company – accessible to all étudiants and requiring no initiation process to bestow the right of admission. Natoire’s drawing depicts a different space from Martin’s painting but it also offers a very different kind of view. Natoire’s observation of this scene comes from within, a position of inclusion that is extended to the beholder in the opening out of the pictorial space: nothing blocks our entry, no one turns away, and a clear path leads accessibly from foreground to mid-ground. While Martin is so far outside that he occupies an impossible position beyond a wall, Natoire, the academician, is so close that he is literally inside, present in a self-representational detail as the professeur instructing two étudiants.16 Despite Natoire’s privileged position as participant, however, his drawing is a far less accurate representation of the Académie. This classicising square-columned interior filled with large-scale antique sculptures and grand history paintings bears little structural or decorative resemblance to the first-floor room that accommodated the école du modèle at mid-century (P2 of Figure 3.3). Natoire makes some gesture at veracity, with the central platform for the models, a few académies on the walls (hardly enough to be as ‘papered’ as Dézallier d’Argenville described them), and some rows of tiered seating (which probably occupied the majority of the space as they had in the previous apartments [Figure 3.6]).17 But this scene is rather, as Susanna Caviglia-Brunel argues, a product of artistic imagination.18 Natoire, the insider, was not recording the Académie as it really was, but creating an idea of the Académie suitable for the public gaze: an ideal scene of academic training with the appropriate grandeur of setting for such illustrious activity. Meanwhile Martin, the outsider, offers the beholder a more documentarylike image, witnessing an unidealised Académie through the eyes of a less implicated observer. Martin’s painting may be more accurate than Natoire’s, but as the sketchy treatment of the oil reminds us, it is still an artistic impression. Opinions, however, can sometimes be more revealing than facts, and as the only painted image of the Académie’s most interior space, Martin’s General Meeting might not provide an exact visual replica, but it does offer valuable insight into how this room was seen and used. What is immediately striking about Martin’s interior is the overwhelming presence of pictures. According to Guérin’s Description, the salle d’assemblée contained 34 sculptures and 21 paintings, but for Martin it is the paintings that dominate the scene.19 Framed pictures cover

3.5 Charles-Joseph Natoire, Life class at the Académie, 45.3 × 32.3 cm, black chalk and watercolour, 1746, The Courtauld Gallery, London. (Photo: © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London)

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every viable portion of wall: they are hung from floor to ceiling in the window embrasures, they appear above doorways and on all sides of the wall recesses, and one is even placed within the decorative roundel above the cornice. In many places the paintings actually account for the setting, subsuming the architectural elements of the room and creating their own surface layer. On the left wall, for instance, the painting in the central recess hangs forward at an oblique angle disturbing the flatness of the wall, while the architectural forms are even more obscured by paintings that jut out over the recesses. Martin registers the dominant presence of these paintings on the walls, but he pays much less attention to the subjects they depict. The sketchily rendered paintings are barely differentiated in tone from the walls, blending into the masonry with just enough articulation of painted form to suggest genre (three are portraits) but with colouring that bears no relation to the actual subjects. Like those other visitors, Brice and Dézallier d’Argenville, Martin seems to have been so struck by the overwhelming quantity of objects in the Académie that the representational surfaces of these works get merely summarised in the effort to convey an impression of the space. Guérin, the secrétaire, by contrast, made the exact subjects of the paintings and their locations on the walls the primary focus of his Description. In part an aid for the Académie’s visitors, Guérin produced an ekphrastic text describing each work in detail and a series of architectural plans and elevations that fold out to create a portable guidebook identifying objects with a numerical key. Guérin’s Description represents the seven principal spaces that made up the Académie’s ground floor apartments, hinted at by the open doorway in Martin’s painting leading from the salle d’assemblée through to the round salon that Guérin calls ‘la première pièce’ (the first room) (Figure 3.7). This was entered from

3.6 Plan and elevation of the école du modèle. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London. (© The British Library Board [7807.e.3.B3-4-289])

3.7 Plan and elevation of ‘le Salon, première pièce de l’Appartement’. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London. (© The British Library Board [7807.e.3.B3-4-289])

3.8 Plan and elevation of ‘la seconde salle où se tiennent ordinairement les assemblées’ showing location of artists’ portraits displayed in this room. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London. (© The British Library Board [7807.e.3.B3-4-289]) KEY: A. Joseph Vivien, François Girardon (1701); B. Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait (1715); C. Hyacinthe Rigaud, Martin Desjardins (1700); D. Hyacinthe Rigaud, Pierre Mignard (1691); E. Nicolas de Largillière, Charles Lebrun (1686); F. Alexandres-François Desportes, Self-Portrait as a huntsman (1699).

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the vestibule (also just visible at the end of the enfilade in the painting), a tiny space crammed with nine morceaux de réception, among them Lambert’s double-portrait of the Beaubrun cousins (Figure 1.8).20 The round salon functioned as the Académie’s initial reception room. Visitors were greeted with an array of casts of antique sculptures (declaring the institution’s classical aspirations), a selection of sculpted and painted morceaux de réception in a range of genres giving a taster of what might follow, and on the right (when walking through to the salle d’assemblée) an imposing display of the Académie’s powerful protectors. In an arched niche Testelin’s grand portrait of Louis XIV as Protector of the Arts (1665) was flanked by various ministers who had served as the Académie’s protecteurs or vice-protecteurs, from Lefebvre’s portrait of Colbert (Figure 1.4) to Rigaud’s portrait of the Duc d’Antin, then in post.21 Performing in absentia the patronal role of their sitters, these effigies were a stand-in for the powerful men they represented. In this entrance space, however, they also marked the beginning of the spatial manifestation of the Académie’s social order constructed through the arrangement of portraits in the rooms that followed. Passing through the round salon into the salle d’assemblée (Figure 3.8), one encountered portraits of a different set of powerful men, those next in line after the protecteurs in the Académie’s ranks (see Table 2.1), namely directeurs, chanceliers, and recteurs. Guérin’s plan provides the detail missing from Martin’s painting, confirming the identity of those three portrait subjects. The most prominent, placed at the centre of the back wall, is Largillière’s portrait of Charles Lebrun (Figure 1.18), the Académie’s revered founding father and directeur until his death in 1690. The other two, hanging on the left wall on either side of the recess, are both portraits by Rigaud: closest to us, his morceau-de-réception portrait of Desjardins (Figure 2.3), sculptor and former recteur; and nearer the corner, a portrait of Pierre Mignard (Figure 3.11), commissioned upon his election as directeur after Lebrun. From Guérin’s plan we learn that there were three other portraits of academicians hanging in this room, not so evident in Martin’s painting.22 Two of these hung opposite each other on the reveals of the central wall recess: Vivien’s portrait of François Girardon (Plate 8) (chancelier, 1695–1715); and a Self-Portrait (Figure 3.12) donated by Antoine Coypel (directeur, 1714–1722). Finally, on the wall behind the viewer in Martin’s painting was Desportes’ SelfPortrait as a huntsman (Figure 3.9). Desportes, a mere conseiller, is somewhat anomalous among these sitters, but his painting was never considered a portrait, indeed its status as a still life is evident in its positioning above the cornice to balance the still life on the wall opposite. Thus in this second room, site of the assemblées, the institution’s most important business was conducted by officiers under the auspices of some of the greatest men ever to represent those officier ranks. Lebrun in particular, his full-length quasistate portrait dominating the wall (so much so that Martin actually ignores the painting that hung beneath it), reigned over this room much as Louis XIV did the round salon.23 When Guérin and Martin described this room, all

3.9 Alexandre-François Desportes, Self-Portrait as a huntsman, 197 × 163 cm, oil on canvas, 1699, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Stéphane Maréchalle)

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but Coypel, the current directeur, had passed away into institutional history. But these were the men from whom the current executive had inherited their decision-making responsibilities and the men to whose greatness they might one day aspire. After the salle d’assemblée, exiting through the other door, the next space encountered was the salle où sont les Vases de Medicis (Figure 3.10). Its function is unspecified but it probably served as a reception room for larger gatherings and formal occasions. It was also here that the majority of the artists’ portraits were displayed. Guérin describes 36 academicians’ portraits in total (including over two-thirds of the morceau-de-réception portraits and a couple of donated works like Mignard’s Self-Portrait [Plate 15]), most of which were hung in the top row above the cornice creating an unbroken chain around all four walls.24 Massed together were many now familiar faces, among them Jacques Buirette (Figure 1.10), Noël Coypel (Figure 1.9), Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron

3.10 Plan and elevation of ‘la troisième Salle de l’Académie où sont les Vases de Medicis’. Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie (Paris, 1715), British Library, London. (© The British Library Board [7807.e.3.B3-4-289])

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(Plate 1) (standing out in her oval frame), Louis II de Boullogne (Plate 5), and the very first, Jacques Sarazin (Figure 1.1). While some of these artists had or would later hold those elite officier positions at the top of the hierarchy, most were on the next rungs down the ladder, adjoints à recteur or professeurs. The route through the enfilade of the Académie’s apartments thus took the visitor through a spatial installation of the institution’s hierarchical structure: as one walked through the rooms in the prescribed order from the entrance vestibule, one moved down the ranks from protecteurs and vice-protecteurs, to directeurs and key executive figures, to the rest of the officiers, all represented in effigy via the Académie’s portrait collection. That the portraits in these apartments were arranged to reflect the Académie’s social structure is an effect that goes unremarked in Guérin’s text. In fact, the secrétaire’s introduction emphasised that the arrangement of paintings was based not on hierarchies of ancienneté, but purely on ‘symmetry’, that is, an effort to achieve the most pleasing order of objects.25 Guérin’s aesthetic justifications were no doubt a balm to soothe the internal jealousies of artists who found their morceau de réception relegated to a vestibule or, like the portraitists in the third room, who found theirs skied high above the reception pieces of history painters occupying the privileged lower walls. But the requirements of harmony might offer some explanation for why the majority of morceau-de-réception portraits lost their pair at the moment of installation. A few, like Jean Ranc’s François Verdier (Figure 1.21) and Nicolas de Plattemontagne (Figure 2.5), remained together, hanging one above the other in the Medici Vase room, but most were dispersed to form new conversations and connections with their painted peers. This idea of portraits ‘in conversation’, interacting with the world around them, is an intentionally animated image of the experience of the Académie’s interiors. Effigies of human beings, irrespective of whether one knows the person, demand attention in a way that other images do not. History paintings and landscapes might make for interchangeable items of decoration in a harmony-driven hang, but portraits, standing-in for real individuals, have a different kind of presence. By ‘presence’ I mean not only the number of works or how much surface area they covered (so aptly conveyed in Guérin’s plans), but rather how these painted bodies existed in that space – their thereness – to put it phenomenologically. In effect, the Académie’s apartments were inhabited by two orders of bodies – those that occupied the environment, and those that constituted that environment – two sets of academicians with an equally palpable presence, one corporeal, the other painted. As we shall see in the following sections, however, this distinction could occasionally blur.

Encounters with Portraits For academicians, the experience of these portraits in this space created particular meanings and values because of the personal connections between

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sitters and beholders. But to understand how academicians’ portraits participated in everyday life at the Académie, we first have to understand how portraits were generally treated by their beholders in eighteenth-century France. Why did portraits demand attention and what interactions did they elicit? Furniture in an interior is, as Mimi Hellman argues, a ‘social actor’, structuring the behaviour and appearance of the individuals who use it.26 Like furniture, the portraits hanging in the Académie’s apartments had a spatial presence that imposed on the social interactions occurring around them. But unlike furniture, paintings have a different way of being present in a room. Paintings do not require kinetic negotiation like a table or chair. As framed flat canvases hung against a wall, their presence is less about material occupation of a space and more about interrupting the perceived material realities of that space – both physical realities (as images that seem to extend the beholder’s vision beyond the wall) and metaphysical realities (inviting the beholder to imagine that extension as a world). As representations of ‘real’ people, portraits are quite unique in this regard. An encounter with any painting involves both a consideration of the painting’s subject (its metaphysical reality) and an awareness of the painting itself as an object (its physical reality). But when that painting’s subject is a person who exists, or once existed, in the world, then the boundaries between the real and the representational become permeable – the presence of the object can become conflated with an imagined presence of the painting’s subject. As a result, portraits can be imbued with all sorts of subjective qualities. Most of us are familiar with that common sensation of being ‘watched’ by a portrait, as though the figure in the frame were aware of our presence before the canvas, but in the eighteenth century the subjectivity of a portrait was taken to greater extremes. The uncanny impulse to interact with portraits is used to great effect in literature of the period, where characters engage portraits in conversations, or sometimes more. In Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), Chevalier Danceney gushes about the pleasure he would feel at ‘touching’ a portrait of Marquise de Merteuil in her absence.27 Such imagined interactions reach a peak in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Narcisse (1753), where the infatuated protagonist Valere falls in love with a portrait (which unbeknownst to him is an image of himself dressed as a woman). In a plot that turns on the distinction between what is real and what is represented, Rousseau foregrounds the slippage the beholder can make with a portrait in the penultimate scene: when Valere takes the portrait and declares ‘Behold now the sole object of all my love’, it is not entirely clear whether this ‘object’ is the portrait or its sitter.28 Intersubjective interactions between people and portraits were not, however, limited to fictional tales. Eighteenthcentury critics and essayists frequently used animated language to recall their viewing experiences. Dézallier d’Argenville in his Life of Rigaud wrote that on encountering his portraits ‘one enters … into conversation with the persons they represent’, and in his comments about the portraits of Desjardins and

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Mignard in particular (those paintings from the salle d’assemblée), he claimed that Rigaud had managed to ‘revive’ his then dead sitters by painting them back to life.29 In the Académie’s apartments, where beholders of portraits shared a lived connection with their sitters, slippages between the real and the representational were especially intensified. When the person represented was a member of the community (a colleague, a former classmate from student days, an old professeur, someone’s introducteur, or the directeur in whose hands the beholder had been sworn into the Académie) and when the person looking at the portrait was also a member of the community (someone who understood the rituals behind the objects, who knew how and where they had been made, who was familiar with the interactions that had taken place in the process, and who understood the histories represented in the objects and their symbolic roles as institutional images) this viewing experience became an intimate interaction. Academicians became ‘engaged spectators’, to borrow John Shearman’s term, viewers implicated by a work of art who therefore experience its meaning differently from casual observers.30 Academicians made the portraits work in a way the uninitiated gaze could not. A rare taste of the engaged spectator’s experience is granted by the academician and portraitist, Louis Tocqué. In an assemblée in 1750, Tocqué opened proceedings with a conférence – his Discours sur le genre du portrait.31 Delivered in the Académie’s apartments using the portraits on its walls to illustrate his arguments, Tocqué’s lecture provides exceptional insights into how academicians responded to portraits within the institution. At one point, while explaining the necessity for a portraitist to be able to represent caractère (personality), Tocqué referred to Rigaud’s portraits of Desjardins and Mignard (Figures 2.3 and 3.11). By mid-century the Académie was installed in its first floor apartments and Rigaud’s portraits (still displayed side-by-side) had taken up residence in the grand salle (P3 of Figure 3.3).32 When reading Tocqué’s text, one imagines him standing in this room delivering his conférence and gesturing to these paintings as he called upon his audience to admire the great skill that M. Rigaud has demonstrated in his portrait of M. Mignard, his model having presented him with nought but a pale and wizened old man. What finesse is in this head? What nobility in the simple comportment? What fire is to be found in that of M. Desjardins? Behold these portraits which render not only the physical traits of the individuals but also their personalities.33

Tocqué was discussing Rigaud’s skills as a portraitist, but his remarks reveal as much about the sitters, his language implying a personal connection. Tocqué talks about Desjardins and Mignard as if he knew them, certainly enough to judge Rigaud’s ability to capture their physical and emotional likenesses, enough to admire the ‘fire’ in Desjardins, and enough to appreciate the finesse and nobility that Rigaud had given Mignard, who looked, in real life, gaunt and wasted. And yet Tocqué never knew either man in real life. Both Desjardins and Mignard were dead before Tocqué was even born. It was

3.11 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Pierre Mignard, 140 × 111 cm, oil on canvas, 1691, Musée national du Château de Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

3.12 Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait, 89 × 70 cm, oil on canvas, 1715, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

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only through institutional legend that Desjardins and Mignard lived on for the next generation, and their portraits provided the vehicle for this legend, allowing academicians like Tocqué to imagine personal connections with men they had never met. Indeed Tocqué all but makes this observation himself. Trying to make sense of his emotional response to these effigies, he exclaims: Why do these portraits affect me so when I look at them? It is because they conjure an illusion such that I believe myself to be in conversation with the persons they represent. I see the canvas appear to breathe. I see the soul painted in the face. I want to understand this mystery. I approach them and I believe I glimpse the blood which circulates beneath their skin.34

For Tocqué, Desjardins and Mignard are as good as alive in their portraits. They radiate the warmth of a human interaction. He imagines himself in a lived exchange with these men, approaching them, conversing with them. Their painted form is no barrier to intimacy because the canvas itself becomes vital: it breathes, pumps blood, and even contains a soul. Of course, Tocqué did not think that Desjardins and Martin were actually still alive. Portraits in the eighteenth century were not generally imbued with supernatural powers, they were not worshipped or fetishised, and nobody believed that people who died in the 1690s could really be spoken to in 1750. But in the Académie’s rooms, portraits did have the power to trigger at least metaphorical dialogues across time and across the metaphysical boundaries normally imposed between a living person and a framed canvas. Most immediate of the interactions between portraits and academicians were those that occurred when the sitter was actually still alive and also present in the room. Antoine Coypel, for instance, one of the most regular attendees of meetings, certainly sat in the presence of his effigy (Figure 3.12) in the salle d’assemblée of the ground floor apartments. In fact, if Martin observed accurately how the academicians used this room, then at every assemblée Coypel would have sat directly underneath his self-portrait. According to the guidelines for seating arrangements, Coypel, as current directeur, occupied the ‘place of honour’ at the top of the arch of the U-shaped bank of chairs, just in front of the wall recess where his portrait hung.35 Being in the same room as his portrait would have instilled a powerful sense of validation for Coypel. With his effigy hanging alongside those of the most highly ranked and highly regarded officiers in the Académie’s history, Coypel’s right to preside in the present was reinforced through this material confirmation of his status: Coypel was, so this display declared, one of the most honoured members of the community. More interesting, however, is the fact that Coypel himself had orchestrated this declaration. Only a month after being elected directeur, Coypel decided to paint his self-portrait with the specific intention of hanging it just above the ‘place d’honneur’ in the salle d’assemblée. Of course Coypel did not couch his motivations quite so explicitly, framing his gesture instead as an effort to create visual harmony. Having first requested that

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Vivien’s portrait of Girardon be hung in the recess, Coypel then conveniently volunteered to paint his own portrait ‘to fill the other side of the embrasure thus affording symmetry’.36 For Coypel, sitting beneath his portrait must have been an affirming experience. For the other academicians, who viewed both simultaneously – the living Coypel and the painted one – we can imagine that it brought to life the very idea of the collected portraits as a history of the institution. By having the portrait of Antoine Coypel in the same room as the real Antoine Coypel, what more dynamic a demonstration could there be of the connection between paint and flesh? A reminder that all these portraits were proxies for real academicians, making those of the past just as present as those still in the room. For as we gathered from Tocqué, even when the sitters were dead, their portraits assured their continued presence in the Académie. Desjardins and Lebrun, who both died in the 1690s, were no less present for engaged spectators in the salle d’assemblée than their living colleagues. In the text of his Description, Guérin experiences these sitters in the present. Desjardins (Figure 2.3) is described in the present continuous – ‘having his left hand rested on the head of one of the slaves’ (referring to the bronze sculpture in the foreground).37 Lebrun (Figure 1.18) too is present, ‘as large as life, sitting in a fauteuil painting a canvas’, and Guérin refers to Lebrun as quite simply being ‘premier Peintre du Roy, Directeur, Chancelier & Recteur’, though he had not actually been so since his death over 20 years earlier.38 This connection between paint and flesh, or between the real and the representational, might have been activated for Guérin by the familiar objects he saw in the portraits. Like many morceau-de-réception portraits, these paintings depicted artworks associated with the sitter, which still existed and were often well-known to their academic audience. In his description of Desjardin’s portrait, Guérin places considerable emphasis on the sculpted head in the foreground, going off on a tangent to describe the bronze slaves from the base of the Monument to Louis XIV (Figure 3.13) that Desjardins made for the Place des Victoires.39 The Place was only a short walk from the Louvre (Figure 3.2) in a quartier where many academicians lived so was no doubt well-known to Guérin from his experience of the city. Rigaud, the author of the portrait, would have been even more familiar with the sculpture, for living just off the Place on the rue de la Feuillade he would encounter it everyday.40 Every academician meanwhile was intimately acquainted with at least two objects in Lebrun’s portrait (Figure 1.18) – the Borghese Gladiator and the Belvedere Antinoüs – which were standing only a few metres away in the entrance salon (Figure 3.7), which was the room behind the wall upon which Lebrun’s portrait hung.41 Given its placement within the salle d’assemblée, the hand with which Lebrun pointed to these two sculptures was also gesturing, when extended beyond its frame, to the doorway into this room. For engaged spectators in the Académie, these recognisable objects triggered a connection between the representational worlds of the portraits and the real world in which they were hung. If one could experience painted objects ‘in the flesh’

3.13 Martin Desjardins, Monument à la gloire de Louis XIV et de la Paix de Nimègue, 220 × 200 × 170 cm, oil on canvas, bronze, c.1679–1685, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / René-Gabriel Ojéda)

3.14 Document Casket of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, leather with gilt bronze, ENSBA, Paris. (Photo: © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Beaux-arts de Paris)

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– if one could, for instance, see the secrétaire’s ornate casket (Figure 3.14) sitting on the desk in Testelin’s portrait (Plate 4) or the sculpted bas-relief of Painting and Sculpture (Figure 1.31) included in Benoist’s portrait of Buirette (Figure 1.10) – then the metaphysical boundary between pictorial space and real space would start to dissolve as painting and world overlapped. Painted bodies became more tangibly present through the possibility of shared phenomenological encounters: like Desjardins, the academicians could also touch the head of the bronze slave around the corner in Place des Victoires; like Testelin, they could take the Statuts out of the box in the secrétaire’s logement; or like Lebrun, they could study Antinoüs and the Gladiator on display in the entrance salon. For the Académie’s engaged spectators, their walls inhabited by intimatelyknown individuals painted as life-sized figures with familiar objects, it was not only interactions between portraits and people that took place in these rooms, but also interactions between portraits and portraits. With that emphasis on ‘likeness’ in the assessment criteria for a morceau-de-réception portrait, there was an awareness of a portrait’s ability to embody the essence of the individual. Indeed the goal of a portrait according to eighteenth-century discourses was to capture inner essence through outward appearance, ‘such that the portrait of the body’, as de Piles defined it, ‘is also that of the spirit’.42 Throughout his essay on portraiture, de Piles’s language reveals the degree of subjectivity with which portraits could be imbued, even referring at one point to ‘the soul’ of the painted body.43 It is not difficult to imagine painted ‘spirits’ and ‘souls’ perpetuating the emotional connections that sitters had with their colleagues when they were still alive. The capacity of a person’s image to sustain and even intensify an emotional connection to a dead acquaintance is well known. Roland Barthes’ encounter with the emotional pull of a photograph of his dead mother – ‘a living image of a dead thing’ – contemplates such an experience, speaking of the ‘resurrection’ of the photographed body.44 In the eighteenth century, maintaining personal relationships through images of dead people was, as Marcia Pointon has shown, common in mourning practices like keeping miniatures of a dead spouse.45 Both the photograph and miniature are instances where the emotional connection is preserved in intimate and exclusive viewing experiences: small, transportable images inviting moments of private meditation in a one-to-one exchange. But in the Académie, where portraits and beholders were always in the plural, these connections played out collectively and on a much grander scale: not intimate moments with handheld objects, but dramatic encounters between life-sized effigies enacted above and around current academicians. In the ground floor salle d’assemblée, there were two portraits in particular that created just this sort of spectacle: Largillière’s Charles Lebrun (Figure 1.18) and Rigaud’s Pierre Mignard (Figure 3.11). The competitive and hostile relationship between Lebrun and Mignard was a well-known episode of the Académie’s recent past (explored in detail in Chapter 6). Lebrun and Mignard

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had led opposing factions throughout their professional lives. Mignard had so resented Lebrun that he refused to join the Académie while Lebrun was its chief, and instead rose to prominence as head of the rival guild.46 In their respective roles, the two men vied for artistic supremacy in Paris until eventually, after Lebrun’s death, Mignard succeeded in all his official capacities including directeur and premier peintre du Roi.47 Mignard only lived for another five years, but his rivalry with Lebrun would play out for much longer on the walls of the salle d’assemblée. Almost as soon as Mignard took the role of directeur, he commissioned Rigaud to paint his portrait, which according to Rigaud’s account books, was completed by 1691.48 What happened to it after that is not entirely clear, but it was eventually donated to the Académie by Rigaud in 1712, only a few weeks before the relocation to the ground floor.49 Thus it came to hang in prime position in the new salle d’assemblée along with those other elite officiers, placed perpendicular to Largillière’s portrait of Lebrun. Staring directly out from their adjacent walls, it was as though even two decades on, Lebrun and Mignard refused to reconcile. The ex-directeurs remained at a permanent junction, their portraits purposefully avoiding each other’s gaze. Even today in a different part of the Louvre, we get some sense of this spatially staged rivalry in the museum’s seventeenth-century galleries, where the portrait of Lebrun is hung in a similar relationship with a portrait of Mignard (not Rigaud’s portrait, but Mignard’s later Self-Portrait [Plate 15]). Echoing the experience of the salle d’assemblée, the museum spectator is caught here in the same right-angled intersection of gazes, where any attempt to engage with Lebrun catches the viewer in the cross-gaze of Mignard, and vice versa. When one knows the histories of these two men, the hostility in the museum display is palpable, but it is nothing compared to the experience afforded to spectators in the salle d’assemblée in the early 1700s, when the rivalry was raw, intimately felt, and recently lived. There is no suggestion in the Académie’s records that this stand-off was arranged intentionally, but the implications could not have been missed by anyone. Its effects would have been especially obvious when activated by the discussions and debates that took place in this room. When, for instance, in 1721, François Tavernier read aloud part two of Guillet de Saint-Georges’ Life of Lebrun, the portraits provided a dramatic backdrop for the proceedings, if not indeed a near re-enactment of events.50 As the secrétaire described Lebrun’s role in the establishment of the Académie and spoke of the attacks of guild masters on the ‘skilful men’ of the arts (read: academicians), the portraits of Mignard and Lebrun were not only standingin for two of the protagonists in this contretemps, but physically staging the antagonism that had existed between these parties.51 Of the 11 academicians who signed the register that day, only Corneille van Clève had been present the first time Saint-Georges had read aloud his Life of Lebrun in 1693.52 On this earlier occasion, the portrait of Mignard was probably not present, but Mignard himself was, listening we might imagine with some resentment to

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the glorification of his rival at, in a sense, his own expense. Twenty-eight years later, Mignard’s portrait took the place of the man, but his subjective response would have been manifest even without his corporeal presence. The placement of portraits on the walls of the Académie thus initiated an entirely new level of meaning for their engaged spectators. Along with experiences derived from one-to-one encounters with portraits (triggering whatever emotional connection the beholder had with the sitter), there were other experiences derived from encountering the portraits collectively. Like a theatrical performance, sitters could interact simultaneously with any of the people, objects, and other portraits in the room. Far from static encounters, these interactions were constantly being activated in different ways, not only through changes to the hang, but also according to who was in the room and what was happening at the time. For those spectators with an insider’s knowledge, there would have been countless conversations to witness: academicians ‘present’, like Lebrun, while their eulogistic Lives were read aloud years after their deaths; in-jokes about portraits of close friends placed next to each other; others coming face-to-face with their professional nemeses; portraits of masters hanging above their former students; or academicians seen in the multiple, like Antoine Coypel in the same room as his self-portrait, or the many faces of Girardon, with portraits in both the salle d’assemblée and the Medici Vase room.53

The Room of Portraits Following these emotional connections around rooms and through the apartments gives a vivid sense of the experience that the Académie’s portraits offered their initiated beholders. Over time, as academicians were surrounded by a steadily growing display of portraits, these subjective encounters increased significantly. By the end of the century, the Académie’s art collection had expanded dramatically. The final inventory taken after the Revolution records thousands of items, among them 399 morceau-de-réception paintings, hundreds more sculpted and engraved morceaux de réception, vast collections of prints and drawings, and countless casts and other teaching objects, like the écorchés of a man and horse donated by Houdon for anatomy classes.54 Most of these objects were displayed within the six principal spaces making up the first floor apartments (the suite of five connecting rooms [P1–P5] and the galerie d’Apollon [S] [Figure 3.3]). By tracing the different arrangement of portraits in these apartments, where the Académie remained for 72 years, we can see how display and institutional custom eventually transformed these effigies into even more active participants in the community’s collective practices. If the Académie’s rooms had already seemed filled to capacity at the beginning of the century, then by the end they were practically overflowing. According to the final inventory, the salle d’assemblée had 42 paintings

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squeezed onto its walls, while the grande salle housed an almost unimaginable 85 paintings and pastels, along with 59 sculptures.55 The walls that Martin witnessed in the 1710s (Figure 3.4) were dominated by pictures, but by the 1780s there must have been no walls left to be seen. In fact, the walls could not even take all they had and many works were in storage throughout the apartments. The grande salle also accommodated two large armoires filled with 91 portfolios of prints and six folders containing 458 académies. The Year II inventory mentions thousands more engravings in portfolios and scores of paintings from the grand prix competitions kept in garde-meubles, while Dézallier d’Argenville’s Description sommaire notes seven oil paintings standing on semi-permanent easels in the galerie d’Apollon, among them Jacob Van Loo’s portrait of Corneille (Figure 1.2) and Marie-Suzanne Giroust’s portrait of Pigalle (Plate 2).56 Amid this plethora of art works, the Académie’s portraits had grown to a collection of well over a hundred works, the morceau-de-réception portraits alone totalling 111 after Mosnier, the final portraitist, was received in 1788. Sheer volume of population meant that emotionally charged encounters with artists’ portraits had become ordinary, but far from meaningless, practices of everyday institutional life. Through the standardisation of their production in the admission process, these official effigies had become familiar objects: threequarter-length bodies on regular sized canvases with sparse backgrounds, accompanied by tools of the trade and equally familiar representations of the sitters’ own artistic productions. Familiarity, however, does not necessarily reduce an object’s impact. Indeed, far from fading from consciousness, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Académie’s portraits had turned into a dramatic focus. Portraits were found in several rooms – four in the salle d’assemblée, 25 in the grande salle – but the vast majority were hung together in a single room, a space so consciously devoted to their display that it was known as the salle des portraits (P4 of Figure 3.3).57 This round room formed a kind of axis point around which the apartments revolved. Its three doorways provided access to three spaces at the Académie’s administrative and ceremonial core: the salle d’assemblée (P5), the galerie d’Apollon (S), and the grande salle (P3). As academicians moved through the apartments, the salle des portraits was a constant thoroughfare, distributing people through its entrances and exits as they came and went about their daily affairs. Artists coming from their studios in the Galerie to attend meetings in the salle d’assemblée, or from the main palace to attend formal receptions and conférences in the grand salle or to perform teaching duties in the école du modèle next door, all passed through the salle des portraits, as did the gouverneur and students coming from the École Royale des Elèves Protégés to attend classes every morning in the galerie d’Apollon.58 These frequent visitors were met in the salle des portraits by an overwhelming 92 portraits, only seven of which were not portraits of artists (Appendix 2). If six portraits in the salle d’assemblée of the 1710s could create

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a presence, then 85 portraits of artists in the salle des portraits of the 1780s must have made that presence quite inescapable. The unique presence of portraits is intensified in spaces where effigies are more numerous and densely displayed, and it would be difficult to imagine a more intense display than this. Records of the placement of art works in the Académie’s apartments from the latter part of the eighteenth century are much less detailed than those from the beginning. But even without sources as precise as Guérin’s elevations or as immediate as Martin’s painted impression, it is possible to reconstruct some sense of the portrait display from inventories and from Blondel’s floor plan that gives the dimensions and layout of the room. With a diameter of approximately six toises (11.7 metres) and a wall circumference therefore of approximately 37 metres, the salle des portraits’ 92 portraits (along with four history paintings) would have literally covered the walls.59 Given the regular canvas size (roughly 130 × 97 centimetres) and accounting for the additional area occupied by frames, the portraits would have circled around this room in at least three rows, probably growing to four or even five in some places to accommodate wall space lost to doorways and window embrasures. All around this room, to a height of perhaps as much as 7 meters and covering a painted surface area of over a hundred square metres, the effigies of 85 past and present academicians watched over the comings and goings of current members. From that single chain of portraits around the top of the wall in the Medici Vase room in the 1710s, the morceaux de réception had expanded to fill an entire ‘room of portraits’, wrapping around and around to circle the walls in row after row of painted bodies. Though the portraits are now no longer all together in their round room, we can still get some idea of the viewing experience of the salle des portraits from the current installation of Académie portraits held at the Château de Versailles. With only 26 paintings in the room at Versailles the display is nothing like as dense, but it nevertheless suggests the palpable effect these paintings have when massed together. Standing in this room is like being surrounded by an ensemble cast, each painted person self-consciously presenting himself to the spectator and to the other painted bodies with a variety of poses, gestures, and interconnecting gazes. Some figures look out into our space as inviting interlocutors, others glance across the walls; some perform actions within their own pictorial space, and others point left or right, up or down, as though interacting with each other across their frames. As a spectator in the midst of these performing bodies, drawn by their gestures and following their interactions around the room, ‘viewing’ feels like an inadequate term to describe the experience of this space. To view something suggests a visual experience with a focused point of interest, where the spectator occupies a position of some passivity – a certain degree of removal from the scene. Here, by contrast, the spectator becomes part of the scene. The crowd of bodies gathered around the walls create numerous focal points in every direction, requiring the beholder to participate actively

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– moving, turning, stepping towards and away – and so inviting a physical experience that is not limited to looking. In Michael Fried’s seminal essay on modernist sculpture, ‘Art and Objecthood’, he draws a distinction between the beholder’s experience of an object and that of ‘an object in a situation’.60 This offers a compelling observation for understanding how the placement of portraits in the salle des portraits transformed the beholder’s experience of them, for once on the walls, they became inseparable from their physical context. Within the salle des portraits, viewing became a corporeal encounter, activating a distinction from the portrait-as-object viewed on its own (e.g. a portrait on an easel being judged as a morceau de réception), to the theatrical and spatially located portrait-as-situation, where the portraits became an environment in which their ‘stage presence’ (to use Fried’s words) both ‘confronted’ and ‘included’ the beholder.61 In their circular room, the massed display of academicians’ portraits did exactly that. They filled the walls in a display so dense as to appear like a single painted surface, uninterrupted except for three doorways and three windows, a canvas layer punctuated only by wooden frames and the occasional glimpse of wall or architrave. Their striking uniformity made for a harmonised display of evenly sized objects, each with a life-sized effigy posing against an empty ground. Seen together the sparse settings of the portraits finally make sense, creating the impression of a continuous backdrop, a coherent pictorial space in which all the sitters were located together – on the wall, as the wall, or instead of the wall. Encircling the spectator in their round room, the portraits would have energised that sensation evident even in the Versailles display of being surrounded by a crowd of interacting bodies. The salle des portraits became not just a room for portraits, but a room of portraits. Here it was not the portraits that one experienced so much as the salle, not the objects so much as the space. This is not to say that the portraits were in anyway overlooked – how could they have been when they dominated the space so entirely? An object in a situation is, as Fried says, still the focus of the situation.62 But in the salle des portraits, the focus shifted away from specific portraits (encounters with individuals) to a consideration of the whole group (an encounter with the collective). One would still be aware of individual portraits, but one would be aware of them as part of something else. Displaying them in a single room activated the portraits to create a physical experience of the Académie’s collective identity. Once on the walls of the salle des portraits, morceau-de-réception portraits went from being painted representations of individual artists, to being a spatial representation of an artistic community. As we saw in Chapter 1, morceau-de-réception portraits became both a way of defining the individual academician and a way of defining the Académie through its members. The salle des portraits was a spatialisation of this pars pro toto / totum pro parte mechanism, in which the individual visually became part of a whole, but a whole that was constituted entirely by individuals.

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In commissioning morceau-de-réception portraits, the Académie had long had the intention for them to work in unison. As we have seen, the traditions underlying their production were in part a conscious effort to create a historical narrative of the institution. It is not surprising then that in the context of their display they should be collected together and highlighted as a group, thus dramatising their role as a history-in-effigy. Like those recueils of engraved morceau-de-réception portraits composed by Saint-Gelais (1729) and Lépicié (1739), the salle des portraits was another way of ‘compiling’ academicians’ portraits. Like the printed documents, this room brought together images from every moment of the institution’s history into a single location: from its earliest days, in old portraits like that first effigy of Sarazin (1657) (Figure 1.1), right up to the present, in the most recent submission of Mosnier’s LouisJacques-François Lagrenée and Charles-Antoine Bridan (1788) (Figure 1.12). In theory, the salle des portraits made the ideal repository for displaying this historical narrative. In practice, however, there seems to have been little attempt to tell any kind of sequential story. Some sense of the portraits’ arrangement is inferable from the order in which the inventories list them, particularly in the case of Dézallier d’Argenville’s Description sommaire, which includes useful subheadings indicating fixed features within the room (‘in the first window embrasure’, ‘above the doorway to the salle d’assemblée’, etc.).63 From these lists, it is clear that the portraits were mixed together on the walls of the salle des portraits irrespective of when they were painted or when their sitters had lived. Dézallier d’Argenville notes, for instance, to the right upon entering from the grande salle, the consecutive presence of Lambert-Sigisbert Adam (1753), Largillière (1723) (Figure 2.1) and Michel I Corneille (1702).64 Corneille (1601–1664) was born 55 years before Largillière (1656–1746), and 99 years before Adam (1700–1759), yet despite each being separated by at least two generations of academicians, the three sitters were placed beside each other. With three different eras of the institution’s history merged in one small part of the wall, a consistent historical narrative was evidently of little concern. Whatever the Académie’s historicising aims, it was apparently only in secondary printed versions of the portraits that chronology was the primary objective. Perhaps the imperative behind the display was still, as Guérin had declared, visual harmony, perhaps these chronological disjunctions were merely consequences of attempts to create a symmetry that pleased the eye of the observer. Regardless of the justifications behind these choices, the unchronological hang had a particular effect, one felt more intensely in the salle des portraits than in the other rooms where paintings were not so immediately attached to specific moments in time. Landscapes, still lifes, genre paintings, and mythological and religious scenes, with their more timeless subject matter, are not so categorically located in real time. The effigy of a person, however, recalls instantly the transitory period of a human life (through personal connections or outmoded fashions) as well as the limited duration of the object’s making (in that social interaction between maker and sitter). In the salle des portraits, time was thus not only present, it was in

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chronometric disarray. Blending successive generations of academicians into a non-sequential scheme, the arrangement of portraits articulated the past, not as a systematic, progressive narrative, but as a single temporal moment characterised by its own internal order. Rather than showing a diachronic panorama of stages within the institution’s history, the room presented a synchronic experience of the Académie’s life as a visually cohesive whole. Unlike those written mémoires and printed recueils, the salle des portraits was not a record of the Académie’s history, it was a presentation of the Académie’s past. Those two orders of bodies that occupied the Académie’s apartments – the painted bodies materially present on the walls and the real bodies corporeally present in the rooms – were marked here not only spatially (as those that formed the space and those that used it), but also temporally (an Académie-past living on in the paintings and an Académie-present living in the now). It was the Académie-past in the portraits that distinguished the current members occupying the room as part of an Académie-present, creating an activated viewing experience with significant ritual import for those implicated therein. For not only was the past a continuous moment, it was connected without disruption to the present, via those portraits representing current academicians still alive and using the space. As we have seen before, life in the Académie was measured differently from life outside. Not only was one born (reçu) as an academician, one also did not pass away, instead moving gradually to a different kind of presence within the institution – from being in the room, to being the room. Effigies, in other words, rendered their sitters immortal within the Académie’s institutional memory. In the salle des portraits, past members did not, however, stand idly by enjoying their perpetuity. Rather they played an active role in company business, forming an environment in which current academicians conducted their professional lives in the symbolic presence of institutional forebears. This Académie-past engendered a spatial experience of a common institutional ancestry from which present members of the academic community were collectively descended. In other words, in the salle des portraits, the morceau-deréception portraits were imbued with a totemic value. Emile Durkheim defines totems as the ‘material representations’ of a community, objects that mark the ancestry of a group and which are often arranged to create a ceremonial space for the performance of rites central to the ongoing life of that community.65 In the salle des portraits, academicians’ portraits certainly marked the Académie’s ancestry, but what went on in this circular room that required the presence of the institution’s ancestors? The room was undoubtedly passed through frequently as people came and went between spaces with more clearly defined purposes, like the salle d’assemblée or the école du modèle. But there is little in the sources that indicates the specific activities that occurred in the salle des portraits itself. Blondel, however, provides a small clue, noting in his Architecture Française that the room was used every August on the feast of Saint-Louis to display submissions by étudiants for the grand prix, probably exhibited on easels in the

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middle of the room.66 It is likely that throughout the rest of the year the salle des portraits served a similar function, as the room in which agrément works and morceaux de réception were displayed for judging before the ceremonies. From the procedures observed in the Procès-Verbaux, the act of assessing the objects appears to have taken place in a separate space from the subsequent acts of deliberating and voting, which were performed in the salle d’assemblée. Presumably, as with grand prix submissions, the works presented for agréments and réceptions were displayed in the salle des portraits on easels and makeshift pedestals so officiers could appraise them before withdrawing next door to cast their anonymous vote in camera. On regular occasions in the Académie’s administrative schedule, that is, every time artists presented for the grand prix, for agréments or réceptions, the salle des portraits came to accommodate a third temporal element. Beneath the academicians of the past in their portraits, the academicians of the present judged the works of étudiants and agréés, aspiring to become the academicians of the future. In this setting, past, present, and future were assembled in a single room, together activating the symbolic space created by the portraits for these institutional rituals. Not only did the space bring these temporal elements together, it hierarchised them according to their function in the ceremony. The past-academicians oversaw proceedings from their elevated positions on the walls, while the present-academicians determined the worthiness of future-academicians either to win prizes or to enter the ranks of the community. For agréés in particular, this was the site of the final act in their stage of reflection, as the salle des portraits also seems to have served as an antechamber while the voting was carried out next door. Waiting in this room, considering the portraits around them, the agréés found themselves surrounded by exemplars. On one hand, as works of art, these were benchmarks of the morceaux de réception criteria, over a hundred years-worth of objects that had been accepted and now defined the standard against which the current candidate was to be judged. On the other hand, these were not just any works of art, but portraits of past academicians and so objects of emulation: the very people that these aspiring artists sought to become and whose places they hoped one day to fill. These effigies were ancestor figures, totems of the academic community, and their presence in this space on these occasions charged the situation with feelings of collective identity, pride in the institution, and communal unity. During these rituals the multiple rows of portraits must have engendered a sense of ascendance – a movement upwards – symbolising the progression taking place as a new member entered the institution’s social structure. Here was a spatial manifestation of the Académie’s hierarchies demonstrating the ideal movement through its levels: all the way from the soon-to-be-initiated candidate, to the officiers about to have their effigies added to the walls, right up to the revered members of the past who were already part of institutional legend. To consider the role of the portraits in this space as totemic is to suggest, to use Tim Ingold’s concept of totemism, that there was an understanding

portraits, spaces, and everyday encounters at the académie 151

in the Académie of a relationship between ancestors, environment (that ‘enduring form of their presence’), and the living beings that the environment engendered.67 Hanging on the walls of the Académie’s apartments, portraits of academicians were activated in this way by the context of their display. Within the institutional setting, these subjectively encountered representations of known (or once-known) individuals created personal meanings for those beholders with lived connections to the Académie. At the same time, the arrangement of portraits in the rooms also imbued both the objects and the spaces with additional symbolic values. The salle des portraits in particular became the site of a ritual cycle for the academicians’ portraits, most of which began their lives as part of a candidate’s initiation process and then continued their ritual service to the community on the walls of the Académie, composing and structuring its environment. In this setting, portraits became material representations of the group’s collective identity, symbolising its ancestral history, demarcating its physical boundaries, and designating a ceremonial space for the ritual activities that would ensure the community’s future. Throughout Part I, my analysis of the Académie’s morceau-de-réception portraits has explored both the official origins and functions of these objects, and how they came to negotiate and reinforce official institutional relationships. As traces of the community of people who made up the Académie, the portraits have facilitated a reconstruction of the institution’s defining ideologies, its social hierarchies, and its physical environment, granting an understanding of how artists imagined their relationship with the institution, how academicians related to each other, and how they inhabited the spaces that housed them. But official portraits viewed in their official context can only tell us about official relationships. The morceau-de-réception portraits tell the story of the institution as it should have been – the official face of the Académie – but as we have already seen, the human story is never that straightforward. In any community of people, there are countless ways in which members relate to each other, some follow the conventional formulas of institutional structures, and some already exist outside or emerge in spite of those prescribed social patterns. Neither was more real than the other, but the experience of being an academician was more complex than the official records might allow. To find a picture of the Académie’s other faces, we have to look to alternative sources. In Part II, I explore less conscientiously documented and less rigorously systemised relationships that nevertheless connected the Académie’s members. Through an analysis of unofficial portraits and selfportraits made by and of academicians (and sometimes through informal uses of official representations), I investigate how artists related to each other outside the formal structures of the institution, though not necessarily beyond its walls. In studies of three different kinds of ‘unofficial’ relationship – family, friendship, and rivalry – these chapters explore the informal social networks that extended throughout the community, and the personal relationships that worked with, alongside, or against academicians’ professional associations.

152 académie royale: a history in portraits

Notes 1

Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie Royale des Arts de Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris, 1715).

2

For Jean-Siméon Chardin’s inventory (1775) and the inventory from Year II see André Fontaine, Les collections de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris, 1910). Chardin retired as trésorier in July 1774 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 155–156).

3

Portraits were so numerous because each portraitist submitted two morceaux de réception compared with the history painter’s one. For a catalogue of morceaux de réception in all genres see: Les peintres du roi, pp. 222–283.

4

Sébastien Mercier, Tableaux de Paris, vol. 5 (Amsterdam, 1782–1788), pp. 238–239.

5

On the heterogeneous space of the Louvre as an artistic neighbourhood see: Hannah Williams, ‘Le Louvre de Demachy: le palais et son quartier au XVIIIe siècle’, Le témoin méconnu, Pierre Antoine Demachy, 1723–1807, exh. cat. (Versailles, 2014), pp. 30–39.

6

On the history of the Louvre see Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Le Louvre, une histoire de palais (Paris, 2008); and Geneviève Bresc-Bautier (ed.), Le quartier du Louvre au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 2001).

7

Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Française, vol. 4 (Paris, 1752–1756), p. 39.

8

Jules Guiffrey, ‘Logements d’artistes au Louvre’, NAAF (1873), pp. 63–135; and Huard, ‘Les logements’, pp. 18–36.

9

Blondel, Architecture Française, vol. 4, pp. 24–39.

10

Germain Brice, Description nouvelle de la ville de Paris, 5th edn, vol. 1 (Paris, 1706), pp. 27–75; Antoine-Nicolas Dézallier d’Argenville, Voyage pittoresque de Paris, 5th edn (Paris, 1770), pp. 43–58.

11

Dézallier d’Argenville, Voyage, 3rd edn, pp. 48–50; Guérin, Description.

12

The first assemblées in these apartments were on 7 March 1712 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 141–142). The rooms are described in Guérin, Description. My analysis of these apartments builds on the studies in Cathrin Klingsöhr, ‘Die Kunstsammlung der Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 49/4 (1986), pp. 556–578; and Valerius, Académie, pp. 207–226.

13

The first assemblées in these apartments were on 31 December 1721 (PV, vol. 4, p. 324). For a description of its mid-century location see: Blondel, Architecture Française, vol. 4, pp. 37–39. On the Académie’s relocations see: Sandt, ‘Note’, pp. 69–76.

14

On Martin’s painting see Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, ‘Le tableau du mois no. 63: Une assemblée ordinaire de l’Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture au Louvre Attribué à Jean-Baptiste Martin (1659–1735). Une nouvelle acquisition pour les salles de l’Histoire du Louvre’ (September 1999), n.p. and Jean Habert, ‘Œuvres relatives à l’histoire du Louvre’, Musée du Louvre, Département des Peintures, Catalogue des nouvelles acquisitions 1996–2001 (Paris, 2002), pp. 188–190.

15

2 June 1696 (PV, vol. 3, p. 188).

16

Natoire: reçu 31 December 1734; elected professeur 6 July 1737 (PV, vol. 5, pp. 148–149, 208).

portraits, spaces, and everyday encounters at the académie 153

17

Dézallier d’Argenville, Voyage, 3rd edn, p. 49. On seating in the école du modèle see Blondel, Architecture Française, pp. 38–39; and Guérin, Description, pp. 257–260.

18

Susanna Caviglia-Brunel, Charles-Joseph Natoire, 1700–1777 (Paris, 2012).

19

Guérin also notes several engravings. Guérin, Description, pp. 105–164.

20

Guérin, Description, pp. 247–250.

21

Guérin, Description, pp. 29–104.

22

Guérin, Description, pp. 113–116, 123–124, 141–142.

23

The painting below the portrait of Lebrun is identified by Guérin as Poerson’s Apollo presiding over the union of the Academies (1.38). Guérin, Description, pp. 127–129.

24

Guérin itemises the following academicians’ portraits: 6. Louis II Elle, Thomas Regnaudin (1681); 7. Antoine Benoist, Jacques Buirette (1681); 8. Nicolas-Alexis-Simon Belle, Louis Lerambert (1704); 10. Louis II Elle, Samuel Bernard (1681); 11. Philippe Vignon, Philippe de Buyster (1687); 12. Philippe Vignon, Henri de Mauperché (1687); 13. Philippe Lallemand, Gédeon Berbier du Metz (1672); 14. Philippe Lallemand, Charles Perrault (1672); 15. NicolasAlexis-Simon Belle, Pierre Mazeline (1703); 17. Jean Ranc, François Verdier (1703); 18. Jean Ranc, Nicolas de Plattemontage (1703); 19. Robert Tournières, Pierre Monnier (1702); 20. Robert Tournières, Michel I Corneille (1702); 23. André Bouys, Etienne Le Hongre (1691); 24. Jean Tiger, Nicolas Loir (1675); 25. Jean-Charles Nocret, Jean Nocret (1674); 26. Gabriel Revel, Michel Anguier (1683); 27. Jean Tortebat, René-Antoine Houasse (1699); 28. Portrait of Philippe de Champaigne (n.d.); 29. Gilles Allou, Antoine Coypel (1711); 37. ElisabethSophie Chéron, Self-Portrait (1672); 43. Pierre Gobert, Corneille van Clève (1701); 44. Jean Tortebat, Jean Jouvenet (1699); 45. André Bouys, Charles de La Fosse (1688); 46. Florent de La Mare-Richart, Noël Coypel (1677); 47. Gabriel Revel, François Girardon (1683); 48. Gilles Allou, Antoine Coysevox (1711); 49. Nicolas-Alexis-Simon Belle, François de Troy (1703); 58. Gilles Allou, Bon Boullogne (1711); 59. Pierre Gobert, Louis II de Boullogne (1701); 60. François Lemaire, Jacques Sarasin (1657); 61. Marc Nattier, Gilbert de Sève (1676); 62. Florent de La Mare-Richart, Antoine Paillet (1677); 63. Paul Mignard, Nicolas Mignard (1672); 64. Jaques Carré, Gaspard de Marsy (1682); 68. Pierre Mignard, Self-Portrait (1690).

25

Guérin, Description, pp. 23–24.

26

Mimi Hellman, ‘Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in EighteenthCentury France’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32/4 (1999), p. 416.

27

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, vol. 4 (Amsterdam, 1782), p. 152.

28

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Narcisse (Paris, 1753), p. 56.

29

Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé, pp. 318, 313.

30

John Shearman, Only Connect … Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1992), pp. 14–15.

31

7 March 1750 (PV, vol. 6, p. 199).

32

Dézallier d’Argenville’s Description sommaire, p. 129.

154 académie royale: a history in portraits

33

Louis Tocqué, ‘Reflexions sur la peinture et particulierement sur le genre du portrait’ (1750), in Arnauld Doria (ed.), Le Discours de Tocqué sur le Genre du Portrait (Paris, 1930), p. 28.

34

Tocqué, ‘Reflexions’, pp. 28–29.

35

Article XXI, Statuts et Règlements (1663). This regulation was clarified on 23 August 1696: the directeur would sit in first place (in the middle), the chancelier in second (one to the right), the current recteur in third (one to the left), and the current professeur in fourth (two to the right). (PV, vol. 3, p. 194).

36

18 August 1714 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 188–189).

37

Guérin, Description, p. 113.

38

Guérin, Description, p. 123.

39

Guérin, Description, p. 113.

40

ENSBA Ms 21.

41

Guérin, Description, pp. 62–63.

42

De Piles, Cours, p. 130.

43

De Piles, Cours, p. 130.

44

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980) (London, 2000), pp. 79, 82.

45

Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England’, Art Bulletin, 83/1 (2001), pp. 48–71. On portraits as commemorative objects see West, Portraiture, pp. 59–65.

46

Lada Nikolenko, Pierre Mignard: The Portrait Painter of the Grand Siecle (Munich, 1983), p. 9.

47

On the rivalry of Lebrun and Mignard see: Duro, Academy, pp. 166, 209–218; and Jennifer Montagu, ‘The Early Ceiling Decorations of Charles Lebrun’, Burlington Magazine, 105 (1963), pp. 395–408.

48

No charge is noted suggesting Rigaud executed Mignard’s portrait gratis. ‘État général des portraits et autres tableaux sortis du pinceau de l’illustre M. Rigaud’, Mémoires inédits, vol. 2, p. 152.

49

30 January 1712 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 139–140).

50

5 April 1721 (PV, vol. 4, p. 312).

51

Georges Guillet de Saint Georges, ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’ (1693), in Mémoires inédits, vol. 1, p. 16.

52

4 July 1693 (PV, vol. 3, p. 116).

53

Guérin, Description, pp. 115, 186–187.

54

Fontaine, Les collections, pp. 144, 145.

55

Fontaine, Les collections, pp. 146–171, 189–197.

56

Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, p. 152.

57

Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, p. 139. On the Académie’s ‘Porträtgalerie’ see Denk, Artiste, pp. 65–70.

58

On the École see ‘Règlement au sujet de l’établissement de l’École Royale’ of 1748 (PV, vol. 6, p. 148); and Courajod, L’École royale.

portraits, spaces, and everyday encounters at the académie 155

59

Calculations are based on the scale dimensions in Blondel, Architecture Française, vol. 4, plate 6.

60

Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 153.

61

Fried, Art and Objecthood, pp. 153–155.

62

Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 154.

63

Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, pp. 127, 136, 141.

64

Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, pp. 139–140.

65

On totemism and totemic objects see: Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915), trans. Karen E. Fields (New York and London, 1995), pp. 118–126. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry’, in What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (London and Chicago, 2005), pp. 188–196.

66

Blondel, Architecture Française, vol. 4, p. 39.

67

Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York, 2000), p. 113.

1 Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron, Self-Portrait, 88 × 73 cm, oil on canvas, 1672, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Jean-Pierre Lagiewski)

2 Marie-Suzanne Giroust, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, 90 × 73 cm, pastel, 1770, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Franck Raux)

3 Adolf-Ulric Wertmüller, Jean-Jacques Caffieri, 129 × 96 cm, oil on canvas, 1784, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund. (Photo: © The Bridgeman Art Library)

4 Jean Tiger, Henri Testelin, 116 × 89 cm, oil on canvas, 1675, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

5 Pierre Gobert, Louis II de Boullogne, 115 × 88 cm, oil on canvas, 1701, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

6 Etienne Aubry, Louis-Claude Vassé, 129 × 97.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1775, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Franck Raux)

7 Alexandre Roslin, Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont, 128 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1753, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

8 Joseph Vivien, François Girardon, 88 × 72 cm, oil on canvas, pastel, 1701, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Michèle Bellot)

9 Alexandre Roslin, Self-Portrait with his wife, Marie-Suzanne Giroust, painting the portrait of Henrik Vilhem Peill, 131 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1767, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. (Photo: © Anna Danielsson / Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)

10 Charles-Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait, 148 × 113 cm, oil on canvas, 1746, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

11 Louis-Michel Van Loo, Carle Van Loo and his family, 200 × 156 cm, oil on canvas, 1757, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

12 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Louis de Silvestre, 63 × 51 cm, pastel, 1753, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Mathieu Rabeau)

13 Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne et Nicolas de Plattemontagne, Double Self-Portrait, 132 × 185 cm, oil on canvas, 1654, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. (Photo: Studio Tromp, Rotterdam)

14 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Johann-Georg Wille, 59 × 49 cm, oil on canvas, 1763, Musée Jacquemart André – Institut de France, Paris. (Photo: © Studio Sébert Photographes)

15 Pierre Mignard, Self-Portrait, 235 × 188 cm, oil on canvas, c.1690, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / René-Gabriel Ojéda)

16 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-Portrait with Two Students, 210.8 × 151.1 cm, oil on canvas, 1785, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Julia A. Berwind, 1953. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, www.metmuseum.org)

PART II The UNOFFICIAl FACe

4.1 Nicolas-Alexis-Simon Belle, François de Troy, 130 × 99 cm, oil on canvas, 1703, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

4 Bloodlines: Portraits of Family

Remaining in the salle des portraits – that locus of institutional affairs – and looking differently at the portraits on its walls, other connections between these sitters start to emerge; connections that have nothing to do with the Académie’s official institutional relationships. Above the doorway to the galerie d’Apollon, for instance, a portrait of François de Troy (1703) (Figure 4.1) was placed next to that of his son, Jean-François de Troy (1734) (Figure 4.2).1 Nearby was a portrait of Carle Van Loo (1747) (Figure 4.7) and further around the wall, a Self-Portrait (1762) (Figure 4.8) by Carle’s nephew, Louis-Michel Van Loo, within which was a portrait of Louis-Michel’s father, Jean-Baptise Van Loo, Carle’s older brother. On the same part of the wall was a fraternity of sculptors, with Nicolas Coustou (1725) hanging near his younger brother Guillaume I Coustou (1725), while back around the wall near the De Troys, was a portrait of Guillaume’s son, Guillaume II Coustou (1758). The Coypels, meanwhile, outdid everyone, with three generations of patrilineal descent spread across the room in La Mare-Richart’s portrait of Noël Coypel (1677) (Figure 1.9), the Self-Portrait (1715) (Figure 3.12) by his son, Antoine Coypel, and another Self-Portrait (1746) (Plate 10) by his grandson, Charles-Antoine Coypel. Through and between the portraits of officiers in this academic setting, a genealogical web of bloodlines metaphorically criss-crossed the room, intersecting institutional hierarchies with the intimate bonds of family. Family ties in the Académie were not just incidental. That François de Troy was Jean-François’ father was not a fact that passed unnoticed. Relationships like these were visible, meaningful, and had a tangible impact on academic life. On the surface, familial relationships were often evident simply by looking, obvious to anyone who observed inherited traits and physiognomies, like that distinctive De Troy double-chin (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). But kinship was also evident in how people interacted. Domestic terms of address and intimate gestures made their way into institutional exchanges and practices, sometimes playing determining roles in the professional sphere. When François de Troy was elected directeur in 1708, his first official act was to preside at the réception of his son, Jean-François.2 ‘De Troy fils’ (as he was called) was only an étudiant at the time and had presented that day for his agrément, but the compagnie

4.2 Jacques-Antoine-Joseph Aved, Jean-François de Troy, 130 × 97 cm, oil on canvas, 1734, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

bloodlines: portraits of family 161

instead voted to receive him as a full académicien.3 The bloodlines connecting ‘De Troy père’ and ‘De Troy fils’ were not only acknowledged by the other academicians but judged significant enough to alter conventional procedures and to circumvent the established social order. After the réception ceremony, in the normal course of academic life, the directeur and a newly received académicien would have had little to do with each other outside of the monthly assemblées, but François and Jean-François de Troy were not just directeur and académicien. As father and son, the two artists lived together on Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, where they likely shared studio space and interacted daily over meals and other domestic activities.4 Family may not have been a factor in the Académie’s official system, but these intimate relationships were a crucial part of its culture. Through an analysis of portraits that artists made of themselves and their family members, this chapter explores the experience of kinship in the Académie. What did it mean to be related to another academician? What additional networks did families establish? Did they include or exclude people from the community? What happened to family relationships within the Académie’s strict social structure, and what happened to those institutional hierarchies in the face of intimate family bonds? We saw in the salle des portraits how portraits might be used to trace relations through the Académie. Some, like Louis-Michel Van Loo’s Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father, represented these bloodlines directly in multi-figure compositions, while others reinforced kinship ties indirectly through the conditions of their production or display. Not all academic families painted portraits of each other, but in looking at those that did, the objects yield valuable insights not always revealed in written documents. Records of births, deaths, and marriages attest to the legal relationships between people, but portraits (those subjective effigies that index human encounters) tell us something about how these relationships were lived and felt. Beginning with an overview of the role that family played in the Académie, this chapter goes on to explore its implications via three specific families: the Coypels; the Van Loos; and the Nattier-Tocqués. With so many families in the Académie these three represent only a fraction, but together they constitute an excellent sample. In part, these case studies were selected because of the intriguing ways in which these particular academicians consciously used portraits to negotiate their family bonds, but also because their relationships represent three different kinds of kinship: direct bloodlines between fathers and sons; indirect bloodlines between siblings, uncles, and nephews; and alliances forged by marriage, in this case between father- and son-in-law. My intention with these close studies is not merely to provide examples, but to deepen the ethnographic description of the Académie begun in the first part of this book. In shifting the emphasis from the ‘official’ to an ‘unofficial’ face, the second part presents a complementary view, enriching the picture of community life by retrieving stories of particular people, specific relationships, and uniquely lived experiences.

162 académie royale: a history in portraits

Institutional Relations: Family in the Académie Family, the oldest and most natural of all social structures, as the Encyclopédie described it, was the foundation upon which ancien-régime society was built.5 Public institutions in France often looked and functioned like families because, as Jean-Louis Flandrin has argued, social and political relations were modelled on systems of kinship.6 So what did this fundamental social structure look like? In one sense, the early modern family was small, contained, and characterised by co-residence. Beginning technically at marriage, family referred to a husband, a wife, and any children issuing from that union.7 These intimate nuclear units were, as social historians such as Sarah Maza have argued, the social groupings in which the vast majority of people lived, it being much less common for extended families to live together, although the household itself would also often include servants and dependents.8 When a man and woman married, their symbolic separations from the nuclear families of their minorities were marked physically in the departure from former family homes and the establishment of a new household together. Early modern kinship ties were, however, more complicated than this would make them appear. In another sense, family was also defined by consanguinity.9 According to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, family was not limited to the household or the nuclear unit, but extended to include ‘all persons of the same blood’.10 In this broader sense, family comprised any individuals descended from the same genealogical stem.11 In a kinship system described by Roland Mousnier as ‘pseudolineage’ (pseudo because it was based not only on patrilineal but also matrilineal descent), an individual in ancien-régime France envisaged himor herself as part of a lineal and collateral network extending back, forward, and across generations.12 In the Académie, small and large family networks extended throughout the community. Some academicians lived together in discrete nuclear units (like the De Troys), while others were connected by bloodlines to several academicians through varying degrees of removal. Some family ties were established at birth, before the persons were admitted to the Académie (parents, offspring, siblings, etc.), and others were forged through marriage alliances after they were already members (spouses, in-laws, etc.). Some relationships were experienced only distantly, while others were felt more intimately, like the loving bond between Roslin and his wife Giroust, materialised in Roslin’s Self-Portrait (Plate 9) through artistic exchange: Giroust at the easel becomes the active agent in her husband’s painting, while Roslin’s gesture (and indeed this entire image) celebrates the artistic achievements of his wife. Some family ties in the Académie were, like this, immediately obvious, whether through intimate interaction, familial likeness, or even the fact of shared surnames like the cousins Charles and Henri Beaubrun (Figure 1.8). Other connections were less instantly apparent. One of the more complex kinship networks in the Académie was, for example, that which connected the Jouvenet, Hallé, and Restout families. As son of Marie-Madeleine Jouvenet,

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the academician Jean Restout was related by maternal descent to her two academician brothers, Jean and François Jouvenet (Restout’s maternal uncles). Restout then married into another academic family when he took as his wife Marie-Anne Hallé, daughter of Claude-Guy Hallé and sister of Noël Hallé, who became, respectively, Restout’s father-in-law and brother-in-law.13 Restout’s marriage created a legal and social alliance between the Jouvenets, Hallés, and Restouts, a fact made manifest in their marriage contract, which records among the witnesses to the union: ‘François Jouvenet … maternal uncle of the groom’ and ‘Noël Hallé … brother of the bride’.14 Three years after the wedding, Marie-Anne Hallé gave birth to a son, Jean-Bernard Restout, who would be admitted to the Académie in 1769.15 Though a Restout by name, Jean-Bernard was, through his paternal and maternal lineage, also a Jouvenet and an Hallé, the purebred product of academic interrelations. All history painters save for a sole portraitist (François Jouvenet), the Jouvenet–Hallé–Restout family was a pedigree of painters. Similar kinship networks also existed among the Académie’s engravers and sculptors, while some created links across the arts. Gabriel-Christophe Allegrain married the sister of another sculptor, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, who in turn married his own niece, Marie-Marguerite-Victoire Pigalle, daughter of Pigalle’s brother Pierre. Another of Pierre’s daughters, Elisabeth-Rosalie, married the sculptor, Louis-Philippe Mouchy, who thus became nephew-in-law to both Allegrain and Pigalle.16 What is immediately striking in extended networks like these is the fundamental role played by women in creating connections between academicians. The Académie may have admitted only 14 women across its entire life (Table 2.3), but hundreds more were intimately involved in its affairs via their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, some of them as practising artists themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than in the large kinship network that extended and descended from the Horthemels sisters – Marie-AnneHyacinthe, Louise-Madeleine, and Marie-Nicole. All engravers, though not academicians, these three women married into the Académie via, respectively, the engravers Nicolas-Henri Tardieu and Charles-Nicolas I Cochin, and the portrait painter, Nicolas-Alexis-Simon Belle. From these marriages, moreover, and the children that issued, the Horthemels sisters connected at least five academic families. Among the next generation, the engravers Charles-Nicolas II Cochin and Jacques-Nicolas Tardieu were cousins to their history painter colleague, Clément Belle, while two additional engraving families were drawn into the clan via the marriage of Jacques-Nicolas Tardieu to JeanneLouise-Françoise Duvivier (daughter of the medal engraver Jean Duvivier), and via the marriage of Nicolas-Henri Tardieu’s nephew, Pierre-François Tardieu, to Marie-Anne Rousselet (daughter of the engraver Gilles Rousselet and sister of Jean, a sculptor).17 Whether these marriages were strategic alliances or less calculated attachments formed through informal socialising between colleagues and their families, the result was a web of relationships that cut across institutional hierarchies of rank, genre, and media, and blurred

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the boundaries between domestic and institutional spheres. Women provided points of connection in these personal-professional networks, but in them women also found opportunities to pursue their own artistic careers, with an affiliation-by-proxy to the Académie and the infrastructure to practice in the studios of male relatives. All this connectedness also had implications within the Académie. Family in early modern France determined patronage and protection. Those fundamental relationships of ‘parenté’ (kinship) were, as the Encylopédie described them, ‘the principal link’ between people.18 Individuals were socially obliged to assist kinsfolk and could in turn expect to receive assistance from them. These obligations and responsibilities were not limited to the immediate or nuclear family, but stretched, as Mousnier points out, as far as the most distant relative connected by blood or marriage.19 When, for example, Noël Coypel was nominated directeur of the Académie in Rome, the group of 12 artists he took with him included no less than seven family members, among them his son Antoine, a cousin-by-marriage, Charles-François Poerson, and his brother-in-law, Charles-Antoine Hérault.20 Such significant acts of patronage were also expected in the more symbolic kinship tie of godparenthood. This was a very common association in the Académie, which could connect artists directly (such as Jean Jouvenet, godfather to Jean-Marc Nattier; and Charles de La Fosse, godfather to Charles Parrocel), or indirectly via other family members (such as Charles Lebrun and his wife who were godparents to Noël Coypel’s daughter, MadeleineSuzanne).21 With its religious import as a spiritual relationship analogous to parenthood, godparenthood created family-like bonds between individuals, forming emotional connections and obliging protection, guidance, and assistance. Both Nattier and Parrocel trained in their godfathers’ studios, while as the godson of Hyacinthe Rigaud, Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont inherited not only his godfather’s name (as per convention), but ultimately his fortune, becoming one of his principal heirs.22 With family members often working in the same trade, kinship customarily brought professional advantages.23 In the corporate culture of guilds, such advantages were entrenched, most notably in the relative ease of access granted by family ties. At the guild’s Académie de Saint-Luc, the cost of membership was fixed entirely on a scale of familial/corporate intimacy: sons or sons-inlaw of a director paid 97 livres 1 sol, and those of an ordinary member 160 livres 1 sol; while artists without family connections paid anything from 300 to 400 livres.24 The Académie’s attitude to such practices was more complicated. Officially, defining itself against the guild, the Académie sought expressly to avoid all aspects of trade-like culture, nepotism foremost among them. In the official Mémoires, the guild’s favouritism was vehemently criticised: At the same time as making admission to their guild so difficult for men of talent, they accept their own children … almost without charge and certainly without skill, indeed without even having made any study or apprenticeship, from the youngest age and sometimes from the cradle.25

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Instead of envisioning art-making as an inherited profession and membership as a right of that inheritance, the Académie privileged skill over blood. Individuals were to be admitted on criteria of ‘talent and virtue’, not alliance or lineage. Hereditary bias could lead only, so the protest went, to ‘incompetence and degradation’.26 In theory, kinship was not a factor in the Académie’s social order. In practice, the experience was quite different. Perhaps predictably, the first hint of preferential treatment emerged during the jonction with the guild, when sons of members were admitted to drawing classes without paying a fee.27 Even after the jonction, however, advantages continued in various individual perks, which over time developed into an established culture of family privileges, sometimes formalised in company deliberations, but almost never written into the official Statuts. In 1667, Claude-François Vignon became the first academician to be exempt from the présent pécuniaire as the son of a former officier, and from then until the abolition of the fee in 1745, children of academicians nearly always gained either a discount or complete waiver.28 Concessions of this nature were justified by framing them not as advantages for the child, but as respectful gestures towards the parent. In 1674, for instance, it was decided that, to honour the memory of past and present officiers, their children should be permitted to attend assemblées as agréés, without having to wait for their réceptions.29 Immediately the agréé JeanCharles Nocret was admitted to the assemblée and in fact reçu on condition that he present a portrait of his late father, Jean Nocret (Figure 1.6).30 Paul Mignard had also recently been given the task of painting his father and would similarly benefit from the culture of preferential treatment for academic progeny. Having delayed completion of his portrait of Nicolas Mignard (Figure 1.5) for a year, he was almost stripped of his agrément but indulged with a final chance ‘in consideration of his father’s memory’.31 Apart from Nocret and Mignard, relatives did not become conventional choices for morceau-de-réception subjects. Portraits of fathers were sometimes given as gifts (Claude-François Vignon donated a portrait of his father, Claude Vignon; and Largillière donated an engraved portrait of his father-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Forest), but after this flurry of excitement in the 1670s at a second generation of academicians, family was kept distinct from those official institutional practices.32 Throughout the eighteenth century, familial preferences nevertheless remained part of the Académie’s unofficial culture. Skill was always championed as the highest priority, whether in the promotion of traditions like prix rewarding talent, or occasional reminders in assemblées that ‘we take extreme care to receive into the Académie only those of the greatest merit’.33 In other ways, however, blood still counted. When it came to the order of precedence for the drawing class, skill made way for blood. Even prize-winning students had to wait for sons of officiers and academicians to take their places before processing into the room, followed only by those remaining étudiants with neither family nor accolade.34 Although the proportion of members directly descended from other academicians diminished across the life of the institution, as Wine has shown,

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being an academician continued to be something of a family business: even in the 1740s at least 30 per cent of members (by Wine’s calculations) were children of academicians.35 The Académie never excluded anyone for not being part of the family, but coming from academic stock gave an artist an elite status that made life just a little bit easier. Preferential treatment for family became the custom in the Académie, but that is not to say it was always unproblematic. Nepotistic practices sometimes provoked resentment, as attested by a revealing incident during the grand prix in 1768, recorded in detailed correspondence between Cochin and Marigny. First prize for sculpture that year had been awarded to Jean-Guillaume Moitte, son of the engraver Pierre-Etienne Moitte. But when the hundred-strong mob of étudiants waiting outside on the Place du Louvre heard the result there was an outcry, with violent protests that Moitte did not deserve first place and had only received the prize because his father was an academician.36 Swords were drawn, threats made, and insolent encounters took place when Cochin and Pigalle went downstairs to investigate the fracas. In his colourful report of the incident, Cochin claimed the students had no genuine complaint and were only angered because they hated the introvert Moitte. But he also revealed that Moitte’s family connection had indeed played a decisive role in what was a difficult competition. In the end, the vote was close – only 23:18 in Moitte’s favour – but several factors tipped the balance, first and foremost his father’s membership. Cochin noted that in cases where all else was equal, the custom was to give preference to entrants who were sons of academicians.37 This incident shows how entrenched family advantages were within academic culture, but it also shows a growing dissatisfaction with these traditions, particularly towards the end of the century among the younger generations of artists drawn from increasingly diverse backgrounds.38 Family evidently had a significant impact in the Académie: re-ordering the social order; promoting selected individuals ahead of their time; securing economic benefits, the advantage of second chances, or even top prizes; and generally offering ready-made networks of influence through the ranks. But in order to understand the effects of family on individual artists’ lives, we need to look to the experiences of particular academicians. What was it like to be a member of an academic family? What did it mean to inherit those advantages? Or to marry into an institutional alliance? The case studies that follow reveal how institutional relationships were affected by the intimate connections between relatives, and how artists accommodated the tensions between professional and personal, enjoying the obvious gains, but also suffering the less obvious losses.

Fathers and Sons: The Coypel Dynasty For the Coypels, family and Académie were almost indistinguishable. Their domestic life was institutional and their academic life familial. Noël Coypel,

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Table 4.1 Family tree showing the Coypel, Hérault, and Dumont families

the initial patriarch, was agréé only a decade after the institution’s founding and from then until the death of his grandson Charles-Antoine in 1752, there was always at least one Coypel in the ranks. Their patrilineal dynasty at the Académie spanned 93 years, three generations, and four directly related academicians (Table 4.1).39 Noël Coypel’s descendants grew up in the Académie, they were trained by its masters, deliberated in its assemblées, and conceived of little beyond its walls. The Coypels were not the only dynasty in the Académie, nor even the largest or longest. The Lemoynes, for instance, also counted four academicians in three generations, but with the added claim that Jean Lemoyne (the starting point of this stem) was the grandson of Simon Guillain, one of the original 12 anciens. The Boullognes, meanwhile, boasted seven academicians (including two women) in four generations over nearly the entire life of the Académie, although during the last 50 years their representatives were honoraires amateurs not artists.40 What the Coypel dynasty could claim, however, was prestige, for among all the dynastic surnames in the Académie’s history (Lemoyne, Boullogne, Silvestre, Roettiers, etc.) none were so consistently elite in their institutional standing. All the Coypels were received as history painters (no black sheep in the form of engravers or still life painters), three ascended to the highest rank of directeur, and two held the highest post in the land for an artist as premier peintre du roi. Despite the privileges brought by name, the Coypels were in many ways like any other family: half-brothers negotiating the tensions of second marriages, fathers preparing legacies for their children’s futures, and sons bearing the weight of their father’s expectations. But unlike other families, the Coypels lived their domestic dramas on an institutional stage.

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Before relating such intimate tales, some introductions and background are required. The beginning of the Coypel dynasty coincided with the beginning of their institutional presence: in April 1659, Noël married Madeleine Hérault (sister of the history painter, Charles-Antoine Hérault) and then in September entered the Académie as an agréé.41 By the time Noël was reçu four years later, his eldest son, Antoine, was already two. Antoine trained with his father from a young age and at 15 travelled with Noël to Rome during his directeur-ship at the Academy (1673–1675). Upon their return father and son moved with the rest of the family into the logement Noël had been allocated – number 27 in the Louvre’s Galerie – and Antoine continued his training at the Académie until his réception a few years later in 1681.42 In 1682, tragedy struck – Antoine’s mother, Madeleine Hérault, died aged only 41 – and three years later a new branch of lineal descent was set with Noël’s marriage to his second wife. In 1690, AnneFrançoise Perrin gave birth to Noël-Nicolas, Antoine’s half-brother. Even after Noël’s re-marriage, Antoine continued to live in his father’s household, only moving out, as per convention, after his own marriage to Jeanne Bidault in 1688, when he relocated to the Cul de Sac St Thomas, a small street just near the Galerie.43 Antoine lived here for a decade, starting a family of his own (his first son, Charles-Antoine, born in 1694) while working his way quickly up the Académie’s ranks. In 1697, Antoine returned to the Louvre (perhaps thanks to his father’s influence, Noël now occupying the post of directeur) to move into his own logement only a few doors away from Noël.44 Thus Antoine’s young family grew up just along the corridor from Noël’s second family, their eldest boys – Noël-Nicolas and Charles-Antoine, half-uncle and -nephew – only four years apart owing to that generational skew. For this family of artists, living, training, working, teaching, eating, sleeping, and eventually dying, in various spaces within the Louvre, it is not difficult to envisage how entwined the domestic and professional spheres became.45 It also comes as no surprise that the Coypels’ sense of themselves as a family should be so inseparable from their identities as academicians. This was evident on the auspicious occasion of one of the Académie’s earliest exhibitions in 1699, held upstairs in the Grand Galerie, the great long room above the logements. The exhibition was an official event to showcase academicians’ works before a public audience, but among the paintings that Noël and Antoine Coypel exhibited were two family portraits. Noël’s (now lost) was listed in the livret as ‘a portrait of himself with his family’ and described by Florent Le Comte as an oval ‘tableau historié’ suggesting some allegorical element.46 Presumably Noël’s ‘family’ here referred to the nuclear unit of his second family: his wife Anne-Françoise and their children including a nine-year-old Noël-Nicolas. Antoine, born of the ‘premier lit’, probably did not figure in his father’s portrait, but he was present in his own a little further along the gallery. Described as Antoine ‘in the act of painting’, this self-portrait was in fact a double portrait, showing Antoine posed at his easel with a four-year-old Charles-Antoine sitting mesmerised by his side (Figure 4.3).47

4.3 Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait with his son, Charles-Antoine, 59 × 42 cm, oil on canvas, 1698, Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie, Besançon. (Photo: © Besançon, Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie- Cliché Charles Choffet)

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In this official exhibition, Noël and Antoine – ‘Coipel pere’ and ‘Coipel fils’ as the livret described them – presented intimate representations of their domestic relationships. Three other artists exhibited self-portraits – among them Chéron (Plate 1) and Desportes (Figure 3.9) – but none of these were paintings of familial relations.48 In the setting of the Grand Galerie, at once home and workplace for the Coypels, Noël and Antoine did not distinguish between their roles as academicians (Noël a former directeur, Antoine a professeur) and their roles as fathers or sons. Indeed it is difficult to determine the context that best fits these exhibited portraits: the institutional tradition of displaying morceau-de-réception portraits of officiers in the Académie’s apartments; or the domestic tradition of displaying family portraits around the home?49 However they envisaged this act, Noël and Antoine’s portraits, painted contemporaneously and exhibited together, are the first material representations of the Coypel family as an academic dynasty. In their familyportraits, each artist showed himself as the head of a household through which the line would continue. Without Noël’s portrait we cannot know exactly the vision he constructed of Noël-Nicolas, but Antoine’s portrait certainly casts a very young Charles-Antoine as his father’s successor (Figure 4.3), next in line to take up the family profession. Seated on a low stool beside Antoine in the studio, he looks on in awe, eyes wide, lips parted, and small arms subtly emulating the pose of his father holding the brush in his right hand above the palette in his left. Painting, Antoine claims, is in the blood. As beholders we see only the back of the canvas, but Antoine offers his son the privileged view of what is painted on the front, metaphorically passing on his artistic insight and making Charles-Antoine the sole beneficiary of this inheritance. Antoine was not, however, envisaging anything like those models of professional inheritance found in guild culture. Instead, the circumstances of the work’s production and its subsequent display suggest an image of family modelled on more noble traditions. The portrait was commissioned by Philippe I d’Orléans (brother to Louis XIV), who, as Charles-Antoine later noted in his Life of Antoine Coypel (1745), wanted a painting of his premier peintre for his petit cabinet in the Palais Royal and so asked Antoine to paint a self-portrait, permitting him to include his eldest son within the scene.50 When viewed in Philippe I’s Palais Royal rather than the Louvre’s Grand Galerie, it was not so much his father’s profession that Charles-Antoine was inheriting here as his role as a member of the Orléans household, an extended royal ménage including domestics and dependents.51 Antoine’s quasi-noble vision of his family in this portrait was formalised legally some years later during the Regency, when in 1717 Philippe II d’Orléans ennobled Antoine as an écuyer and extended the title to his sons, while also supplementing his pension of 2,500 livres (as premier peintre du Roi) with an additional 500 livres specifically for Charles-Antoine, who was then only a very junior académicien.52 A few months later, Charles-Antoine’s primogenital inheritance was secured further when the Regent conferred upon him the

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‘survivance’ of his father’s post of premier peintre du duc d’Orléans, ensuring the title would continue down the Coypel line.53 Even before this significant advancement to his career, Charles-Antoine had long enjoyed the special status his family line afforded. When he entered the Académie as an étudiant, Charles-Antoine was unusually young, first mentioned in the records at the tender age of 11.54 Training simultaneously in his father’s Louvre studio and in the Académie where Antoine was an ancien professeur, Charles-Antoine experienced, from his earliest years, a slippage between paternal authority and institutional authority. But it was after the death of his grandfather in 1707, that the impact of Coypel family relationships started to be most keenly felt. In the days following his father’s death, Antoine was promoted to the rank of adjoint à recteur but then almost immediately fell gravely ill himself.55 Though he survived, this brush with death coming so quickly after the death of his father seems to have prompted Antoine to consider his posterity, for when he returned to work the following year, he presented to the Académie a most unusual conférence: ‘an Epistle in verse from a father to his son’.56 Written as a letter addressed to Charles-Antoine, then a 14-year-old étudiant, Antoine’s discours explicitly framed his professional legacy in terms of a familial inheritance. The epistle begins by framing the boy’s academic career as a fait accompli, an act of destiny beyond his father’s control: Enfin vous le voulez, ma résistance est vaine; Un ascendant plus fort malgré moy vous entraîne; Et de l’Art du Dessin votre cœur trop épris, Veut dans l’Académie en disputer le prix.57

Being an academician becomes here not a choice but a vocation, an inexorable path that has called Charles-Antoine through his ‘ancestor’, an affectionate homage to the late Noël. With the rhetorical conceit thus established, through the rest of the letter Antoine proceeds to offer fatherly advice to assist his son on this journey, tenderly imploring: Suivez donc les transports de cette ardeur extreme; Mais écoutez, mon Fils, un Pere qui vous aime.58

Reciting these verses at an assemblée, that most institutional of settings, Antoine transformed an academic conférence on the skills (moral and practical) required of a great artist into an evocative letter to his first-born son. Envisaging the professional through the personal, the foundation of an academic education was here read through a palimpsest of paternal love and filial duty. Far from feeling discomfort in the face of Antoine’s intimate gesture or exclusion from this private exchange, the compagnie readily accepted the epistle as an analogy for the institutional relationship between professeurs and étudiants. They were so pleased with the epistle that Antoine was requested to extend it, and over the next decade he took lines from the poem and elaborated

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a series of discours in prose on various theoretical ideas. For the Académie, Antoine’s relationship with Charles-Antoine became a rhetorical model for all academicians to emulate in their interactions with students. For CharlesAntoine, however, it was personal. His father’s epistle had once again singled him out as an academic heir-apparent, pushing him prematurely forward just like the Self-Portrait with his son (Figure 4.3), that image of Charles-Antoine as Antoine’s rightful successor. Whatever Charles-Antoine felt in that moment, over time the idea that he owed his legitimacy to his father and grandfather would become a disquieting shadow over his identity as an academician. Charles-Antoine’s ‘destiny’ was nowhere more evident than in the circumstances surrounding his réception seven years later. On 31 August 1715, Charles-Antoine presented himself for his agrément as any other aspiring étudiant might, bringing a selection of works to be judged by the compagnie.59 But Charles-Antoine was not like any other étudiant. He was not only precociously young (just 21), he was also the son of the current directeur, and grandson of a former directeur (Table 1.1). In a space where institutional authority was inseparable from his bloodlines, these elite connections were to have a significant impact on the day. Instead of having his paintings approved and being awarded the title of agréé (as occurred in the textbook agrément of Jean Raoux in the same meeting), Charles-Antoine was reçu as a full member of the Académie. Benefitting from the same preferential treatment given precedent in the combined agréments/réceptions of artists like Jean-Charles Nocret and Jean-François de Troy (who had both at least been a more conventional age), Charles-Antoine was fast-tracked through an entire stage of academic initiation to be precipitately awarded the title of académicien. Exactly how this was negotiated in the assemblée is unclear as the minutes only note that: ‘his presentation was agréé, and following the proposal to receive him as an académicien, the Académie received him in that capacity’.60 The key moment is lost in the passive construction of the sentence, which obscures exactly who ‘proposed’ this or how it came about. There is no evidence that it was Antoine and perhaps such obvious partiality would have been too overt, but maybe he did not need to, for the very language used to record the event emphasises the special status that Charles-Antoine already held. In place of the institutional ranks and positions that the Procès-Verbaux normally used to describe the roles taken in these ceremonies, we instead find words that describe familial relationships. Charles-Antoine is not referred to as an étudiant or an aspirant, but rather as ‘son of Monsieur Coypel, the current Directeur’. Likewise, at the end of the ceremony when Charles-Antoine took the oath, he did so not ‘in the hands of the directeur’, but ‘in the hands of his father’. What did this mean for Charles-Antoine? Standing there in the Louvre, where he had lived most of his life, surrounded by portraits of great academicians of the past including that effigy of his father (Figure 3.12) recently hung on the wall of the salle d’assemblée, was Charles-Antoine swearing allegiance to his kin or his Académie? In this moment, were Antoine and Charles-Antoine two artists taking respective places in the institutional hierarchy, or were they

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flesh and blood? Perhaps, one might argue, the unofficial culture of familial advantage was so entrenched in academic customs that it did not really matter. But for Charles-Antoine, it did. Whatever pride he may have experienced at the time, in the long-term Charles-Antoine’s preferential treatment was not a privilege but a burden. Rather than making him more legitimate than his colleagues, it actually made him feel less so. Thirty years later, long after his father’s death, Charles-Antoine, now a successful ancien professeur, wrote his eulogistic Life of Antoine Coypel, which he delivered at an assemblée in 1745.61 Throughout the essay, CharlesAntoine completely obscured his intimate relationship with the subject, and even where he had to mention himself for the sake of the narrative, he did so in the third person, as ‘his eldest son’.62 At the very end, however, biography transformed abruptly into autobiography, as Charles-Antoine asked his colleagues to recall the experience of his own réception.63 CharlesAntoine declared that the special treatment he received on this occasion had since troubled him greatly with feelings of shame about the agrément works he presented – ‘passable works for a young man, but not worthy to appear among the masterpieces that shine on these walls’ – particularly his Medea (1715) (Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg), which the compagnie accepted as his morceau de réception: ‘a painting so weak when seen alongside yours’.64 Charles-Antoine did not feel like a proper academician. His status had been acquired illegitimately – not through skill, but blood – for he would never have been admitted in such a manner, he claimed, were it not for his kin: ‘for the memory of my grandfather’ and thanks to ‘the high esteem with which the Académie holds my father’.65 For Charles-Antoine, the supposed advantage of his expedited réception had been anything but, having in essence denied him the opportunity to complete his initiating rite of passage. His pure academic blood ironically became a source of illegitimacy. Perhaps remembering his father’s advice from the epistle – ‘let your works alone speak in your favour’ – Charles-Antoine asked his colleagues for a chance to make amends by substituting his old morceau de réception for ‘a less defective piece’.66 The following October he presented a painting of Abraham and Isaac (now lost) to replace Medea, but also made an additional offering of a Self-Portrait (Plate 10).67 What is most striking about this self-portrait is that it adopts the form of a morceau-de-réception portrait. Painted on a canvas slightly larger than average but still within the standard dimensions, the formally dressed, wigged sitter appears at three-quarter length in a sparse interior with tools and painterly attributes. While this form was by now de rigueur for morceaux de réception and had become conventional for academicians’ portraits generally, it was not a customary form for self-portraiture. Most of Charles-Antoine’s earlier self-representations had been more characteristic half- or bust-length (Figure 4.4), with only his Self-Portrait of 1734 (Figure 4.5), painted for his brother Philippe, bearing any comparable formality.68 Yet while the composition and costume of these self-portraits are similar, the attitude of the sitter’s body has changed completely: from a self-assured,

4.4 Charles-Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait, 65 × 53 cm, pastel, 1739, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Agence Bulloz)

4.5 Charles-Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait, 97.8 × 80.1 cm, pastel, 1734, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Photo: © Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

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flamboyantly gesturing, standing Charles-Antoine in 1734 (Figure 4.5), to a far more unassuming, quietly seated Charles-Antoine of 1746 (Plate 10), posed neatly with a drawing board on his diminutive knees. It is difficult to imagine Charles-Antoine’s Académie Self-Portrait (Plate 10) as the same kind of act of self-promotion that his father’s had been in 1715 (see Chapter 3). Antoine’s Self-Portrait (Figure 3.12) was a more imposing self-image, showing a gentleman painter of the highest rank, grandly posed with the Livre des médailles sur les principaux événements du Règne de Louis le Grand (1702) to invoke his royal connections.69 Most importantly, however, when Antoine donated his portrait to hang in the salle d’assemblée, he had already been the subject of a morceau-de-réception portrait, submitted by Allou in 1711 (Château de Versailles); when Charles-Antoine donated his morceaude-réception-style self-portrait, he had not. Thierry Lefrançois suggests that this was an act of self-aggrandisement, arguing that Charles-Antoine simply preferred to paint his own portrait than let one of the aspiring agréés do a lesser job.70 This, however, misinterprets the prestige associated with being selected as the subject of an agréé’s reception piece. It was certainly an honour to be represented on the walls of the Académie, but from an institutional point of view, the real honour came in the act of representation, when the officier became the focus of the agréé’s stage of reflection. This was the honour that Charles-Antoine intentionally denied himself. Instead, as maker and sitter, Charles-Antoine retrospectively recast himself into a post-facto agréé experience, becoming the model for his own mature stage of reflection, taking himself through this rite of passage from the other side and back again. In painting and donating Abraham and Isaac and his Self-Portrait, CharlesAntoine mobilised the Académie’s ritual of initiation as a kind of penance, an attempt to legitimise the unearned privileges of his blood. Whether or not it worked is another question. Two years later, having been elected directeur, Charles-Antoine still fostered concerns about the threat that family ties posed to the greater good of the institution, going to lengths to ensure that blood should never be privileged over skill. In one of his many conférences, he reminded the assembled academicians how important it was when voting to forget ‘parenté’ (kin) and consider only ‘mérite’ (skill) (an ideal that had clearly been forgotten by the time Cochin described the competition for the grand prix of 1768).71 Only a month after Charles-Antoine’s speech, he took the unprecedented measure of removing another academician’s morceau de réception from the collection, replacing his grandfather’s Cain after Abel’s Murder with another, ‘infinitely superior’, taken from the family collection.72 The better version of Noël’s painting belonged in the Académie, for the glory of the institution was, in Charles-Antoine’s mind, never to be compromised by family.73 None of these feelings of undeserved nepotistic advantage that plagued Charles-Antoine were ever a problem for Noël-Nicolas. Son of the ‘deuxième lit’, half-brother, and half-uncle, Noël-Nicolas was always the ‘other’ Coypel, a peripheral member of the dynasty. By the time he was reçu, his father Noël had already been dead for 13 years, and his half-brother Antoine took little interest in

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the affairs of his father’s second family, focusing entirely on the career of his eldest son.74 It was Charles-Antoine, after all, who would inherit his grandfather’s apartments in the Louvre along with those of his father, passed down the primogenital line and bypassing Noël-Nicolas entirely.75 In his Life of Noël-Nicolas Coypel, Dézallier d’Argenville does more than hint at the animosity between the half-brothers, noting that their age gap and ‘a little jealousy of the trade’ did not draw them much together.76 Indeed, he claims it was only after Antoine’s death that Noël-Nicolas ‘became who he was’.77 The Coypels’ eminent academic lineage did not benefit Noël-Nicolas as it had CharlesAntoine. Noël-Nicolas was on his own – ‘he flew with his own wings and he flew without help’.78 While most academicians with family acquired a moniker relative to their position in their nuclear family (‘père’ and ‘fils’; or ‘l’aîné’, ‘le jeune’, or ‘le cadet’ for siblings), Noël-Nicolas was known as ‘Coypel l’oncle’.79 Charles-Antoine meanwhile was never ‘Coypel le neveu’. After his father’s death he became simply ‘Coypel’, the new patriarch of the dynasty. Though four years Charles-Antoine’s senior, Noël-Nicolas was, thanks to his nephew’s expedited réception, five years his junior in the Académie.80 Taking no advantages from his bloodlines, it is no coincidence that Noël-Nicolas did not represent them either. The only academician’s portrait he ever painted was that posthumous portrayal of Simon Guillain (Figure 1.29), given to the Académie by its commissioner, Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne.81 Lemoyne was in turn the only academician ever to represent Noël-Nicolas (1730) (Figure 4.6) in a terracotta bust that suggests Noël-Nicolas found an alternative social network among the Académie’s sculptors, particularly after his sister, Anne-Françoise, married the sculptor François Dumont in 1721.82 Whatever the case, as a member of a family that imagined its academic pedigree like noble bloodlines, Noël-Nicolas – a distant half-blood collateral relative – hardly had a role to play.

Brothers, Sisters, Uncles, and Nephews: The Van loo Ménage Long family dynasties producing generation after generation of academicians were relatively rare compared with the more common experience of relationships across one or two generations. Though the Van Loos were

4.6  Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, NoëlNicolas Coypel, 65 × 36 × 43 cm, terracotta, 1730, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMNGrand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / RenéGabriel Ojéda)

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Table 4.2 Family tree of the Van Loos

indeed a dynasty, with six family members admitted to the Académie – the first, Jacob, in 1663, and the last, Jules-César, in 1784 (Table 4.2) – they did not have the continuous presence of a family like the Coypels, nor the same pure and elite standing, at least not at the beginning.83 While the Coypels’ uninterrupted dominance of high-ranking positions and their long-standing residence in the Louvre gave them a sense of ‘academic blood’, the Van Loos were more international in their scope and less fixed in their domicile, giving them more wide-ranging artistic careers of which being an academician was but one avenue. Other Van Loos worked as masters in regional towns and several took on prestigious roles as court painters in the kingdoms of Sardinia, Spain, and Prussia. The most ‘academic’ period in Van Loo family history was from the 1730s to the 1770s, during which four of the six were reçu and familial and institutional relations were at their most enmeshed. I focus here on the domestic experience of these two generations – especially JeanBaptiste, his little brother Carle, and his son (Carle’s nephew) Louis-Michel – to explore not the long view of a family line, but rather the intimate relations between the living members of an academic family, in particular the bonds that formed along the indirect bloodlines of siblings, uncles, and nephews. Along with fathers and sons, these indirect lines were the most common familial relationships found within the Académie’s ranks. Brothers were especially frequent, present already among the original members (Louis and Henri Testelin), right up to the final years (Jean-Louis-François and JeanJacques Lagrenée), and in all media, though most siblings tended to practice

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a family trade, either sculpting (Lambert-Sigisbert and Nicolas-Sébastien Adam), painting (Gilbert and Pierre de Sève), or engraving (Claude and Gérard Audran). Born and bred together in the nuclear household, fraternal relations spurred quite specific intimacies and tensions: sometimes supportive brotherly affection (as we shall see with Jean-Baptiste and Carle Van Loo); and sometimes intense sibling rivalry (as with Nicolas Mignard and his younger, more successful brother, Pierre). Relations between uncles and nephews were even less predictable, ranging from practically paternal experiences (as for Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne who trained with his uncle Philippe), to fairly uninterested (as we saw with Noël-Nicolas Coypel and his nephew CharlesAntoine), to downright antagonistic (as with Paul Mignard who inherited the disdain for his uncle Pierre). Clearly families in the Académie were as resistant to norms as families anywhere else. Whatever the conventional expectations of these kinship ties, the lived experience depended on specific personalities, events, and circumstances. The Van Loos were no more typical than any other academic relatives, but Jean-Baptiste, Carle, and Louis-Michel provide an intriguing example of a collaterally extended ménage – a household which, for various reasons, stretched beyond the nuclear unit – and although they did not always physically reside together, their family portraits show the intimacy they maintained as a conceptual household. The story of the Van Loos is thus as much about co-residence as consanguinity, and as much about domestic environment as primogenital heritage, but just like the Coypels, the Van Loos’ vision of family would become a palimpsest (albeit of a different shape) through which institutional relations came to be read. The Van Loos’ earliest years at the Académie were far from auspicious and the family did not last long in Paris, but some sense of this family history is necessary to understand the later generations’ relations with each other and with the institution. Jacob, the first Van Loo at the Académie, was the Flemish portraitist whose réception had prompted the new admissions directive about the moral standing of foreigners, after an accusation of murder (of which there seems little doubt Jacob was guilty).84 Jacob’s two sons, LouisAbraham and Jean, fared arguably even worse: both trained as étudiants but neither was ever reçu, the former in fact being expelled in 1670 (only a couple of days after his father’s death) with a group of students who went on an insolent and disruptive rampage, committing gross misdemeanours including throwing ‘vile things’ in neighbourhood shops, and the foul act of soiling the model’s clothes.85 Louis-Abraham was later re-admitted and though both brothers competed for the prix the following year, they appear to have abandoned academic aspirations soon after, leaving Paris (due to ‘a matter of honour in Nice’, according to Dézallier d’Argenville) to pursue careers in the provinces.86 It is also possible that the crackdown on Protestant artists had made life difficult for the Van Loos, for Louis-Abraham converted to Catholicism (abjuring in Lyon around 1681), before marrying Marie Fossé, daughter of a Provençal sculptor, in 1683.87 Together they had eight children,

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as Louis-Abraham worked peripatetically across the South living in Aix-enProvence (where Jean-Baptiste was born in 1684), Toulon, Grasse, Mallorca, and Nice (where Carle was born in 1705).88 When Louis-Abraham died in 1712, his eldest son Jean-Baptiste (then 28) assumed parental responsibility for his much younger brother Carle (then only seven), bringing him up with his own sons, Louis-Michel (then five) and later Amédée (born 1719). In this unconventional household, the skewing of generational ages and familial duties saw brothers relating more like fathers and sons, while uncles and nephews interacted more like brothers, all working together in an extended ménage that would prove an extremely successful professional unit. After the Van Loos’ ominous début at the Académie, these next two generations fared much better than their forebears. Carle, Louis-Michel, and Amédée trained as étudiants, and were, along with Jean-Baptiste, successfully admitted and later elected officiers, all achieving the rank of professeur or higher along with the great respect of their colleagues. Even these generations, however, were never quite as institutionally embedded as a family like the Coypels, many of them spending long periods of their careers at a physical distance from the Académie, both before and after their réceptions. Their early formation had taken place in the south of France and in Italy, partly in the service of the House of Savoy, and they would only live together in Paris for a few years in the 1730s at the Hôtel de Soissons (still in the service of the Sardinian crown with Jean-Baptiste as painter to the Prince of Carignano).89 After this Carle alone remained in France: Jean-Baptiste travelled to London and later back to Provence; Louis-Michel spent 15 years (1737–1752) in Madrid as first painter to King Philip V; and Amédée worked in Berlin for over 20 years (1748–1769) as first painter to King Frederick II of Prussia.90 Though as adults they spent many years apart, the Van Loos’ itinerant ménage always retained its intimacy as a family group, particularly when it came to Carle and Louis-Michel: uncle and nephew raised like brothers with only two years between them. This familial intimacy became the primary subject of Carle Van Loo and his family (Plate 11), painted by Louis-Michel after his return from Spain in the 1750s, by which time Carle had a young family of his own. In a comfortable domestic scene, this family gathers around their paterfamilias. With drawing board in hand, Carle sketches his daughter, MarieRosalie, seated before him in a silk dress; his wife, Christine Somis, an Italian opera singer, stands behind the sofa with two of their sons, Jean-François and Charles; and their third son, Jules-César, étudiant at the Académie, stands with a drawing portfolio behind his father gazing intently at Carle’s sketch.91 This detail of father and son, with Jules-César’s wide eyes and gaping mouth, recalls that paternal relationship in Antoine Coypel’s Self-Portrait (Figure 4.3), where Charles-Antoine was positioned similarly to watch mesmerised while his father worked. But as representations of family, these two paintings could not be more different. Where Coypel’s two-figure composition limited family to the patrilineal line from father to eldest son, Louis-Michel’s multi-figure

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composition shows family as an intimate household of both genders with numerous relationships co-existing harmoniously. Like a sentimentalist genre painting of the happy home, a more urban version of one of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s rustic families, Louis-Michel’s portrait of his uncle evokes Enlightenment notions of a private domestic sphere.92 Carle and Christine’s marriage is here not just a legal contract, but a visibly emotional and sexual relationship. Their roles as parents have not ended with the procreative act of producing heirs, but continue daily in the nurturing and education of these children. As in the portrait of Alexandre Roslin and Marie-Suzanne Giroust (Plate 9), the loving bond of husband and wife is expressed through artistic exchange. Attributes of music and painting, each parent’s profession, meander harmoniously down a diagonal axis from the large canvas in the background, to Christine’s score, and through Carle’s drawing to the guitar at his feet. Van Loo familial harmony is idealised as a product of blissful aesthetic union, where Carle’s art-making and Christine’s singing become professional activities turned domestic pastimes that express and enrich their loving bonds. Louis-Michel constructs his scene as a glimpse into the private sphere, its conceit emphasised in the subtle hints at public intrusion. Standing near an open doorway and wearing a mantelet (a garment usually worn outdoors), Christine approaches the threshold between inside and out; the family interact casually, but their attire suggests a degree of formality – the men in wigs and Marie-Rosalie in her elaborate silk dress.93 Exhibited at the Salon of 1757, Louis-Michel’s portrait was indeed a public statement about this intimate group.94 Privileged access to this private moment was not, however, granted by some voyeuristic gaze, but through the approved gaze of LouisMichel: not an intruder to this site of domesticity, but a welcomed family member. As nephew and cousin to his portrait-subjects, Louis-Michel was part of this family and his intimate viewing position is a visualisation of his inclusion. Just beyond the nuclear unit, Louis-Michel occupies a place in the collateral extension of this group – close but not quite within – he is invited by Christine’s direct outward gaze into the web of glances exchanged between them. At this close remove, his act of art-making mirrors that of Carle’s – we imagine Louis-Michel sitting just beyond the group, painting a canvas standing in parallel to the one behind them. The space itself is a fusion of salon and studio, where comfortable furnishings appear side-by-side with artistic paraphernalia: the large canvas leans against decorative moulding; brushes, palette and a painter’s rag nestle behind the silk-upholstered fauteuil. The contented relationships between these objects in turn suggest a symbiosis of familial and professional relationships. Art-making and home-making are synthesised: the family gather together, Carle teaches his son, and works alongside his nephew. At a time when artists habitually worked and lived in the same spaces, this was far from unconventional.95 The symbiosis here, however, was not just between domestic and professional, but domestic and institutional – this

4.7 Pierre Le Sueur, Carle Van Loo, 130 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1747, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Christophe Fouin)

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family ‘home’ being in fact an academic building. Elected gouverneur of the Académie’s École Royale des Elèves Protégés in 1749, Carle and his family lived in the hôtel on the Place du Louvre in which the Ecole was housed. It was also here, following the Salon of 1757, that Louis-Michel’s portrait of his uncle would be hung as a formal representation of the school’s head.96 As an institutional image, Louis-Michel’s portrait of Carle Van Loo and his family diverges significantly from those traditional institutional images found in the Académie’s morceaux de réception. Carle’s official effigy in the Académie’s apartments, painted by Le Sueur in 1747 (Figure 4.7), shows a somewhat youthful professeur at three-quarter length in a sparse interior setting. With chalk in hand, Carle’s artistic act denotes his status as academician, isolated in this tableau as a tribute to his individual achievements like the others in the portraits around him. In Louis-Michel’s family portrait, by contrast, Carle’s same artistic act of sketching, performed here in the company of his wife and children, is no longer an exclusive monument to his academic identity, but becomes a collective activity shared by the entire household. Louis-Michel’s intimate domestic portrait of the school’s gouverneur may seem an incongruous image for an institutional setting, but it was in fact an ideal emblem for this small offshoot of the Académie. Established as part of Tournehem and Charles-Antoine Coypel’s mid-century reforms, the Ecole was in many ways an intimate branch of the main institution. Its six students, known as élèves, were étudiants who had proven themselves worthy (usually by winning the grand prix) of studying at the Academy in Rome as pensionnaires.97 To ensure their readiness, the Ecole provided three years’ preparatory training involving early-morning classes with a professeur d’histoire, followed by sessions with the gouverneur copying works from the royal collection.98 In terms of education, the school was an extension of the Académie, but in terms of day-to-day interactions it was entirely different. Relationships between teachers and students were here modelled not on formal hierarchies of rank, but on the informal structure of a nuclear family. The school’s regulations stated that the élèves were not only to ‘reside together in the same house as the gouverneur’, but also to ‘eat at his table’ alongside his own family.99 In this institutional building only a few hundred yards from the heart of the Académie, Carle Van Loo, his wife and children thus lived with the élèves protégés as an extended ménage. It is perhaps no surprise that this familial turn in institutional life came during the directeur-ship of Charles-Antoine Coypel, who had always envisaged institutional relationships through that palimpsest of paternal bonds. Speaking in the year of the school’s opening, Coypel claimed that the Académie regarded its élèves ‘as its children’, a simile conferring parental responsibility upon all the professeurs.100 In a speech made directly to the élèves protégés the following year, Coypel placed Carle Van Loo directly in this role, imploring the students to be grateful for his fatherly attentions.101 In Coypel’s ideal of the school, the élèves’ hard work and future success were conceived

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as filial duties to repay Carle’s paternal care, a vision of family life that is, as Coypel’s was, understood entirely as a patrilineal dynamic of father–son relations. In the running of the school itself, however, it was the Van Loos’ very different vision of family that became the model for life in this domestic branch of the Académie. As gouverneur for the first 16 years, Carle established himself not as patriarch of the Ecole, but as an academic paterfamilias. This relationship worked both ways, for while the students of the Académie joined Carle’s ménage, Carle’s nuclear family became part of the extended ‘family’ of the Académie. Christine Somis, as Louis-Michel’s portrait suggests, played materfamilias to Carle’s pater, becoming an integral if unofficial part of the running of the Ecole. According to Louis Courajod’s history of the school, Madame Van Loo took on the role of housekeeper, providing for her household of élèves and even tending to them when ill.102 Becoming an all but honorary member of the Académie’s staff, Christine on occasion went so far as to intervene in the school’s administration. In 1755, she wrote directly to Marigny to solicit an increase in the housekeeping allowance to cover the costs of heating, lighting, cleaning, and provisions.103 In turn, the Académie’s administration took an interest in Carle’s children, even those who were not enrolled as étudiants. A letter Cochin wrote to Marigny suggests that the boys were a common topic of conversation: ‘you have almost heard too much about these young men, the sons of Van Loo’.104 Louis-Michel’s portrait of Carle and his family may have depicted a domestic scene, but displayed in the hôtel of the Ecole Royale it became an institutional image: a symbolic representation of the academic ménage that Carle and Christine had fostered. Unlike his uncle Carle, Louis-Michel never married. With no conjugal family of his own, his bachelor status determined the very different family portraits he made of himself, such as his first, Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father, Jean-Baptiste (1762) (Figure 4.8). As an image of father and son, this portrait is arresting. Family likeness is undeniable, but the strange proximity in their ages makes the figures appear more like brothers, with only the difference in wig-style suggesting the temporal disjunction. When Jean-Baptiste died in 1745, he was 61, six years older than Louis-Michel (at 55) when he painted this portrait. Yet the face of Jean-Baptiste appears, if anything, more youthful than his son’s, seeming to recall the memory of Jean-Baptiste as he was when LouisMichel last saw his father (aged 53) before leaving for Madrid in 1737. Unlike the father–son images of Antoine and Charles-Antoine Coypel or Carle and Jules-César Van Loo, where marked generational age-gaps in shared temporal moments gesture expectantly to the future of youth, this is a retrospective father–son portrait seen from the perspective of an adult son. In this encounter between two academicians in their primes – one ‘present’ in his full-bodied shimmering silks, the other long-lost and only a trace on his canvas-within-acanvas – Louis-Michel’s portrait seems at once a loving memorial to his father and a poignant realisation that he would probably surpass him: living longer, going further, achieving more. Charles-Antoine Coypel had feared living up

4.8 Louis-Michel Van Loo, Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father, Jean-Baptiste Van Loo, 129.5 × 98 cm, oil on canvas, 1762, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

4.9 Louis-Michel Van Loo, Self-Portrait with his sister, Marie-Anne, and a portrait of his father, Jean-Baptiste, 245 × 162 cm, oil on canvas, 1763, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Daniel Arnaudet)

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to the reputation of his paternal line, Louis-Michel, by contrast, was more afraid of exceeding his. This portrait ensured that in one way at least he and his father would remain parallel. Louis-Michel had long had an acute awareness of his father’s academic status. Perhaps because of the Van Loos’ dubious history at the Académie, or perhaps simply because he had received his training there, Louis-Michel was more conscious of (or cared more about) institutional culture than Jean-Baptiste, who trained with Louis-Abraham in the South. According to Dézallier d’Argenville, it was indeed only at his son’s insistence that JeanBaptiste was admitted in the first place. After returning from Italy in the 1730s and passing his agrément, Louis-Michel had been keen to submit his morceau de réception, but not wanting to be reçu before his father (who had delayed his réception for nine years), he pressured Jean-Baptiste to complete his morceau de réception first in order to avoid the discomfort being academically superior to his father.105 Thirty years later, Louis-Michel’s double-portrait was once again an attempt to preserve the natural order. Conforming to the Académie’s official portrait conventions of size and format, Louis-Michel’s unusual painting was yet another family-motivated appropriation of the morceau-de-réception tradition, not this time to make a penance for blood (as it had been for Coypel), but rather an attempt to backdate a legacy.106 Donating a self-portrait was actually far from common. Of the 12 self-portraits in the collection, only four were given directly by their authors (among them those by Antoine (Figure 3.12) and Charles-Antoine Coypel [Plate 10]).107 Most, however, to avoid any suggestion of amourpropre, were presented (usually posthumously) by friends or relatives, such as those by Largillière (Figure 6.10) and Rigaud (Figure 6.11), left to the Académie by Jean de Julienne, or that by Mignard (Plate 15), donated by his daughter.108 Louis-Michel’s self-portrait gift was also an honourable gesture of filial piety, for though he was the work’s principal subject, the inclusion of his father’s portrait was understood by the Académie to constitute a distinct effigy (when Simon-Charles Miger engraved it for his réception, it counted for both his required works).109 Thus Louis-Michel had found a way of keeping father and son academic equivalents, both achieving the status of ‘effigy’ at the same time, both destined to hang together in perpetuity in the salle des portraits, neither more prominent than the other. A few months after this donation to the Académie, Louis-Michel made another public statement about his family, exhibiting Self-Portrait with his sister and a portrait of his father (Figure 4.9) at the Salon of 1763. Though Jean-Baptiste is present again on a canvas-within-a-canvas, compositionally the second portrait is very different: a full-length portrait, three times as large, including the additional figure of Louis-Michel’s sister. It is the presence of Marie-Anne that most alters the image. Where the first portrait showed the professional relationship between father and son (two equivalents, academicians sharing age and institutional identity), this portrait shows the domestic relationship of brother and sister, together venerating their late father. As Diderot notes,

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the family resemblance could not be clearer in all three, but it is brother and sister who are the principal subjects, drawn together on the left of the canvas, her hand supportively resting on his shoulder, as he leans back comfortably towards her.110 As a family portrait exhibited at the Salon, Louis-Michel’s Self-Portrait with his sister actually had more in common with his portrait of Carle and his family (Plate 11) than it did with his institutionally-destined Self-Portrait (Figure 4.8). Indeed I would contend that the two were conceived as pendants, for LouisMichel made a copy of Carle and his family (the original going to the Ecole Royale) for his own collection, where it was joined a few years later by this SelfPortrait with his sister.111 Their unusually grand scale (both over two metres) and their comparable settings in elegant salon-studio interiors certainly encourage comparison. Seen together, the works playfully echo each other. Like Carle, Louis-Michel appears seated, dressed in a robe de chambre, with a canvas on the right and his ‘family’ on the left.112 Marie-Anne meanwhile becomes a visual conflation of Christine and Marie-Rosalie: standing, like Carle’s wife, with her hair coiffed en papillon, wearing earrings and an identical mantelet, but beneath wearing the same grey silk cartouche dress as Carle’s daughter. Viewed as pendants, these paintings create an enlarged family portrait. Alone each represented a single nuclear family, but together they represented the Van Loos’ extended ménage: the lineal and lateral lines of their family tree brought together in uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, fathers, sons, brothers, sisters, wives, and husbands. Louis-Michel’s Self-Portrait with his sister was actually quite a literal representation of the artist’s household, for though Marie-Anne had married a Lyonnais merchant, she chose to live with her bachelor brother. In 1745, she and her husband, Antoine Berger, had followed Louis-Michel to Madrid, where the two men established a partnership in a ‘commerce d’articles de mode’.113 But when Louis-Michel returned to Paris in 1752, Marie-Anne left Berger with the business in Spain and returned with her brother. In 1765, when Carle died and Louis-Michel was nominated gouverneur of the Ecole Royale, Marie-Anne again accompanied him to his new residence in the hôtel, and moreover took on the role of surrogate materfamilias to the academic household. In succeeding his uncle as gouverneur, it might look as though Louis-Michel had inherited a family title in a Coypel-style patrilineal progression, as though his Self-Portrait, painted as a pendant to the copy, was always intended to take its place as pendant to the original in the Ecole. But this was not the case. Louis-Michel was not the first choice for the position and his eventual selection had nothing to do with his bloodlines. It did, however, have everything to do with family. In the days following Carle’s death, Cochin advised Marigny on options for his replacement.114 Their utmost concern, however, was not finding the most able academician to fill the post, but rather the most accommodating means to assist Carle’s widow and her children.115 Widows of academicians were traditionally well provided for by the Académie, former wives of

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officiers being supported throughout their widowhoods.116 But when it came to Christine Van Loo, the Académie’s administration wanted to do more than remunerate. Initially, Cochin thought the best solution would be to offer the two vacant posts of premier peintre du Roi and gouverneur to Boucher. Then part of Boucher’s old logement in the Louvre could be given to Madame Van Loo, along with a pension of 3,000 livres. This, he thought, would work well, for the logement could be split with Louis-Michel – ‘the two families united’ – and everyone would benefit.117 But two days later, Cochin went to pay his condolences to the widow, who was ‘very troubled at having to leave her home in the school’ and so requested a different solution that Cochin thought practical, namely to elect Louis-Michel to the post instead.118 If another family member were gouverneur, Christine and her children could remain, and the Van Loo ménage at the Ecole simply extend collaterally. Cochin made some effort to justify the decision institutionally: Louis-Michel was ‘a wise and careful man’, he had ‘a certain natural gravitas’, and he was actually the ancien of Boucher (received a year earlier).119 But it was the personal justification that proved more convincing: perhaps Louis-Michel was not the best man for the job, but, Cochin claimed, ‘he loves his aunt’ and ‘would be pleased to be her consoler’.120 Thus the appointment to a high-ranking institutional post was decided not by skill but by family. Not this time through some notion of birthright, but rather through that social obligation to support and nurture one’s kin. Carle’s wife and children, those long-term residents of the Ecole, had become dependents of the Académie’s extended family. Even after Louis-Michel’s death in 1771, the Van Loo women continued to live in the school, despite the fact that neither Christine nor Marie-Anne were related to the new gouverneur (Joseph-Marie Vien), and the only current academician to whom they were still connected was Amédée, recently returned from two decades in Prussia.121 Marigny arranged matters so that the wife and sister of the former gouverneurs could remain housed in the hôtel, even acquiring for MarieAnne an additional life pension.122 The familial culture of the Ecole would become more problematic in years to come (Angiviller’s hostility eventually precipitating its closure in 1777), but after devoting their working lives to supporting the school, Christine and Marie-Anne’s final years were happily secure thanks to the Académie’s sense of its own extended ‘family’: an often unrecorded though not unacknowledged community accommodating the dependents of its members as its own.123

Academic In-laws: Nattier and Tocqué Unlike the Coypel dynasty or the Van Loo ménage, Jean-Marc Nattier and Louis Tocqué were not related by blood. But on 7 February 1747, when Tocqué married Nattier’s eldest daughter, the two artists became ‘family’ by law (Table 4.3). Marrying into a master’s family had a long tradition in guild

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Table 4.3 Family tree of the Nattier, Tocqué, and Challe families

culture – a way of expanding the family business – and sons and sons-inlaw were treated indiscriminately.124 In the Académie too, relationships by law functioned like bloodlines, even outranking blood when they did so in the institutional hierarchy. In 1699, Jean-Louis Lemoyne was reçu and given permission to attend assemblées before submitting his reception piece, not because his father, Jean Lemoyne, was an académicien, but because his fatherin-law, Baptiste Monnoyer, was an officier.125 From then on, officiers’ sons-in-law were accorded the same privileges as their sons, particularly with regard to preferential treatment during admission. Tocqué, however, gained no familial advantages at his réception, for his marriage to Marie-Catherine-Pauline came later. Because Tocqué and Nattier were already academicians before they became family, this final story offers an intriguing look at the effects of academic kinship by examining what changed afterwards, exploring the impact of family relationships on institutional relationships, and professional motivations on domestic arrangements.126 To begin we need to start at the end, with the Self-Portrait with his Family (Figure 4.10) that a nearly 80-year-old Nattier exhibited at the Salon of 1763, just a few years before his death. Nattier appears, palette in hand, surrounded by his conjugal family: his wife, Marie-Madeleine Delaroche, seated before her harpsichord; his three daughters, the eldest, Marie-Catherine-Pauline, studying a musical score; and his only son, Jean-Frédéric-Marc (still dressed like his

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sisters as all boys were up to five), holding a porte-crayon to indicate his future inheritance of the family profession. Once again music and painting become gendered attributes creating visual and symbolic harmony, connecting mother and daughters in an oblique diagonal, and father and son through an anchoring vertical axis. But compositional harmony does not reflect actual togetherness, for this was not the Nattier family as it was, only as it once might have been. Nattier completed the portrait in 1762, but painted his wife and children as they would have been when he began the canvas 30 years earlier, at which point it had started as a very different work. As Xavier Salmon has discussed, X-rays reveal the canvas originally bore a single-figure composition showing Nattier alone.127 By the time he exhibited the portrait in 1763, the composition of Nattier’s canvas had changed as much as the composition of his family. His adult son, who did train as a painter, had been dead for nine years (drowned in the Tiber in Rome); his wife had been dead for 20 years; and his three daughters were no longer little girls, but women in their thirties, all married (or about to be), two of them with children of their own. The youngest, Madeleine-Sophie, married the academician CharlesMichel-Ange Challe a few days after the Salon opened; Charlotte-Claudine married François-Philippe Brochier, a Procureur au Parlement, in 1754; and Marie-Catherine-Pauline married Tocqué in 1747, giving birth to their daughter, Catherine-Pauline Tocqué, the following year.128

4.10 Jean-Marc Nattier, SelfPortrait with his wife and children, 149 × 165 cm, oil on canvas, 1730– 1762, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

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The passage of time endured by the Nattiers and Tocqués as a family, and by this portrait as an object, is most poignantly announced in Madame Nattier’s harpsichord. Two extinguished candles symbolise the lives now lost and an inscription on its side panel measures out the 32-year life of the canvas: Tableau de l’attelier de M. Jean-Marc Nattier trésorier de L’académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture commencé en 1730 et fini par Le dit S[ieur] en 1762.129 In real life too, the harpsichord (the actual instrument made by Nicolas Dumont) had embodied the passage of Nattier family life as it passed down the maternal line.130 When Madame Nattier died, her harpsichord was inherited by her eldest daughter, and when Marie-Catherine-Pauline married Tocqué, the instrument became a principal component of her dowry, later bequeathed to her own daughter down the Tocqué line.131 Nattier’s nostalgic portrait of his family was thus, in 1762, an artificial gathering of people and things that time and others had taken away – a pictorial reclaiming of the disbanded elements of a household that had legally or physically passed on. Tocqué, who had taken the hand of Marie-CatherinePauline and so become custodian of Madame Nattier’s harpsichord, was implicated in this portrait as a precipitating factor behind Nattier’s collage, inextricably linked to his father-in-law through an exchange of goods and services. Nattier’s portrait-reunion of a long-gone nuclear family more than hints at the emotional pulls that emerged with the reconfigurations of family networks, and it is an evocative musing on the fragility of life. This was Nattier trying to put back together something that was broken, creating an alternative temporality that preserved in paint relationships, people, and things that were now dead or dispersed through a network of kinship alliances. More inadvertently, the portrait also draws attention to the essentially proprietary customs of the ancien-régime family, which was not a closed unit, but an everexpanding legal assemblage of people, brought together by contracts, ratified by property exchanges, and maintained by social obligations. Before marrying Marie-Catherine-Pauline and becoming a legal component of Nattier’s family, Tocqué already had a long professional relationship with his father-in-law. His own father, Luc Tocqué, a guild painter, died when Tocqué was a child. After this Tocqué trained at the Académie, probably enrolled through the patronage of his godfather, Jean Lemoyne (whose son, Jean-Louis, Tocqué would later paint for his réception [1734] [Musée du Louvre]).132 He studied briefly in the studio of Nicolas Bertin, but in 1718, soon after Nattier was reçu, Tocqué moved to the studio of his future father-in-law, from whom he would receive the majority of his training over at least eight years.133 When Tocqué delivered his conférence on portraiture over 40 years later, he began with an autobiographical reflection that clearly connected his academic career with his unfortunate childhood. Orphaned at ten, his desperate need for a profession led him to ‘the good company’ of the Académie.134 Tocqué here casts the institution as his surrogate family, his profession standing in for parental protection, and Nattier (by now his father-in-law, listening in the audience to this presentation) playing the paternal role of master to his

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young dependent.135 Despite their apparent hierarchical distance, however, Tocqué was in fact only 11 years younger than Nattier. In the social structures of institution and kinship, Tocqué was the junior, but biologically, the distance was minimal and gradually diminished over the years as the relative difference between their ages decreased. In their negotiation of this complex situation, portraiture would play a significant role. In the decades before the marriage, Nattier and Tocqué’s relationship was determined by their positions within the Académie’s hierarchy (see Table 2.1). In 1718, when Nattier (aged 33) was admitted as an académicien, Tocqué (aged 22) had only just started as an étudiant.136 In 1734, when Tocqué was received as an académicien, Nattier had still not been promoted, so now suddenly master and student became colleagues holding the same rank. Moreover the 11-year age gap was slowly starting to close: there was still a distance between Nattier and Tocqué (then 49 and 38), but not quite enough for a generational gap. In the Académie, the institutional culture of ancienneté gave Nattier 16 years over Tocqué, and Nattier (a history painter) would always be higher in the genre hierarchy than Tocqué (a portraitist), but their professional relationship was nevertheless significantly altered at this moment when former master and student became peers. A conventional master–student relationship was characterised simultaneously by intimacy and distance: two people separated by hierarchy, but brought close together by their working relationship. As académiciens, holding the same rank with the same privileges and responsibilities, Nattier and Tocqué could no longer easily maintain hierarchical distance. Their former intimacy moreover was strained by a new collegial relationship that structured personal interactions out of their daily practice: they might greet each other at meetings, but they would no longer spend their days in the same studio; and instead of working together on commissions, they now had to compete for them. It was at this point that portraiture first played a role in negotiating their relationship, when, in 1739, Nattier painted a portrait of Tocqué (Figure 4.11). This in itself was already an unusual act. It was not customary for a senior member to paint a junior, especially when the junior had not already painted the senior, and Tocqué had not. Within the institution, the social conventions of artists’ portraiture were established through the rituals of morceau-deréception portraits, in which agréés painted officiers. In a culture where the custom was to paint upwards, Nattier’s portrait of Tocqué was an anomaly falling outside official categories of representation. When compared with the morceau-de-réception portrait-type (Aved’s portrait of De Troy [Figure 4.2], for example, from the same period), form and iconography situate Nattier’s portrait somewhere between official and unofficial. Nattier presents Tocqué as an ‘academician’, holding the tools of his profession and dressed formally as per convention in suit and wig, but the physical proximity of Nattier’s halflength format gestures to greater familiarity than the Académie’s three-quarter portraits. Blurring institutional boundaries, Nattier’s portrait of Tocqué looks like an attempt to retrieve something of their former relationship, as though

4.11 Jean-Marc Nattier, Louis Tocqué, 82 × 64.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1739, Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian-Museu, Lisbon. (Photo: © Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation / Catarina Gomes Ferreira)

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the master–student dynamic was being reformulated through another model of social interaction that combined hierarchy with intimacy, that is, something akin to a paternal gaze. Eight years later, this pseudo-familial relationship between the two artists was ratified by Tocqué’s marriage to Marie-Catherine-Pauline. This is not to imply, with the benefit of hindsight, that the portrait was somehow the guarantee of a Tocqué–Nattier betrothal. Rather that the marriage, when it occurred, had as much to do with negotiating the relationship between fatherand son-in-law as it did that between husband and wife. For in the years between the portrait and the marriage, as the artists ascended separately through the institutional hierarchy, much had happened that required renegotiation. While Nattier remained an académicien, in 1744, Tocqué was promoted to the rank of conseiller.137 This was the highest that a portraitist like Tocqué could achieve, but it was enough to outrank his former master for at least two years, before Nattier was eventually elected adjoint à professeur in 1746.138 As Tocqué started to surpass Nattier professionally, this uncomfortable reversal of the master–student dynamic threatened their former intimacy. For the Coypels and Van Loos, where master–student relationships mirrored familial relationships (father–son, brother–brother, or uncle– nephew) intimacy had been easily maintained within the institutional sphere. But for Nattier and Tocqué, without biological bloodlines, the condition of co-residence, or even a sufficient age gap, one way to salvage their pseudo-paternal relationship was via an alliance in law. They had to wait for some time, however, because even Nattier’s eldest daughter was nearly 30 years younger than Tocqué. When they eventually married on 6 February 1747, the contract shows a marriage negotiated between Tocqué, as groom, and Nattier, standing proxy for the bride, who at 21 was still too young to give legal consent.139 Through an exchange of property and contractual obligations (Marie-Catherine-Pauline brought a dowry worth 6,000 livres, including her harpsichord, and Tocqué’s dower assured financial support in the case of his pre-deceasing her), this marriage restored Nattier and Tocqué’s intimacy by turning them legally into family.140 This signed contract transformed Nattier (aged 61) and Tocqué (aged 50) into beau-père and gendre (father- and son-in-law), and with that the pressures of competitive collegiality and differences in professional success could be contained within a normative family structure. In the years following the marriage, the two artists were safely able to establish a closer professional relationship, even, as Arnauld Doria notes, sharing commissions in a kind of commercial partnership.141 At the Salon of 1755, for instance, Tocqué exhibited a portrait of the financier Charles-FrançoisMichel de Roissy, while Nattier exhibited a portrait of his wife, Madame de Roissy, each artist conforming to his recognised talent for masculine and feminine portraiture respectively.142 Painted as pendants on canvases of matching dimensions and exhibited together, these portraits were the result of close collaboration.143 Despite such confrontations of skill, however, artistic rivalry

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4.12 Jean-Marc Nattier, Louis Tocqué, 81.1 × 62.8 cm, oil on canvas, c.1759–1762, Akademiraadet (Det Kongelige Akademi for der Skønne Kunster), Copenhagen. (Photo: © Akademiraadet [Det Kongelige Akademi for der Skønne Kunster] / Det Kongelige Bibliotek)

was kept at bay by their family alliance, wherein Tocqué could flourish without threat to Nattier, for any success would belong to a son-in-law, not a competitor. Their new familial–professional relationship was put to the test at the end of the 1750s, when portraiture once again became an agent of negotiation. Just as Nattier’s career had begun to slow, Tocqué was reaching a peak of productivity and renown. In 1756, Tocqué was invited to the court of Empress Elizabeth at St Petersburg, and on his way back to France in 1758, while travelling through Denmark, he was honoured with an invitation to join the recently established Royal Academy of Painting in Copenhagen.144 To avoid once again accelerating uncomfortably beyond his father-in-law, Tocqué solicited an invitation for Nattier as well, a filial gesture reminiscent of LouisMichel Van Loo’s attempts to remain professionally behind, or at least parallel

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4.13 Louis Tocqué, JeanMarc Nattier, 83 × 68 cm, oil on canvas, 1762, Akademiraadet (Det Kongelige Akademi for der Skønne Kunster), Copenhagen. Photo: © Akademiraadet [Det Kongelige Akademi for der Skønne Kunster] / Det Kongelige Bibliotek)

with, Jean-Baptiste.145 Tocqué too was unwilling to disturb the natural order by surpassing his father-in-law, and though he was received by the Danish Academy before Nattier, both artists delayed submitting their reception pieces until the works could be sent together.146 For Nattier and Tocqué’s collaboration here was not limited to the act of submission, but extended also to the works themselves: what each artist chose as his reception piece was a portrait of the other.147 Nattier’s portrait of Tocqué (Figure 4.12) was a copy of his portrait from 1739 (Figure 4.11), practically identical save for the softer handling of paint and the treatment of light, which Salmon notes were characteristic of Nattier’s later style.148 Tocqué’s portrait of Nattier (Figure 4.13) meanwhile was a formal and conceptual pendant to his father-in-law’s: half-length, on a matching canvas,

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showing the sitter formally attired with tools in hand. Compositionally the debt is evident in Nattier’s turned pose, the sweep of the left arm across the foreground, and the large ellipse of the palette. Through a combination of live sittings and compositional studies of the earlier painting, Tocqué produced a deliberate homage. As pendants, Tocqué’s portrait of Nattier provided a new semantic setting for Nattier’s recycled image of Tocqué. Undoubtedly belonging on the left, Tocqué’s gaze now has an object as he looks across to his former master on the right, whose body turns towards his son-in-law. Together the portraits evoke the narrative of their collaboration, as Nattier appears in the act of painting the portrait of Tocqué, with the necessary drops of paint – red, white, raw sienna, and yellow – just visible around the edge of the palette. Like Charles-Antoine Coypel’s Self-Portrait (1746) (Plate 10) and LouisMichel Van Loo’s Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father (Figure 4.8), Nattier and Tocqué’s Danish portraits mobilised morceau-de-réception traditions to negotiate family issues. As used objects, these reception pieces ratified the artists’ admissions to the Danish Academy, but as effigies, the portraits performed a more remarkable feat. Across the space between the frames, the portraits created an alternative temporality in which Nattier and Tocqué finally achieved an age-gap appropriate to master and student, father and son. When the works were completed in 1762, Nattier was 77 and his son-inlaw 66. Nattier is in good shape for a septuagenarian, but he certainly appears considerably older than Tocqué, whose likeness recalls that captured over two decades earlier in 1739 when he was 43. The artists’ original hierarchical distance – which had progressively diminished through Tocqué’s professional success, Nattier’s slowing career, and the natural course of time – was restored (or re-invented) in portraiture through the disparity of a 30-year age-gap that framed father- and son-in-law with a generational distance that had never existed in life. Portraiture’s ability to arrest temporality seems to have become for Nattier, at this moment, a way of reflecting on his family legacy. Soon after the portraits of father- and son-in-law were sent to Denmark in 1762, Nattier returned to that self-portrait he had started in 1730 (Figure 4.10). While the Danish portraits created an alternative temporality across two canvases (aligning separate temporal realms side-by-side to suggest a single moment), Nattier’s self-portrait distorted temporality within a single pictorial space. In this collage of the living, the dead, and the ‘no longer’, the disproportions and disjunctions in Nattier’s composition hint at the real-life disconnection between a group of people now irreversibly changed and distanced by time and death. Diderot described it as ‘weak’ and ‘vague’, and one can see what troubled him.149 The children grouped around a low table in the foreground are proportionally too small for the adult figures; Madame Nattier is too far forward to be sitting on the same chair against which Nattier leans, yet there is no room for any additional furniture in the compressed mid-ground space. The children and Madame Nattier seem strangely superimposed, like

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coulisses receding through a shallow stage to the figure of Nattier, set back, contemplating his imagined scene. As a representation of the past rather than the present, Nattier’s painted family reunion is more like an autobiography, reflectively looking back at what-has-been, than a selfportrait, representing the here-and-now. In terms of motivation, it is thus more akin to the mémoires he started to write around this time, which a painful illness ultimately prevented him from completing. Nattier died on 7 November 1766 and the following day was interred at his parish church of Saint-Eustache in a small service attended by his three sonsin-law, two of them – Tocqué and Challe – both colleagues and family.150 Afterwards it fell to his daughter, Marie-CatherinePauline, to finish Nattier’s mémoires, which she presented to the Académie on 7 February 1767, coincidentally the twentieth anniversary of her marriage to Tocqué.151 Not surprisingly, given the small age gap, Tocqué died only five years after his fatherin-law, and again it was Marie-Catherine-Pauline who became responsible for assuring an institutional legacy. In 1773 she donated a portrait of Tocqué for the Académie’s collection – a framed print of Louis-Jacques Cathelin’s engraving after her father’s portrait of her husband (Figure 4.14) – with the intention of presenting additional copies for every current member.152 After Madame Tocqué died, her daughter sold the plate to the Académie.153 Once again, in death as in life, it was the women of the family, above all MarieCatherine-Pauline – Madame Tocqué née Nattier – who became the mediators of their fathers’ and husbands’ professional relationships, and once again a portrait that memorialised that academic intimacy. Family was a constant presence in the Académie, structuring relationships between members and simultaneously drawing non-members into an extended institutional community: to be related to an academician was to be related to the Académie. Whether determined by blood or law, kinship ties established an unofficial culture within the institution, which formed a complement, rather than an alternative, to the official social order. Family never became part of the official rules and regulations, but it was always acknowledged and accommodated in the preferential treatment extended to those individuals who had academic kin or came from academic stock. The guild culture of art-making as a family business, where masters and apprentices were synonymous with fathers and sons, was never completely

4.14 LouisJacques Cathelin (after JeanMarc Nattier), Louis Tocqué, 37.6 × 26.1 cm, engraving, 1773, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

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eliminated in the Académie’s revised social order of professeurs and étudiants. There may have been a theoretical opposition to nepotism when it was seen to trump skill, but skill could be imagined as an inheritable quality, and preferential treatment could be envisaged, not as an advantage to the son, but as a mark of honour to the father. As a social structure with its own exigencies and obligations, family often conflicted with the culture of the Académie, as evident in CharlesAntoine Coypel’s ambivalent sense of belonging in the community – never entirely sure whether he was there because he deserved to be, or simply because his father and grandfather paved his way. At the same time, family provided a social model through which institutional relationships could be negotiated in productive ways. When the competitive proximity of Nattier and Tocqué’s ranks threatened the relationship they had developed as master and student, their kinship alliance allowed them to retrieve intimacy and maintain hierarchical distance. Family and institution could even work symbiotically, perhaps nowhere more so than in the ‘family’ branch of the Académie established under Carle Van Loo in the Ecole des Elèves Protégés, where the élèves became extensions of the gouverneur’s nuclear family, and his wife and children became part of an institutional ménage. Family was a palimpsest through which institutional relationships were interpreted, an ‘unofficial’ social relation that came before the Académie’s ‘official’ culture, but also became a layer within it. But family was not the only informal relationship that connected individuals in the Académie. As we shall see in the next chapter, in contrast to the predetermined relations of family, friendship was a different matter entirely: an ambiguously subjective social relation that could create intimate connections between the most unlikely people.

Notes 1 This arrangement is from the inventory of 1781 and differs slightly from the final inventory of Year II. Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, pp. 140–143. 2 François de Troy was elected directeur on 7 July 1708 (PV, vol. 4, p. 65). Wine, Painting, p. 31. 3 Jean-François de Troy was reçu at the next assemblée on 28 July 1708 (PV, vol. 4, p. 66). 4 ENSBA Ms 21. On François de Troy’s presumed family portrait see: Jean Cailleux, ‘Some Family and Group Portraits by François de Troy (1645–1730)’, The Burlington Magazine, 113/817 (1971), pp. i–xviii. 5 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 6, p. 390. 6 Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 1–3. 7 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 6, p. 391.

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8 Flandrin, Families, pp. 65–78; Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Private and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 33–36; Sarah Maza, ‘The “Bourgeois” Family Revisited: Sentimentalism and Social Class in Prerevolutionary French Culture’, in Richard Rand (ed.), Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, exh. cat. (Dartmouth, 1997), pp. 39–40. 9 On historical notions of family and line see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 341–343. 10 The definition remained consistent throughout the century: Nouveau dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise (Paris, 1718), vol. 1, p. 640; and Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise (Nismes, 1787), p. 502. 11 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 6, p. 391. On notions of kinship comprising co-residence and consanguinity see Flandrin, Families, pp. 4–23. 12 Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789, vol. 1 – Society and State (Chicago and London, 1979), p. 49. 13 Wine, Painting, pp. 23–24. 14 Documents du Minutier Central concernant l’histoire de l’art (1700–1750), vol. 2 (Paris, 1964), p. 376. 15 25 November 1769 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 27–28). 16 Auguste Jal, Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d’histoire, 2nd edn (Paris: 1872), pp. 969–970. 17 Alexis-Simon Belle was also the widower of Anne Chéron, sister of ElisabethSophie Chéron. Elizabeth Poulson, ‘Louise-Magdeleine Horthemels: Reproductive Engraver’, Woman’s Art Journal, 6/2 (1985), pp. 20–23; Alexandre Tardieu, ‘Notice sur les Tardieu, les Cochin et les Belle’, AAF (1855–1856), pp. 49–68. 18 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 6, p. 391. 19 Mousnier, Institutions, pp. 49–50. 20 Nicole Garnier, Antoine Coypel (1661–1722) (Paris, 1989), p. 4. 21 Jal, Dictionnaire, pp. 449, 908, 941. 22 On godparenthood see: François-Joseph Ruggiu, L’individu et la famille dans les sociétés urbaines anglaise et française (1720–1780) (Paris, 2007), pp. 56–57. For the distribution of Rigaud’s property see his will: AN MC, LXXIX, 21 (21 April 1738). 23 Maza, ‘The “Bourgeois” Family Revisited’, p. 39; Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy, pp. 112–116; Daniel Roche, ‘Work, Fellowship, and Some Economic Realities of Eighteenth-Century France’, in Steven Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp (eds), Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca and London, 1986), pp. 56–57, and Edward J. Shepherd Jr, ‘Social and Geographic Mobility of the Eighteenth-Century Guild Artisan: An Analysis of Guild Receptions in Dijon, 1700–1790’, in Kaplan and Koepp, Work in France, pp. 123–127; and Wine, Painting, pp. 47–56. 24 Guiffrey, Histoire, p. 25. 25 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, pp. 8–9. 26 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 9.

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27 Article III, Statuts et Règlements (1651). This is one of only two mentions of family in the Statuts; the second is in Article XVII, Règlement pour l’Académie. 28 The decision regarding family privilege and the présent pécuniaire was first made on 9 May 1659 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 154–155) but not put to the test until Vignon’s admission, 25 June 1667 (PV, vol. 1, p. 320). 29 31 March 1674 (PV, vol. 2, p. 26). 30 31 March 1674 and 1 September 1674 (PV, vol. 2, 26, p. 33). 31 14 February 1671 and 12 March 1672 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 356, 378–379). 32 29 November 1670 (PV, vol. 1, p. 354); and 28 March 1722 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 331–332). 33 17 June 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 279). 34 30 March 1697 (PV, vol. 3, p. 209); 26 October 1743 (PV, vol. 5, p. 353). 35 Wine, Painting, p. 30. 36 27 August 1768 (PV, vol. 7, p. 397). See also Wine, Painting, pp. 81–84. 37 Correspondence between Cochin and Marigny, 29 August–16 September 1768 (PV, vol. 7, pp. 399–406). 38 On the growing diversity of academicians’ backgrounds later in the eighteenth century see Wine, Painting, pp. 35–41. 39 Noël Coypel was agréé on 6 September 1659 and reçu on 31 March 1663 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 159–160, 219). 40 The Boullognes were: Louis I; four of his children, Bon, Geneviève, Madeleine, and Louis II; the latter’s son, Jean, and then his son, Jean-Nicolas (the two honoraires amateurs). 41 Noël Coypel was married on 29 April 1659. On the history on the Coypel family, see Garnier, Antoine Coypel, pp. 3–43; Thierry Lefrançois, Charles Coypel, Peintre du Roi (1694–1752) (Paris, 1994), pp. 37–112; and Jérôme Delaplanche, NoëlNicolas Coypel, 1690–1734 (Paris, 2004), pp. 15–74. 42 Guiffrey, ‘Logements’, pp. 75, 135. See also Garnier, Antoine Coypel, pp. 11, 258. Antoine Coypel is first mentioned in the Académie’s records when awarded second place in the grand prix of 1676; he was reçu on 25 October 1681 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 94, 199). 43 Ms 21 ENSBA. 44 Antoine initially moved into logement number 5 but later moved to number 26, next-door to his father’s former logement, in 1711. Guiffrey, ‘Logements’, pp. 129, 135. 45 Several women of the Coypel family, including both of Noël’s wives (Hérault and Perrin), were also artists, though none were ever received at the Académie. Abecedario de Pierre-Jean Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les artistes, ed. Ph. de Chennevières and Anatole de Montaiglon, vol. 2 (Paris, 1851–1860), pp. 26–27. 46 Collection des livrets [1699], p. 14. Florent Le Comte, Cabinet des singularitez d’architecture, peinture, sculpture et gravure, vol. 3 (Paris, 1700), p. 250. 47 Collection des livrets [1699], p. 21. Le Comte, Cabinet, vol. 3, p. 261.

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48 The other was La Mare-Richart. Chéron exhibited a portrait of her sister on a separate canvas. Collection des livrets [1699], pp. 21, 23–24. 49 On the hanging of portraits in homes see Pointon, Hanging, pp. 13–26. 50 Antoine was named first painter to the duc d’Orléans in 1685. Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’ (1745), in Lépicié, Vies des premiers peintres du Roi, pp. 14–15. On Antoine’s career see Garnier, Antoine Coypel, pp. 3–43. 51 On the structure of the ancien-régime ‘ménage’ and its inclusion of domestics see: Jean-Louis Flandrin, Familles. Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l’ancienne société (Paris, 1984), pp. 63–130. 52 Antoine was made premier peintre du Roi in October 1715 (PV, vol. 4, p. 213). For details of the pensions see: ‘Nouvelles de Paris’, Mercure de France, April 1717, p. 102. On the Coypels’ ‘annoblissement’ in April 1717 see Lefrançois, Charles Coypel, pp. 43, 113. 53 Lefrançois, Charles Coypel, p. 114. 54 On Charles-Antoine’s biography see I. Jamieson, Charles-Antoine Coypel. Premier Peintre de Louis XV et Auteur Dramatique (1694–1752) (Paris, 1930). CharlesAntoine won third place in a prix du quartier of 1705 (PV, vol. 4, p. 38). 55 31 December 1707 (PV, vol. 4, p. 54). Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’, p. 24. 56 Delivered on 7 January 1708 (PV, vol. 4, p. 56). 57 ‘Well, you wanted it, I resisted in vain; / A forebear much more powerful than me is leading you on; / And your heart that is smitten with the art of Drawing, / wants to be in the Académie competing for the prize.’ Antoine Coypel, ‘Epistre a mon fils, sur la peinture’, Discours prononcez dans les conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris, 1721), lines 1–4. 58 ‘So follow the path of this passionate desire; / But listen, my son, to a father who loves you.’ Antoine Coypel, ‘Epistre a mon fils, sur la peinture’, lines 5–6. 59 31 August 1715 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 207–208). 60 31 August 1715 (PV, vol. 4, p. 207). 61 6 March 1745 (PV, vol. 6, p. 5). 62 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’, p. 15. 63 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’, pp. 40–41. 64 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’, pp. 40–41. 65 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’, p. 41. 66 Antoine Coypel, ‘Epistre a mon fils, sur la peinture’, line 50. Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’, p. 40. 67 6 March 1745 (PV, vol. 6, p. 5); 1 October 1746 (PV, vol. 6, p. 37). 68 Lefrançois, pp. 136–137. This portrait is inscribed: Charles Coypel s’est peint/ lui meme pour Philippe/ Coypel son frère et son/ ami qui plus est./1734. 69 Antoine made the drawings for this recueil in 1691. Garnier, Antoine Coypel, pp. 22, 168–169. 70 Lefrançois, Charles Coypel, p. 139; and Fontaine, Les collections, p. 360.

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71 27 April 1748 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 102–103). 72 31 May 1748 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 112–113). 73 31 May 1748 (PV, vol. 6, p. 113). 74 Antoine’s only concession was to disinherit himself from his father’s will, offering the estate to Noël-Nicolas and his siblings. Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Vie d’Antoine Coypel’, pp. 23–24. 75 Guiffrey, ‘Logements’, p. 135. Lefrançois, Charles Coypel, pp. 42–43; Garnier, Antoine Coypel, pp. 22–23. 76 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Noël-Nicolas’, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 441. 77 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Noël-Nicolas’, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 442. 78 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Noël-Nicolas’, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 442. 79 30 October 1734 (PV, vol. 5, p. 146). 80 Noël-Nicolas Coypel: agréé 31 December 1716 and reçu 29 November 1720 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 237, 305). 81 31 December 1732 (PV, vol. 5, p. 111). 82 Delaplanche, Noël-Nicolas Coypel, pp. 24–27, 43, 59. 83 Jacques Van Loo was reçu on 6 January 1663 and Jules-César on 30 October 1784 (PV, 1, p. 205; vol. 9, pp. 215–217). 84 6 May 1662 (PV, vol. 1, p. 192). See earlier discussion in Chapters 1 and 2. 85 29 November 1670 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 353–354). 86 10 January and 8 March 1671 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 355, 358). Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 385. 87 Jean-François Mozziconacci, ‘Cinq générations, deux siècles de peinture’, Les Van Loo, fils d’Abraham, exh. cat. (Nice, 2000), p. 13; Luc Thevenon, ‘L’Assomption de Ludovic Van Loo, une œuvre niçoise épigone de la peinture européene’, in JeanMarc Giaume and Jérôme Magail (eds), Le Comté de Nice: De la Savoie à l’Europe (Nice, 2006), pp. 107–119. 88 Mozziconacci, ‘Cinq générations, deux siècles de peinture’, p. 13. 89 ENSBA Ms 21. On the Van Loos and the Italian crown see Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé, vol. 4, pp. 385–396. 90 On the careers of the Van Loos see: Christine Rolland, ‘La dynastie Van Loo’, Les Van Loo, fils d’Abraham, exh. cat. (Nice, 2000), pp. 83–84; Christine Rolland Buckingham, Louis-Michel Van Loo (1707–1771): Member of a Dynasty of Painters, PhD Thesis (University of California Santa Barbara, 1994); and Andréa Zanella, ‘Jean-Baptiste Vanloo “niceensis”’, Les Van Loo, fils d’Abraham, exh. cat. (Nice, 2000), pp. 27–39. 91 Jules-César was awarded third place in the prix du quartier on 31 December 1757 (PV, vol. 7, pp. 52–53). 92 On Enlightenment notions of the family in art see: Carol Duncan, ‘Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in French Art’, Art Bulletin, 55/4 (1973), pp. 570– 583; Maza, ‘The “Bourgeois” Family Revisited’, pp. 39–47; and Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 90–112.

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93 François Alexandre de Garsault, L’art du tailleur (Paris, 1769), p. 54. 94 Collection des livrets [1757], p. 12. 95 Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy, pp. 112–116. 96 The Ecole was officially established in 1748; Carle was elected gouverneur on 12 April 1749 (PV, vol. 6, p. 162) after Dumont le Romain resigned before properly commencing in post. 97 Articles I and II, Règlement au sujet de l’établissement de l’Ecole Roïale (1748) (PV, vol. 6, pp. 146–147). 98 Articles III, VI, VII and VIII, Règlement au sujet, pp. 147–148. 99 Article V, Règlement au sujet, p. 147. 100 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Réponse de Monsieur Coypel au Discours de M. Massé sur les devoirs des Elèves’ (1749) (PV, vol. 6, p. 151). 101 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Réponce de Monsieur Coypel à Monsieur le Comte de Caylus, au sujet de la vie de Louis Lerambert, Sculpteur’ (1750) (PV, vol. 6, p. 194). 102 Courajod, L’École royale, p. 81. 103 Letter from Christine Vanloo to the marquis de Marigny (11 March 1755) (AN O1 1923, 1–2), Courajod, L’École royale, pp. 61–62. 104 Letter from Cochin to Marigny (16 July 1765) (AN O1 1924), Courajod, L’École royale, p. 84. 105 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Jean-Baptiste Vanloo’, Abrégé, p. 392. 106 Its donation is recorded on 9 April 1763 (PV, vol. 7, p. 217). 107 Twelve self-portraits are listed in Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire. Excluding Chéron’s self-portrait submitted for her réception, the only other artist to donate a self-portrait was Henri de Favanne (29 May 1745, PV, vol. 6, p. 9). 108 22 March 1766 (PV, vol. 7, p. 324); 28 September 1696 (PV, vol. 3, pp. 196–197). 109 7 February 1778 (PV, vol. 8, p. 324). 110 Denis Diderot, ‘Salon de 1763’, Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar (eds), Salons, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1957), pp. 201–202. 111 Louis-Michel’s copy of Carle and his family (Château de Versailles) was noted with his Self-Portrait with his sister in his inventaire après décès, 22 April 1771 (AN MC, étude LVI, 166, 9), cited in Diderot et l’Art de Boucher à David, exh. cat. (Paris, 1984), p. 388. 112 There is also an obvious compositional debt to Largillière’s portrait of Lebrun (1686). 113 Georges Guigue, Vanloo Négociant, 1745–1767 (Lyon, 1902); Rolland, ‘La dynastie Van Loo’, p. 83. 114 On Cochin’s relationship with Marigny and his authority within the Académie’s administration, see Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, pp. 81–91. 115 Letter from Cochin to Marigny (16 July 1765), Courajod, L’École royale, p. 82. 116 9 May 1659 (PV, vol. 1, p. 154).

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117 Letter from Cochin to Marigny (16 July 1765), Courajod, L’École royale, pp. 82–84. 118 Letter from Cochin to Marigny (18 July 1765), Courajod, L’École royale, p. 85. 119 Letter from Cochin to Marigny (18 July 1765), Courajod, L’École royale, p. 85. 120 Letter from Cochin to Marigny (18 July 1765), Courajod, L’École royale, p. 85. 121 Amédée received Vien’s atelier in the Louvre when Vien moved to the École in 1771 (PV, vol. 8, p. 74). 122 Letter from Marigny to Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre (20 April 1771) (PV, vol. 8, pp. 70–72). 123 On Angiviller’s hostility to the École see: Locquin, La peinture d’histoire en France, p. 60; Crow, Painters, p. 184. On its closure see Courajod, L’École royale, pp. 133–173. 124 See admission fees for guild in Guiffrey, Histoire, p. 25. 125 4 April 1699 (PV, vol. 3, p. 256). 126 On Nattier and Tocqué as family see also Williams, ‘Academic Intimacies’, pp. 341–349. 127 Xavier Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, 1685–1766, exh. cat. (Versailles, 1999), p. 295. 128 For the marriage contracts (AN MC LIX, 238; LIX, 253; and LVIII, 410) see Philippe Renard, Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766): Un parisien à la cour de Louis XV (Paris, 1999), pp. 193–199. 129 Painting from the studio of M. Jean-Marc Nattier, treasurer of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, begun in 1730 and finished by this gentleman in 1762. 130 The instrument is identified as a Dumont harpsichord in Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, p. 296. 131 Marie-Catherine-Pauline bequeathed most of her estate to her only child (25 March 1772, AN MC CXIII, 477). Renard, Jean-Marc Nattier, pp. 205–207. 132 On Tocqué’s early associations with Nattier, see Renard, Jean-Marc Nattier, p. 145; Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, pp. 32–33. 133 Nattier was reçu 29 October 1718 (PV, vol. 4, p. 273). On Tocqué’s early life see: Arnauld Doria, Louis Tocqué. Biographie et catalogue critiques (Paris, 1929), pp. 2–5. 134 Tocqué, ‘Reflexions’, p. 13. 135 Tocqué’s conférence was delivered on 7 March 1750 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 199–200); Nattier was present at the assemblée. 136 29 October 1718 (PV, vol. 4, p. 273). 137 31 January 1744 (PV, vol. 5, p. 360). 138 26 March 1746 (PV, vol. 6, p. 26). 139 The age of majority was 25: Lucien Bély (ed.), Dictionnaire de l’ancien régime: royaume de France XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1996), pp. 788, 798. 140 Contract of marriage (6 February 1747, AN MC LIX, 238). 141 Doria, Louis Tocqué, p. 13. See also Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, pp. 32–34. 142 Collection des livrets [1755], pp. 15, 17.

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143 Both canvases are now lost. Doria, Louis Tocqué, p. 135. 144 10 November 1758 (Archives of DKDK), in Doria, Louis Tocqué, p. 78. 145 8 January 1759 (Archives of DKDK), in Doria, Louis Tocqué, p. 78. 146 10 November 1758 (Archives of DKDK), in Doria, Louis Tocqué, p. 78; and letter from Nattier to the Danish Academy, 29 January 1759 (Archives of DKDK ‘Letters received’ 1759, no. 2), in Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, p. 122. 147 Choice of subject was, at least in Nattier’s case, left to the artist’s discretion. 8 January 1759 (Archives of DKDK), in Doria, Louis Tocqué, p. 78. 148 Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, p. 122. 149 Diderot, ‘Salon de 1763’, p. 206. 150 Renard, Jean-Marc Nattier, p. 158. 151 7 February 1767 (PV, vol. 7, p. 353). Marie-Catherine-Pauline Tocqué, ‘Abrégé de la vie de M. Nattier’ (1767), Mémoires inédits, vol. 2, pp. 348–364. 152 6 March 1773 (PV, vol. 8, p. 118). On Cathelin’s engraving see David Maskill, ‘A Proof of Cathelin’s Portrait of Louis Tocqué’, Print Quarterly, 23/4 (2006), pp. 414–417. 153 27 June 1778 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 339–340).

5.1 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, 44 × 35 cm, pastel, 1747, Private Collection. Image after Albert Besnard, La Tour, la vie et l’œuvre (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1928).

5 Reciprocal Acts: Portraits of Friendship

In 1747, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour painted a pastel portrait of the sculptor Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne (Figure 5.1), which he exhibited at that year’s Salon. In itself, this was nothing particularly extraordinary. La Tour painted many portraits of academicians and exhibited several in the Salons: René Frémin (Figure 5.2) and Charles Parrocel (Figure 5.3) at the Salon of 1743; Jean Restout (a morceau de réception) at the Salon of 1746; and a few years later, Louis de Silvestre (Plate 12) at the Salon of 1753. As one might expect, given the hierarchical conventions of academicians’ portraiture established by the morceau-deréception rituals, all these portraits represented artists considerably senior to La Tour, who was only an agréé when he painted Frémin (directeur), Parrocel (conseiller), and Restout (adjoint à Recteur); and a conseiller when he painted Silvestre (directeur). His portrait of Lemoyne was no exception. In 1747, La Tour was a recently-received académicien, while Lemoyne, a professeur, had been received nearly ten years earlier. Yet despite the strict hierarchical relations through which the Académie’s members conventionally imagined themselves, at the following Salon, Lemoyne, this distinguished officier, reciprocated the junior pastellist’s gesture by exhibiting a sculpted portrait-bust of La Tour (Figure 5.4). Lemoyne’s publicly exhibited bust of a junior colleague cuts against the grain of what we have found to be the normative function of portraits within the Académie. But how was this act perceived at the time? In his Réflexions on the Salon of 1748, the amateur Baillet de Saint-Julien claimed that in presenting the bust: M. Lemoyne sought to repay [La Tour] for his pastel portrait, exhibited at the previous Salon and received with accolades by the public. How well has M. Lemoyne acquitted his debt and how few people in the world pay so agreeably!1

For one critic at least, Lemoyne’s act of portraying La Tour was envisioned as restoring a balance, a reciprocation in kind to acquit the debt left by La Tour’s portrait of Lemoyne the previous year. But why should Lemoyne feel the need to repay this portrait debt to his junior colleague when Frémin, Parrocel, Restout, and Silvestre did not?

5.2 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, René Frémin, 91 × 73 cm, pastel, 1743, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Jean-Gilles Berizzi)

5.3 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Charles Parrocel, 56 × 44 cm, pastel, 1743, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Gérard Blot)

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5.4 Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, 65 cm, terracotta 1747, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, SaintQuentin. (Photo: © RMNGrand Palais / Agence Bulloz)

Perhaps there was something different about La Tour’s portrait of Lemoyne. Beautifully rendered though it is, the work does not stand out among La Tour’s portraits of artists. When compared with the others mentioned here, it is possibly the least striking. Less elaborate than the portraits of Frémin and Restout, it is a simple bust without expressive gestures or additional objects. In tone it is more formal than that of Silvestre, who is dressed casually in studio attire in a sartorial conceit readily mobilised by portraitists to convey a sense of intimacy between maker and sitter. In terms of format, the portrait is most comparable to that of Parrocel, but even then it was considerably smaller, only as high as the other was wide. Not particularly special as a portrait, it seems what was different in the case of La Tour and Lemoyne was not so much the image as the object, and the value it held in the relationship between these two men. At first glance, there is something reminiscent of Nattier and Tocqué’s intimate reciprocal portrait-exchange for the Danish Academy (described in Chapter 4), but Lemoyne and La Tour’s relationship was in no way determined by familial connections. Lemoyne was a third generation academic pedigree, the son and grandson of celebrated sculptors; La Tour was a provincial ‘self-made’ academician, the son of an engineer, who started his Paris career working with artists of the Académie de Saint-Luc (Jean-Jacques Spoede and Claude Dupouch).2 Fifteen years after their portrait-exchange in the 1740s, pastellist and sculptor made another public statement of their association, offering a further glimpse at the nature of their relationship. At the Salon of 1763, La Tour exhibited a new portrait of Lemoyne (Figure 5.5), praised by Diderot for its ‘life and truth’, and Lemoyne again exhibited a bust of La Tour (probably the same work exhibited in 1748).3 Their second publicly performed portrait-exchange affirms what was already evident in the first: there was something distinct about the relationship between La Tour and Lemoyne, something not shared with the majority of their colleagues. Apart from these portraits, however, few traces remain to elucidate La Tour and Lemoyne’s relationship, except for an almost throwaway line years later in the minutes from an assemblée in 1788. Lemoyne had already been dead for ten years, but La Tour had died only a few months earlier, and the sculptor Jean-Jacques Caffieri had acquired Lemoyne’s bust of La Tour from the pastellist’s estate.4 In July, Caffieri offered it to the Académie, and in the entry recording the gift the secrétaire referred

5.5 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, 46.4 × 38.8 cm, pastel, 1763, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Michèle Bellot)

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to the sculpture as: a ‘bust of the late M. de La Tour, made by M. Lemoyne, sculptor, his friend’.5 In those final two words, the Académie’s minutes inadvertently defined the informal relationship between two of its members: not merely colleagues, but friends. The portraits that La Tour and Lemoyne exhibited of each other were part of a cycle of exchange that not only marked, but perpetuated this friendship. Each object was a physical sign of their friendship, exhibited publicly for all to witness, but each gesture also generated an obligation to reciprocate. In his essay on The Gift, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss examines the fundamental role of such cycles in establishing and maintaining social solidarity between groups or individuals. What is key is that the process is ongoing: social relationships like friendships are built from a continual cycle involving consistent acts of giving, receiving, and reciprocating.6 In the long-standing association between La Tour and Lemoyne, their portraits were, what Mauss calls, ‘total prestations’, forging bonds of friendship through the mechanisms that they triggered. Objects given to another person are not inactive, but invested with life, never completely separated from the people who exchange them.7 This was the pull of the portrait that La Tour made of Lemoyne in 1747, constantly reminding its recipient of the act of the giver, obliging Lemoyne to return the gift the following year. As the emotional debt was transferred back to La Tour, their social bond was perpetuated in an ongoing cycle of reciprocation. Yet how can we make sense of such friendly portrait exchanges when all the Académie tells us of members’ relationships was based on hierarchy and status? In the institution’s social structure, Lemoyne was always La Tour’s senior. When Lemoyne became an académicien, La Tour had just been agréé; by the time of the first exchange, La Tour was an académicien, but Lemoyne was already a professeur; by the second, though La Tour had climbed as high as a portraitist could to conseiller, Lemoyne had reached the heights of adjoint à recteur. Locating every member in a hierarchy determined by rank, genre, media, and ancienneté, the Académie fostered an authoritative culture seemingly incommensurate with the intimacy and reciprocity required for friendship. This chapter explores the conditions that allowed academic artists to become friends, discovering the lines that needed to be negotiated, and finding the spaces (real and metaphorical) where friendships could form. Friendship in early modern France was by no means a fixed category. Unlike institutional rank or predetermined ties of kinship, the voluntary association of friendship was much more ambiguous, eluding classification through its emotional and sentimental mutability.8 Its meaning and value were as subjective as individuals themselves: what one artist considered friendship was not necessarily the same thing understood by another. Rather than look for categorical definitions, I instead consider three specific friendships from different moments to understand what it meant, for these academicians, to call themselves friends, why some friendships worked while others failed, and how friendships changed as academic culture evolved.

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Portraits offer unique access to these relationships. As objects, the portraits in this chapter were material declarations of the intimacy between maker and sitter, both in their form (intentionally personal images that broke through the formality of official portraits) and in the very selection of a sitter (designating that colleague as a social intimate). As indexical traces of social interactions, portraits also provide a glimpse at the dynamics behind these private relationships, granting access to the home and studio, to artistic collaborations and recreational activities, to those spaces of sociability beyond the institution that blurred boundaries and made room for friendships to form. But most crucially, as gifts or tokens of friendship, portraits also embody the relationship itself, as products of the maker’s personal investment, signs of the sitter’s implicit trust, and celebrations of time spent together. The acts of making these portraits were as much personal as much as professional. And it was these acts, as much as the objects themselves, that became integral to the formation, negotiation, and experience of artists’ friendships.

Champaigne and Plattemontagne: Self and Other It would be difficult to find a more intimate or equal exchange than the remarkable Double Self-Portrait (1654) (Plate 13) of Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne and Nicolas de Plattemontagne. Born only a few months apart in 1631, both artists were 23 when they created their unique monument to friendship. At the time, they were students training as history painters in Philippe de Champaigne’s studio, where the scene appears to be set, with the apparatus of art-making – palettes, brushes, and drawings – covering every surface.9 Neither artist had yet been admitted to the Académie, but as young relatives of two of the institution’s earliest members (Jean-Baptiste, the nephew of Philippe de Champaigne, and Nicolas, the son of Mathieu de Plattemontagne), their future membership of the newly established corps was already intended.10 Painted in the wake of the chaotic jonction, when academic identity was still in a state of flux, the students’ Double Self-Portrait reads as a youthful contribution to the emerging discourse on the figure of the artist that came with the birth of the Académie and its separation from the guild. At a moment when the culture of the nascent corps had only just started to develop, before morceau-de-réception traditions emerged to establish conventions for visualising its members, and before the social structure had evolved much beyond students, members, and anciens, Champaigne and Plattemontagne offered an image of themselves and their relationship founded not in institutional hierarchies but classical ideals of friendship. Their dual-authored ‘self’-portrait, an image without precedent in French painting, simultaneously allegorises, portrays, and embodies friendship as a perfect union of self and other.11 On a horizontal canvas, the multi-figure composition is replete with symbolic objects and expressive gestures, calling to be read in the historical mode as an allegory of ideal friendship. Dressed

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in matching garments and facing each other in almost mirrored poses, the two figures complete the composition, and by extension each other, creating a balanced formal unity around an inversed triangle. Forming one of its sides, the viola da gamba, a symbol of harmony or concord, leads up to the figure of Plattemontagne, where the scroll of the instrument casts its shadow over his heart. From here, Plattemontagne reaches across towards his friend, gesturing with an open hand along the painting’s central horizontal axis towards Champaigne’s chest, indicating the heartfelt connection between them. Directly above, a shelf on the back wall creates a second horizontal to reinforce the first, formally and symbolically. While Plattemontagne’s gesture signifies a joining of hearts, the shelf above establishes a simultaneous joining of minds, not only in its position over their heads, but in the objects that rest here: a small glass flask sitting between two sculptures, one a statuette of an unidentified standing classical figure, the other a bust thought at the time to represent the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca the Younger.12 Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s allegory of friendship invokes its philosophical origins in a composition descending from this symbolic assemblage.13 Taken with the glass flask, a symbol of fragility and the brevity of life, the bust of Seneca recalls his moral epistle ‘On Grief for Lost Friends’: ‘For I have had them as if I should one day lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still.’14 With a memento mori awareness that death will one day part them, the moral intoned – that bodily parting does not break the bond of friendship – suggests the even greater influence of another philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, described by his sixteenth-century contemporary Étienne Pasquier as ‘a new Seneca’ for France.15 Montaigne’s passionate thoughts in his essay ‘On Friendship’ were an effort to explain the deep connection he had shared with Étienne de La Boétie, whose untimely death had in many ways instigated the philosophical exercise of self-scrutiny undertaken by Montaigne in the Essais. For Montaigne, the ancients’ understanding of friendship did not adequately explain the intensity of the emotions felt in a perfect friendship such as that between him and La Boétie, who were together ‘so perfect and so entire’.16 Utterly different from common friendships, this once-in-a-lifetime kind of friendship was stronger even than the love of husband and wife, which was, after all, held together by an external contract. The powerful love shared by Montaigne and La Boétie, meanwhile, required no external ties for it was already a perfect union of souls. Montaigne’s essay fuels an implicit homoeroticism through language that constantly infuses the platonic with the erotic.17 From their first meeting, described like love at first sight, Montaigne conveys inexpressible longing and devotion, articulating his feelings in heady passages of desire: ‘tis I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, having seized my will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and which, having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal hunger to plunge and lose itself in mine’.18 Sexual metaphor becomes a vehicle for expressing the completeness

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of the union Montaigne experienced with La Boétie, union being the central characteristic of this perfect relationship: ‘in that friendship of which I speak, [the souls] merge and become one with the other, a blending so complete that they efface beyond retrieval the seam that joined them’.19 Friendship by this definition was not merely affection or connection, but an intense and inextricable convergence of self and other, or as Montaigne had it, ‘one soul in two bodies’.20 In Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s strange act of double-‘self’portraiture, we find a painting which both as image and object embodies this Montaignian ideal of friendship: ‘he who is not another: he is me’.21 Like Montaigne’s Essais, the image depicted is a philosophical exercise constructed as a personal portrayal – a discourse on friendship enacted through the bodies of two individuals. Composed like a history painting unfolding across a horizontal canvas, it proffers a universal ideal of friendship in the form of an allegory, but with its portrait likenesses, it presents a particular experience of this ideal. The bodies of Champaigne and Plattemontagne become complementary parts of a unified whole. Their individuated faces gently distinguish one from the other – Champaigne’s pallor forming an opposition to Plattemontagne’s rosiness. But the repetition and mirroring of pose and costume bring the sitters into a balanced fusion, each completing the other in compositional terms. The unprecedented mode of double-self-portraiture infuses the scene with a homoerotic charge in their self-presentation as a couple, heightened moreover by the suggestively sexualised gesture of Plattemontagne’s third finger, and the inclusion of the viola da gamba, a musical instrument that has little role in an artist’s studio but is a familiar iconographic convention in scenes of marital harmony. This is not necessarily to claim a sexual dimension to Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s relationship, for there is no evidence either way. While sexual relations presumably did exist between male artists, they were, not surprisingly, entirely written out of the Académie’s records. The Académie’s attitude to ‘homosexuality’ was evident during the controversy surrounding the only academician ever accused of the crime of sodomy, Jean-Baptiste Nattier (the older brother of Jean-Marc), who was arrested in 1726 and incarcerated in the Bastille, where he committed suicide after being condemned to burn on Place de Grève.22 In the assemblée following the news of his arrest, the Académie voted to expel him from its ranks, euphemistically making reference to ‘perverted behaviour’ and ‘corrupt morals’ unworthy of the corps.23 Sodomy, for the Académie, was an unspeakable act, but passionate friendships between two artists were something else entirely. Whether they were a sublimation of sexual desire or not, the way passionate friendships were perceived and described tended to borrow from metaphors of loving couples. When, for instance, the Abbé de Monville described the friendship that formed in Rome between Pierre Mignard and Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy, he cast the great painter and the great art theorist as two complementary halves creating a unified whole.24

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In the case of Champaigne and Plattemontagne, whatever the sexual reality, the sexual iconography becomes, like Montaigne’s corporeal metaphors, a pictorial phrasing of the intensity and intimacy of this friendship. As an image, the painting participates in neoplatonic discourses on friendship suitable for men of virtue, at once allegorising the kind of friendship described by Montaigne, and portraying its experience in the persons of Champaigne and Plattemontagne. As an object, however, Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s painting was, perhaps even more than Montaigne’s essay, a materialisation of that union of self and other, actualising in painted form the philosopher’s metaphor of a seamless join. How two artists could produce a double-‘self’-portrait has been a source of consternation for art historians, for it begs the question: who was responsible for what? As each body occupies half the canvas, it seems plausible that each artist painted one of the figures, yet there is no discernible difference in style or brushwork.25 What confuses matters further is that while Champaigne appears on the left and Plattemontagne on the right, their signatures are reversed. CHAMPAIGNE is inscribed on the easel behind Plattemontagne, while Plattemontagne’s name is inscribed as MONTAIGNE (an abbreviation that both invokes the philosopher and effects a rhyme with the name of his friend) on the drawing board held by Champaigne. Bernard Dorival argues that the work is therefore a doubleportrait, each artist having signed beside the figure authored, but Hélène Meyer allows for a contrasting possibility: these could be self-representations, where the swapping of signatures expressed the mutual confidence each had in the other’s skill.26 I want to suggest an alternative interpretation: that these artists found a way to efface the joining seam of their hands in the ultimate act of reciprocation. If the scene is read as a narrative of the object’s making, then the painting itself provides all the clues necessary for understanding its authorship. Reading from left to right, we encounter a mimetic narrative of production in which Champaigne is shown as the artist who drew the work and Plattemontagne as the artist who painted it. Divided into three diagonal segments by the line of shadow on the wall and the angle of the viola da gamba, the composition moves from the top left to the bottom right. On the left, Champaigne sketches two figures on a sheet of paper, while an empty palette hangs unused on the wall behind him. Champaigne’s creative agency in the primary act of drawing then passes literally into the hand of Plattemontagne in the middle of the work, where we find a finished drawing (dated 1654), a bunch of brushes, and a palette of unmixed paints lying on the table. Plattemontagne’s role as painter is emphasised in the relation between body and tools: his right hand ready to take the brushes rising from the table, and his left gripping his hat like a palette with a thumb on the brim, reiterating the shadow cast by the thumbhole of the actual palette along the same horizontal axis. Finally we encounter the body of Plattemontagne on the easel, occupying the place normally taken by a canvas, his painted body presented as the work of art created.

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This narrative of the work’s creation is reiterated in the artists’ signatures, where the verbs in each inscription indicate their different roles: CHAMPAIGNE ME FECIT and MONTAIGNE PINXIT ME. ‘Fecit’, from the infinitive ‘to make’, denotes an act of creation, here the primary process of drawing before that of painting found in ‘pinxit’, which has a sense of colouring something that already exists. Pursuing the literalism of the painting’s declaration one step further, the ‘me’ in each inscription, placed on the easel and the drawing board, refers not to the person nearby but to the object upon which it is written: not ‘Champaigne drew Plattemontagne’ and ‘Plattemontagne painted Champaigne’; but rather ‘Champaigne drew the painting’ and ‘Plattemontagne painted the drawing’. Thus while the crisscrossing of names and bodies certainly marks the reciprocity involved in the work’s production – shifting back and forth between its two creative agents – this is a reciprocity of making rather than a reciprocity of representation. In other words, this was not an exchange of portraits per se, but a creative exchange through portraiture. For each artist, this was simultaneously a portrait and a self-portrait. At the different stages of the work’s production and in different media, each artist created a representation of himself and of the other: Champaigne in design, Plattemontagne in paint. Whether this narrative reflects the actual circumstances of the work’s production is another question, but this is the story of creative collaboration that the painting relates. As a self-portrait, this unique process of construction disrupts the modern art-historical concept of a single-authored object with one maker-sitter-beholder.27 But as an early modern portrait of friendship, this intentional blurring of self and other makes sense. With its dual-authorship and doubled subjects, Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s collaborative work embodies Montaigne’s notion of perfect friendship as a bond so complete that self and other are no longer distinct. As long as authorship of the work belonged wholly to one and to the other, there was no seam, no disruptive point on the painting’s surface at which the two joined, and therefore no point at which they could be divided. As with Montaigne, what is central to this relationship is equality and reciprocation, those elements that distinguished perfect friendship from other experiences of love (with parents, siblings, or spouses, etc.), which involved intimacy and affection, but were always hierarchical. This is expressed perhaps most evocatively in Montaigne’s moving response to the imagined question: why did you love him? Montaigne’s answer – ‘because it was he; because it was I’ – not only poignantly captures the sentiment, but its perfect symmetry as a phrase becomes, as Marc Schachter argues, a stylistic expression of their equality and reciprocity.28 Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s Double SelfPortrait offers a pictorial equivalent to this phrase in its visual symmetry and the collaborative process of its making. In this intimate and equal artistic exchange, each artist’s ‘self’-image was the product of the other’s vision and creativity, their friendship embodied in an object that became the indissoluble substance of self and other.

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5.6 Nicolas de Plattemontagne, Portrait of JeanBaptiste de Champaigne and his wife, 26 × 20.8 cm, black, red and white chalk, 1677, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s ideal friendship may have emerged through the intrinsic nature of their persons (as Montaigne would have it), but taking place literally and figuratively in the artist’s studio, their friendship was painted as a model for professional relationships. At a moment when the Académie was struggling to differentiate itself from the guild, friendship presented an ideal counter-culture to the individualistic practices admonished in their rivals. Intimate intellectual friendships of skilled and erudite men formed a perfect opposition to the jealous and megalomaniacal ‘cabals’ that the Académie was modelling itself against.29 Moreover, as a relationship which, following Montaigne, was only truly experienced by virtuous men, friendship was a ready image for a community of artists whose Statuts declared an ideological dedication to virtue.30 Later, academic relations would be distinguished in a different way, as hierarchies of rank, genre, media, and ancienneté gradually evolved into a complex social order, where juniors and seniors were clearly marked, and peers were placed in direct competition. Champaigne and Plattemontagne, however, experienced none of that. Though the two artists were admitted in the same assemblée, on 21 April 1663, their proximity (sharing age, rank, genre, and ancienneté) did not pose a threat to their friendship.31 From what can be gleaned of their relationship from archived documents, the artists remained incredibly close, consistently inhabiting personal roles for each other throughout their lives. In 1667, for instance, Plattemontagne served as witness at Champaigne’s marriage; and seven years later, after Philippe de Champaigne’s death (1674), Jean-Baptiste asked Plattemontagne to undertake the inventory of his uncle’s studio.32 Such personal, quasi-fraternal, interactions continued right to the end: in 1681, the year of Champaigne’s death, Plattemontagne asked his friend to become godfather to his son; then only a few months later it was Plattemontagne who took on the sad task of taking the after-death inventory of Champaigne’s possessions.33 Notarised records provide traces of important events that stand testament to the artists’ continued intimacy. But it is another pair of double-portraits that offers perhaps the most poignant encounter with the mature years of this relationship. In 1677, a few years before Champaigne’s death and more than 20 years after their Double Self-Portrait, two drawings were made representing Champaigne and his wife, Geneviève-Jehan (Figures 5.6 and 5.7). Attribution is contested, but Frédérique Lanoë and Pierre Rosenberg have compellingly argued that the first is to be attributed to Plattemontagne and the second

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to Champaigne (a copy made after his friend’s original drawing).34 If these propositions are correct, then once again we find an expression of ideal friendship as a visualisation of self in other. To see oneself in profile is a perceptual impossibility, for it is an aspect that can only be taken upon the body of another. For Champaigne to ‘see’ himself in profile, he had to use Plattemontagne’s drawing, thus representing himself as Plattemontagne had seen him, and acknowledging the other’s gaze as his own. As an articulation of the experience of friendship as a seamless union of self and other, these drawings are less overt than their youthful painted declaration, but in a way more intimate because the union is so practised, so habitual. In this intimate artistic exchange of a different kind, we find Seneca’s mark of true friendship – to trust another as one trusts oneself – a youthful ideal materialised through a lifetime of experience.35

Rigaud, edelinck, and Drevet: A Network of Friends In those early decades of the Académie’s life, friendship could be a model for professional relations. By the turn of the century things had changed considerably. For early academicians, the dynamics of friendship reinforced the virtuous intellectual community they desired in their efforts to rise above the individualistic factionalism of corporate culture; for later academicians, the institution’s more structured hierarchies presented a very different context for professional relationships. By the 1700s, rank, genre, medium, and ancienneté gave every member a locatable position within the social order, through which movement was strictly controlled by rituals of initiation and promotion. Friendships did not cease to develop in this regulated institutional environment, but now that an official system of professional relations existed, friendship was no longer a model. Instead friendship became an unofficial form of social interaction to be negotiated around those formal hierarchies and sometimes in tension with them. Three artists who managed to accommodate the intimacy of friendship within this institutional context were Hyacinthe Rigaud, Gérard Edelinck, and Pierre Drevet. For this informal network of academic artists, friendship came to mean something quite different: not an ideal union shared with one other person, but a close social and professional circle. Over a short period between 1698 and 1700, two fascinating exchanges of portraits took place between Rigaud and these two engravers. In each

5.7 Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, Self-Portrait with his wife, after Plattemontagne, 22.5 × 16.5 cm, black and red chalk, 1677, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. (Photo: © Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe)

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5.8 Hyacinthe Rigaud, SelfPortrait in a red cloak, 42 × 34.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1692, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. (Photo: © Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe)

case, the pattern was the same: the engraver made a portrait of Rigaud by engraving one of his self-portraits, and Rigaud in turn painted a portrait of the engraver. What was different in each case were the institutional ranks of those involved: Rigaud was junior to Edelinck, but senior to Drevet. If these reciprocal portrait-exchanges are considered in Maussian terms then the incidents are quite revealing, for not only were Rigaud’s friendships crossing through institutional hierarchies, but at first glance, a friendship formed with a senior colleague looks comparable, if not identical, to one formed with a junior. A closer examination of the dynamics of each exchange and the portraits themselves reveals the nuances involved in these academic

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5.9 Gérard Edelinck (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), SelfPortrait in a red cloak, 47.5 × 35.8 cm, engraving, 1698, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

friendships and the values ascribed to the objects performing these complex acts of sociability. The first exchange, between Rigaud and Edelinck, occurred in 1698 when Edelinck engraved Rigaud’s Self-Portrait in a red cloak (Figures 5.8 and 5.9) and Rigaud painted a portrait of Edelinck (Figure 5.10). That the portraits were conceived in friendship is affirmed in the Latin inscriptions on both works, where Rigaud and Edelinck not only designated their association as friendship, but also called for the objects themselves to be understood as signs of that friendship. Rigaud’s painting of Edelinck was an AMICI EFIGIEM – a portrait of a friend, while Edelinck’s engraving of Rigaud was

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amicum simul et amicitiam æternitati consecraturus – dedicated to a friend and to eternal friendship. Having made their portraits at around the same time, one might imagine that the poignancy of these reciprocal acts of friendship would have been concentrated at a moment of physical exchange – a giving of the objects as gifts – but it seems that such an event never took place. Rigaud may have received an impression of Edelinck’s engraving, but neither it nor the plate were itemised in his inventaire après décès, and the painted portrait of Edelinck remained in Rigaud’s possession.36 An actual swapping of objects was apparently not necessary, the intention being instead to make an image of the other to keep as both monument to the man and memento of the exchange. For Rigaud and Edelinck, the exchange was in the making, and its site, like the site of their friendship, was that sociable space of artistic and technical collaboration: the artist’s studio. From anecdotes in eighteenth-century biographies and from revealing research by scholars such as Ariane James, Mary O’Neill, and Stéphane Perreau into Rigaud’s working practices, it is possible to glean something of the interactions that would have taken place between the two artists. Rigaud’s professional interest in printmaking was considerable. Throughout his career he amassed an enormous collection of reproductions of his painted œuvre – over 150 engravings – which he had bound as a recueil and bequeathed to the Académie in his will.37 Over the years, Rigaud cultivated close working relationships with his engravers, for his role was not limited to commissioning and collecting the reproductions, he also participated actively in their making.38 According to Dézallier d’Argenville, Rigaud enthusiastically involved himself in the techniques and processes of printmaking, with his ‘unique ability to bring out the best of an engraving, retouching proofs with extraordinary patience and intelligence’.39 His impact was so great, claimed his biographer, that ‘one could even say that he was responsible for forming the engravers of his day’.40 Contemporary accounts offer a sense of Rigaud collaborating with his engravers, sharing studio space, working alongside them, and interacting through objects as he amended their proofs and finished their drawings.41 From the records that Rigaud kept in his livre de raison, we encounter a more personal sense of these studio interactions, in the patterns of engravers’ names recurring in the margins beside the paintings they reproduced.42 Rigaud and Edelinck worked together over 15 years (1690–1705) on at least 18 engravings, with the bulk of their studio interactions occurring in 1698, when Self-Portrait in a red cloak was one of five engravings completed. While some of these works were presumably started earlier, Rigaud and Edelinck’s portrait-exchange clearly came at a time when their professional association was at its peak, when the two artists were most socially engaged, spending considerable time working together on these projects. Studio interactions had become the basis of Rigaud and Edelinck’s friendship, and the two portraits they made of each other in 1698 were an embodiment of

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that artistic exchange. As Edelinck engraved the painter and Rigaud painted the engraver, the making of these objects gave substance to the reciprocal collaborations through which their friendship had formed. Edelinck’s gift to Rigaud was simultaneously a translation of oil paint into the linear technique of taille-douce, and a translation of a self-portrait into a portrait (Figures 5.8 and 5.9). Rigaud re-appears in the engraving in the same clothing, leaning with the same pose on a stone parapet, and occupying the same setting between a canvas and ornate column.43 But Edelinck’s translation of his friend into his own medium also transforms the image. Rigaud’s dramatic shaft of light is evenly dispersed to illuminate a more delineated background, and the deep shadows of the foreground replaced with a detailed bas-relief on the wall. Through the lengthy process of intaglio printmaking, with its multiple stages of drawing, incising, and re-working, Edelinck claimed technical authorship over an image created by Rigaud. Rigaud’s palette and brushes no longer share a tonal connection with his body, and his previously self-referential gesture of the index finger indicating ‘I’ the painter, is translated into a passive touching of his cloak. As the inscriptions beneath observe, what was once se ipse pinxit (painted by himself) is now sculpsit (carved) by another. Engraving this portrait should, by definition, have involved a deferral of the live encounter between maker and sitter – capturing likeness not from life, but from an inanimate image. But for Rigaud and Edelinck, the intimacy of their relationship came precisely from studio interactions mediated by inanimate objects, as Edelinck copied Rigaud’s drawings, as Rigaud modified Edelinck’s proofs, and as Edelinck re-worked his plates accordingly. Edelinck’s engraved translation of Rigaud’s Self-Portrait was thus an index of the very collaborative methods that formed their friendship in the first place. If Edelinck’s gift reformed Rigaud’s body through the linear marks of the burin, then Rigaud’s gift was a perfect reciprocation: an imaging of the engraver’s body through strokes of paint. Indeed, it is difficult to envisage a more painterly portrait than Rigaud’s Edelinck (Figure 5.10), his loose handling making no effort to conceal its physicality. Edelinck emerges amid a wash of undisguised, broad grey strokes, his wig achieving form through the comparative density of pigment, while his shoulders form through the lack of it, outlined as a negative space where volume is conveyed through absence of colour. Rigaud’s non-finito is the painter’s version of a memento of their studio encounters, an object that captures the experience of their interactions and preserves them perpetually in-process.44 Passages of unpainted ground, abstract traces of raw pigment, and visible brushstrokes relate the immediacy of what was probably a single sitting, for Rigaud was renowned for his speed of execution (Dézallier d’Argenville claimed he could paint a sitter’s head in a couple of hours).45 Like a glimpse at those two hours in Rigaud’s studio, the portrait of Edelinck seems to witness the two friends in their natural habitat.

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5.10 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Gérard Edelinck, 71 × 59 cm, oil on canvas, 1698, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMNGrand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / RenéGabriel Ojéda)

Rigaud and Edelinck’s studio interactions were very different from social interactions that took place in the Académie. In this official institutional environment, rank determined everything from privileges to seating arrangements. At the time of their exchange, Edelinck was a conseiller of 20 years’ standing, described by Hulst as ‘one of the most illustrious members of the Académie’.46 Rigaud, meanwhile, was only an agréé.47 According to the hierarchies of rank and ancienneté, Edelinck was undoubtedly Rigaud’s superior. Even the hierarchy of media could not give Rigaud an advantage, for though engravers were classed below painters and sculptors, the order of precedence was determined first by rank, then by media, and then ancienneté. So the Procès-Verbaux noted, with specific reference to the rank of conseiller (the only officier position that could be held by any artist regardless of media or genre):

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painters and sculptors take their places first, following the order of their admission … and the engravers take their places after the painters and sculptors, also following the order of their admission.48

In the Académie, as long as Edelinck was a conseiller, Rigaud would not outrank him until he achieved the same or a higher position. By contrast, in the working environment of the studio, social relations developed more intuitively, through creative exchanges and collaborative practices. Rank was not forgotten here, but it could become secondary to another social order determined by the activities and interactions that took place there. This was an experience of sociable interchange akin to that described by Dena Goodman in Paris’s literary salons, those regular informal gatherings of men and women, nobles and commoners, where any threat to the social order posed by the mixing of ranks was made safe by an alternative system of social governance ruled by the culture of polite conversation.49 The studio was likewise a space outside, literally and figuratively beyond the Académie, where intimacy and informality called for a culture determined not by rank, but by the rules and roles of art-making. In Rigaud and Edelinck’s collaborations, agency probably rested ultimately with the painter who was orchestrating the commissions, but it was still a relationship of mutual reliance. For Rigaud and Edelinck to imagine this relationship as ‘friendship’ suggests a very different understanding of the term from that classical ideal encountered in Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s Double Self-Portrait. This was no Montaignian notion of the one true friend as an extension of the self, but rather something more like François de La Rochefoucauld’s notion of ‘an economy of reciprocal interests’.50 In his sceptical Maximes, La Rochefoucauld claimed that people were always attracted to those more powerful than themselves when forming friendships, for no one gives without expecting something in return: ‘we do not give them our affection for their benefit, but for the benefits we wish to receive from them’.51 Presumably the two artists did not conceive of friendship quite so cynically as the writer, but their use of ‘friendship’ to conceptualise a professional relationship certainly resonates with La Rochefoucauld’s description of ‘a commerce’ of self-interest.52 Perhaps for Rigaud and Edelinck, ‘friendship’ made safe a relationship that could otherwise look like the profit-seeking association that La Rochefoucauld claimed it always was. It would not be difficult to argue that Rigaud sought out friendship with Edelinck because he was a well-established, successful engraver who could enhance the painter’s career, nor that Edelinck sought out friendship with Rigaud, despite his institutional inferiority, because he was a prolific portraitist building up a profitable practice in which Edelinck could take a share. Rigaud and Edelinck evidently had something to gain from friendship, but what about Rigaud and Drevet? On the face of it, Rigaud and Drevet’s friendship looks very similar to that of Rigaud and Edelinck. Only two years after the exchange with Edelinck, Rigaud and Drevet enacted an exchange

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5.11 Hyacinthe Rigaud, SelfPortrait in a turban, 83 × 66 cm, oil on canvas, 1700, Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan / Giraudon. (© The Bridgeman Art Library)

modelled on the first: Drevet engraved Rigaud’s Self-Portrait in a turban (Figures 5.11 and 5.12) and Rigaud reciprocated with a painting of Drevet (Figure 5.13).53 Rigaud’s friendship with Drevet also developed through a long artistic association. They probably met as early as the 1670s when Drevet was undertaking his apprenticeship in Lyon, but their first known artistic collaboration occurred in Paris in 1688, when Drevet engraved Rigaud’s portrait of Pierre-Vincent Bertin.54 By 1700, they had experienced over 12 years of artistic interaction, working on at least 11 projects together, and by the end of Drevet’s career, Rigaud’s paintings would account for a third of the engraver’s total output.55 Gilberte Levallois-Clavel argues that a profound friendship developed between the two artists in the early years.56 Drevet, she

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5.12 Pierre Drevet (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), SelfPortrait in a turban, 49.8 × 35 cm, oil on canvas, engraving, 1700, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

claims, found his artistic voice by engraving Rigaud’s portraits, while Rigaud found an engraver willing to respond to any of his demands, who had the skill to draw out the brilliance of his paintings.57 This was again a friendship which, in a Rochefoucauldian sense, emerged as each man found something he needed or wanted in the other: one, a source of high-profile paintings to engrave; the other, a worthy reproducer of those paintings. Rigaud and Drevet, however, were not managing the same dynamic of reciprocal self-interest as Rigaud and Edelinck. At the time of their exchange, clearly marked on Drevet’s second impression of the print – anno MDCC – Rigaud was Drevet’s superior in every academic hierarchy of rank, media, and ancienneté. On 2 January 1700, Rigaud had been received as an

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académicien, while Drevet was only just beginning his professional association with the Académie and would not be agréé for another three years.58 Rigaud’s friendship with the senior Edelinck would have enhanced his professional standing; what he had to gain from demonstrating his intimacy with the junior Drevet is less clear. But perhaps this was never the intention. For while the two portrait-exchanges appear very similar, on closer inspection, the nature of the second exchange and the objects involved were actually quite different. To begin with, this time the exchange was a physical one: Drevet gave Rigaud the copper plate of his engraved portrait (which Rigaud later bequeathed to the Académie along with the original painted Self-Portrait), and Rigaud appears to have given Drevet the painted portrait.59 Each artist did not this time keep an effigy of the other to stand-in during his absence, but was rather given an image of himself made by the other. These were still tokens of a reciprocal exchange, but already the degree of intimacy was different. In the inscription that Drevet appended to his engraving, we see how different. Edelinck’s inscription presented his engraving unequivocally as an act of friendship (amicum simul et amicitiam æternitati), but Drevet framed his gesture as an act of reverence. The Latin inscription describes the engraving as ‘a heartfelt monument’ given in gratitude for the ‘expert skills’ offered to a youth through the ‘wise counsel’ of an academic master.60 In a text suggesting a very different dynamic of social interaction, Drevet subordinates himself into a master–student relationship with Rigaud. In his honorific homage, Drevet acknowledges the hierarchical distance between himself and Rigaud and deals with it by making no attempt to overcome or disguise their inequality. Instead, Drevet incorporates their difference in status into their friendship: Rigaud’s offering of advice becomes a gift that Drevet is repaying, education becomes another ‘total prestation’ in their ongoing cycle of friendship, reciprocated by Drevet through this act of portrayal. Rigaud’s portrait of Drevet (Figure 5.13) was in turn envisaged as part of this same cycle. Through a metapictorial narrative, Rigaud’s painting consciously acknowledges itself as the object given in reciprocation for Drevet’s engraved gift. Drevet is depicted here in the studio, poised in the act of making with his cuffs folded back, a burin in his right hand and a copper plate supported by his left. What Drevet is making is revealed in the background, where Rigaud’s Self-Portrait in a turban hangs nailed to a post, triggering a quasi-mise-enabyme of representational planes from the painting-within-a-painting, to the copper plate, and finally to the painting itself. Moving through this series of surfaces we encounter the stages of the exchange – from Drevet’s gift, to Rigaud’s reciprocation – a metapictorial declaration that explains the painting beheld in terms of the engraved plate depicted, like a note from Rigaud to say: ‘because you made this for me, I made this for you’. Despite acknowledging its role in this cycle of friendly exchange, Rigaud’s portrait of Drevet does not convey quite the same intimacy as his nonfinito image of Edelinck. Both portraits were located in the studio – the first indexically, the second representationally – reiterating this as the site in which

5.13 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Pierre Drevet, 116.5 × 89.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1700, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. (Photo: © Lyon MBA – Photo Alain Basset)

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professional friendships could develop, a space where artists could imagine more personal relationships than those permitted in the Académie. But there the similarities end. In place of the informal spontaneity of Edelinck’s oil sketch, Drevet is portrayed in the formal language derived from the morceaude-réception tradition, with its standard size, three-quarter length composition and familiar iconography. On the surface, this appears entirely counter to the relationships involved: Rigaud, the académicien, has painted Drevet, the unagréé engraver, as though a revered officier of the institution; while painting Edelinck, the senior conseiller, like an intimate equal. But formal language also establishes formal distance. While the informality of the portrait of Edelinck showed the intimacy he wanted with a senior colleague, the formality of his portrait of Drevet asserts Rigaud’s authority over the junior. For whatever the visual tropes employed, this was clearly not a morceau de réception. Drevet is not shown here surrounded by his own works as signs of personal achievement, but rather with an art work created by Rigaud. With the Self-Portrait in a turban dominating the background like an omnipresent signature, Rigaud not only claimed authorship of the painting, but also a formative role in Drevet’s artistic identity. This portrait was no gesture of subordination to his junior colleague, but entirely the opposite, as it cemented Drevet’s success in the patronage of his friend Rigaud. Whether it was more or less difficult for Rigaud to be friends with Drevet is not easy to say. There is no method of inquiry that can tell us what Rigaud felt for Drevet or how those feelings differed from those he had for Edelinck. The similar pattern of the two exchanges suggests that Rigaud imagined he was friends with both, but the differences in those exchanges and the objects involved suggest that the dynamic of each friendship was different. What is even more difficult to retrieve is a sense of the relationship that existed between Edelinck and Drevet. The paralleled patterns of exchange and the common site of production in Rigaud’s studio suggest that this was not simply two separate friendships, but a social network involving all three (and presumably many other) artists. Drevet’s portrait of Rigaud (Figure 5.12) was certainly as much an emulation of Edelinck as it was an honouring of Rigaud, translating Rigaud’s Self-Portrait in a turban (Figure 5.11) by reframing it through Edelinck’s engraving of the Self-Portrait in a red cloak (Figure 5.9). With its additions of a column, a swathe of fabric, and a stone parapet, Drevet’s Rigaud indeed looks more akin to Edelinck’s Rigaud than Rigaud’s Rigaud, save for his pose and costume. By framing Rigaud through a conscious appropriation of Edelinck, Drevet drew all three artistic agents into one object, tracing a network of social interactions between them. Although the modes of sociability that characterised studio interactions are difficult to salvage, from the Académie’s record of events a few years later Drevet and Edelinck certainly appear to have developed close relations. When Drevet was agréé in 1703, the company requested as his morceau de réception an engraved portrait of Robert de Cotte, but four years later the work Drevet presented was something entirely different.61 With his reception piece

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still incomplete, Drevet did something unprecedented and unrepeated in institutional history and submitted a work made by someone else to act as an interim until he could submit his own.62 The pro tem surrogate reception piece he submitted was Edelinck’s engraving of Largillière’s Charles Lebrun (Figure 6.5), which Edelinck had given to the Académie 23 years earlier, but which he had then taken back in order to make a series of impressions.63 Edelinck had not yet returned the plate to the Académie when he died, on 3 April 1707, and somehow it ‘fell into the hands’ of Drevet (as the Académie’s minutes record it).64 This curious acquisition strongly attests to Drevet’s involvement in Edelinck’s life and the rituals following his death. Clearly unofficial relationships between artists could play out quite directly on official affairs. Drevet finally submitted his morceau de réception in 1722.65 What caused the delay and prompted Drevet’s elaborate deal is not entirely clear, for he could easily have engraved Joseph Vivien’s portrait of Robert de Cotte (1701) (Musée du Louvre). But it is possible, as Levallois-Clavel has proposed, that Drevet was instead waiting for Rigaud to complete his portrait of De Cotte (1713) (Musée du Louvre), so that in a sentimental gesture his morceau de réception would always connect him to his friend, colleague, and mentor.66 These tiny traces of interactions and connections provide a glimpse into the friendships that existed between Rigaud and his engravers. The lives of the objects exchanged between these men tell the stories of particular relationships and of an intimate social network, a fact perhaps most poignantly witnessed in the afterlife of Rigaud’s portrait of Edelinck (Figure 5.10). Kept in Rigaud’s possession throughout his life, years later it ended up in the collection of Claude Drevet, nephew and student of Pierre, and another of Rigaud’s engravers.67 Like many other artists who shared encounters in the studio, collaborated on projects, or lived side-by-side in the Louvre’s logements, this was a community-within-a-community – a network of intimacy that grew through and around academic hierarchies to form alternative professional relationships that these men called amitié (friendship).

Greuze and Wille: A Failed Friendship From the beginning of the eighteenth century, artists’ friendships had to negotiate the Académie’s formal social order. Throughout the century, as its structure became more refined, as the culture of hierarchy became more entrenched, and as academic status became ever more a determinant of professional success, finding space for intimate and equal relationships within the ranks became even more of a challenge. Commentators on contemporary society at mid-century discussed more generally, and with resounding accord, the impossibility of forming ‘real’ friendships. For Rousseau, friendship was always requited: ‘it is only by offering, or by pretending to offer friendship that it can be attained from someone else’.68 While Claude Yvon in the Encyclopédie declared that friendship was doomed to failure, never filling the

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void it promised to fill, for sooner or later: ‘one comes to expect as tribute the kindnesses once received as gift’.69 Academicians, however, continued to describe connections with particular colleagues as friendships. ‘My true friend’ was how Johann-Georg Wille described Jean-Baptiste Greuze.70 ‘Pure friendship’ were the words Greuze used when, in 1763 he painted a portrait of Wille as an expression of that relationship (Plate 14).71 In contrast to the sceptical enunciations of mid-century writers, Greuze and Wille clearly imagined their friendship as something transcendent – ‘true’ and ‘pure’ – as though the adjectives protected it from any vulgar connotations of professional self-interest. In their eyes, friendship could be genuine. But only a few years later, when faced with a rupturing test of institutional loyalty, their friendship went decisively the way of Rousseau and Yvon’s dooming prophecies. In the spirit of a Geertzian inquiry into the stories these artists ‘tell themselves about themselves’, my interest here is not whether this friendship was ever really ‘true’ and ‘pure’, but why it was so important for them to imagine that it was.72 By recontextualising Greuze’s portrait of Wille within the artists’ social interactions from the 1750s onwards, we can retrieve a deeper understanding of how the artists started thinking of each other as friends, what they meant by this, and why it could not last. Greuze and Wille met in Paris in the 1750s: Greuze, a genre painter recently arrived from the provinces; Wille, an engraver and picture dealer who emigrated from Germany some 20 years earlier.73 There is little trace of the initial development of their relationship, but it seems they met at the Académie (both agréé in 1755) and were drawn together by shared professional interests.74 Wille was engraving Dutch genre paintings for the French market that proved formative for Greuze’s developing practice, while Wille took a commercial interest in Greuze, collecting and selling his drawings and paintings.75 From 1759, however, a much more detailed picture of their friendship is revealed in the journal that Wille started keeping. His regular, often daily, entries provide a rare insight into an artist’s everyday life, recording where he went, what he did, and who he met. By tracing every moment that Greuze appears in the journal’s pages – whether in face-to-face encounters, other interactions, gift exchanges, or commercial transactions – it is possible to reconstruct something of the development of the artists’ friendship (at least from Wille’s perspective) in the two phases before and after Greuze painted Wille’s portrait.76 At the outset, their relationship was rooted in professional contexts. The first interaction Wille noted was a commercial transaction in 1759 when Wille purchased one of Greuze’s paintings.77 This was quickly followed by a gift from Greuze of a drawing, perhaps a strategic offering intended to solicit the patronage of Wille in his capacity as a picture dealer, for a business relationship certainly developed over the next few months.78 Wille started buying Greuze’s art, both directly from the artist (such as a drawing of Woman Roasting Chestnuts) and from independent sales (such as the preparatory sketch for Father Reading the Bible which Wille purchased from ‘M. Remy’), and he went on to sell some of these purchases in Germany.79 Gifts and reciprocal gestures

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continued over the years in what look like efforts to cultivate a professional relationship (Greuze offered to retouch one of the paintings he had given Wille; Wille gave Greuze a silver medal by Johann Karl von Hedlinger), both artists clearly aware of the professional gain each offered the other: Greuze as a commodity for Wille to sell; Wille as a commercial outlet for Greuze.80 But the artists quickly began to establish greater intimacy, moving their relationship beyond professional spaces and following up professional interactions with personal ones. From the early 1760s, Greuze and Wille invested time socialising together, making casual visits to each other’s homes or going out on leisurely pursuits, such as an excursion to the Rubens gallery at the Palais de Luxembourg on 22 July 1760, or an evening out in Paris on 11 April 1761.81 They also increasingly involved their families in these activities: on 25 July 1760, Wille took Greuze on a day trip to the countryside at Auteuil with his wife and son; and on 18 September 1763, Greuze and his wife invited Wille to Champigny to visit their child at the wet-nurse.82 In April 1761, Wille’s son, Pierre-Alexandre, became a student in Greuze’s studio, further blurring the professional boundary, as Wille offered his gratitude in personal gifts: a cafetière for Madame Greuze as a New Year present, and a hundred engravings after Van Dyck for Greuze after he admired them one day at Wille’s home.83 The increased intimacy initiated by Greuze’s new role as master to Wille’s son was evoked by another artist and close friend of both, Jean-Baptiste Descamps. In a letter to Wille in August 1761, Descamps affectionately described the relationship that developed between Greuze and his student: ‘do you recall the warmth with which [Pierre-Alexandre] spoke to us of his master, and the accuracy with which he repeated the lessons of his dear master; that trust between student and master warrants the attachment they have for each other’.84 Gifts, domestic encounters, and social events surrounded Greuze and Wille’s working relationship in a frame of intimacy, establishing a pattern where personal mediated professional – whenever their relationship started to look too business-like, a personal gesture was made to restore familiarity. It was these gestures (according to Wille’s understanding at least) that distinguished their relationship from others, for Greuze was not just any colleague for Wille, he was ‘mon ami’. Throughout his journal, Wille constantly prefaced Greuze’s name with these two words, placing him in a textual envelope of intimacy: ‘my true friend’, ‘this old friend’, or ‘my particular friend’.85 In 1763, within this pattern of professional interactions made personal, Greuze painted his portrait of Wille (Plate 14). It all began at a dinner on 21 October, soon after their Champigny trip, when Wille set up a profitable commission for Greuze with a Russian merchant called Bacherach, whose portrait Greuze painted for the considerable sum of 25 louis d’or, a deal, Wille notes, which he struck.86 Evidently Greuze owed Wille for this significant professional service, and a week after finishing Bacherach’s portrait, he set about repaying his debt. On 19 November, Greuze invited Wille to his home, ostensibly to take hot chocolate with Madame Greuze, but then surprising

5.14 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of a Man (probably Monsieur Bacherach), 64.7 × 54.8 cm, oil on canvas, 1763, National Gallery, London. (Photo: © The National Gallery, London)

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Wille by asking him to sit for a portrait.87 Greuze continued working all day, eventually inviting Wille to stay on for dinner so he could paint until the light ran out. Over the next four weeks, Wille sat five more times for Greuze, initiating a series of face-to-face interactions, which, like that first sitting, became intimate social occasions.88 Indeed once Greuze was feeling sick and not up to the intricate task of painting Wille’s face, but Wille nevertheless stayed until nightfall keeping his friend company.89 This artist–sitter experience was very different from that of a commercial arrangement, where the production of the work was the primary objective, and was usually achieved in a minimum of sittings: one to capture likeness, and perhaps another to follow up, while in-between models or studies stood in for costume and composition. These six sittings permitted time for socialising, but also scope for greater personal attention in the portrait’s making. Wille noted three of the sittings as devoted specifically to his clothing. When viewed as an indexical trace of this experience, the language of Greuze’s portrait can be understood as a painterly equivalent to that textual envelope of intimacy found in Wille’s journal. Greuze’s personalising of Wille as a ‘friend’ is particularly evident when the work is compared with a commissioned portrait from the same year, presumed to be that of Bacherach (Figure 5.14). Closely observed imperfections in Wille’s rumpled suit and the curling edge of his lace shirt form a marked contrast to Bacherach’s generically idealised clothing, rendered with prosaic orderliness by comparison. Such naturalistic details seem to index the greater familiarity in Greuze and Wille’s casual sittings, with the intimacy of their interactions envisaged in Wille’s frank expression and trusting look to the side. With more intense lighting, Greuze heightens the emotional energy of his encounter with Wille and describes his friend’s features in spot-lit detail. While Bacherach’s unfocused eyes look back mildly from the generalised smooth finish of his face, Wille’s ‘little, fervent, blazing eyes’ (as Diderot saw them) animate a textured surface of uneven skin and burst blood vessels, which apparently captured his likeness precisely.90 Greuze’s visual rhetoric of natural imperfections, minute details, and honest textures become like those adjectives in Wille’s journal, a painterly vocabulary for distinguishing the sitter as a ‘true’ and ‘particular’ friend. Greuze’s portrait of Wille was thus a personal gift given in response to a professional service. From the outset it was framed as an act taking place between friends, initiated not during a professional encounter, but a domestic one (while taking chocolate with Madame Greuze), and on its completion Wille seemed conscious of the portrait’s status as a personal offering: when he collected it from Greuze’s home, he did not rush to show his colleagues, but returned excitedly home to show his family.91 Greuze’s portrait proved a successful gift, experienced not as an equivalent but as a superior offering – ‘reciprocated with interest’, to invoke Mauss.92 Part of this interest in giftgiving accumulates during an appropriate lapse of time between receipt and reciprocation, something which Greuze judged successfully.93 Invested with

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the time and labour of those six sittings, Greuze’s portrait of Wille was imbued not only with material value but emotional value; it was an enduring trace of their social interactions in the painter’s home, a souvenir of that experience of friendship. When Wille tried to reciprocate, however, it all started to go wrong. On the same day he collected his portrait, he returned to Greuze’s home in the evening bearing a silver platter. He presented it to Madame Greuze as ‘a little mark of gratitude for the effort she went to (as I told her) in attaching my portrait to another stretcher’, seemingly offering his thank-you gift to Greuze’s wife (instead of Greuze) in an attempt to keep the gesture personal.94 But Wille’s platter was not well received. Greuze had not been home when the gift was presented, but the following day he turned up at Wille’s home ‘to admonish us, as he said, for the expense’, exclaiming that the portrait had been made ‘in pure friendship’.95 Despite the personal terms of his gift, Wille’s platter had been an embarrassing misjudgement. His reciprocation failed it seems for three reasons. First, it came too soon. Unlike the four weeks of labour that had gone into Greuze’s portrait, Wille’s platter came a matter of hours later, without the appropriate lapse of time vital for generating interest. The platter was immediate, without thought, and without personal investment. Second, it was the wrong kind of thing. Not only was the platter impersonal (bought not made), but also, due to its material, it appears to have been received less as gift than as payment. Silver in eighteenth-century France was a currency standard (argent means both silver and money) and could be immediately valued by weight: a mark of silver (8 ounces) had been set in 1726 at 51 livres, 2 sols and 3 deniers.96 Wille’s silver platter all but broke the social taboo of offering money as gift, which, as Mary Douglas describes, transforms what should be a personal gesture into a commercial transaction.97 As a result, the platter retrospectively threatened to alter the value of Greuze’s portrait by transforming it from gift to commodity. In his study of material objects in social encounters, Nicholas Thomas examines this difference in terms of exchange relation, where gifts are objects inalienable from the giver that generate social debt, and commodities are alienable objects with a price that are exchanged as equivalents.98 Greuze’s portrait of Wille had been an inalienable gift, an objectification of their social interactions permanently embodying Greuze’s labour in its facture; Wille’s platter was an alienable commodity, involving no personal investment beyond monetary outlay. But when Wille gave Greuze that silver platter (so readily transferable as currency), he gave the portrait a price. This brings us to the third problem: it was not enough. Not only had Wille transformed Greuze’s portrait from gift to commodity, he had also vastly underpaid Greuze in the transaction. Only a month earlier, Greuze sold the portrait of Bacherach for 25 louis d’or. Even if this had been a lucrative deal for a ‘bust without hands’, it was far beyond the sum Wille now offered for a portrait of the same format: 25 louis d’or was 600 livres, but the silver platter

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(so Wille noted in his journal) was worth only 200 livres.99 Adding insult to injury, Wille not only paid for his portrait-gift, he drastically (and knowingly) undervalued it. When recontextualised in the chronicle of Greuze and Wille’s relationship, the portrait–platter exchange occurs at a turning point. From 1755 to 1763, the artists had steadily established a close friendship, but their interactions subsequently became more distanced. In fact, after the portrait of Wille was exhibited at the following Salon in August 1765, Wille’s mentions of face-toface contact with Greuze cease almost entirely. In the interim, Greuze had made some efforts to re-establish intimacy (asking Madame Wille to become his daughter’s godmother), but their previous pattern of friendship was now largely reversed.100 When Greuze had a cahier of Têtes de différents caractères engraved and dedicated to Wille – ‘by his friend J.-B. Greuze’ – Wille’s only response was to negotiate a commercial transaction with Greuze on behalf of the comte de Moltke.101 Whereas previously personal gestures had followed professional ones to affirm intimacy, now we find the opposite as Wille in particular (interestingly enough) seemed intent on restoring distance between them. Wille stopped referring to Greuze in his journal as ‘mon ami’, instead labelling him simply ‘M. Greuze’. From this chain of events, the portrait–platter debacle looks like the catalyst for the demise of the artists’ friendship, the cause of an irreparable social debt in their pattern of interaction. But if that were the case, then it should surely have been Wille making overtures to Greuze, for Wille was the one still indebted. Rather the mismanaged exchange appears instead to be the first visible crack in a friendship that was already in trouble, a social injury brought about by clumsy efforts to handle a personal–professional relationship under increasing pressure from institutional affairs. During the years when Greuze’s friendship with Wille started to go wrong, Greuze’s relationship with the Académie had become strained and antagonistic. His ambitions to be received as a history painter, despite having been agréé as a genre painter, and his efforts to elevate scenes of everyday life to the prestigious level of history painting both provoked the ire of his colleagues. Throughout the 1760s, Greuze’s standing in the Académie became precarious; he lost the support of Marigny and incurred the disdain of many academicians, most notably the influential Cochin.102 Greuze’s brash disregard for the boundaries of genre posed a dangerous threat to the Académie, whose ideological authority was, as Ledbury has argued, dependent on the strictness of these artistic categories and the social barriers they activated.103 As an agréé, consistently flouting the institution’s rules and customs was not the way to seduce his superiors, and Greuze was stretching his relationship with the Académie to the limit. Wille rarely mentioned the Académie and Greuze in the same breath in his journal, but if their friendship had developed outside the Académie’s walls, its origins lay within. Since their agréments in 1755, Wille had advanced fairly conventionally after his réception in 1761, but Greuze was strategically delaying.104 Graduating as an agréé granted the privilege of exhibiting at the

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Salons, but becoming a full académicien bestowed those additional rights of access to the confidential assemblées, which Wille attended regularly, if not frequently.105 Meanwhile Greuze was being threatened with the loss even of his agréé privileges if he delayed his réception any longer.106 Within the Académie, a hierarchical gap had thus opened up between Greuze and Wille. When they were agréé in 1755, their different media and shared commercial interests had protected them from any rivalry that might be anticipated between two artists of the same rank, allowing their friendship to develop as it did. But by the mid-1760s, the hierarchical difference of a single grade had changed the dynamic of their interactions. For Greuze, Wille had become a colleague in a position of authority, a member of the very institutional corps against which he was constantly finding himself struggling. For Wille, Greuze’s renegade activities were likely turning their friendship into a political liability, making gradual withdrawal the safest solution. Coming just as these difficulties began to emerge, the problem with the exchange was perhaps not that Wille’s platter was too little, but rather that Greuze’s intimate portrait felt embarrassingly too much. By the time of Greuze’s infamous réception on 23 August 1769, the distance between the artists was palpable.107 Wille attended the assemblée where Greuze notoriously made his strike, submitting a history painting instead of his allocated genre painting. Wille did not hold voting rights, but he was there to witness the result of 24:6 in favour of admitting Greuze. Wille was also present for the ensuing discussion, looking on while a most irregular second vote was orchestrated by Cochin, who proposed that Greuze’s Septimius Severus and Caracalla (Musée du Louvre) be accepted not as a history painting, but ‘a historical subject painted by a genre painter’, and to see that vote passed 21:9.108 Immediately following the vote, Wille was witness finally to the scene of Greuze’s mortification as he entered the room and took his membership oath under the impression that his submission had been successful, only to be told afterwards that his ambitions had been quashed by his definitive relegation to the lower genre. Wille’s unimpassioned account of Greuze’s réception in his journal reveals the extent to which their former friendship had deteriorated by this time: For his réception, Greuze presented a history painting at the Académie Royale to be received as a history painter. He was received as a painter, but refused as a history painter. This caused him great pain; but nobody can dispute the collective voice of the corps … From there I went to see the Salon, which is nearly arranged, and where I am exhibiting my Concert de famille.109

Despite describing a series of events that had been calculated to humiliate Greuze and leave his institutional reputation in tatters, Wille’s account is utterly detached. He gives no details of what took place in the meeting, instead summarising the complex machinations of institutional politics in that single, evasive line: ‘he was received as a painter, but refused as a history painter’. There is a trace of sympathy in Wille’s acknowledgement of Greuze’s

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pain, but sentiment is quickly brushed aside by institutional loyalty – ‘nobody can dispute the collective voice of the corps’. Perhaps most telling is Wille’s immediate return to everyday life, going straight off afterwards to inspect the preparations for the upcoming exhibition, seemingly completely unaffected by an event which had destroyed the man he once called ‘my true friend’. Not surprisingly, this was the bitter end of whatever was left of Greuze and Wille’s friendship: no more gifts, no more outings, no more visits. When in 1775, Wille received correspondence with an enclosed letter for Greuze, he curtly noted in his journal that it would be ‘sent on’.110 What might once have been the occasion for a sociable visit to his friend’s home now called for nothing more than the detached administrative task of having a letter delivered to an acquaintance. In 1777, the Mémoires secrets reported that a resentful Greuze had gone so far as to accuse Wille’s son of plagiarising his work in a painting that Pierre-Alexandre exhibited at the Salon.111 The friendship that Greuze and Wille once described as ‘true’ and ‘pure’ was thus, in the end, not transcendent enough to survive the pressures of institutional politics and professional ambition.

La Tour and Lemoyne Again: Possible Conclusions As the culture of the Académie became entrenched in a hierarchical social order that governed relations between its members, the emotional and practical demands of friendship became increasingly harder to negotiate. Academicians continued to describe relationships with certain colleagues as ‘friendships’, but what they meant by the term was not always the same. Whatever intimacy Greuze and Wille envisaged in their sociable interactions, it was nothing like that indissoluble union of self and other imagined by Champaigne and Plattemontagne. Of all the friendships discussed here, that of La Tour and Lemoyne is perhaps the most difficult to pin down. There is no document like Wille’s journal or Rigaud’s livre de raison to reconstruct the story of their relationship or to illuminate the reciprocal portrait-exchanges that the artists made to mark their friendship in 1747/8 and then in 1763 (Figures 5.1, 5.4, and 5.5). But the other friendships in this chapter might allow us to conjecture. Given the inherently subjective experience of friendship, the dynamics and sentiments are always unique to the individuals involved, and I am not suggesting that any of these relationships were models of academic friendship. But their narratives nevertheless offer a sense of how friendships formed in the Académie, of who could be friends, of what mattered in institutional friendships, and of what did not. By way of conclusion then, I want to look back at what we now know in order to determine what it is possible to speculate about the friendship of La Tour and Lemoyne. The first and perhaps unexpected observation is that what did not matter at all was age. Champaigne and Plattemontagne were exactly the same age; Edelinck was 18 years older than Rigaud; Rigaud was four years older than

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Drevet; and Wille was ten years older than Greuze. The fact that La Tour and Lemoyne were both born in 1704, which might appear to provide some point of connection, thus actually tells us very little. Age gaps, or the lack of them, did not appear to influence the development of academicians’ friendships. Real age, as we know, had an almost negligible role in the Académie, where institutional age was the factor that determined social position. An artist’s peers were not those with whom he or she shared a birth date, but those at the same level within the hierarchical structure: other étudiants, other agréés, or, after réception, those artists with the same rank or comparable ancienneté. From the friendships examined here, it may seem that institutional age was not a particularly important factor either: Champaigne and Plattemontagne trained together and were reçu on the same day; Rigaud was received 23 years after Edelinck, but seven years before Drevet; and Greuze was received eight years after Wille. But on closer inspection, these differences in institutional age were actually crucial to the formation, or at least to the success, of friendships between academicians. With the exception of Champaigne and Plattemontagne, whose friendship emerged during a period before institutional hierarchies were codified into a fixed social structure, friendships tended to form where there was significant distance and difference between the artists. Edelinck (conseiller) and Rigaud (agréé) were separated by at least two levels within the hierarchy of ranks (Table 2.1), while their media – engraving and painting – provided another point of difference. Rigaud (académicien) and Drevet (equivalent to an étudiant) were also separated by more than one level with distance again reinforced by difference in media. Greuze and Wille had a more complicated institutional relationship. Having started off as peers, both agréé in 1755, even their different media gave them a similar social status (neither an engraver nor a genre painter could pass the rank of conseiller). But Wille’s réception in 1761 opened up a gap – equality suddenly became distance, Greuze’s peer suddenly became his superior. Separated by only a single level in the hierarchy, Wille was senior enough to warrant a different mode of interaction with Greuze, but not senior enough to create a safe space of difference. In the Académie, friendship depended on something of a social paradox, in that the intimacy it required was best achieved when there was significant distance between the individuals involved. Academicians’ friendships in this respect relied on a dynamic akin to that described by anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown as a ‘joking relationship’.112 In his analysis of the different interactions between members of a community, Radcliffe-Brown notes that community culture is imagined to be handed down from one generation to the next. For these rituals and traditions to maintain their authority, it is necessary for individuals to preserve a marked respect for those in the generation directly preceding them.113 Strict asymmetrical relations are not required, however, where the generational gap is larger, so individuals separated by more than a generation can have ‘joking relationships’, more symmetrical associations characterised by friendly equality.114 In the

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Académie, the generational gap afforded by significant distance in status created just such a space. Friendships could develop between artists of substantially different ranks because their respective positions diminished the threat of competition and lessened the imperative to establish authority, for the greater the distance, the more clearly authority was already marked. Friendship formed, in other words, where there was less need for the senior to pull rank, or for the junior to show deference, either involving an assertion of formalities that hindered intimacy. La Tour and Lemoyne shared exactly this dynamic. Despite being the same age, La Tour was reçu eight years after Lemoyne. Ancienneté combined with a significant difference in media meant that the portraitist and sculptor were always separated by more than a single level within the hierarchy: académicien:professeur in 1747/8 and conseiller:adjoint à recteur in 1763. Institutional distance and difference thus provided the social space necessary for La Tour and Lemoyne to establish an intimate and equal friendship. Social space was, however, only one of the factors necessary for academic friendships to flourish. Real space was another. It is evident from these narratives that academicians who imagined themselves as friends inhabited spaces beyond the institution in which they could conceptualise those friendships occurring, spaces, that is, in which different kinds of interactions took place. Even Champaigne and Plattemontagne, for whom such a space was not an imperative (not needing to negotiate institutional hierarchies that did not yet exist), clearly conceptualised their friendship in the space of the studio, where their Double Self-Portrait was set. The studio was a key location for friendship because it permitted the intimacy of informal social interaction along with the equality inherent in artistic collaboration. For Rigaud, Edelinck, and Drevet, friendship developed in the studio through a network of social interactions. In their exchanged portraits, the studio is constantly present (indexically or representationally) as that place outside the institution where an alternative culture of sociability permitted unofficial interpersonal relationships to develop. The friendship of Greuze and Wille meanwhile found its setting initially in the space of commerce with the buying and selling of pictures, and later in all those places outside the walls of the Académie in which the artists enjoyed informal interactions – from the Luxembourg gallery to the countryside, from dinner parties to hot chocolate mornings. The site of La Tour and Lemoyne’s friendship is less immediately evident, though as a pastel portraitist and a sculptor, it is difficult to imagine either the studio or commerce providing a ready setting for their interactions. One possibility, however, is a space where the artists certainly came together sociably on a regular basis: the weekly salon of Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin.115 Every Monday, according to Jean-François Marmontel’s Mémoires, Madame Geoffrin held a dinner for artists at her home on the rue Saint-Honoré at which both La Tour and Lemoyne (along with Boucher, Carle Van Loo, and Joseph Vernet) were regular attendees, enjoying these hospitable gatherings and their habitual conversations about art and current affairs.116 Dena

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Goodman notes that Geoffrin’s salon flourished from 1749, perhaps a little late then to be the site in which La Tour and Lemoyne’s friendship formed (as affirmed by their portrait exchange of 1747/8), but certainly a space in which it would have developed through informal sociable discourse.117 La Tour and Lemoyne in fact already shared another space of sociability, as inhabitants of that artistic and intellectual neighbourhood occupying the Louvre: in 1747, Lemoyne was resident in the old Louvre and La Tour had a logement in the Galerie.118 Though the Académie was also an occupant of the Louvre’s corridors, living in the palace afforded opportunities for very different interactions with colleagues during the course of quotidian affairs and the mundane activities performed in one’s local quartier (shopping, drinking, eating, etc.). Wherever La Tour and Lemoyne’s friendship was conceived, the Louvre certainly appears as a site of significance in their association, for it was here in the exhibition space of the salon carré that the artists chose publicly to stage their portrait exchanges. These objects and their records of display remain the primary traces of this artistic friendship. Even now La Tour’s pastel of Lemoyne (Figure 5.5) and Lemoyne’s sculpture of La Tour (Figure 5.4) re-enact the intimate engagement of their makers as they once did across the space of the salon carré when exhibited together in 1763. The sitters’ relaxed sartorial presentations – Lemoyne’s untidy hair and workaday handkerchief around his neck; La Tour’s casually loose shirt and lopsided collar – affirm the informal sociability in their making. Despite their difference in media, the bust-length formats of both works break through the boundaries of formal distance, conveying the proximity of maker and sitter in their palpable corporeality: La Tour was close enough to capture the bulging vein running vertically down Lemoyne’s forehead; Lemoyne offers the intimately observed detail of wrinkles and individual hairs in the scratched clay around La Tour’s eyes and eyebrows. Whatever La Tour and Lemoyne’s institutional relationship, these portraits – intimate renderings offered in reciprocal exchanges – are witnesses to the very different interpersonal relationship experienced by these artists somewhere beyond the Académie’s officialdom.

Notes 1 Louis-Guillaume Baillet de Saint-Julien, Réflexions sur l’exposition des Tableaux au Louvre cette année 1748 (Paris, 1748) (CD, III:38), p. 9. 2 On La Tour’s biography see Abecedario, vol. 3, pp. 66–78; and Christine Debrie, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. ‘Peintre de portrait au pastel’ 1704–1788 au Musée Antoine Lécuyer de Saint-Quentin (Saint-Quentin, 1991), pp. 27–32. On Lemoyne’s biography see: Louis Réau, Une dynastie de sculpteurs au XVIII siècle: Les Lemoyne (Paris, 1927). 3 Diderot, ‘Salon de 1763’, p. 224. On the provenance of Lemoyne’s bust of La Tour and debates about the possible existence of a second sculpture see: Salmon, Le voleur d’âmes, p. 60.

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4 Lemoyne died 25 May 1778; La Tour died 17 February 1788 (PV, vol. 8, p. 334; vol. 9, p. 351). 5 5 July 1788 (PV, vol. 9, p. 365). 6 Marcel Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1950) (London and New York, 1990), pp. 16–18. 7 Mauss, The Gift, p. 16. 8 For recent histories and philosophies of friendship see: Michael Pakaluk (ed.), Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis, 1991); Mark Vernon, The Philosophy of Friendship (Basingstoke, 2005); Sandra Lynch, Philosophy and Friendship (Edinburgh, 2005); Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (eds), Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (Berlin and New York, 2010); Daniel Lochman, Maritere Lopez and Lorna Hutson (eds), Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Farnham, 2011). 9 For their early biographies see Bernard Dorival, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1631–1681) La vie, l’homme et l’art (Paris, 1992), pp. 10–11. 10 Philippe de Champaigne and Mathieu de Plattemontagne were original members from 1648 (PV, vol. 1, pp. 15, 24). 11 On this portrait in the context of early modern self-portraiture see: Hannah Williams, ‘Autoportrait ou portrait de l’artiste peint par lui-même? Se peindre soi-même à l’époque moderne’, Images Re-vues, 7 (2009), imagesrevues.revues. org/574 (accessed 9 August 2013). 12 This bust also served as the model for Lebrun’s Tomb of Seneca (Paris, Musée du Louvre). See Michael Vickers, ‘Rubens’s Bust of “Seneca”?’, Burlington Magazine, 119/894 (1977), pp. 643–645. 13 For another reading of the symbolism see Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674). Entre politique et devotion, exh. cat. (Lille and Geneva, 2007), pp. 268–271. 14 Seneca, ‘Epistle 63 – On Grief for Lost Friends’, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard Gummere, vol. 1 (London, 1917), p. 433. 15 Cited in Dudley Marchi, Montaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the Essais (Providence and Oxford, 1994), p. 22. Pakaluk, Other Selves, pp. 185–186. Montaigne also wrote a ‘Defence de Seneque et de Plutarque’, suggesting a possible identity for the standing statuette. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey, vol. 2 (Paris, 1930), p. 775. 16 Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’Amitié’, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey, vol. 1 (Paris, 1930), p. 354. 17 On homoeroticism in Montaigne see Marc D. Schachter, ‘“That Friendship Which Possesses the Soul”: Montaigne Loves La Boétie’, in Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis (eds), Homosexuality in French History and Culture (New York, 2001), pp. 5–21. 18 Montaigne, Les Essais, vol. 1, p. 363. 19 Montaigne, Les Essais, vol. 1, p. 362. 20 Montaigne, Les Essais, vol. 1, p. 366. 21 Montaigne, Les Essais, vol. 1, p. 369. See also Lynch, Philosophy, p. 34. 22 Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, p. 302.

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23 27 April 1726 (PV, vol. 5, pp. 5–6). 24 Abbé de Monville, La vie de Pierre Mignard (Paris, 1730), pp. 17–20. 25 Hélène Meyer claims some differences in the facture which I find difficult to distinguish: Philippe de Champaigne, p. 268. 26 Dorival, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, p. 11; Hélène Meyer in Philippe de Champaigne, pp. 268, 271. 27 On art-historical notions of self-portraiture see: Koerner, The Moment of SelfPortraiture; Woods-Marsden, Renaissance; Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall, Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, exh. cat. (Sydney and London, 2005); Calabrese, Artists’ Self-Portraits; and Williams, ‘Autoportrait’. 28 Montaigne, Les Essais, vol. 1, p. 362. Schachter, ‘“That Friendship Which Possesses the Soul”’, p. 17. 29 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 1, p. 11. 30 Lynch, Philosophy, p. 34. Article I, Statuts et Règlements (1648). 31 21 April 1663 (PV, vol. 1, p. 225). 32 Dorival, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, p. 11. 33 Dorival, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, p. 11. 34 Frédérique Lanoë et Pierre Rosenberg, Trois maîtres du dessin: Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674), Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1631–1681), Nicolas de Plattemontagne (1631–1706), exh. cat. (Paris, 2009), pp. 102–103, 142–143. 35 Seneca, ‘Epistle 3 – On True and False Friendship’, Ad Lucilium, vol. 1, p. 11. 36 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Inventaire après décès (6 mars – 21 avril 1744), AN MC XLIII, 383, res 217. 37 The Œuvre de Hyacinthe Rigaud contains 155 engravings including five selfportraits (ENSBA, Ms. 01439fol). 38 See Ariane James, ‘Portrait et gravure: Rigaud et ses interprètes’, Visages du Grand Siècle, p. 183; and Mary O’Neill, ‘Hyacinthe Rigaud’s Drawings for his Engravers’, Burlington Magazine, 126/980 (1984), pp. 674–683. See also Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont, ‘Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. Rigaud’, Mercure de France (November 1744), vol. 2, p. 10. 39 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Rigaud’, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 320. 40 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Rigaud’, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 320. 41 Stéphan Perreau, Hyacinthe Rigaud. 1659–1743. Le peintre des rois (Montpellier, 2004), pp. 152–157. 42 ‘Catalogue de l’œuvre gravé du Sr Hyacinthe Rigaud rangé selon l’ordre de tems qui ont été faits les tableaux d’après lesquels les Estampes qui composent cet œuvre ont été gravé. Avec les Noms du Graveur de chacune, l’Année qu’elle a été produite, et les autres eclaircis sem. nécessaires’ (ENSBA, Ms 117); and ‘Etat general des portraits et autres tableaux sortis du pinceau de l’illustre M. Rigaud pendant les soixante deux années qu’il a exercé son art à Paris’ (ENSBA, Ms 117). Both documents are presumed to have been transcribed by Henri van Hulst. 43 On Rigaud’s self-portrait see Perreau, Hyacinthe Rigaud, p. 135.

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44 After Edelinck’s death, Rigaud ‘finished’ the portrait by drawing it for an engraving: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Gérard Edelinck, 1707 (Paris, ENSBA). On this drawing as Rigaud’s final memorial to Edelinck see Hannah Williams, ‘Le peintre gravé et les graveurs peints: les portraits d’amitiés de Hyacinthe Rigaud et ses graveurs’, in Markus Castor, Jasper Kettner, Christien Melzer, and Claudia Schnitzer (eds), Drückgraphik: Zwischen Reproduktion und Invention (Berlin, 2010), pp. 55–66. 45 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Rigaud’, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 320. 46 Henri Van Hulst, ‘Vie de Monsieur Edelinck’ (ENSBA, Ms 80). Edelinck was reçu and elected conseiller on 6 March 1677 (PV, vol. 2, pp. 102–103). 47 Rigaud was agréé on 5 August 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 281). 48 28 June 1686 (PV, vol. 2, p. 330). 49 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London, 1994), pp. 90–135. Among the rich and extensive scholarship on the culture of salons, see also: Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 443–448; Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2005); Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, 2006), pp. 17–45. 50 François de La Rochefoucauld, ‘Maxime 83’, Maximes et réflexions diverses (1678) (Paris, 1977), p. 52. 51 François de La Rochefoucauld, ‘Maxime 85’, Maximes et réflexions diverses (1678) (Paris, 1977), p. 52. 52 La Rochefoucauld, ‘Maxime 83’, p. 52. 53 Unlike Rigaud’s Self-Portrait in a red cloak, his Self-Portrait in a turban is not listed in his production records: Le Livre de Raison du peintre Hyacinthe Rigaud, ed. J. Roman (Paris, 1919). Ariane James has dated Self-Portrait in a turban to c.1698: Visages du Grand Siècle, pp. 241–242. 54 Gilberte Levallois-Clavel, Pierre Drevet (1663–1738), graveur du roi et ses élèves Pierre-Imbert Drevet (1697–1739), Claude Drevet (1697–1781), PhD Thesis (Université de Lyon 2, 2005), theses.univ-lyon2.fr/documents/lyon2/2005/ clavel_g (accessed 9 August 2013), Part 1: II: 4: paras 34–38. 55 The ‘Catalogue de l’œuvre gravé …’ (n.d.) notes Drevet as the engraver of fifty-five of Rigaud’s paintings. Levallois-Clavel has identified forty-two, which she calculates to be a third of Drevet’s total production. Levallois-Clavel, Pierre Drevet, Part 2, II: 2, para 1. 56 Levallois-Clavel, Pierre Drevet, Part 2, I: 1, para 1. 57 Levallois-Clavel, Pierre Drevet, Part 2, I: 1, para 3. 58 2 January 1700 (PV, vol. 3, p. 285). Drevet was agréé on 28 September 1703 (PV, vol. 3, pp. 373–374). On Drevet’s interactions with the Académie and académiciens during this period see Levallois-Clavel, Pierre Drevet, Part 2, II: 2, paras 37–41. 59 Drevet’s copper plate and Rigaud’s painted Self-Portrait are both itemised in Rigaud’s inventaire après décès (1744). In accordance with his will, both objects were donated to the Académie: 22 August 1744 (PV, vol. 5, p. 370). On Rigaud’s portrait of Drevet see Visage du Grand Siècle, pp. 242–243.

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60 The inscription from the second impression reads: Hyacinthus Rigaud Eques natus Perpiniani ex nobelium ejusdem Civitatis numero in Regia Picturae Academia Professor Hanc ab ipso mat coloribus expressam effigiem aeri incidit Petrus Drevet Lugdunensis Calcographus Regius perenne grati animi monumentum quod illum in artis peritia sapientibus consiliis juvenit anno MDCC. 61 Drevet was agréé on 28 September 1703 (PV, vol. 3, pp. 373–374); his morceau-deréception subject was allocated on 6 October 1703 (PV, vol. 3, p. 374). 62 Drevet’s réception took place on 27 August 1707 (PV, vol. 4, p. 49). Drevet had arranged this morceau-de-réception exchange on 30 July 1707 (PV, vol. 4, p. 48). 63 16 March 1684 (PV, vol. 2, p. 270). McAllister Johnson, Morceaux, pp. 65–68, 95–97. 64 30 July 1707 (PV, vol. 4, p. 48). 65 28 February 1722 (PV, vol. 4, p. 330). 66 Levallois-Clavel, Pierre Drevet, Part 2, II: 3, para 46. 67 After Rigaud’s death, the portrait of Edelinck passed first into the collection of Collin de Vermont and later into that of Claude Drevet. Dossier INV20341, Centre de documentation, Musée du Louvre. 68 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de l’Education (1762) (Paris, 1964), p. 276. 69 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 1, p. 361. 70 Mémoires et Journal de J.-G. Wille, Graveur du Roi, ed. Georges Duplessis (Paris, 1857), vol. 1, p. 124. 71 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 242. 72 Geertz, ‘Deep Play’, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 448. 73 On Greuze’s biography see Anita Brookner, Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (London, 1972). On Wille see his autobiography Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 1–109; and Edgar Munhall, Jean-Baptise Greuze, 1725–1805, exh. cat. (Dijon, 1977), p. 94. 74 Greuze was agréé on 28 June 1755 and Wille on 30 August 1755 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 418, 423). 75 Brookner, Greuze, p. 92; Edgar Munhall, Greuze the Draughtsman, exh. cat. (New York, 2002), pp. 13, 16. 76 For a detailed table of these interactions see Williams, ‘Academic Intimacies’, p. 350. 77 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 113. 78 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 124. 79 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 125, 139. Munhall, Greuze the Draughtsman, p. 13. 80 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 140, 144. 81 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 139, 164. 82 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 139–140, 230. 83 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 184, 188–189. 84 Briefwechsel. Johann Georg Wille (1715–1808), ed. Elisabeth Décultot, Michel Espagne, and Michael Werner (Tübingen, 1999), p. 239.

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85 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 124, 230, 238. 86 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 235, 237. 87 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 238. 88 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 238–241. 89 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 239. 90 Diderot, ‘Salon de 1765’, Seznec and Adhémar, Salons, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1960), p. 153. 91 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 241. 92 Mauss, The Gift, p. 53. 93 Mauss, The Gift, pp. 45–46. 94 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 242. 95 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 242. 96 Abot de Bazinghen, Traité des monnoies et de la jurisdiction de la Cour des monnoies, vol. 2 (Paris, 1764), p. 822. 97 Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London, 1996), pp. 58–59. 98 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 14–16. 99 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 241. 100 15 May 1764, Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 256. 101 21 February and 14 June 1766, Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, pp. 313, 322. The Têtes were engraved by Pierre-Charles Ingouf: Munhall, Greuze the Draughtsman, p. 24. 102 Crow, Painters, p. 164. Brookner, Greuze, p. 66. On Cochin’s attitudes to Greuze see Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, pp. 138–140. 103 Ledbury, Sedaine, p. 163. 104 Wille was reçu on 24 July 1761 (PV, vol. 7, p. 170). Crow describes Greuze’s plans as a ‘surprise invader’ strategy. Crow, Painters, p. 164; Brookner, Greuze, p. 66. 105 Wille signed his attendance two to four times a year between 1761 and 1775. 106 Jean Seznec, ‘Diderot et l’affaire Greuze’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 67 (1966), p. 344. 107 23 August 1769 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 18–19) (Montaiglon’s transcription erroneously dates it ‘23 July’. On Greuze’s réception see Greuze et l’affaire du Septime Sévère, exh. cat. (Tournus, 2005); Eik Kahng, ‘L’affaire Greuze and the Sublime of History Painting’, Art Bulletin, 86/1 (2004), pp. 96–113; Seznec, ‘Diderot et l’affaire Greuze’, pp. 339–356; and Daniel Arasse, ‘L’échec du Caracalla, Greuze et “l’étiquette du regard”’, in Antoinette and Jean Ehrard (eds), Diderot et Greuze (Clermont-Ferrand, 1986), pp. 107–119. 108 Letter from Cochin to Marigny (23 July 1769), Marc Furcy-Raynaud, Correspondance de M. de Marigny, NAAF, 20 (1904), p. 182. 109 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 1, p. 415.

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110 Mémoires et Journal, vol. 2, p. 17. 111 Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres en France, vol. 11 (London, 1784), pp. 22–24. See also Barker, Greuze, p. 164. 112 Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On Joking Relationships’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 13/3 (1940), pp. 195–210. 113 Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On Joking Relationships’, pp. 200–201. 114 Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On Joking Relationships’, pp. 196–197, 201–202. 115 I am grateful to Dena Goodman for this suggestion. 116 Mémoires de Marmontel, ed. Maurice Tourneux, vol. 2 (Paris, 1891), pp. 83, 101–104. 117 Goodman, Republic of Letters, p. 74. 118 ENSBA Ms 21.

6 Facing Off: Portraits of Rivalry

If friendship is an affectionate relationship of compatibility, then rivalry is its negative impression: a hostile relationship of opposition. What is common to both, however, is intimacy. Rivalry might involve an entirely different set of emotional responses, but few relationships are closer or more intensely felt than those between rivals. In the Académie, the exclusivity of rivalry made it perhaps more intimate even than friendship, for while artists usually had several friends, rivals tended to be singular: an other who challenged the self precisely through their similarity and proximity. In Chapter 5, we saw friendships forming most easily between hierarchically unequal members, and certainly proving most successful where institutional pressures were kept at bay by sufficient distance and difference. It was precisely these pressures that fostered rivalries between artists who were closest in the Académie’s ranks. Rigaud could be friends with Edelinck, and La Tour could be friends with Lemoyne, because difference in academic status eliminated any sense of professional threat, but for artists on the same level (like Rigaud and Largillière) or for those on immediately adjacent levels (like La Tour and Perronneau), the competitive challenge to be ‘the best’ created a friction that could in turn spark rivalry. Despite the competitive environment fostered within the Académie, not every academician envisaged their peers as hostile adversaries. Rivalry and competition were two things understood differently within the culture of the institution.1 Rivalry had been an influential force from the Académie’s very inception. The impetus for the new institution had come from the bitter hostility between royal brevetaires and maîtres of the guild, and the decisive boundaries drawn between the two corps stemmed from their mutual coveting of privileges and authority. Rivalry was actively encouraged as part of inter-institutional opposition, but it was not supposed to exist internally: the Académie could be in conflict with the guild, but academicians were not supposed to be in conflict with each other. From the outset, the Académie had done its utmost to ban any behaviour that might spawn internal rivalry. The early Statuts proclaimed there was to be ‘a strict union and good relations’ between all members; deliberations were to be undertaken ‘in good faith and

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conscience, without ruse or cabal’; and by the Statuts of 1777, even seating arrangements in the assemblées had been formalised ‘to avoid any instance of conflict and jealousy’.2 Rivalries between academicians not only threatened the stability of the institution in its efforts to maintain authority, both inside and out, but also jeopardised the very ideological principles upon which the corps was founded, as the Statuts claimed: ‘there is nothing more contrary to virtue than envy, slander and discord’.3 Competition was a different matter entirely. While rivalry was punishable by reprimand and potentially even expulsion, competition was envisaged as a positive and productive relationship to be systematically encouraged and rewarded.4 Emulation – that ‘noble jealousy between men of learning and virtue’ – was the heart of the Académie’s educational programme, spurring students to create works as good as their masters and better than their peers.5 Étudiants copied the works of Old Masters; they reproduced the styles of their teachers; and the walls of the école du modèle were covered with académies and bas-reliefs intended, as Guérin noted, ‘to serve as examples for young students to imitate’.6 From as early as the 1660s, prix were established to stimulate a competitive dimension to their training – ‘to encourage emulation’, according to the official minutes.7 Unlike the base jealousy of rivalry, the ‘noble jealousy’ of competition was considered fundamental to the pursuit of great art. Competition was constantly roused between academicians through the prospect of reward by promotion, or by the allocation of lucrative pensions (stipends) or coveted logements in the Louvre. Industriousness and creativity were incited by organised concours (notably the competitions of 1727 and 1747) that consciously set academicians against each other, eliciting communal excellence by challenging each individual to assert superiority. There was a fine line in the Académie between rivalry and competition. Jealousy and emulation could look the same, distinguished not by actions but by the intentions underlying them. Emulation might be noble and jealousy might be dishonourable, but who could judge which it was from the act alone? Despite the Académie’s attempts to eliminate rivalry from its ranks, institutional culture offered fertile ground for slippages between productive competition and rivalrous conflict. In this chapter, I examine the conditions that provoked these slippages, how and where artists’ rivalries played out, and what these relationships meant for the people involved and the audiences who witnessed them. Portraits provide revealing answers to these inquires. As objects used in the negotiation of academic rivalries they are unique sources for recovering these relationships and understanding their dynamics. But the portraits in this chapter are a bit different. In contrast to those reciprocal acts described in the chapter on friendship, where artists painted each other in mutual exchanges, this chapter is mostly composed of self-portraits, set either directly or conceptually in competition with those of a rival. While portraits exchanged by friends were characterised by formal difference (often even different media), the images produced in rivalrous acts of self-portraiture were marked

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by similarity, creating artistic face-offs that demanded comparison and adjudication. Self-portraits were ideally equipped for these artistic battles: as works of art, they were acts of self-promotion that could prove skill and artistic superiority; as readable images, they could activate rivalries discursively through a visual rhetoric of rivalry understood by engaged spectators; and as effigies, self-portraits were avatars of their makers that could play out hostilities through dramatic displays. I do not mean to suggest that all selfportraits were deployed as weapons with rivalrous intent. Indeed we have seen several self-portraits already in this book that served other purposes, like Charles-Antoine Coypel’s faux morceau de réception that sought to make recompense with the Académie (Figure 4.5), Nattier’s nostalgic self-portrait that attempted to restore his lost family (Figure 4.13), or Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s double-self-portrait that embodied their seamless union as friends (Figure 5.7). But in this chapter we see a more confrontational side to self-portraits, as objects sent into the artistic arena to compete, thwart, and win.

An Institutional Rivalry: lebrun versus Mignard Charles Lebrun and Pierre Mignard harboured the most notorious artistic rivalry of seventeenth-century France, and its ramifications were felt for generations to come. A century after the fact, Dézallier d’Argenville recounted a revealing incident from the 1670s, when Mignard allegedly convinced a Paris picture dealer to sell one of his paintings as a Guido Reni.8 It was snapped up by a collector but soon rumours started circulating about its attribution. The collector went to see Mignard who denied its authorship, before adding, as though incidentally, that if he really wanted an expert opinion he should ask the great Lebrun. So the collector invited both artists to a dinner to inspect the work and after a lengthy assessment, Lebrun passed judgement: no hesitation, no question, the painting was without doubt by the hand of Guido Reni. Instantly, Mignard leapt up, elated at his moment of triumph, and with the flourish of a conjuror produced some distemper to wipe away a layer of paint, revealing the proof that confirmed his authorship. What a conquest this was: Lebrun forced to acknowledge Mignard’s masterful artistic abilities, while being publicly humiliated into the bargain. Whatever the truth of this colourful anecdote, the story captures the competitive hostility of Lebrun and Mignard. Animosity dominates the visual and textual record of their relationship, in material objects, accounts of social interactions, theoretical debates, and institutional politics. Together they came to personify the bitter division between the Académie (with Lebrun as founding father) and the guild (with Mignard as chief), and they would become exemplars for the two sides of the querelle du coloris – Lebrun for line, Mignard for colour – even if in practice their approach was more in parallel than opposition. Their notorious rivalry is not in question, but while most

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third-party accounts present a damaging and destructive relationship, the paintings they produced relate a more complicated story – an intense conflict that was at times a productive dynamic. While some nascent version of their rivalry may have begun during their training under Simon Vouet, the personal antagonism of Lebrun and Mignard was cemented in the early history of the Académie and its formative institutional rivalry with the Maîtrise. In 1648, when the ‘douze anciens’ were establishing the Académie, Mignard was living in Rome. He returned to France in 1657, not long after the failure of the jonction, and was met with the political decision of which faction to join, a decision delayed until 1663 when the elimination of brevets finally forced a choice (as discussed in Chapter 1). Keen to lure this renowned painter into the fledgling Académie, Lebrun offered Mignard the position of recteur, but Mignard was reputedly incensed at the idea of occupying second place to Lebrun (then chancelier).9 A month after sending his rejection letter to Lebrun (claiming he was too busy to undertake all the commitments required of academicians), Mignard joined the Maîtrise, rising through its ranks such that each artist became leaders of these opposing institutional parties.10 But upon Lebrun’s death three decades later, it was Mignard who took his place. In 1690, in a moment described by Anthony Blunt as Mignard’s great ‘triumph’, the marquis de Louvois (surintendant des bâtiments, 1683–1691) transferred to Mignard ‘every title, honour, prerogative and position heretofore possessed by Monsieur Lebrun’, including the roles of directeur, chancelier, and recteur of the Académie.11 Mignard’s ascension is usually viewed (by eulogists and art historians alike) as the ultimate victory, the final nail in the coffin of their conflict. But while death may have eliminated Mignard’s rival, it actually did very little to expunge their rivalry. After all, what satisfaction was to be derived from vanquishing Lebrun thanks only to his death? What gratification could there be in a conquest from which Mignard had only attained that which he had always sworn to hate? As the comte de Caylus later empathised (with little real sympathy): ‘I am certain he found it painful … to become the head of this Company after having always been its sworn enemy’.12 On becoming directeur of the Académie, Mignard had entered the enemy camp, not only metaphorically but physically. Moving through apartments overlooked by Lebrun’s painted, sculpted, and engraved effigies, he found himself surrounded by omnipresent traces of his former adversary. Mignard’s response to his rival’s continuing presence came in the form of a monumental Self-Portrait (Plate 15). In his luxurious robe de chambre and velvet fauteuil, the life-size figure of Mignard occupied a composition that would have been extremely familiar to his colleagues, for his grandiose self-portrait was a direct appropriation of the celebrated effigy of Lebrun (Figure 1.18) painted by Largillière four years earlier. Mignard not only borrowed its vast canvas size and full-length format, but also extensively repeated its formal elements: re-using the same earthy tones with bright colours in the costume and textiles; re-assembling objects in matching groups (from the pile of sculptures and

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artistic paraphernalia on the floor, to the paired sculptures and engraving/ drawing on a cloth-covered table, with a rounded canvas behind); and even re-staging the setting itself (a flagstoned interior with fluted pilasters and heavy draped curtain). The Académie’s official Mémoires stressed that Mignard had refused to join the Académie for fear of exposing himself to any ‘parallel’ with Lebrun, but the striking similarity of these portraits suggests that this is exactly what Mignard did want.13 This was an effigy so closely derived from his rival’s that it could only demand comparison. Mignard had already commissioned Rigaud to paint his portrait for the collection, but whether or not Rigaud had already started this more conventional (and much smaller) institutional portrait (Figure 3.11) by the time Mignard painted his Self-Portrait, it must have been evident to Mignard that no other official Académie portrait would ever take the same grand scale as that reserved for its revered founder.14 If Mignard’s portrait were to compete with Lebrun’s, he would have to make it himself. When viewing these two portraits together, it is difficult to imagine a more striking example of what artistic rivalry looked like. If there is a visual rhetoric of rivalry, it is to be found in acts of appropriation like this, where similarity establishes comparison, and comparison in turn sets the stage for rivalry. Superlatives, after all, only exist with comparatives: no one can be ‘the best’ unless there is someone to be ‘better than’. Mignard’s Self-Portrait was the material culmination of a professional relationship that had often played out through exactly this dynamic, though in history painting rather than portraiture. While Lebrun was alive, the two artists consistently borrowed each other’s subjects and compositions in efforts to prove themselves superior by creating works that explicitly demanded comparison. Mignard’s Tent of Darius (1689) (Figure 6.1) was, for example, a deliberate appropriation of Lebrun’s earlier acclaimed painting from 1661 (Figure 6.2), depicting not only the same moment of the narrative, but even repeating the setting and distribution of the figures, in order, according to Caylus, ‘to crush’ Lebrun’s original.15 During the 1680s, Lebrun made several of his own retaliations, as the privileged position he had enjoyed when Colbert was surintendant des bâtiments (1664–1683) came under increasing pressure due to Louvois’ overt preferential treatment of Mignard. When Mignard’s Christ Carrying the Cross (Figure 6.3) was widely acclaimed in 1684, Louis XIV supposedly offered Lebrun a chance to even the score by painting a work ‘to oppose that of Monsieur Mignard’.16 The king specified no particular subject, but Lebrun’s Elevation of the Cross (1685) (Troyes, Musée des Beaux Arts) was a pointed retort: a matching canvas showing the next scene in the Passion, complete with formal echoes in figural groupings that made obvious reference to his rival.17 Three years later, with Lebrun’s authority diminishing further, he made an even more direct appeal with his own version of Christ Carrying the Cross (1688) (Figure 6.4), this time appropriating both subject and composition (Christ fallen in the centre of a landscape, with a crowded midground, framing architectural elements, and Calvary in the distance). Lebrun

6.1 Pierre Mignard, Tent of Darius, 298 × 453 cm, oil on canvas, c.1689, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. (Photo: © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Yuri Molodkovets)

6.2 Charles Lebrun, Tent of Darius, 298 × 453 cm, oil on canvas, c.1660, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

6.3 Pierre Mignard, Christ Carrying the Cross, 150 × 198 cm, oil on canvas, 1684, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Jean-Gilles Berizzi)

6.4 Charles Lebrun, Christ Carrying the Cross, 153 × 214 cm, oil on canvas, 1688, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Franck Raux)

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and Mignard claimed not to have any regard for each other’s works (Lebrun, for instance, once refused to visit a gallery at Versailles that Mignard was painting), but their practice clearly relied on close scrutiny.18 Their battle for supremacy was waged through a tit-for-tat of similar objects that demanded comparison, and in turn, judgement. Rivalry, for Lebrun and Mignard, had been a productive dynamic, the impetus behind a host of creative outputs. On Lebrun’s death, however, these habitual interactions came to an abrupt end. After a career of defining himself in relation to Lebrun, Mignard suddenly faced the prospect of constructing an artistic identity independent of that hostile yet productive rivalry. Mignard’s challenging appropriation of Lebrun’s institutional image thus looks like an effort to restore the dynamic. Mignard’s Self-Portrait was not, as some scholars have suggested, a straightforward imitation or replication, but a much more complicated gesture: at once a decisive confrontation as well as a kind of homage.19 Defining himself through and against the figure of Lebrun, Mignard affirms his ultimate superiority as the last man standing, but also acknowledges Lebrun as his most worthy foe. It seems not, as Paul Duro has argued, an attempt to ‘obliterate’ Lebrun, but, I would suggest, precisely the opposite: an effort to revive Lebrun at least long enough for Mignard to have the final word.20 Nor was this, as Duro puts it, emulating to extinguish, for this time the appropriation was not artistic but embodied.21 Lebrun’s portrait was, after all, not by the hand of Lebrun. It was not the formal elements that Mignard sought to rival here but the effigy itself, bringing into being an equivalent avatar that could go into the Académie to play out their rivalry for posterity. Similarity was not to make the viewer forget Lebrun, but on the contrary, to recall Lebrun constantly, so we could never look at one without thinking of the other. Having seen these portraits with each sitter posed before his masterpiece, how could one, for instance, ever consider Lebrun’s Franche-Comté at Versailles without imagining a comparison with Mignard’s ceiling at Val-de-Grâce? Yet whatever Mignard’s efforts to secure his legacy, there remains something unnervingly defeatist about his Self-Portrait. Duro describes Mignard here as ‘a man who knows, with certainty, that his time has finally come’.22 But as tempting as it is to imagine Mignard’s self-fashioning in that light, his effigy is simply not triumphant. Compared with Lebrun, Mignard appears diminished, sitting tensely upright rather than reclining comfortably. In place of Lebrun’s expansive gestures, he retreats into himself, holding his drawing board guardedly to his chest. Where Lebrun is unrestrained, open, and munificent, Mignard is withdrawn, closed, and parsimonious. In the assembled objects, moreover, Mignard weakens the force of the scene by replacing those active muscular forms of Antinoüs, the Gladiator, and the Belvedere torso with the more passive feminised forms of Fidelité and Fourberie (sculpture designs he made for Versailles), and the marble bust of his daughter, Catherine.23 These substitutions also create a very different narrative about the sitter: from Lebrun’s powerful account of institutional authority (surrounded with

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objects from the Académie’s collection), to Mignard’s more modest scene that tells only his personal story. Mignard, ever the outsider, was unable to create a comparably ‘institutional’ image for an institution he had spent his entire career opposing. The resulting self-portrait is a strange kind of untriumphant victory, which makes most sense when read as a monument to the end of this productive rivalry. A victory cloaked in defeat, tinged with pathos, as Mignard pays tribute to his great adversary while vainly attempting to keep alive the competitive dynamic that had motivated him throughout his career. Keeping conflict alive is precisely what these portraits did. In the end, Mignard only held his reign at the Académie for five years before his death in 1695. His Self-Portrait entered the collection the following year, donated by his daughter in an effort to construct the legacy that Mignard seems always to have intended.24 Though he evidently envisaged the Académie’s apartments as the site for re-staging his rivalry with Lebrun, while Mignard was alive, he embodied his opposition to Lebrun; only after his death would the Self-Portrait take on that role. These two monumental portraits were not, however, their only avatars in that space. As we saw in Chapter 3, when the Académie moved into its ground floor apartments in 1712, Largillière’s portrait of Lebrun (Figure 1.18) was hung perpendicular to Rigaud’s portrait of Mignard (Figure 3.11) in the salle d’assemblée, that principal site of monthly meetings, company deliberations, and discursive conférences. In the same room, there were also two engravings of the ex-directeurs: Edelinck’s portrait of Lebrun (Figure 6.5) and Cornelis Vermeulen’s portrait of Mignard (Figure 6.6).25 And later, after the Académie’s move to the first floor, Antoine Coysevox’s bust of Lebrun (Figure 6.7) would be joined in the grande salle by another donation from Catherine Mignard, Desjardins’ bust of Mignard (Figure 6.8).26 Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry had clearly made an impression, both on the colleagues who made these portraits, and on those who later arranged them as pairs. In the engravings, Vermeulen borrowed the oval framing of Edelinck’s Lebrun, but made the conscious decision not to reverse the original. His reproductive print of Mignard was thus intentionally

6.5 Gérard Edelinck (after Nicolas de Largillière), Charles Lebrun, 51.8 × 39.6 cm, engraving, 1683–1690, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

6.6 Cornelis Vermeulen (after Pierre Mignard), Self-Portrait, 42.6 × 34.6 cm, engraving, 1690, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

6.7 Antoine Coysevox, Charles Lebrun, 63.7 × 58 × 34 cm, marble, 1679, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Hervé Lewandowski)

6.8 Martin Desjardins, Pierre Mignard, 85.1 × 56.5 × 34.5 cm, marble, before 1694, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Jean-Gilles Berizzi)

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set against the image of Lebrun, such that when displayed back-to-back in the salle d’assemblée, they performed an almost comedic staging of disregard. Likewise with the sculptures, Desjardins’ marble bust of Mignard borrowed material, size, and form from Coysevox’s Lebrun, and concentrated a sense of conflict into the antithetical turn of Mignard’s head, a gesture activated all the more dramatically in the grande salle, where, side-by-side, it was from Lebrun that Mignard turned away. Mignard’s grandiose Self-Portrait would never hang in the same room as its appropriated model (at least not until the present-day hang in the Musée du Louvre), but Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry was palpable in other effigies displayed throughout the Académie’s apartments. Once materialised in this official collection of objects, Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry became a permanent fixture in the institution’s history, constantly on the walls for present and future academicians to witness. It is not surprising then that Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry lived on for subsequent generations of academicians. What is more intriguing is that the response to its legacy was not always the same. In the following two sections, I examine two different responses to this great rivalry: the first, from 1730, in Rigaud’s strange double-portrait of Lebrun and Mignard (Figure 6.9); the second, from around 1750, in two new Lives of Lebrun and Mignard, written by Claude-François Desportes and the comte de Caylus, published together with responses by Charles-Antoine Coypel in the first volume of Bernard Lépicié’s Vies des premiers-peintres.27 Rigaud’s double-portrait and the two mid-century Lives reveal a dramatic shift in how Lebrun and Mignard’s relationship was imagined by different generations. Rigaud had been an étudiant during Lebrun’s directeur-ship and an agréé during Mignard’s term.28 Desportes, Caylus, and Coypel, meanwhile, were not even born until the 1690s so did not enter the Académie until years after Mignard’s death.29 In other words, Rigaud was part of a generation with lived experience of Lebrun and Mignard, old enough to have witnessed their rivalry firsthand. Desportes, Caylus, and Coypel, by contrast, were too young to have known Lebrun and Mignard except as legends of institutional history. Nevertheless, it was for this later generation that the rivalry of Lebrun and Mignard would pose a much greater problem, for while Rigaud turned the rivals into a poster for the productivity of competition, by mid-century the picture had soured completely.

Rivalry Made Good: Rigaud versus largillière Lebrun and Mignard had been dead for over three decades when Rigaud posthumously reunited them in his double-portrait (Figure 6.9).30 Painted for François de Castanier, a financier with no apparent connection to the Académie, and destined for his private residence on rue des Capucines, Rigaud’s portrait re-staged this notorious artistic rivalry somewhat incongruously in a setting far beyond its institutional origins.31 When compared with the pairings of the

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6.9 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Charles Lebrun and Pierre Mignard, 130 × 140 cm, oil on canvas, 1730, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Gérard Blot)

sitters’ portraits on display in the Académie, Rigaud’s Lebrun and Mignard (1730) offers a very different image of their relationship. While the singlefigure effigies had been staged in conflict – back-to-back, turning away, or separated from the other’s gaze on perpendicular walls, Rigaud’s two-figure composition brought the men together into an intimate encounter in a shared pictorial space. Standing side-by-side, Lebrun and Mignard’s bodies turn towards each other in acknowledgement rather than confrontation. On an almost square canvas, the figures are pushed together to meet at the central axis where they overlap: Mignard’s right hand crossing over Lebrun’s left, their arms all but wrapping around each other. Bringing Lebrun and Mignard together in this way was strange for two reasons: first, because of their ostensibly disharmonious relationship; and second, because it contravened expected portraiture conventions. Doubleportraits of artists were rare. In fact double-portraits in general were not common beyond the context of family portraiture. Apart from Champaigne and Plattemontagne’s unique Double Self-Portrait (Plate 13), the only doubleportraits of academicians I have encountered have been representations of family couplings, like Roslin’s Self-Portrait with his wife (Plate 9), or Lambert’s portrait of the Beaubrun cousins (Figure 1.8).32 But on its square canvas with symmetrical figures on either side, Rigaud’s composition looks less to those

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portrait traditions than to allegorical tropes of pairing. Indeed with its bare stone wall, its low parapet framing the bottom edge, and motif of interlocking arms, it resonates more compellingly with Buirette’s Union of Painting and Sculpture (Figure 1.31), then hanging in the Académie’s grande salle (along with that panoply of Lebrun and Mignard effigies).33 Borrowing an emblematic form, Rigaud’s duo becomes as much allegory as portrait, as much a symbolic idea as it is a mimetic image of two people. Employing a decorative formula accords with the painting’s design as an overdoor for Castanier’s residence. In this non-institutional context, a symbolic subject also makes more sense. Katie Scott has argued that the choice of subject matter articulated Castanier’s desire to associate himself with the heroic tradition, to accumulate status through culture, a suggestion made even more compelling when the work is considered in relation to its pendant, Rigaud’s Self-Portrait painting the portrait of François Castanier (Perpignan, Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud).34 Depicting the production of a portrait that Rigaud painted of Castanier (Carcassonne, Musée des Beaux-Arts) some years earlier, this pendant ‘double’ draws the patron into a circuit of effigies, which, located in his domestic interior, showed Castanier as the inheritor of a glorious cultural tradition. In this pairing of double-portraits, however, Castanier was not the only figure set in relation to this artistic tradition. If Castanier had inherited the role of patron to the French School, then Rigaud had inherited that of artist. But if Rigaud had wanted to show himself as a successor to the academic tradition, the figure of Lebrun alone would have been sufficient in this formula. If, however, these figures are seen to represent something other than themselves, then Mignard brings something to the equation that Lebrun alone could not. Far from imagining Lebrun and Mignard as two men in hostile enmity, Rigaud’s symmetrical tableau cast them as an emblem of interdependence – an image where each figure required the other to complete the picture. The composition is held together by doublings and juxtapositions: Lebrun’s dark brown wig is balanced by Mignard’s light grey; Lebrun points down and in with the maulstick, Mignard points up and out with his index finger; and Lebrun’s soft swathe of velvet is countered by the hard table and parapet in front of Mignard. At the centre of the canvas, Rigaud brings this composition to a rhetorical climax. In the juxtaposition of Lebrun’s palette and brushes with Mignard’s drawing portfolio, Rigaud gestures to the two sides of the querelle du coloris, that art theoretical conflict which dominated the Académie’s conférences during the last quarter of the seventeenth century.35 Yet while Lebrun had been a principal advocate of dessein and Mignard was associated with the coloristes, Rigaud playfully swaps the symbols of their allegiance, giving Lebrun the tools of colour and Mignard the apparatus of drawing.36 By invoking and then switching the terms of this debate at the very point of the composition where the bodies of Lebrun and Mignard are most inextricably entwined, Rigaud suggests that the value of debate was not in the outcome, but the process. This was not a staging of conflict, but an allegorisation, indeed

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a valorisation, of opposition. Like a painted version of de Piles’ Dialogue sur le coloris, where two voices present arguments for either side, Rigaud turned Lebrun and Mignard into a productive rhetorical conversation – a dialectic through which meaning was created.37 Rendering Lebrun and Mignard’s relationship as one of mutual reliance, Rigaud’s allegory of opposition recast this notorious rivalry as competition: the interdependency of two men striving to create better art by competing with each other. Only recently, the value placed on competition by the Académie had been underscored in the concours of 1727. This contest, staged by the duc d’Antin (surintendant des bâtiments, 1708–1736) was explicitly designed to ‘excite between [the academicians] a noble emulation’, to stir the institution’s history painters to greatness at a time when the grand genre was thought to be dwindling.38 In practice, however, it proved something of a failure, because there was no clear winner among the 13 competitors: d’Antin ended up splitting the official prize between Jean-François de Troy and François Lemoyne; the king bought the submission by Charles-Antoine Coypel; while the public were more taken by the entry of Noël-Nicolas Coypel.39 Rigaud did not take part in the concours so was spared its anticlimactic conclusions, not experiencing the divisive battle, which, for instance, made rivals of Lemoyne and De Troy. Being forced to share the prize certainly did more harm than good to relations between these two artists and among the history painters more generally. Nevertheless, it was Rigaud’s relationship with one contemporary in particular that was central to his positive vision of artistic competition. For notwithstanding its symbolic form, the image of Lebrun and Mignard is mimetic after all, not strictly as a portrait of two men, but as a painting of two portraits: Rigaud’s portrait of Mignard (Figure 3.11) and Largillière’s portrait of Lebrun (Figure 1.18). The figure of Mignard is taken directly from Rigaud’s earlier work, with identical black satin robes, white kerchief, and portfolio of drawings; some changes in pose and gesture accommodate Mignard’s new setting, but he is a recognisable duplicate. The figure of Lebrun is taken from Largillière’s portrait through reference rather than direct reproduction: the facial features and expression come from Largillière, as does the pose of head and shoulders, and the fall of the wig, but Rigaud altered the costume, turning gold brocade into green satin, and replacing the red robe de chambre with a swathe of grey velvet. In bringing Largillière’s portrait together with his own, Rigaud turned the effigies of Lebrun and Mignard into a vehicle for rehearsing his own relationship with his closest competitor in the Académie. By 1730, Rigaud and Largillière’s original portraits had been displayed together for over 30 years in the Académie’s apartments, first in the salle d’assemblée on the ground floor, and later in the grande salle on the first floor. But here Rigaud re-worked the figures into a single pictorial space, making their comparison more overt, while at the same time offering more even ground for judging. In their original forms, Largillière’s luxurious Lebrun on his massive canvas would always

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6.10 Nicolas de Largillière, SelfPortrait, 80 × 65 cm, oil on canvas, 1711, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

dominate Rigaud’s smaller, more sober Mignard. But scaled to the same size and in harmonious costumes, Rigaud’s double-portrait provided the equal terms for comparison with Largillière that had always been denied. Lebrun and Mignard’s effigies had on many occasions become metaphorical stages for contests of skill, in those portrait pairings by Edelinck and Vermeulen, or Coysevox and Desjardins. In Rigaud’s version, however, there is unity instead of discord. Instead of setting his Mignard against Largillière’s Lebrun, he brings them together as a model of interdependence. Rigaud’s positive spin on Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry can be explained by his own affirming relationship with Largillière, an artist described somewhat paradoxically by the chevalier de Jaucourt as Rigaud’s ‘friend and rival’.40 Born three years apart, Rigaud and Largillière commenced their academic careers around the same time, both agréé in the early 1680s.41 With Rigaud’s long-delayed réception, however, Largillière advanced more quickly, and although Rigaud eventually caught up when he was made professeur in 1710, and although they would later share the rank of directeur (1733–1735), the earlier interval had a lasting impact.42 According to Hulst, Rigaud always imagined himself in deference to his peer, seeing Largillière as a model to be emulated. In an emotive account, Hulst describes how Rigaud would break down in tears at feeling ‘so distant’ from the greatness of Largillière, but the tears were not ‘prompted by envy’ (Rigaud assured Hulst); they were triggered not by the base jealousy of rivalry, but the noble jealousy of competition.43 Rigaud saw himself as Largillière’s ‘émule’, his imitator, and claimed his motivation was not the desire to outdo his colleague, but rather ‘the desire to come close [to him] and to fight on [his] side’.44 Dézallier d’Argenville presented a similarly amicable relationship from Largillière’s perspective, emphasising their intimacy despite their competitive proximity, for no one, he claimed, could ‘be more closely connected’ than Rigaud and Largillière. He even recounted a conversation in which Largillière openly proclaimed Rigaud’s superiority as a painter, declaring this proof that Largillière ‘saw no rival in his competitor’.45 If rivalry found visual form in direct appropriation (like Mignard’s Self-Portrait [Plate 15]), competition found its form in subtle reference. Two self-portraits by Largillière and Rigaud (Figures 6.10 and 6.11) are a case in point. Commissioned by the amateur Louis Malpenée, sieur d’Assenay, around 1710, the works were designed as pendants.46 Rigaud and Largillière were two of the most prolific self-portraitists in the Académie (over their

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careers, Largillière painted at least seven and Rigaud at least eight), and in these, as in their other self-representations, we witness constant formal cross-references. Rigaud’s Self-Portrait (Figure 6.11) recalls Largillière’s Self-Portrait of 1707 (Washington, National Gallery of Art), borrowing the pose and brown jacket, citing the portfolio with the artist’s hands resting upon it, and transforming Largillière’s soft cap into an elaborate turban. Comparisons can also be drawn between Largillière’s SelfPortrait (Figure 6.10) and Rigaud’s Self-Portrait in a turban (Figure 5.11), with the bulk of robed body in the foreground and the easel behind. Neither of these references was a wholesale appropriation. Clearly Rigaud and Largillière were looking attentively at each other’s works, but the slightly larger visual gap between reference and appropriation suggests a lesser degree of friction in the contest. These were not ripostes to prove oneself ‘better’ than the other, but rather acts of emulation – a dialogue of respectful acknowledgements of the other’s abilities, in which each became a benchmark for the other to judge himself. As pendants hanging side-by-side, Rigaud and Largillière’s two acts of emulation were brought together. Wearing harmonious shades of brown, the half-length figures appear in mirrored poses, facing the viewer, but with bodies turned inwards to acknowledge the encounter with the other. Largillière’s right arm reaches across the canvas towards the inside edge, where it meets Rigaud’s left arm reaching across his own space. Their hands perform matching tasks, clutching untidy portfolios with little fingers extended, ostensibly to keep the leaves closed, but in effect reaching as though to make contact with their reflection in the frame next door. Together this pair establish the visual rhetoric that Rigaud would later reformulate in his double-portrait of Lebrun and Mignard, drawing into a single picture plane the meaningful dialectic of opposites that resonates here in the space between the frames. As with the later double-portrait, Rigaud and Largillière’s Self-Portraits hung not in the institutional space of the Académie, but rather in the private space of a collector’s home – in Assenay’s residence on rue des Fontaines.47 Having begun their lives as a pair, the self-portraits would continue as such wherever they were subsequently housed, passing together after Assenay’s death into the collection of Jean de Julienne, who in turn bequeathed them as a set to the Académie in 1766. Here their unity was sealed with the bestowal of matching frames, following a stipulation in Julienne’s will,

6.11 Hyacinthe Rigaud, SelfPortrait, 81 × 65 cm, oil on canvas, c.1710, Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Château de Versailles] / Gérard Blot)

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6.12 François Chéreau (after Nicolas de Largillière), Self-Portrait, 46.9 × 33.5 cm, engraving, 1715, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

which ensured the works were paired for posterity even among the scores of artists’ portraits in the salle des portraits, and even today in their display at Versailles.48 Their first framing as a pair had, however, already taken place decades earlier, when Assenay commissioned their reproduction in print: Largillière by François Chéreau (1715) (Figure 6.12) and Rigaud by Pierre Drevet (c.1714) (Figure 6.13).49 The engravings enhanced their unity, setting the figures’ mirrored poses into matching window-like apertures, where complementary swathes of drapery balance the compositions when set side-by-side. That the prints were intended as a pair is obvious but confirmed nevertheless in a

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6.13 Pierre Drevet (after Hyacinthe Rigaud), Self-Portrait, 47.1 × 34.3 cm, engraving, c.1714, British Museum, London. (Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum)

portrait by Largillière of Louis d’Assenay (now lost and known only through a studio copy [Figure 6.14]), where the amateur is shown with the two engravings laid on a table.50 Though painted by Largillière, it is the engraving of Rigaud that is seen to advantage, held up by Assenay, while the engraving of Largillière is recognisable beneath only by association from its distinctive stonework and drapery. With the two prints blending into one, Largillière imagines a scenario in which he and Rigaud were not so much compared as considered together. Folding in on each other, the engravings become two parts of a whole, just as ‘connected’ as Dézallier d’Argenville once described their sitters.

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Largillière’s unifying representation of the engravings in the Assenay portrait set a precedent for Rigaud’s double-portrait of Lebrun and Mignard (Figure 6.9), not in form, but in sentiment. For at the heart of Rigaud’s positive re-interpretation of Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry was his mutual competitive respect for Largillière. At one level, Lebrun and Mignard was an allegory of opposition, their bodies symbolising a productive dialectic. At another, Lebrun and Mignard was a portrait of artists. But in a portrait derived from portraits, they were as much indices of their makers (Rigaud and Largillière) as effigies of their sitters. Whoever’s relationship is in fact represented on this canvas, it was Rigaud’s affirming experience of competition with Largillière that allowed him to envisage Lebrun and Mignard as a model in the first place. 6.14 Studio of Nicolas de Largillière, Louis d’Assenay, 66 × 53.3 cm, oil on canvas, after 1715, Private Collection. (Photo: © ArtDigitalStudio / Sotheby’s)

Institutional Rivalry Returns Two decades after Rigaud painted his double-portrait, Lebrun and Mignard’s relationship was being remembered in a very different way by another generation. This time the re-engagement took place firmly within the bounds of the Académie. During the directeur-ship of Charles-Antoine Coypel and a renewed interest in recording the institution’s history, two new biographies of Lebrun and Mignard were written and delivered as conférences: ClaudeFrançois Desportes’ ‘Vie de Lebrun’ (1749) and the comte de Caylus’ ‘Vie de Mignard’ (1751).51 As ‘portraits’, these biographies were obviously very different from Rigaud’s painting: text rather than image, created by academicians with no living memory of their subjects, and produced not for the private homes of patrons but as official acts on the part of the Académie. Given the differences in form, authorship, and context, a change in content is not unexpected. But the shift in attitude towards Lebrun and Mignard’s relationship was remarkable. From Rigaud’s positive allegory of opposition (a relationship to be emulated), Lebrun and Mignard were now negatively recast as bitter and hostile enemies (a relationship that threatened the good order of the institution). Gone was any attempt to envisage Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry in terms of productive competition. Instead, these texts turned their rivalry into a destructive force. Desportes’ ‘Vie de Lebrun’ (1749) reads like a tragedy in three acts.52 The first two parts eulogised Lebrun’s early years, glorifying his founding of the

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Académie and his crucial role in freeing French art from its former ‘slavery’.53 The third part told of his demise. Some of the blame for the difficulties he faced after Colbert’s death are attributed to Louvois (always ‘very badly disposed’ towards Lebrun), but it is Mignard who becomes the villain of the piece.54 Desportes devoted nearly the entire third part to exposing Mignard’s conspiratorial machinations, painting him as antagonist to the heroic Lebrun – a man whose personal deficiencies spawned a rivalry so intense that it all but destroyed the ‘illustrious father’ of the Académie.55 Lebrun is cast as the innocent victim of Mignard’s malevolence, guilty only of possessing the skills and fortune that a jealous Mignard so coveted for himself.56 Mignard tried ‘in vain’ to equal Lebrun, and although he was a great artist, ‘as he himself declared’, it was not his skill that ensured his progression, but his tactics.57 Desportes attributed Mignard’s success to a faceless coalition of supporters – his ‘cabal’ – pointedly invoking one of the very things admonished in the institution’s Statuts, and thus simultaneously proclaiming Mignard’s ignobly anti-academic conduct. Mignard was not just a mean and jealous man, he was also unfit to uphold the ideals of the Académie. Caylus’ ‘Vie de Mignard’ (1751) paints an even more demonising picture. Mignard was responsible for much more than merely inciting personal discord, coveting Lebrun’s career, or even seeking its destruction. Going completely against the conventional form of the Académie’s Lives as laudatory ‘éloges’ of past members, Caylus’ instead wrote a vilifying critique, filled with invective against a man whose hatred of Lebrun was deemed equal only to his hatred of the Académie. Caylus presented Mignard as an inherently flawed individual, marred by ‘partiality’, ‘weakness’, ‘envy’, ‘injustice’, ‘ambition’, and ‘miserliness’, unable to sustain normal relationships with his colleagues because of his ‘morose temper’ and his ‘preference for solitude’.58 Like Desportes, Caylus blamed Mignard’s unpleasant character for the rivalry with Lebrun, but unlike Desportes, he traced the conflict back to long before the death of Colbert, neatly dating the origins of their personal antagonism to coincide with the establishment of the Académie. Indeed, it becomes difficult in Caylus’ essay to distinguish between the personal rivalry of the artists and the institutional rivalry of Académie and guild. The ‘internal war’ of the arts in Paris is subsumed in the rivalry between the two men; Mignard’s desire to ‘destroy’ Lebrun becomes inseparable from ‘his hatred for the Académie’.59 This diatribe against a past member, delivered in an official assemblée, should have been a perfidious act, but Caylus’ essay was essentially an expulsion of Mignard from the Académie, relegating him back to the ranks of the Maîtrise where he should always have remained. Justifying his critique, Caylus declared that Mignard’s early loathing for the Académie had never ceased, that he had only pretended to change his ways, and only at the moment he was named directeur.60 But even as their leader, Caylus asserted, Mignard had never really been one of them: ‘at every occasion, Mignard made clear his marked estrangement, and showed his contempt for all [the Académie’s] customs’.61

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Desportes and Caylus’ critical re-interpretations were upheld by Coypel’s réponses, formal replies that, as directeur, he took to delivering after conférences. Coypel welcomed the Lives as ‘long-awaited’ interventions in the institution’s historical record.62 As a statement of the Académie’s official attitudes at the beginning of the 1750s, his réponse to Caylus is particularly revealing. Praising Caylus’ sincerity in admitting Mignard’s ‘faults’, Coypel endorsed the amateur’s diatribe, arguing that this was a vital episode in the community’s history that needed to be understood by every academician.63 It was only in remembering ‘the wrongs of M. Mignard’, Coypel declared, that they could realise just how much ‘[M. Lebrun] had suffered for [the Académie]’.64 Setting Lebrun and Mignard side-by-side, Coypel offered his final concluding remarks to Caylus via their comparison: suppose that there are still Artists [in the Académie] tempted to abuse it as M. Mignard once did, then you will have intimidated them, and you will have encouraged those, who, like M. Lebrun, are engaged in enterprises where the common good is their only objective.65

Coypel’s dialectical image of Lebrun and Mignard could not form a more dramatic contrast from that presented in Rigaud’s double-portrait. From standing in unity as a model of competition, Lebrun and Mignard were now divided. Their rivalry, which had been reciprocal, was now one-sided; their opposition, which had been mutually productive, was now a split between right and wrong. Epitomised as good versus bad, Lebrun alone was the model for emulation, while Mignard became the anti-model informing future academicians what not to be. What had happened in 20 years to bring about such a dramatic shift? Once again these representations seem to reveal more about their authors than their subjects. For Rigaud, Lebrun and Mignard provided a filter through which to understand his own positive competitive relationship with Largillière. For Coypel, Desportes, and Caylus, authors of the institution’s official history, Lebrun and Mignard became a screen for projecting the Académie’s ongoing rivalry with its oldest adversary. The guild had been slowly reclaiming ground for some time. As early as 1705, it had regained the privilege of holding lifedrawing classes, opening a rival school with the threateningly similar name – the Académie de Saint-Luc.66 But this was just the beginning. In 1730, the guild proposed a new set of règlements, 22 articles that openly rivalled the Académie by appropriating its language and customs. The Académie de Saint-Luc would have officier-like roles including ‘recteurs’, ‘professeurs’, and ‘adjoints’; it would employ a ‘professeur de géometrie’ and a ‘professeur d’anatomie’; it would schedule monthly meetings on a Saturday; and have a system of ‘prix’ for its students.67 This direct imitation posed such a threat to the Académie that ratification of the regulations was held up for eight years while concerns were lodged.68 During the 1730s, as the guild competitively sought to become ‘like’ its rival, the Académie instituted a new point of distinction. In 1737, it inaugurated

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the Salons as annual events (biennial from 1751).69 Commencing each year on the feast of Saint-Louis (25 August) and staying up for about a month, these exhibitions became an instant popular spectacle.70 The Salons were quickly recognised as one of the Académie’s most valuable practices, generating new markets for the consumption of art, showcasing the talents of the institution and its members, and boosting the reputations of both. The advantages of the Salons were undeniable. Not surprisingly, the Académie de SaintLuc, once again feeling the Académie’s monopolisation of art’s economies, soon developed designs of its own for a rival exhibition forum, and in 1751 eventually convened its first public exposition.71 Held in Les Grands Augustins on the left bank of the Seine, diagonally across from the Louvre, the Académie de Saint-Luc’s exposition was staged figuratively and physically in opposition to the Académie’s Salons. For the Académie, the threat was significant. But not only because it dissolved one of the last concrete privileges still held over its adversary, or even because of the challenge it might pose to the Académie’s claim of superior artistic talent. Just as worrying was what the exposition revealed almost inadvertently, that while ideologically the institutional battle lines were firmly in place, in practice they were not so distinct. The exposition was organised under the patronage of the marquis de Voyer, vice-protecteur of the guild, who was also one of the Académie’s honoraires-associés libres.72 Fraternisation was also evident among the artists: the miniaturist Nicolas Vénévault exhibited a portrait of Boucher, and Mademoiselle de Saint Martin exhibited portraits of Oudry and his wife.73 Membership of the two corps had never been completely distinct. Many artists, like Oudry and later Vénévault, started their careers in the guild before being admitted to the Académie; some, like Oudry and Tocqué, were the sons of maîtres; while others, like La Tour, had been apprenticed to maîtres.74 But in the negotiation of institutional rivalry, this social network extending back and forth between the corps, not easily demarcated or controlled, was perhaps the greatest threat to the Académie’s supremacy. Without two distinct competitors, how could there ever be a clear winner? Two weeks after the Académie de Saint-Luc opened its first exposition on 20 February 1751, Caylus delivered his vitriolic ‘Vie de Mignard’ at the Académie – a clear response to the threat posed by the guild’s increasingly competitive presence and the murky boundaries of the eighteenth-century art world.75 Desportes and Caylus’ revisionist histories re-established the distance between the two corps and reinforced the old battle lines by personalising institutional conflict in human form: Lebrun an embodiment of the Académie, Mignard the Maîtrise. This new version of institutional history returned Mignard unequivocally to the other side, giving a face to their enemy, and a focus for their opposition. For the Académie, whose collective identity had always been defined against that of its rival other, the irreconcilability that dominated both Desportes and Caylus’ narratives was fundamental to the story, creating an image of estrangement between Lebrun and Mignard that made it clear you could not be in both camps at once.

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In the eighteenth-century Académie, the Salons proved formative in the ongoing rivalry with the guild, but they also had an impact on internal rivalries between academicians. From 1737, the Salons offered a new site for staging professional rivalries and a new audience for judging them, as public exhibitions brought unprecedented exposure to academic affairs and academic relationships. For an institution that had conducted its affairs in camera for nearly a century, the Salons marked a point of departure. The salon carré (T of Figure 3.3) became a threshold between the inside and the outside, opening the Académie up for a month at a time like an aperture between the private space of the institution and the public space of the city. Just the length of the galerie d’Apollon (S) away from the inner sanctum of the community’s administrative, ceremonial, and pedagogic activities (P1–6), access to the salon carré extended an invitation.76 With this physical opening-up of the Académie came a social opening-out. Once the Académie’s authority had been bestowed from the state and maintained through collective practices, now its reputation would increasingly be determined by popular vote and critical acclaim. This shift had a profound effect on artistic practice and, just as importantly, on artists’ relationships.

Rivalry and the Critics: La Tour versus Perronneau According to the livret (a small catalogue produced for each exhibition), the Salon of 1737 was envisaged as a showcase of the Académie’s collective talent (under the patronage of the bountiful king) for the public to enjoy ‘with pleasure’.77 Very quickly, however, the Salon re-oriented itself. By 1743, the livret was describing a competitive arena, a contest of skill that encouraged individuals to attain ‘glory’ by rising above themselves and each other.78 The public’s role meanwhile changed from that of passive audience to arbitrating judge: ‘the vote of the enlightened public gives [each work] its true value, and the accumulation of these votes determines reputation’.79 It was no longer the community as a whole that was assessed, for it was in choosing between academicians that the public expressed opinion. Success was now to be determined through a new form of reward – top place in a popularity contest – judged unofficially by the criteria of a new discourse: Salon criticism.80 But in their search for sensational competitions, critics not only sought out artistic rivalries, at times they actually created them. La Tour was arguably one of the first artists to realise the potential of the Salons for self-promotion, and was certainly among the earliest to be deemed a critical success. La Tour exhibited at the inaugural Salon in 1737 and rarely missed an exhibition thereafter. At this first occasion he drew attention immediately with his candidly humorous Self-Portrait (Figure 6.15).81 Publicly exhibiting a self-portrait was not without precedent, as evident from the table of exhibited self-portraits in Appendix 3. But

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6.15 MauriceQuentin de La Tour, Self-Portrait (laughing), 59 × 49 cm, pastel, 1737, Musée du Louvre DAG, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Michel Urtado)

La Tour’s stands out from those of his colleagues for eschewing formal conventions of artistic self-presentation. Rather than being decorously composed or studiously self-absorbed, a scruffily dressed La Tour presents himself as a low-life trickster. Turning art itself into a joke he laughingly reveals the metaphysical boundary between object and viewer through an illusionistic gesture: reaching in to ‘touch’ the surface of his pictorial space. Like a street performer on a formal stage, La Tour’s Self-Portrait broke open elite boundaries of connoisseurial consumption, offering broader access to aesthetic pleasures for the new Salon audiences. From the outset, La Tour had an intuitive understanding of the salon carré as a space – that threshold between the institution and the street – and he designed his works accordingly, connecting with the crowds through pastel performances that attracted the eye and foregrounded him.

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By the mid-1740s, La Tour had turned himself into a firm Salon favourite. At the Académie he was still only an agréé, but outside his reputation soared thanks to his popularity with the critics.82 La Font de Saint-Yenne declared him the pioneer of pastel painting, claiming he had given the medium ‘a vogue and credibility that would seem impossible to surpass’.83 With his continued dominance of the Salons among portraitists, it is not surprising that this early subject of critical acclaim should also become one of the earliest subjects of critic-induced rivalry. Each year, the critics were on the lookout for anyone who might threaten La Tour’s top position, and they soon started envisaging a rivalrous dynamic with one artist in particular – Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. Perronneau was 11 years La Tour’s junior, but when he first exhibited at the Salon of 1746, immediately following his agrément, both artists shared the grade of agréé.84 At their first public confrontation they made fairly comparable submissions in terms of quantity, but the critics registered no significant threat to their favourite in terms of quality.85 La Tour was still the one to beat and the rest, as La Font de Saint-Yenne remarked, merely ‘a crowd of miserable imitators’.86 Perronneau had not yet distinguished himself in the public eye. But he may have already done so in La Tour’s, for something certainly spurred La Tour to present for his long-delayed réception only days before the closing of the Salon, even though he had still completed only one of his two required portraits.87 Whatever the motivations, the timing of Perronneau’s agrément and La Tour’s réception at either end of the Salon of 1746 mark this exhibition as a turning point in each artist’s career and in their professional relationship. Within two years, the critics had definitely noticed Perronneau and had him flagged as the greatest potential threat to La Tour’s supremacy. Asserting his position at the Salon of 1748, La Tour exhibited his largest submission to date with 15 pastels including portraits of the king and queen, while Perronneau exhibited six modest pastels of lesser-known sitters.88 But the critics’ comparison was favourable. One critic wrote of the glory awaiting Perronneau ‘in La Tour’s genre’ if he continued as he had started, while Baillet de Saint-Julien concluded: [Perronneau] must surely one day take from [La Tour’s] hands the sceptre of pastel, when the other, satisfied with his great multitude of triumphs, decides to rest in the shade of his laurels.89

According to the critics, Perronneau was making his mark. But while the competition was no doubt real and intimately felt, these ideas of La Tour as favourite, of his territory, and of Perronneau’s rivalrous encroaching were being imagined (if not invented) by the critics themselves. With their talk of ‘laurels’ and a make-believe ‘sceptre’ of which only one could be in possession, the critics raised the stakes of the Salons as they looked for a winner to take the prize. In this imagined battle, La Tour and Perronneau became imagined rivals.

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It is with Diderot that we encounter the extent to which such imaginings could go. In his ‘Salon de 1767’, Diderot recounted a story about a dramatic portrait face-off between La Tour and Perronneau, allegedly staged at a Salon many years earlier: As soon as the young Perronneau appeared on the scene, La Tour became a bit nervous; he feared that the public would only register the difference in quality between them through a direct comparison. So what did he do? He proposed that his rival paint his portrait … and while [Perronneau] was thus engaged, the jealous artist executed a self-portrait of his own. The two paintings were completed at the same time and exhibited at the same salon, clearly demonstrating the difference between master and student.90

Diderot offers a compelling tale of artistic rivalry, but how much of it actually happened is another question. While the portraits of which Diderot writes seem to exist, their confrontation in the salon carré was apparently imagined, or at least misremembered by Diderot in light of the vivid image of rivalry that he and others had helped to construct. Perronneau exhibited his portrait of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (Figure 6.16) at the Salon of 1750. But if this is the Salon to which Diderot was referring, then La Tour’s contribution is more problematic for his submissions that year were only vaguely recorded in the livret as ‘several heads in pastel’.91 If one of these were a self-portrait then the most likely candidate is that dated to circa 1750 (Figure 6.17), which, of all La Tour’s self-portraits, bears the closest resemblance to Perronneau’s portrait.92 Both present half-length bodies turned sideways against a blueish background. Each figure is dressed in a wig and dark velvet suit with a hand tucked into the waistcoat, and looks directly out to reveal the same distinctive nose, dimples, and shadow of a beard. Competition is palpable in even the briefest comparison of these portraits, one of which was undoubtedly a response to the other. Whether viewed backto-back or face-to-face, the reversed poses of the two La Tours necessarily stage them in opposition, and when seen in tandem their direct gazes seem to demand appraisal. In the viewer’s search for features that might distinguish them, subtle differences emerge. La Tour’s La Tour starts to look younger and more energetic, springing through the work with his back arched, while his counterpart in Perronneau’s portrait weighs heavily downwards, his sedentary body expanding across the picture plane. In the facial expressions too, Perronneau’s La Tour appears almost haughty with his straight lips and heavy eyelids, while the self-imaged La Tour is characteristically jovial, rosycheeked with smiling lips that curve fractionally upwards. Whichever was painted first, such intentional formal similarities (with tiny competitive differences) invite the works to be considered together, making Diderot’s anecdote all the more compelling. But reviews from the Salon of 1750 reveal no trace of any such confrontation. No mention was made of La Tour exhibiting a self-portrait and no one observed a rivalrous encounter between the two artists. Baillet de Saint-Julien wrote admiringly of La Tour’s works

6.16 Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, 56 × 48 cm, pastel, 1750, Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Gérard Blot)

6.17 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Self-Portrait, 64.5 × 53.5 cm, pastel, c.1750, Musée de Picardie, Amiens. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Agence Bulloz)

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in general, but did not specify any individually, and the Mercure referred only to his ‘beautiful pastels’.93 Perronneau, meanwhile, went unnoticed by the Mercure critic, and Baillet de Saint-Julien noted only that Perronneau had taken La Tour ‘as his model’, ambiguously implying the senior academician’s role as both sitter and artistic influence.94 If such a dramatic display of rivalry did take place at the Salon of 1750, the lack of commentary is especially curious given the critics’ usual alertness to such contests. If the portraits were seen together at the time, it was probably not in the public setting of the salon carré. Yet this is the detail upon which Diderot is adamant, the pivotal point of his critique being La Tour’s ‘public’ humiliation of the young Perronneau: La Tour my friend, wasn’t it enough for Perronneau to concede that you are the better artist? You couldn’t be content until the public declared it as well? Then you should have waited a bit and your vanity would have been assuaged without having to humiliate your colleague. In the end, everyone gets the place he deserves.95

For Diderot, the location was crucial. The real sting came not in La Tour’s act of painting a portrait for comparison, but in his act of staging this comparison in the Salon. The Self-Portrait as an object was inconsequential compared with the Self-Portrait as a site-specific event, for it was only in the publicly performed encounter between the works that it acquired its rivalrous potency. In the private context of the studio, where only Perronneau acknowledged ‘you are the better artist’, the Self-Portrait was merely competition. In the Salon, where the public would declare La Tour’s superiority, competition became rivalry. Diderot’s misremembering suggests something of the role that the Salons were coming to play in forming academicians’ rivalries. At mid-century, however, those Salon rivalries often had as much, if not more, to do with the imaginings of outsiders than with the actual experiences of artists: La Tour did not stage a rivalry with Perronneau at the Salon of 1750, it was Diderot who staged it in 1767. Yet even if La Tour did not stage a public face-off with Perronneau, both artists were clearly using portraiture as a forum for negotiating their competitive relationship. Diderot may have changed the location for dramatic effect, but the portraits themselves are clear evidence of a rivalry, wherever it was actually played out. Throughout the Salons from the 1740s to the 1770s, self-portraits were a relative rarity, with seldom more than one each year, and often none at all (Appendix 3). Statistics suggest an apparent lack of interest in exhibiting self-portraits, while the works themselves reveal disparate motivations from selfpromotion to self-examination (most notably in Chardin’s introspective series of pastels during the 1770s).96 Self-portraits, like any works in the Salons, were entered into a general competition, but they were not always made to enact personal rivalries. In the Salons of the 1780s, however, something changed, and four artists started to exhibit self-portraits in a markedly more confrontational way.

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Rivalling the Other: The Salons of the 1780s Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis, Alexandre Roslin, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and Adélaïde LabilleGuiard were the only artists to exhibit selfportraits at the Salons of the 1780s. None exhibited more than one in any Salon, so they do not present a statistical anomaly, but on closer inspection of the circumstances, their intentions were different. Responding to each other, these self-portraits negotiated the competitive relations of their makers just as Mignard’s had in the 1690s, as Rigaud’s and Largillière’s had in the 1710s, and as La Tour’s had in the 1750s. What is key here, however, is that the location chosen for this negotiation was not the institutional space of the Académie, the private space of a patron’s home, or the professional space of the artist’s studio, but the public space of the salon carré. In the Salons of the 1780s, it was no longer just the critics staging rivalries, now artists were actively doing it themselves. At the Salon of 1781, Duplessis exhibited a small but exquisite Self-Portrait (Figure 6.18); at the following Salon in 1783, Roslin exhibited a Self-Portrait rejoinder (Figure 6.19). In near-identical attire but on a canvas with almost twice the surface-area, Roslin’s riposte reads like a pointed declaration that ‘anything Duplessis can do, I can do better’. Roslin took Duplessis’ wig, lace jabot and satin suit complete with tassels, but added to the ensemble his medal of the Swedish Royal Order of Vasa, along with the prominent diamond appendage given to him by the Hapsburg Empress MariaTheresa.97 Social pre-eminence asserted, Roslin used his more ambitious portrait to declare artistic superiority as well. Making the most of the larger surface area, Roslin demonstrated his talent for fabrics, creating a series of folds to describe vividly the texture of satin in the fall of light, while maximising the compositional possibilities of the format to replace Duplessis’ fragment of green curtain with a more elaborate setting. From the unfinished portrait of his wife in the background, to his foreshortened elbow and brushes projecting outwards, Roslin enlivened the picture plane and demonstrated a command of spatial recession for which there had been little scope in Duplessis’ modest bust. All in all, Roslin’s Self-Portrait was a masterful retort. But the question remains – why here – why stage this rivalrous declaration of superiority in the Salon? To get at ‘why here’, we first need to understand ‘why now’, and in fact, ‘why at all’, for Roslin and Duplessis were not really obvious candidates for rivalry. In theory, Roslin’s far senior position at the Académie should have

6.18 JosephSiffrèd Duplessis, Self-Portrait, 60 × 50 cm, oil on canvas, 1780, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Carpentras. (Photo: © Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Carpentras)

6.19 Alexandre Roslin, Self-Portrait, 80 × 67 cm, oil on canvas, 1783, Musée Jacquemart-André – Institut de France, Paris. (Photo: © Culturespaces-Musée Jacquemart-André)

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removed him from direct competition with Duplessis, who was admitted over 20 years later.98 In practice, however, Roslin’s nominal superiority was at that moment offering little protection. Roslin had long faced opposition within the institution, from the outset indeed, when, as a foreigner and a Protestant, his admission had provoked resistance from some colleagues (as discussed in Chapter 2). As Magnus Olausson has argued, Roslin’s troubles continued even after reception, for he remained an outsider on the inside, his skill as a painter constantly inciting the professional jealousy of his peers.99 Roslin had the support of some senior officiers like Boucher, Vien, and Pierre, but whether due to hostile factions or something else, his success certainly waned in the 1770s after Angiviller was appointed directeur général des bâtiments (1774– 1789). When, after Louis XV’s death in 1774, Roslin requested the prestigious commission for the new king’s portrait, Angiviller refused him. To add insult to injury, the royal commission was instead awarded to the newcomer Duplessis (received only months earlier), and Roslin was told he could paint Louis XVI using Duplessis’ portrait as a model.100 Just as Roslin was slipping, Duplessis was on the institutional ascent.101 In 1779, Duplessis was commissioned to paint Angiviller’s official portrait (Château de Versailles) for the Académie’s apartments, and in 1780, he was elected conseiller, equalling the rank Roslin had held for 13 years.102 Thus when Duplessis exhibited his Self-Portrait (Figure 6.18) at the Salon of 1781, the zenith of achievement it marked for him simultaneously marked Roslin’s nadir.103 Olausson even claims that Roslin was that year the victim of a cabal: a deliberate plot to ensure his portraits went un-itemised in the livret.104 While it was not that unusual for a portraitist’s full submission to be recorded as a single entry (even if most of Duplessis’ portraits were listed individually), it does seem that Roslin was reaching a breaking point of some kind. Pierre, the directeur, wrote to Angiviller after the Salon on Roslin’s behalf in a letter suggesting some desperation: ‘Roslin is very hopeful of your kindness, the crisis in which he finds himself consumes him with embarrassment.’105 In the face of hostile machinations, Roslin was evidently struggling to maintain his position in Angiviller’s Académie, and Duplessis had become a point of focus in his difficulties. Roslin’s Self-Portrait (Figure 6.19) at the Salon of 1783 thus came in the spirit of counterattack. As Roslin could no longer rely on his institutional status to exercise superiority over Duplessis, he instead turned to the public as an alternative arbiter of reputation. In just the manner that Diderot had earlier imagined, this was a sting aimed at proving his supremacy publicly through comparison. Yet in this instance, the comparison Roslin sought was not all that direct. This was not a wholesale appropriation of an effigy like Mignard’s of Lebrun; nor was it a competitive analogising of effigies through formal references like those of Rigaud and Largillière. Instead, Roslin’s self-portrait mobilised that rivalrous dynamic of similarity in order merely to recall Duplessis’ selfportrait, and then to eclipse it by showing himself as bigger and better. A

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direct comparison would have implied competition between peers, which this was not; but through an indirect comparison, Roslin was able to reassert his superior status over his rival. Angiviller may have refused Roslin the sceptre, but the public might be reminded that it was rightfully his. Roslin’s face-off in the salon carré might have been an isolated incident, except that the Salon of 1783 was also anticipated as the setting for other emerging rivalries. Much more celebrated in art-historical literature was the rivalry between the history painters, François-André Vincent and JacquesLouis David.106 With only three years between them, both had been students in Vien’s studio, but Vincent’s agrément and Salon début had taken place in 1777, four years before David’s in 1781. Vincent became an académicien in 1782 and though the livret of 1783 lists David still as an agréé, his réception in fact took place two days before the opening of the Salon, making this their first public showing as ‘equals’ in academic terms.107 In the months preceding the Salon, Vincent felt the pressure of this impending competition, expressed in a letter to his friend Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours: The time of the Salon draws near; here it is, the moment of combat. It will be tough for me. Joining my old adversaries (still, my friends) are the newcomers David and Peyron. Their reputations promise powers to overcome. But, far from a discouragement, this must be a great stimulus.108

In the event, Jean-François-Pierre Peyron was not agréé in time to exhibit in 1783, but David and Vincent went head-to-head on the walls of the salon carré, each including amid their similar submissions a scene from Homer’s Illiad: David, Andromache Mourning Hector (Paris, Musée du Louvre); and Vincent, Achilles Rescued by Vulcan (now lost).109 Despite the legend of rivalry constructed by their biographers, it is clear, as Elizabeth Mansfield argues, that Vincent did not perceive David as the only threat among his peers.110 What is also evident from the combative language of his letter is how Vincent envisaged the role of the Salon. This threshold between the Académie and the street, between institution and public, had become a battleground for artistic supremacy. This was the site in which an artist could fundamentally prove his or her worth, especially for those who, like Vincent, found themselves liminally placed within the institutional itself. Vincent was a Protestant and though his position in Angiviller’s Académie was not as tenuous as that of Roslin, he had nevertheless experienced significant prejudice for his religion, particularly as a pensionnaire at the Academy in Rome.111 The Salon had become a competitive arena for all artists in the Académie, but for those outsiderswithin it offered a particularly vital space of common ground – even terrain for staging a fair contest. This experience was felt nowhere more strongly than among the Académie’s female members. In 1783, fresh from their réceptions a few months earlier, Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard both exhibited self-portraits as part of their Salon débuts: Vigée-Lebrun showing the original version of her Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (Figure 6.20) and Labille-Guiard submitting a self-

6.20 Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, 97.8 × 70.5 cm, oil on canvas, 1782, National Gallery, London. (Photo: © The National Gallery, London)

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portrait (now lost), described as a small oval pastel showing her dressed in ‘simple and picturesque’ costume holding a paintbrush.112 With a personal history of exhibiting in the same spaces, both at the Académie de SaintLuc’s final exposition in 1774 and then in the Salon de La Correspondance of 1782, Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard’s self-portraits at the Salon of 1783, and those exhibited later at the Salons of 1785 and 1787, were part of an ongoing competitive relationship, now being reformulated following their recent admissions to the Académie and the changing parameters of their professional spheres.113 But if, like Roslin, Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard were using self-portraiture in the Salons to negotiate a personal rivalry, then the form of their self-portraits suggests that the stakes of this contest were quite different. In contrast to all the other rivalrous pairings examined here, VigéeLebrun and Labille-Guiard’s self-portraits were not characterised by that now familiar rhetoric of similarity. In 1783, Labille-Guiard’s diminutive oval pastel made no effort to compete through appropriation or formal reference with her rival’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (Figure 6.20). VigéeLebrun’s self-portrait was a different size, rectangular rather than round, set outdoors not indoors, and composed in oil not pastel. Yet still the works were compared and the accumulated votes were clear: Vigée-Lebrun’s was declared ‘superior to all her other works’ and Labille-Guiard’s ‘inferior to everything else she exhibited’.114 Perhaps spurred by such responses, at the next Salon in 1785 LabilleGuiard exhibited a self-portrait that would take centre stage. Abandoning the artistic modesty of her earlier pastel, Self-Portrait with Two Students (Plate 16) was an elaborate full-length oil, showing the sitter in her studio dressed luxuriously.115 This time, Labille-Guiard’s self-portrayal was perfectly pitched: it was her ‘most beautiful portrait’ and ‘one of the most accomplished works in the Salon’.116 Despite the originality of LabilleGuiard’s Self-Portrait, however, the critics yet again saw it as a point of comparison, noting how ‘Labille-Guiard rivals Vigée Lebrun with … this self-portrait’.117 Nevertheless when Vigée-Lebrun exhibited a new selfportrait at the following Salon in 1787, she too made no attempt to capitalise on her rival’s success, and indeed, no effort to appropriate or adapt LabilleGuiard’s approach at all. Self-Portrait with her daughter, Julie (Figure 6.21) was a marked contrast in both form and content: a three-quarter-length portrait refusing the monumentality of Labille-Guiard’s full-length; and a representation of ‘mother’ rather than ‘teacher’.118 Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard had no desire to establish a direct comparison. Characterised by difference rather than similarity, their Salon self-portraits were instead attempts to differentiate, efforts to prevent or at least problematise the direct comparisons that were already being made. For it would have been impossible to be any closer as academic peers than Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard. Linked first by their gender, as two of only four female members, second by their genre therein as portraitists (the

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others, Anne Vallayer-Coster and Marie-Thérèse Reboul, both painted stilllife), and third by their ancienneté (both were agréé and reçu on 31 May 1783), these two female portraitists were the institutional equivalent of twins.119 The stakes of Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard’s rivalry were always going to be different. As women in the Académie, they were never to compete in the same competition as their male colleagues, because theirs was a separate contest.120 Melissa Hyde has noted how the critics isolated the women of the Académie, referring to them, for instance, as the Three Graces of the Salon (omitting Reboul who did not exhibit after 1767).121 Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard had no need to stimulate comparison with their selfportraits, for their comparison was inevitable. What they sought was a means of separation: works that would visualise individuality through difference. Whatever other commercial or self-promoting purposes these self-portraits served, they should also be understood as part of this exclusive institutional contest with its own alternative prize: not best academician, but best académicienne.122 Exactly what an académicienne was, however, remained undefined, both culturally and visually. Before Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard’s admission, there had been a grand total of 12 female members, and rarely a concentration of more than one or two at a time (Table 2.3). With so few académiciennes over such a long period, a general definition had yet to emerge, and even by the 1780s, Chéron’s Self-Portrait (Plate 1) was still the only image of a female member in the official collection. VigéeLebrun and Labille-Guiard’s self-portraits of the 1780s became part of an effort to construct this definition, but in the competition to establish the iconography of the académicienne, each artist launched a very different model. Labille-Guiard seems to have drawn inspiration from the Académie’s existing portrait conventions for women. The oval format of her first academic self-portrait made formal reference to the only precedent, Chéron’s Self-Portrait (Plate 1), which was then hanging in the grande salle alongside six academicians’ effigies including Lebrun (Figure 1.18), Mignard (Figure 3.11), Desjardins (Figure 2.3), and Rigaud.123 At the Salon of 1783, Labille-Guiard transposed this institutional display into the salon carré, replacing Chéron with her own oval Self-Portrait and updating her male colleagues by exhibiting seven portraits of contemporary academicians including Joseph-Marie Vien, Jean-Jacques Bachelier, Guillaume Voiriot, and Augustin Pajou (Figure 1.13).124 Laura Auricchio has compellingly demonstrated how Labille-Guiard’s portrait submissions to the Salon of 1783 asserted her professional connections within a network of important artists.125 But the presentation of this display in the salon carré only 40 metres away from the grande salle should also be understood as a conscious modern re-staging of the Académie’s gendered portrait culture: the académicienne in her curvilinear frame, a literal feminisation of the male academicians surrounding her.

6.21 Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait with her daughter, Julie, 105 × 84 cm, oil on canvas, 1786, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Franck Raux)

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With the critical response to her oval self-portrait so unfavourable, Labille-Guiard sought out much grander institutional precedents for the Salon of 1785. At over two metres, Self-Portrait with Two Students (Plate 16) made a remarkable statement of artistic identity, taking its scale from that great institutional icon, Largillière’s portrait of Lebrun (Figure 1.18).126 With its compositional device of the reversed canvas in the foreground, Labille-Guiard’s painting was also, as Auricchio shows, closely modelled on Antoine Coypel’s Self-Portrait with his son (Figure 4.3), itself a reference to La Mare-Richart’s portrait of Noël Coypel (Figure 1.9).127 Appropriating the iconography of such an esteemed academic lineage, Labille-Guiard inserted herself directly into institutional traditions, while her luxurious satin dress and the setting in her studio with female students drew overt attention to her position as a woman inhabiting these roles of artist and academician. Simultaneously borrowing and gendering the Académie’s own visual criteria, Labille-Guiard asserted her right to belong by making an académicienne the same as an académicien on all points but gender. Vigée-Lebrun also foregrounded the issue of the académicienne’s gender, but made it fundamental rather than incidental. While Labille-Guiard sought institutional precedents that might formulate the académicienne as an-artistwho-happened-to-be-a-woman, Vigée-Lebrun looked outside academic traditions to paint the académicienne as a-woman-who-happened-to-be-anartist.128 In 1783, her Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (Figure 6.20) had more in common with conventions of women’s portraiture than artists’ portraiture (most notably, as Mary Sheriff has discussed, with Rubens’ Susanna Lunden [London, National Gallery]).129 Apart from the palette and brushes, Vigée-Lebrun makes little attempt to visualise her role as a member of the Académie. Though the rhetorical gesture of her right hand, as Sheriff notes, is in keeping with conventions of artists’ portraits, the exterior setting of this scene makes a radical departure, particularly from the interior settings of the Académie’s morceau-de-réception portraits.130 Standing before a sunlit sky, Vigée-Lebrun located herself ‘outside’ the institution, both literally and figuratively. In 1787, Vigée-Lebrun’s Self-Portrait with her daughter (Figure 6.21) again turned away from academic conventions of artists’ portraiture in favour of an image of womanhood. Intimately embracing her daughter, Vigée-Lebrun presented an ideal of Enlightenment maternalism, occupying a domestic setting that offered no iconographic trace of her artistic identity.131 At the following Salon in 1789, however, she exhibited the pendant she created for this self-portrait – a portrait of the academician Hubert Robert (Figure 6.22). As Paula Rea Radisich argues, this initiated a new dialectical sequence, transforming her self-portrait from (on its own) a definition of womanhood, into (in tandem with Robert) a definition of the artist.132 As pendants the works set up competing images of artistic identity, not only drawing VigéeLebrun into a new friendly comparison with Robert and away from that obvious rivalry with Labille-Guiard, but also making gender inseparable

6.22 Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Hubert Robert, 105 × 84 cm, oil on canvas, 1788, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Jean-Gilles Berizzi)

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from her professional sense of self. In contrast to the model offered by Labille-Guiard, Vigée-Lebrun’s claim was clear: an académicienne may be an académicien, but she is foremost a woman. Given their unique position in the Académie, Vigée-Lebrun and LabilleGuiard’s rivalry was different from that of Roslin and Duplessis, or Vincent and David. Yet all chose the Salons as the site to stage their rivalries. Like Roslin’s disenfranchisement in Angiviller’s Académie, and Vincent’s problematic Protestantism, Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard’s sense of exclusion motivated their use of this public forum. If the Académie found them indistinguishable, then before the public they could prove themselves different. Moreover, if what was at stake in this rivalry was the definitive embodiment of the académicienne, then where else could their alternative definitions be rehearsed except in the Salons? Certainly not within the Académie, where the institution’s rules and regulations had always restricted women’s participation, from a règlement in 1706 that the corps ‘would receive no woman in the quality of academician’, to a decision taken in 1770 that limited female members to four.133 Académicienne was an institutional category but, however ironically, it was the culture of the Académie that denied visual definition of an entity deemed ‘somewhat foreign to its constitution’.134 Members of the Académie were defined visually in the morceau-de-réception portraits, but these represented artists of an officier status denied to women, so there was never going to be an official image of a female member.135 If the académicienne were to find visual form, it could only be in that liminal space of the salon carré, inside but outside, connected to but increasingly separate from, the institutional core of the Académie. It may have been a coincidence that a disenfranchised foreigner, a Protestant, and two women started actively using the Salons as a stage for negotiating professional rivalries in the 1780s. Or perhaps the significant changes to the culture of the institution made this not only possible but necessary. Under Angiviller’s reign, the Académie had become a very different place. Taking an active, even dictatorial role in the running of the institution, Angiviller initiated what Locquin described as a period of increasing subordination to state control.136 From the mid-1770s, the culture of the Académie stopped evolving organically through community practices and was instead managed from above by external officials. With the new Statuts of 1777 (the first entirely new set since 1663), Angiviller exercised his muscle. Among other changes, now every election of an officier and every admission of a new member had to be approved by the protecteur before ratification.137 State authority thus subsumed the collective voice, even, and perhaps most crucially, on the very question of who could belong. Internal changes were compacted by external changes. In 1776, Angiviller dissolved the Académie de Saint-Luc.138 On one hand, the elimination of its age old rival was a victory for the Académie, but on the other, this destruction of its counterpart saw the loss of the very thing against which the Académie had always defined itself. Rivalry, from the beginning, had been concentrated in that inter-institutional conflict, embodied in the relationship between

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Lebrun and Mignard, and remembered for generations through them. When the Académie reigned supreme during the early decades of the eighteenth century, Lebrun and Mignard’s rivalry became, for Rigaud, a positive model of productive competition, like that experienced in his own relationship with Largillière. By mid-century, the guild’s growing power called for a revisionist narrative. Mignard’s presence in the Académie became, for Coypel, Desportes, and Caylus, an infiltration prompting a dangerous blurring of boundaries, and his rivalry with Lebrun was recast as the hostile machinations of a bitter enemy. In the 1780s, the demise of the guild left no ‘outside’ to define the Académie’s ‘inside’, and Angiviller’s reforms brought a diminishing communal investment in its composition, customs, and ideals. It is no coincidence that the Salons – that forum on the threshold – should at this moment take on the role of primary competitive arena for artistic rivalries, or that it was those outsiderswithin – the foreign Roslin, the Protestant Vincent, and two académiciennes – who were among the main protagonists. The advent of the Salons had seen an opening up of the Académie to the outside gaze that would change the power dynamics of the Paris art world for ever, as the institution’s casting vote on greatness was assumed by the public, and the academicians’ quest for collective achievement gave way to desire for individual glory.

Notes 1 On rivalry and competition in relation to women artists, see Laura Auricchio, ‘The Laws of Bienséance and the Gendering of Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Art Education’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36/2 (2003), pp. 231–240. For a discussion of rivalry in the Académie’s final decades see: Elizabeth Mansfield, The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting (Minneapolis, 2012), pp. 1–21. 2 Article IX, Statuts et Règlements (1648); Article VI and V, Statuts et Règlements (1663); Article XXXI, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 3 Article VI, Statuts et Règlements (1663). 4 On the culture of competition in the Académie see Benhamou, ‘Public and Private’, pp. 80–88. 5 Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (The Hague and Rotterdam, 1690), vol. 1, n.p. On ‘emulation’ in early modern art education see Mirzoeff, ‘Revolution’, pp. 153–174 and Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven and London, 1996). 6 Guérin, Description, p. 258. 7 27 January 1663 (PV, vol. 1, p. 208). 8 Dézallier d’Argenville, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’, Abrégé, vol. 4, pp. 78–79. 9 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 2, pp. 102–103; Monville, La vie de Pierre Mignard, p. 85; Comte de Caylus, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’ (1751), in Lépicié, Vie des premiers-peintres du roi, vol. 1, p. 130.

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10 Mignard’s rejection letter is dated 12 February 1663 (Mémoires pour servir, vol. 2, p. 103). He was admitted to the guild on 29 March 1663 (Guiffrey, Histoire, p. 393). 11 4 March 1690 (PV, vol. 3, p. 30). Blunt, Art, p. 236. 12 Caylus, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’, p. 161. 13 Mémoires pour servir, vol. 2, p. 102. 14 On Mignard’s commissioning of Rigaud see ‘Abrégé de la vie de Hyacinthe Rigaud’ (1716), in Mémoires inédits, vol. 2, p. 116. See also Christophe Hardouin, La Collection de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, Mémoire de D.E.A. (INHA, Université de Paris, 1994), pp. 177–179. 15 Caylus, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’, p. 160. 16 ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’ (c.1689), in Mémoires inédits, vol. 1, pp. 65–66. 17 ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’ (c.1689), in Mémoires inédits, vol. 1, p. 65. 18 ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’ (c.1689), in Mémoires inédits, vol. 1, p. 64. 19 For interpretations of Mignard’s self-portrait see Nikolenko, Pierre Mignard, pp. 93–94; Jean-Claude Boyer, Le peintre, le roi, le hero: l’Andromède de Pierre Mignard (Paris, 1989), p. 59; and Hardouin, Collection, pp. 154–156. 20 Duro, Academy, p. 218. 21 Duro, Academy, p. 218. 22 Duro, Academy, p. 218. 23 On Mignard’s sculpture designs for Versailles see: Françoise de La Moureyre, ‘Réflexions sur le style des statues aux façades du château de Versailles’, Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles (2007). 24 Mignard’s Self-Portrait was presented on 28 September 1696 (PV, vol. 3, pp. 196–197). 25 Guérin, Description, pp. 154–155. 26 Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, p. 131. 27 Lépicié, Vie des premiers-peintres du roi, vol. 1. 28 Rigaud was agréé 5 August 1684 and reçu 2 January 1700 (PV, vol. 2, p. 281; vol. 3, p. 285). 29 Coypel was reçu 31 August 1715; Desportes was reçu 25 September 1723; Caylus was elected amateur honoraire on 1 December 1731 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 207, 363; vol. 5, p. 96). 30 Perhaps coincidentally the same year that Monville published La vie de Pierre Mignard (1730), another ‘non-institutional’ representation supposedly dictated by Mignard’s daughter. 31 François de Castanier (1676–1759) was a directeur in the Compagnie des Indes (1723–1759). 32 Another intriguing work is Largillière’s Self-Portrait with Gérard Edelinck and Pierre Bernard, 1686 (Norfolk, The Chrysler Museum) showing portraitist, engraver, and patron, but the third figure makes this a group portrait rather than a double.

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33 Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, p. 131. 34 Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early EighteenthCentury Paris (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 27. 35 For recent writings on the querelle see: Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Colour: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 138–168; Jennifer Montagu, ‘The Quarrel of Drawing and Colour in the French Academy’, in Ars Naturam Adiuvans. Festschrift für Matthias Winner (Mainz, 1996), pp. 549–556; Rubens contre Poussin: La querelle du coloris dans la peinture française à la fin du XVIIe siècle, exh. cat. (Antwerp, 2004). 36 Mignard’s association with coloris was due largely to Roger de Piles, in particular his translation of De Arte Graphica by Charles-Antoine Dufresnoy, Mignard’s closest friend (L’Art de peinture, 2nd edn [Paris, 1668]). On de Piles’ contribution to the debate see Teyssèdre, Roger de Piles; and Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art (New Haven and London, 1985). 37 Roger de Piles, Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris, 1699). 38 ‘Prix de peinture donnés par le roi’, Mercure de France, July 1727, 1563. 39 On the concours of 1727 see: Pierre Rosenberg, ‘Le concours de peinture de 1727’, Revue de l’Art, 37 (1977), pp. 29–42; Candace Clements, ‘The Duc d’Antin, the Royal Administration of Pictures, and the Painting Competition of 1727’, Art Bulletin, 78/4 (1996), pp. 647–662; and Abecedario, vol. 2, p. 29. 40 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 5, p. 322. 41 Largillière was agréé 6 March 1683 and Rigaud 5 August 1684 (Procès-Verbaux, vol. 2, pp. 242, 281). On their relationship see Perreau, Hyacinthe Rigaud, pp. 57–62). 42 On 28 November 1733, it was decided that the four recteurs (Rigaud, Largillière, Guillaume I Coustou and Claude-Guy Hallé) should each take the role of directeur during his quarter. This oligarchy lasted until 5 February 1735 when an annual directeur-ship was reinstated (PV, vol. 5, pp. 127, 154–155). Largillière served as directeur on his own (1738–1742), but Rigaud never did. 43 Henri van Hulst, ‘La vie de M. Rigaud’ (n.d.), in Mémoires inédits, vol. 2, p. 132. 44 Henri van Hulst, ‘La vie de M. Rigaud’ (n.d.), in Mémoires inédits, vol. 2, pp. 130, 132. 45 Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé, vol. 4, p. 300. 46 On the commission see Perreau, Hyacinthe Rigaud, pp. 140–142. 47 Germain Brice, Nouvelle description de la ville de Paris, vol. 2 (Paris, 1725), p. 76. 48 Julienne’s bequest was recorded on 22 March 1766 and the portraits delivered on 6 August 1768 (PV, vol. 7, pp. 324, 327–328, 395). Their location in the salle des portraits is noted in Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, p. 141. 49 Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Les Drevet (Pierre, Pierre-Imbert et Claude) (Paris, 1876), pp. 76–77. 50 On the lost portrait see Nicolas de Largillierre, 1656–1746, exh. cat. (Paris, 2003), p. 64; and Perreau, Hyacinthe Rigaud, p. 141. 51 Lépicié, Vie des premiers-peintres du roi, vol. 1.

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52 Desportes’ text was presented in assemblées on 2 August, 6 September and 4 October 1749 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 173, 175, 177). This was the last official biography of Lebrun written in the eighteenth century. 53 Desportes, ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’, p. 14. 54 Desportes, ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’, pp. 73–74. 55 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Reponse de M. Coypel à M. Desportes, sur la vie de M. le Brun’ (1749), in Lépicié, Vie des premiers-peintres du roi, vol. 1, p. 101. 56 Desportes, ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’, p. 74. 57 Desportes, ‘Vie de Charles Lebrun’, pp. 77–78. 58 Caylus, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’, pp. 131, 161. 59 Caylus, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’, pp. 131–133. 60 Caylus, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’, p. 131. 61 Caylus, ‘Vie de Pierre Mignard’, p. 163. 62 Coypel, ‘Reponse de M. Coypel à M. Desportes’, p. 100. 63 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Reponse de M. Coypel à M. le comte de Caylus, sur la vie de M. Mignard’ (1751), in Lépicié, Vie des premiers-peintres du roi, vol. 1, p. 176. 64 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Reponse de M. Coypel’, pp. 176–178. 65 Charles-Antoine Coypel, ‘Reponse de M. Coypel’, p. 178. 66 On the origins of the Académie de Saint-Luc see Guiffrey, Histoire, pp. 3, 14–15. 67 Guiffrey, Histoire, pp. 26–27. 68 The règlements were ratified on 30 January 1738. Guiffrey, Histoire, pp. 20–21, 27–29. 69 The Salon was held annually up to 1751 with the exception of 1744 and 1749. Previous one-off exhibitions were held in 1673, 1699, 1704, and 1725. 70 For useful discussions on the history of the salons see: Crow, Painters; Richard Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration (Oxford, 1993), pp. 40–96; and Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Histoire du Salon de peinture (Paris, 2004), pp. 35–40. 71 On public art exhibitions in eighteenth-century Paris see Wrigley, Origins, pp. 11–39. 72 Livrets des expositions de l’Académie de Saint-Luc à Paris (Paris, 1872), p. 1. 73 Livrets des expositions, pp. 5, 14–15. 74 Vénévault was reçu by the Académie the following year (26 August 1752, PV, vol. 6, pp. 330–331). On La Tour in Spoëde’s studio see Abecedario, vol. 3, p. 69. 75 6 March 1751 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 260–261). 76 Blondel, Architecture Françoise, vol. 4, pp. 35–39. 77 Collection des livrets [1737], p. 11. 78 Collection des livrets [1743], p. 11.

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79 Collection des livrets [1743], p. 11. Important or recent interventions in the vast literature on the eighteenth-century ‘public’ include: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989); Keith Michael Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 181–211; Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29/1 (1996), pp. 97–109; and Diane E. Boyd and Marta Kvande (eds), Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transforming Public and Private (Cranbury, 2008). On the public sphere and art criticism see: Crow, Painters; Bernadette Fort, ‘Théorie du public et critique d’art: de Félibien à Lefébure’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, 265 (1989), pp. 1485–1488; and Wrigley, Origins, pp. 97–119. 80 On salons and art criticism see: Wrigley, Origins; Bernadette Fort, ‘The Visual Arts in a Critical Mirror’, in Jeremy Popkin and Bernadette Fort (eds), The Mémoires secrets and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1998), pp. 143–174; René Démoris and Florence Ferran, La peinture en procès: l’invention de la critique d’art au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 2001); and Melissa Hyde, Making up the Rococo: François Boucher and his Critics (Los Angeles, 2006). 81 Collection des livrets [1737], p. 33. On the self-portrait see: Salmon, Le voleur d’âmes, pp. 47–48; and Christine Debrie and Xavier Salmon, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour: Prince des pastellistes (Paris, 2000), p. 59. 82 La Tour was agréé on 25 May 1737 (PV, vol. 5, p. 205). 83 La Font de Saint-Yenne, ‘Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’État présent de la peinture en France avec un Examen des principaux Ouvrages exposés au Louvre, 1746’, in Étienne Jollet (ed.), La Font de Saint-Yenne. Œuvre critique (Paris, 2001), p. 82. 84 Perronneau was agréé on 27 August 1746 (PV, vol. 6, p. 34). 85 Collection des livrets [1746], pp. 27, 31. 86 La Font de Saint-Yenne, ‘Réflexions’, p. 82. 87 La Tour submitted for his réception (24 September 1746) a portrait of Jean Restout. He submitted his second morceau-de-réception portrait – Dumont le Romain – on 31 October 1750 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 35–36, 234). 88 Collection des livrets [1748], pp. 24, 27–28. 89 Observations sur les arts et sur quelques morceaux de peinture et de sculpture exposés au Louvre en 1748 (CD III:34, p. 277). Baillet de Saint-Julien, Réflexions, p. 16. 90 Diderot, ‘Salon de 1767’, Seznec and Adhémar, Salons, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1963), p. 169. 91 Collection des livrets [1750], p. 31. 92 Collection des livrets [1750], p. 25. On its dating see Debrie and Salmon, MauriceQuentin de La Tour, pp. 50–59. Diderot recalls the self-portrait of La Tour in his chapeau clabaud (now lost), but this was executed in 1742 several years before Perronneau executed any portrait of La Tour. 93 Baillet de Saint-Julien, ‘Lettres sur la peinture à un amateur’ (1750) (CD, IV:46, p. 157). ‘Beaux-Arts’, Mercure de France, October 1750, p. 135.

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94 Baillet de Saint-Julien, ‘Lettres’, p. 157. 95 Diderot, ‘Salon de 1767’, p. 169. 96 On Chardin’s experimental self-studies see Claudia Denk, ‘“Chardin n’est pas un peintre d’histoire, mais c’est un grand homme”: les autoportraits tardifs de Jean-Siméon Chardin’, in Thomas Gaehtgens (ed.), L’art et les norms sociales au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 2001), pp. 279–297. 97 Alexandre Roslin 1718–1793, p. 50. 98 Roslin was agréé 28 July 1753, and reçu 24 November 1753 (PV, vol. 6, pp. 355, 369). Duplessis was agréé 29 July 1769, and reçu 6 August 1774 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 16, 156–157). 99 Alexandre Roslin 1718–1793, pp. 28–30. 100 Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis, Louis XVI, 1777 (Versailles, Musée national du Château, MV7083). For details of the incident see Alexandre Roslin 1718–1793, p. 47. 101 On Duplessis’ career see: Jules Belleudy, J.-S. Duplessis, Peintre du Roi, 1725–1802 (Chartres, 1913). 102 On the commissioning of the portrait of Angiviller see Alexander Roslin, exh. cat. (Stockholm, 2007), p. 150. Roslin was elected conseiller on 31 October 1767 (PV, vol. 7, p. 370); Duplessis was elected conseiller on 8 January 1780 (PV, vol. 9, p. 1). 103 On Duplessis’ career see: Rachel Dudouit, ‘Duplessis, peintre du roi et portraitiste de Louis XVI’, L’Estampille – L’Objet d’art (June 2006), pp. 64–73. 104 Alexandre Roslin 1718–1793, pp. 49–50. 105 Letter from Pierre to d’Angiviller (25 December 1781), Marc Furcy-Raynaud (ed.), Correspondance de M. d’Angiviller, NAAF, 21 (1905), p. 332. 106 Explored extensively in Mansfield, The Perfect Foil. 107 David was reçu on 23 August 1783 (PV, vol. 9, p. 164). 108 François-André Vincent, Letter to Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours, 15 June 1783, cited in Mansfield, The Perfect Foil, p. 11. 109 Collection des livrets [1783], pp. 31, 39. 110 Mansfield, The Perfect Foil, pp. 1–21. 111 On Vincent’s Protestantism, see Mansfield, The Perfect Foil, pp. 23–37, 55–56. On the treatment of Protestants in eighteenth-century Paris see: David Garrioch, ‘The Protestants of Paris and the Old Regime’, French History and Civilisation: Papers from the George Rude Seminar, 2 (2009), pp. 16–24, www.h-france.net/rude/rudeTOC2009.html (accessed 22 July 2013); and ‘The Protestant Problem and Church-State Relations in Old Regime France’, in Hilary M. Carey and John Gascoigne (eds), Church and State in Old and New Worlds (Leiden, 2011), pp. 55–76. 112 Collection des livrets [1783], pp. 34–35. Labille-Guiard’s costume and accessories are described in Bernadette Fort, Les Salons des ‘Mémoires secrets’ 1767–1787 (Paris, 1999), p. 271; its format is described in the livret, and its medium in François-André Vincent’s will (22 mai 1816, AN, MC, Et CVIII, 945), transcribed in Anne Marie Passez, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard 1749–1803. Biographie et catalogue raisonné de son œuvre (Paris, 1973), p. 310.

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113 Livrets des expositions, pp. 160–161, 165. For records of works exhibited at the Salon de La Correspondance see: Émile Bellier de la Chavignerie, ‘Les artistes français du XVIIIe siècle oubliés et dédaignés. Pahin de la Blancherie et le Salon de la Correspondance’, Revue universelle des arts, 20 (1865), pp. 415–417, and 21 (1866), pp. 183–184. On the history of these exhibitions see: Laura Auricchio, ‘Pahin de la Blancherie’s Commercial Cabinet of Curiosity (1779–87), Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36/1 (2002), pp. 47–61. 114 ‘Observations sur les Ouvrages de Peinture & Sculpture, exposés au Louvre, le 25 Août 1783’, Année Littéraire, vol. 6, lettre XIII (Paris, 1783), p. 266. 115 On this portrait see the enlightening analysis in Laura Auricchio, ‘SelfPromotion in Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s 1785 Self-Portrait with Two Students’, Art Bulletin, 89/1 (2007), pp. 45–62. 116 ‘Exposition des Tableaux au Louvre’, Année Littéraire (1785) (CD, XIV:349, p. 796). ‘Exposition des Tableaux au Salon du Louvre’, Mercure de France, October 1785, pp. 738, 757–758. 117 Jugement d’un musicien sur le salon de peinture de 1785 (Amsterdam, 1785) (CD, XIV:341, p. 16). See also ‘Obervations sur le sallon de 1785’, Journal général de France (1785) (CD, XIV:339, p. 549). 118 For a comparison of the portraits in terms of professional and domestic spheres see: Gen Doy, ‘Women and the Bourgeois Revolution of 1789: Artists, Mothers and Makers of (Art) History’, in Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (eds), Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture (Manchester and New York, 1994), pp. 184–203. 119 Marie-Thérèse Reboul (wife of Vien) was reçu as a miniaturist in 1757 (PV, vol. 7, p. 41) and Anne Vallayer-Coster was reçu for two still life paintings in 1770 (PV, vol. 8, p. 48). Vigée-Lebrun submitted a history painting as a morceau de réception, but was received ambiguously only as a ‘peintre’ in 1783 (PV, vol. 9, pp. 152–154). She specialised in portrait painting. 120 Vallayer-Coster was not pitted against her fellow-académicienne still-life painter Reboul, in large part because she actively established a comparison between herself and Chardin, no doubt seeing in him as a more worthy subject for emulation and thus a more exciting competition. On their relationship see Eik Kahng, ‘Vallayer-Coster/Chardin’, in Eik Kahng and Marianne Roland Michel (eds), Anne Vallayer Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette, exh. cat. (Washington, Dallas, and New York, 2002), pp. 39–57. 121 Melissa Hyde, ‘Looking Elsewhere: Women and the Parisian Art World in the Eighteenth Century’, in Royalists to Romantics, p. 33. 122 On suggested motivations behind these self-portraits see: Auricchio, LabilleGuiard, p. 40; and Paula Rea Radisich, ‘Que peut définir les femmes?: VigéeLebrun’s Portraits of an Artist’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 25/4 (1992), pp. 446–452. 123 Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire, pp. 124–139. 124 Collection des livrets [1783], pp. 34–35. 125 Auricchio, Labille-Guiard, pp. 26–30. 126 The only other artist’s portrait in the Académie’s collection of this scale was Mignard’s Self-Portrait (1690). 127 Auricchio, Labille-Guiard, pp. 42–43; Garnier, Antoine Coypel, pp. 129–130.

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128 Mary Sheriff offers a compelling reading of the gendering of Vigée-Lebrun and Labille-Guiard in the Salon criticism, showing how writers conceptualised Vigée-Lebrun as ‘feminine’ because of her soft touch, while Labille-Guiard with her firm brush ‘painted like a man’. Sheriff, Exceptional Woman, pp. 185–189. 129 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, 1981), pp. 96–99. On the feminist debates surrounding Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait see: Sheriff, Exceptional Woman, pp. 197–203. 130 Sheriff, Exceptional Woman, pp. 203–207. 131 On Vigée-Lebrun’s maternal self-image see Sheriff, Exceptional Woman, pp. 43–52; and Radisich, ‘Que peut définir les femmes?’, pp. 441–467. 132 Radisich, ‘Que peut définir les femmes?’, p. 454. 133 25 September 1706 (PV, vol. 4, pp. 33–34); 28 September 1770 (PV, vol. 8, pp. 52–53). 134 28 September 1770 (PV, vol. 8, p. 53). 135 An ‘official’ image was thus technically denied to any artist of a secondary genre who could not achieve senior officier status, but many such male artists were represented in the Académie through donated portraits, e.g. La Tour’s Chardin (1761), and Perronneau’s Laurent Cars (1745), both hanging in the salle des portraits. 136 Locquin, La peinture d’histoire en France, pp. 54–63. 137 Article V, Statuts et Règlements (1777). 138 On the dissolution of the Académie de Saint-Luc see Guiffrey, Histoire, pp. 89–94; and Scott, ‘Hierarchy, Liberty and Order’, pp. 59–70.

Epilogue: The End of an Institution

This book started with the story of the Académie’s beginnings and has traced through its pages a century and a half of institutional life. It seems fitting therefore that the book close with the end of this artistic community during the French Revolution. The events that took place in Paris during the turbulent years of the early 1790s, and the subsequent development of new artistic institutions and collectives that filled the void left by the Académie, have been discussed more thoroughly in recent art-historical scholarship than has the life of the ancien-régime institution.1 Rather than rehearse the details of political shifts following the Revolution, I want to examine instead what this post-Académie world can tell us about the Académie itself. How did the Académie, that enduring dominant institution, finally come to an end? What emerged to replace it? And what do these endings reveal about the community that was being replaced? From this vantage point of the Académie’s final days, I look forward to the afterlives of the Académie’s portraits, tracing what happened to them, and by extension to the institution, in French art’s subsequent histories. As encountered at the end of Chapter 6, already from the mid-1770s the traditional culture of the Académie had started to erode. The 1780s became a period marked by increasing individualism with a shift away from the collective practices of the past, and a loss of vested interest in the Académie as an artistic community.2 Without the guild to define itself against from the outside, the Académie started to distinguish differences from within. As artists sought more localised communities in the life of their studios (most notably in the case of Jacques-Louis David), academicians became increasingly factionalised in their institutional interactions.3 After the Revolutionary events of 1789, those emergent rifts developed into profound conflicts, with active moves to dissolve the hierarchies that had held together the ancienrégime institution, now being seen increasingly as a representative organ of royal power, an inadvertent testament to oppressive tyranny and passé ideals. As were its beginnings, the Académie’s endings were a very human story. Following the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, the students began to agitate. Nicolas Mirzoeff’s detailed account of this moment notes the revolutionary

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tenor of their demands: their call for an ‘open’ Salon and an end to the nepotistic privileges afforded to sons of academicians.4 More important than the idealistic insurrections of the students, however, were the mutinies among the Académie’s members themselves. At the end of 1789, one of the Académie’s engravers, Simon-Charles Miger, sent an open letter to Vien, the directeur, accusing the Académie of ‘despotism’ and calling for an end to its elitist restrictions and abuses of power.5 That social order ranking officiers above académiciens, which had organised the Académie since the 1650s, was now proclaimed an oppressive class structure. To underscore the inequality inherent in the system, David and Miger declared themselves respectively ‘président’ and ‘secrétaire’ of the body of académiciens, emphasising their limited agency as a second ‘class’ within the institution.6 Officially, the compagnie reacted with surprise at this description of a disunity ‘that does not exist’, and defended its Statuts against attacks that claimed them ‘tyrannical and persecutory’.7 Friction between the officiers and the académiciens eventually broke the institution apart into several chaotic and constantly changing groups: some, like David’s ‘Commune des Arts’, claiming to have seceded from the Académie and calling for its abolition; others, like the ‘Académie Centrale’ claiming to be reformulations of the old institution.8 Thus by the time the Assemblée Nationale officially abolished the Académie Royale (along with all the nation’s academies) on 8 August 1793, the writing had already been on the wall for some time.9 The community that once made up the Académie was fractured and diluted; its apartments in the Louvre were repossessed and re-allocated; and its defining customs and social order dissolved along with the rest of ancien-régime society.10 In post-Revolutionary artistic imaginations, verticality was to be exchanged for horizontality: equality would replace ranks and grades, liberty would replace controlling Statuts, and fraternity would replace hierarchy. One of the most emblematic images of artistic sociability created during the Directoire (the period of government 1795–1799) was LouisLéopold Boilly’s Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio of 1798 (Figure E.1). Only five years after the closure of the Académie, the artistic communities of Paris had changed dramatically. Boilly’s painting has been described by Susan Siegfried as a representation of ‘modern artists in their own terms’, defined not by hierarchies but by ‘professional or personal allegiances that they themselves declared’.11 This was the first generation of what we might call ‘post-academicians’. Boilly includes no one in his gathering who had been a member of the Académie – not even David or Miger – for this was the new guard: a group of 31 artists redefining what that now meant. Old social and institutional boundaries were dismantled here as painters and sculptors appeared alongside architects, composers, and actors forming an artistic community, which, as Tony Halliday argued, intentionally included those previously on or beyond the Académie’s margins.12 Boilly himself is in the thick of this mélange, off to the right-hand side, positioned between two actors: his arm around Simon Chenard as they converse with François-

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Joseph Talma. Even between painters, the aesthetic hierarchies have been levelled out and the genres now mingle together: just in front of Boilly two history painters (Anne-Louis Girodet and Charles Meynier) and two flower painters (Jean-François Van Dael and Pierre-Joseph Redouté) sit amicably around a common table.13 Though none had been academicians, the majority of Boilly’s painters and sculptors had, however, been étudiants at the Académie and at least four of them had been agréé.14 Boilly’s image of artistic society thus makes a convincing strike in a confrontation between these sons and their defeated fathers, even literally in the case of Carle Vernet (son of the academician, Joseph Vernet) who stands at the central axis. In this notably all-male gathering, one aspect of equality is ignored, but though continuing the patriarchal exclusionism of their academic forebears, this new image of a homosocial artistic community also clearly distinguished itself from images of the old guard. Its elongated horizontal composition reforms the vertical format of those ancien-régime portraits of officiers to create a level frieze of figures, championing the ideology of egalitarianism to replace the erstwhile hierarchies of their former masters.15 No longer in individual Académiestyle portraits, no one here is singled out, though everyone is distinct amid the crowd. Along with the rejection of their forebears’ artistic community, this new Republican generation also abandoned their artistic legacy, turning instead to Older Masters – Andrea del Sarto, Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael – who appear in roundels running along the top of the wall, their influence thus fixed in the foundations.16

E.1 LouisLéopold Boilly, Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio, 71.5 × 111 cm, oil on canvas, 1798, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: © RMNGrand Palais [Musée du Louvre] / Adrien Didierjean)

304 académie royale: a history in portraits

At the very moment that Boilly was constructing this portrait of ‘postacademicians’, the official portraits of the old academicians were being relegated to relative obscurity. In March 1798, only a few months before Boilly’s Meeting was met with acclaim in the Salon, the Académie’s morceaude-réception portraits – those institutional images of the old community – were being packed up and dispatched from the capital. Five years earlier, the paintings had been seized when the Académie’s apartments at the Louvre were repossessed for the Commune des Arts.17 Faced with such tangible eviction, the compagnie of the Académie protested vehemently, and used the potential fate of their collection of morceaux de réception as a bargaining strategy in a last ditch effort to hold their ground. These works of art, they declared, together formed a ‘Musœum’ representing ‘the history of the French School over the past hundred and fifty years’.18 The morceaux de réception may have been produced in the confines of the institution to serve internal ritual functions, but as a group, these objects could constitute a national collection. Ultimately the Académie’s protests were unsuccessful, but not entirely unheeded: the institution was finished, but its works would indeed live on in various museological forms. In 1798, amid the fervour of museum-building, the Académie’s morceaux de réception became part of a museum of the French school – not, however, in Paris, at the major Musée Central of the Louvre, but rather out at Versailles in the much more modest Musée spécial de l’école française.19 This short-lived museum was not much of a success, being seen, as Andrew McClellan has argued, largely as a depository for works of art that the Louvre did not want.20 Among these unwanted works were the vast majority of the Académie’s collections. Decisions about what to keep in Paris and what to relegate to Versailles had been made by a jury of eight artists: some, like Antoine Chaudet, were among Boilly’s ‘post-academicians’; but mostly, they were ex-academicians – Fragonard, Peyron, Vincent, and JeanMichel Moreau – who were taking active roles in the arts administration of the new regime.21 Former members of the Académie thus became responsible for dismantling and rehousing the objects that had once defined, ideologically and physically, the boundaries of their community. According to the minutes of this jury, a small number of the Académie’s portraits were to remain at the Louvre (among them Desportes’ Self-Portrait as a huntsman [Figure 3.9], Rigaud’s portraits of Mignard [Figure 3.11] and Desjardins [Figure 2.3], and Vivien’s portrait of Girardon [Plate 8]). All the rest were sent amid the 11 convoys of objects transported to Versailles.22 In the seventh convoy, shipped on 26 ventôse an VI (16 March 1798), there were 37 morceau-de-réception portraits and ten other artists’ portraits from the Académie’s collection; in the eighth convoy on 7 germinal an VI (27 March 1798), there were 27 morceau-de-réception portraits and another four portraits of Académie members.23 Wrapped, stacked, and transported on a wagon were objects that had played fundamental ritual roles in the life of the institution and in the professional lives of all academicians: Benoist’s portrait of Buirette (Figure 1.10), Roslin’s portrait of Jeaurat (Figure 2.4), Perronneau’s portrait

epilogue: the end of an institution 305

of Oudry (Figure 2.6), and the list goes on. Beside them were objects that had played similarly crucial roles in the personal lives of the members of this community: Louis-Michel Van Loo’s Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father (Figure 4.8); the Self-Portrait (Plate 10) that Charles-Antoine Coypel submitted as part of his self-inflicted re-reception; and Pierre Mignard’s Self-Portrait (Plate 15) that had marked the showdown in his rivalry with Lebrun. Ten days later, nine more morceau-de-réception portraits were shipped in the ninth convoy, among them Lemaire’s portrait of Sarazin (Figure 1.1), that first ever institutional image of an academician, which had inaugurated one-and-a-half centuries of collective representation.24 Of all the works from the Académie’s collection, it was the portraits that proved trickiest to deal with in the new museums. In the early 1800s after the closure of the Musée spécial, most of the morceaux de réception were dispersed further still, sent to the provinces to fill the nation’s new regional museums. Tours and Montpellier, for instance, took most of the history paintings, with others going to Rouen, Lyon, and Rennes.25 But the portraits were left behind. History paintings and other genres clearly proved more effective staffage than the individuated subjects of the Académie’s portraits. Detached from their original setting, the Académie’s portraits lost their totemic value as ancestors of a community. But even so, these likenesses of long-dead artists in their uniform three-quarter format remained a permanent representation of that now defunct institution. Without subsequent additions, the morceau-de-réception portraits ceased to be a living collection as they had been at the Académie, but throughout their afterlives they were always, as McAllister Johnson points out, kept largely intact as a group.26 In the 1820s, during the Bourbon Restoration, at least 50 were granted to the École royale des Beaux-Arts, where they were displayed together in one room, inaccessible to the public but nevertheless making a legible statement about the institutional lineage imagined by the new school.27 Later, during the 1880s and the Third Republic, the majority of the portraits once again returned to the Louvre, where they were exhibited in the new Pavillon Denon, fulfilling (albeit briefly) the desire of Philippe de Chennevières (Directeur des Beaux-Arts, 1873–1878) that France inaugurate ‘a collection of portraits of the nation’s artists’.28 In the twentieth century, many went back to Versailles, where even today those that are not kept in storage are displayed together in a single room. Somehow, even when their institutional and ritual values were obliterated, the portraits were still envisaged not as individuals but as a group. In the afterlives of the morceau-de-réception portraits, their inseparability as objects reveals something intrinsic about the communal image they constructed: no matter how much time passed, the portraits continued to stand as a monument to a community. Boilly’s Meeting of Artists may be, as both Alain Bonnet and Bridget Alsdorf designate it, the first group portrait of French artists, but it was by no means the first collective representation of French artists.29 When the Académie’s morceau-de-réception portraits are viewed together, their efficacy as a communal portrait is overwhelming. As a collective representation, however,

306 académie royale: a history in portraits

the Académie’s portraits differed markedly from a work like Boilly’s in form, function, and effect. As a single image of multiple figures, Boilly’s painting represented an artificially selected community that was fixed in time and place, a gathering of 31 artists of Boilly’s choosing, never to include any more or any less. By contrast, the institutional image that the Académie created of itself was never static. Individual portraits collected together to form a group made for an infinitely extendable vision of the institution – this was a living community with a past, present, and future. For the Académie, the morceaude-réception portraits were a record of the institution’s history – not at one single moment – but as an ongoing cumulative narrative. This community was never limited to its immediate members, but always incorporated those who had come before and anticipated those who would come next. Whatever their value as a historicising vehicle, however, the function of the morceau-de-réception portraits was never limited to representing the Académie in a visual sense. These were not just images of academicians, but also ritual objects that symbolised the becoming and being of academicians. Produced through established cultural practices, the portraits reinforced the community’s rules, hierarchies, and traditions, marking the rite of passage that turned young agréés into académiciens, and senior officiers into commemorative effigies. While Boilly’s idealised gathering shows a network of artists interacting as equals, the morceau-de-réception portraits embody the tensions inherent in the unequal social interactions that produced them, interactions between people with prescribed roles in a system of ranks that defined the community’s social order. The morceau-de-réception portraits did not present a single-authored vision of this community but rather a collective representation of this collective – objects made in and for the Académie, by and of its members. During the Académie’s lifetime, this collective representation was activated through the displays of portraits in the Louvre apartments. These objects defined the physical boundaries of institutional space, and participated as effigies in the everyday life of the community. Once on the walls of the Académie, these life-sized portraits created conversations between past, present, and future members as they interacted en masse in spaces like the salle des portraits, or became witnesses to current events in the salle d’assemblée. For the engaged spectators in these rooms, the Académie’s portraits were encountered as quasi-members of the community – totems of ancestors – and they remained so until both the portraits and the institution were removed from their communal environment. Group portraits of French artists like Boilly’s Meeting and those painted later in the nineteenth century are fascinating collective representations in an art-historical sense, but the Académie’s morceau-de-réception portraits were a collective representation in an anthropological sense: a symbol of the group, that reflects their shared history, and is a product of their beliefs and culture.30 It seems telling that group portraiture of artists did not develop as a genre until after the demise of the Académie. As paradoxical

epilogue: the end of an institution 307

as it may be, this evinces the success of the Académie as a social group, that only when it was gone did artists begin inventing their own. Works like Henri Fantin-Latour’s A Studio in the Batignolles (1870) (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), showing Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and others together in Édouard Manet’s studio, were according to Alsdorf, symptomatic of nineteenth-century artists seizing on the group as a form of reflection on the rise of the individual.31 But they are also a result of the breakdown in this period of institutions to which artists could feel a sense of invested belonging. Artists’ personal social networks were always part of the experience of artistic community in the ancien-régime, as family ties, friendships, and rivalries created alternative bonds of association through and around the Académie’s hierarchies. But what connected these men and women in the first place was their professional identity as academicians, their membership of a community to which they felt an affiliation. It seems no coincidence that Fantin-Latour should turn to group portrayals in the same period that Chennevières was calling for the reunification of the old Académie’s morceau-de-réception portraits. Amid the fractured world of nineteenth-century art institutions, Fantin-Latour sought community in independent spaces of sociability, while Chennevières sought to revive the ancien-régime model of institutional community in his ultimately unsuccessful plan for an Académie Nationale des Artistes Français.32 Of course, whatever the success of the Académie as an artistic community, its official life was never the only one lived by its members. It brought people together and provided them with a social order and customs of interaction, but institutional ranks and roles were not the only relationships that its artists inhabited. The Académie’s unofficial face was traced in the second half of this book through a different set of portraits – those informal images that revealed the personal bonds between members of families, networks of friends, and intimate rivals. What these portraits also showed, however, was that personal relationships were not separate from institutional relationships – they formed through them, negotiated their way around them, and sometimes even became part of them. Bloodlines and family alliances became a palimpsest through which other professional relationships could be experienced; friendship made space for itself in the Académie’s hierarchies, emerging most successfully between artists holding different ranks or practising different genres; while the same hierarchies triggered rivalries between those closest within the institution’s competitive culture. Perhaps most importantly, these portraits also reveal the tensions that the Académie’s official history kept at bay. While the morceau-de-réception portraits presented the institution as a harmonious and unified community, the stories traced in these unofficial portraits show that artists’ relationships were often far from ideal. Preferential treatment for family members could prove divisive, friendships sometimes went sour, and rivalries could either be productive or downright destructive. In a study that tells the human story of the Académie Royale, the messiness of these relationships is crucial. From its muddled beginnings in the 1640s

308 académie royale: a history in portraits

and 1650s, to its disorderly endings in the 1780s and 1790s, the events of institutional life were always contingent on very human relationships. For all the objects it produced, for all its ideologies and theoretical discourses, and for all that it came to stand for, the Académie was not a homogeneous ideal. It was a diverse community of people, brought together through shared interests, and bounded together by the cultural practices they gradually developed. Portraits – objects that represent people – have retrieved for us that human side of the Académie, bringing us face-to-face with the members who made it. Through art-historical approaches to those objects and anthropological approaches to those people, it has been my intention here to narrate a portrait through portraits, offering a different history of this artistic institution: not as a series of events, but as a network of relationships; not as a collection of art theoretical debates, but as a site of social interactions; not as an inanimate institution, but as a living and lived community.

Notes 1

See especially Mirzoeff, ‘Revolution’, pp. 153–174; Tony Halliday, ‘Academic Outsiders at the Paris Salons of the Revolution: The Case of Drawings “à la manière noire”’, Oxford Art Journal, 21/1 (1998), pp. 71–86; Philippe Bordes and Régis Michel (eds), Aux armes et aux arts! Les arts de la Révolution 1789–1799 (Paris, 1988); June Hargrove (ed.), The French Academy: Classicism and its Antagonists (Newark, 1990); Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, revised edn (New Haven and London, 1986); Raphael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd (eds), Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 2000).

2

See, for instance, Crow’s analysis of David’s motivations in the 1780s (Crow, Painters, pp. 211–258) or Boime’s more general description of the period (Boime, Academy, pp. 4–5).

3

Crow, Emulation, pp. 5–30; and Thomas Crow, ‘A Male Republic: Bonds between Men in the Art and Life of Jacques-Louis David’, in Perry and Rossington, Femininity and Masculinity, pp. 204–218.

4

Mirzoeff, ‘Revolution’, pp. 156–157.

5

Letter from Simon-Charles Miger to Joseph-Marie Vien, 20 November 1789, in: Émile Bellier de La Chavignerie, Biographie et Catalogue de l’œuvre du graveur Miger (Paris, 1856), pp. 52–63. See also Mirzoeff, ‘Revolution’, pp. 157–158.

6

5 February 1790 (PV, vol. 10, p. 45).

7

5 February 1790 (PV, vol. 10, p. 45). Esprit des Statuts et Règlemens de l’Académie Royale de Peinture & de Sculpture, pour servir de réponse aux Détracteurs de son Régime (Paris, 1790), p. 1.

8

Mirzoeff, ‘Revolution’, pp. 162–165; Claudette Hould, ‘Les beaux-arts en révolution: au bruit des armes les arts se taisent!’, Êtudes françaises, 25/2–3 (1989), pp. 193–208.

9

‘Décret rendu sur la proposition du Comité d’instruction publique’ (1793) (PV, vol. 10, p. 224).

epilogue: the end of an institution 309

10

The Ministres de l’Intérieur repossessed the Académie’s rooms for the Commune des Arts on 8 July 1793 (PV, vol. 10, pp. 216–217).

11

Susan Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 96.

12

Tony Halliday, Facing the Public: Portraiture in the Aftermath of the French Revolution (Manchester, 1999), p. 141.

13

For a detailed discussion of the intermixing of genres here see Halliday, Facing, p. 141.

14

Former étudiants include: Jean-Baptiste Isabey, François Gérard, Meynier, Girodet, Charles-Louis Corbet, and Guillaume-Guillon Lethière. The former agréés were: Jean-Louis Demarne (29 March 1783 [PV, vol. 9, pp. 144–145]); Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (31 July 1784 [PV, vol. 9, pp. 202–203]); Carle Vernet (24 August 1789 [PV, vol. 10, p. 21]); Antoine Chaudet (30 May 1789 [PV, vol. 10, pp. 13–14]).

15

Halliday discusses Boilly’s painting in relation to Colin Jones’ analysis of post-revolutionary shifts in professional structures between vertical, hierarchical corporate models and horizontal, egalitarian civic models. Halliday, Facing, p. 141; Colin Jones, ‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change’, in C. Lucas (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991), p. 96.

16

Siegfried describes this as grafting ‘the cult of the modern artist onto the cult of Old Masters’. Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly, p. 96.

17

The Commune des Arts was then the ‘Société des Beaux-Arts’. 8 July 1793 (PV, vol. 10, pp. 216–217).

18

8 July 1793 (PV, vol. 10, p. 217).

19

On the development of museums and collections during this period see: Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 91–154.

20

McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, pp. 130–131, 253.

21

Yveline Cantarel-Besson, Musée du Louvre (Janvier 1797–Juin 1798): Procèsverbaux du Conseil d’administration du ‘Musée central des Arts’ (Paris, 1992), p. 18. Fragonard was agréé in 1765 (PV, vol. 7, p. 295), though never admitted his age (1732–1806) made him part of that older generation of French artists.

22

Cantarel-Besson, Musée du Louvre, pp. 243–244.

23

Cantarel-Besson, Musée du Louvre, pp. 256–257, 262–264.

24

Cantarel-Besson, Musée du Louvre, pp. 269–270.

25

On the dispersal of the Académie’s collection see Fontaine, Les collections, pp. 86–128.

26

McAllister Johnson, ‘Les morceaux’, pp. 40–41. The provenance of several portraits is catalogued in Les Peintres du Roi.

27

For the portraits granted to the école des beaux arts in the 1820s see: Philippe De Chennevières, ‘Le musée de portraits des artistes français’, La chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 24 (June 1876), p. 212. According to Chennevières, in the 1870s there were also six morceau-de-réception portraits at the Louvre, six in the Musée des Dessins, and 15 at Versailles.

310 académie royale: a history in portraits

28

Chennevières, ‘Le musée de portraits des artistes français’, p. 210. See also McAllister Johnson, ‘Les morceaux’, pp. 40–41.

29

Alain Bonnet, Artistes en groupe: la représentation de la communauté des artistes dans la peinture du XIXe siècle (Rennes, 2007), p. 60; Bridget Alsdorf, Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (Princeton, 2013), p. 12.

30

The concept of collective representation is defined in Durkheim, Elementary, pp. 14–16.

31

Alsdorf, Fellow Men, p. 4.

32

On Chennevières see Boime, Academy, p. 16; and Jane Mayo Roos, ‘Aristocracy in the Arts: Philippe de Chennevières and the Salons of the Mid 1870s’, Art Journal, 48/1 (1989), pp. 53–62.

APPeNDICeS

Appendix 1 Portraits submitted as morceaux de réception (1648–1793) Date submitted

1649

Painter * Artist not received as portraitist

Age of painter

Sitter ** Sitter not an artist at the Académie

Age of sitter (age at death if posthumous)

Sitter’s media/ genre

Sitter’s rank at time of painting † Deceased artist’s final rank

* Juste d’Egmont (1601–1674)

48

** Duc d’Orléans, frère de Louis XIII

* Henri Testelin (1616–1695)

33

** Louis XIV, roi de France et de Navarre

1657

François Lemaire (1620–1688)

37

Jacques Sarazin (1588–1660)

1660

Pierre Rabon (1619–1684)

41

** Antoine de Ratabon (1612–1670)

1663

Jacob Van Loo (1614–1670)

49

Michel I Corneille (1601–1664)

62

History painter

Recteur

Antoine Berthélemy (1633–1669)

30

Louis Du Guernier (1614–1659)

49

Miniature painter

Professeur

Pierre Daret de Cazeneuve (1604–1678)

59

** Portrait (sitter unknown)

Simon Renard de Saint-André (1613–1677)

51

** Anne d’Autriche et Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche

Antoine Matthieu (1631–1673)

33

** Henriette-Anne présentant le portrait du duc Philippe d’Orléans, son mari

Nicolas Hallier (1635–1686)

30

Louis Testelin l’aîné (1615–1655)

d. 40

History painter

† Professeur

François Tortebat (1621–1690)

44

** Simon Vouet (1590–1649)

d. 59

Painter

Never a member of Académie

1666

Claude Lefebvre (1632–1675)

34

** Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683)

1672

Pierre Bouguignon (1632–1698)

40

** Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans présentant le portrait du duc d’Orléans, son père

1664

1665

69

Sculptor

Recteur Directeur

Vice-Protecteur

Date submitted

Painter * Artist not received as portraitist

Age of painter

Sitter ** Sitter not an artist at the Académie

Paul Mignard (1639–1691)

33

Nicolas Mignard (1606–1668)

Philippe Lallemand (1636–1716)

36

** Gédeon Berbier Du Metz

Age of sitter (age at death if posthumous) d. 62

Sitter’s media/genre

History painter

24

Self-portrait

1674

Jean-Charles Nocret (1648–1719)

27

Jean Nocret (1617–1672)

1675

Jacques d’Agar (1642–1715)

33

Michel Anguier (1612–1686) François Girardon (1628–1715)

Jean Tiger (1623–1698)

52

Martin Lambert (1630–1699)

45

1676

Marc Nattier (1642–1705)

34

† Adjoint à Recteur Conseiller (honoraire amateur) Conseiller (honoraire amateur)

** Charles Perrault Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron (1648–1711)

Sitter’s rank at time of painting † Deceased artist’s final rank

24

Portrait painter

Agréé

d. 55

History painter

† Adjoint à Recteur

63 47

Sculptor Sculptor

Recteur Recteur

Nicolas Loir (1624–1679) Henri Testelin (1616–1695)

51 59

History painter History painter

Professeur Secrétaire

Double-portrait of Henri Beaubrun (1603–1677) and Charles Beaubrun (1604–1692)

72

Portrait painter

Trésorier

71

Portrait painter

Conseiller

Gilbert de Sève (1615–1698) ** Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Seignelay (1651–1690)

61

History painter

Professeur Vice-Protecteur

1677

Florent de La Mare-Richart (1630–1718)

47

Antoine Paillet (1626–1701) Noël Coypel (1628–1707)

51 49

History painter History painter

Professeur Professeur

1680

Henri Gascard (c.1635–1701)

45

Louis I Elle, dit Ferdinand (1612–1689) Pierre de Sève (1623–1695)

68 57

Portrait painter History painter

Professeur Professeur

1681

Louis II Elle (1648–1717)

33

Samuel Bernard (1615–1687) Thomas Regnaudin (1622–1706)

66 59

Miniature painter Sculptor

Professeur Professeur

Antoine Benoist (1632–1717)

49

Jacques Buirette (1631–1699) Gabriel Blanchard (1630–1704)

50 51

Sculptor History painter

Professeur Professeur

1682

Jacques Carré (1651–1694)

31

Gaspard de Marsy (1624–1681) Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1631–1681)

d. 57 d. 50

Sculptor History painter

† Adjoint à Recteur † Recteur

1683

Gabriel Revel (1643–1712)

40

François Girardon (1628–1715) Michel Anguier (1612–1686) [LOST]

55 71

Sculptor Sculptor

Recteur Recteur

1686

Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746)

30

Charles Lebrun (1619–1690)

67

History painter

Directeur/Chancelier

1687

Philippe Vignon (1638–1701)

49

Henri de Mauperché (1602–1686) Philippe de Buyster (c.1598–1688)

85 89

Landscape painter Sculptor

Professeur Professeur

1688 1691

André Bouys (1656–1740)

32 35

Charles de La Fosse (1636–1716) Etienne Le Hongre (1628–1690)

History painter Sculptor

Professeur † Adjoint à Recteur

1699

* Alexandre-François Desportes (1661–1743)

Still life painter

Agréé

History painter History painter

Adjoint à Recteur Professeur

Sculptor

† Recteur

52 d. 62

Self-Portrait

Jean Tortebat (1652–1718)

47

René-Antoine Houasse (c.1645–1710) Jean Jouvenet (1644–1717)

1700

Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743)

41

Martin Desjardins (c.1640–1694)

1701

François Jouvenet (c.1665–1749)

36

Antoine Coysevox (1640–1720) René-Antoine Houasse (c.1645–1710)

61 56

Sculptor History painter

Recteur Recteur

Joseph Vivien (1657–1734)

44

François Girardon (1628–1715) ** Robert de Cotte (1656–1735)

73 45

Sculptor

Chancelier Conseiller (honoraire amateur)

Pierre Gobert (1662–1744)

39

Louis II de Boullogne (1654–1733) Corneille van Clève (1646–1732)

47 55

History painter Sculptor

Professeur Professeur

Robert (Levrac) Tournières (1669–1752)

33

Michel I Corneille (1601–1664) Pierre Mosnier (1641–1703)

d. 63 61

History painter History painter

† Recteur Professeur

1702

54 55 d. 54

Date

Painter

Age of

Sitter

Age of

Sitter’s

Sitter’s rank at

submitted

* Artist not received as portraitist

painter

** Sitter not an artist at the Académie

sitter

media/genre

time of painting

1703

Jean Ranc (1674–1735)

Nicolas-Alexis-Simon Belle (1674–1734)

1711

Gilles Allou (1670–1751)

1720

* François Stiémart (1680–1740)

1723

Charles-Etienne Geuslain (1685–1765)

1725

Jacques-François Delyen (1684–1761)

Jean Le Gros (1671–1745)

1728

1730

1734

Pierre Le Boutteux (1683–1750)

Hubert Drouais (1699–1767)

Louis Tocqué (1696–1772)

29

29

41

(age at death if

† Deceased artist’s

posthumous)

final rank

Nicolas de Plattemontagne (1631–1706)

72

History painter

Professeur

François Verdier (1651–1730)

52

History painter

Professeur

Pierre Mazeline (1632–1708)

71

Sculptor

Professeur

François De Troy (1645–1730)

58

History painter

Professeur

Louis Lerambert (1620–1670)

d. 50

Sculptor

† Adjoint à Professeur

Antoine Coysevox (1640–1720)

71

Sculptor

Ancien Directeur

Antoine Coypel (1661–1722)

50

History painter

Adjoint à Recteur

Bon Boullogne (1649–1717)

62

History painter

Professeur

** Portrait de Louis XV 38

41

54

45

31

38

Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746)

67

Hist./Port. painter

Recteur

François Barrois (1656–1726)

67

Sculptor

Adjoint à Recteur

Nicolas Bertin (1668–1736)

57

History painter

Professeur

Guillaume I Coustou (1677–1746)

48

Sculptor

Professeur

Claude-Guy Hallé (1652–1736)

73

History painter

Professeur

Nicolas Coustou (1658–1733)

67

Sculptor

Recteur

Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743)

69

Hist./Port. painter

Professeur

Guy-Louis Vernansal (1648–1729)

80

History painter

Professeur

Joseph Christophe (1662–1748)

68

History painter

Professeur

Robert Le Lorrain (1666–1743)

64

Sculptor

Professeur

Louis Galloche (1670–1761)

64

History painter

Professeur

Jean-Louis Lemoyne (1665–1755)

69

Sculptor

Professeur

Jacques-Antoine- Joseph Aved (1702–1766)

32

Pierre-Jacques Cazes (1676–1754) Jean-François De Troy (1679–1752)

58 55

History painter History painter

Professeur Professeur

Louis Autereau (1692–1760)

49

Réné Frémin (1672–1744) Henri de Favanne (1668–1752) [LOST]

69 73

Sculptor History painter

Professeur Professeur

Donat Nonnotte (1708–1785)

33

Pierre Dulin (1669–1748) Sebastien II Le Clerc (1676–1763)

72 65

History painter History painter

Ancien Professeur Ancien Professeur

1742

Gustave Lundberg (1695–1786)

47

François Boucher (1703–1770) Charles-Joseph Natoire (1700–1777)

39 42

History painter History painter

Professeur Professeur

1746 1750

Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788)

42 46

Jean Restout (1692–1768) Jacques Dumont le Romain (1701–1781)

54 49

History painter History painter

Adjoint à Recteur Adjoint à Recteur

1747

Pierre Le Sueur (c.1724–1786)

24

Robert (Levrac) Tournières (1669–1752) Carle Van Loo (1705–1765)

78 60

Hist./Port. painter History painter

Adjoint à Professeur Professeur

1753

Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715–1783)

38

Lambert Sigisbert Adam l’aîné (1700–1759) Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755)

53

Sculptor

Professeur

67

History painter

Professeur

Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont (1693–1761) Etienne Jeaurat (1699–1789)

60

History painter

Professeur

54

History painter

Professeur

1741

Alexandre Roslin (1718–1793)

35

1754

Jean Valade (1709–1787)

45

Louis II de Silvestre (1675–1760) Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne (1704–1778)

56 50

History painter Sculptor

Directeur Professeur

1758

François-Hubert Drouais (1727–1775)

31

Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) Guillaume II Coustou (1716–1777)

60 42

Sculptor Sculptor

Professeur Professeur

1759

Guillaume Voiriot (1713–1799)

46

Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre (1714–1789) Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766)

45 74

History painter History painter

Professeur Professeur

1770

Marie-Suzanne Giroust (1735–1772)

35

Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714–1785)

56

Sculptor

Adjoint à Recteur

Date

Painter

Age of

Sitter

Age of

Sitter’s

Sitter’s rank at

submitted

* Artist not received as portraitist

painter

** Sitter not an artist at the Académie

sitter

media/genre

time of painting

1774

Joseph-Siffrède Duplessis (1725–1802)

1785

49

Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain

60

(1710–1795) Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809)

(age at death if

† Deceased artist’s

posthumous)

final rank

64

Sculptor

Professeur

69

History painter

Professeur (when ordered) Recteur (when completed)

1775

Etienne Aubry (1745–1781)

30

Noël Hallé (1711–1781) Louis-Claude Vassé (1716–1772)

1779

Alexis III Loir (1712–1785)

1783

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803)

1785

64 d. 56

History painter

Professeur

Sculptor

† Professeur

67

Clément Belle (1722–1806)

57

History painter

Professeur

34

Augustin Pajou (1730–1809)

53

Sculptor

Professeur

36

Charles-Amédée-Philippe Van Loo

66

History painter

Professeur

(1719–1795) 1784

1786

1788

Adolf-Ulric Wertmüller (1751–1811)

Antoine Vestier (1740–1824)

Jean-Laurent Mosnier (1744–1808)

33

46

45

Jean-Jacques Bachelier (1724–1806)

60

History painter

Professeur

Jean-Jacques Caffieri (1725–1792)

59

Sculptor

Professeur

Gabriel-François Doyen (1726–1806)

60

History painter

Professeur

Nicolas-Guy Brenet (1728–1792)

58

History painter

Professeur

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée

63

History painter

Recteur

58

Sculptor

Professeur

(1725–1805) Charles-Antoine Bridan (1730–1805) 66 artists in total

111 portraits in total (97 portraits of artists)

Appendix 2 Inventory of portraits in the salle des portraits (c.1794)

From the final inventory of the Académie’s apartments made in Year II (cited in André Fontaine, Les collections de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture [Paris, 1910], pp. 172–185). 1. Pierre Gobert, Corneille Van Clève, 1701

20. Jacques Carré, Gaspard de Marsy, 1681

2. Pierre Gobert, Louis II de Boullogne, 1701 3. Jean Tortebat, Jean Jouvenet, 1699

21. Jacques Carré, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, 1681

4. Jean Tortebat, René-Antoine Houasse, 1699

22. Guillaume Voiriot, Jean-Marc Nattier, 1759

5. Robert Levrac, dit Tournières, Pierre Monnier, 1702

23. Guillaume Voiriot, Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre, 1759

6. Robert Levrac, dit Tournières, Michel I Corneille, 1702

24. Alexis-Simon-Nicolas Belle, Louis Lerambert, 1704

7. Jean Ranc, François Verdier, 1703

25. Alexis-Simon-Nicolas Belle, François de Troy, 1703

8. Jean Ranc, Nicolas de Plattemontagne, 1703 9. Henri Gascard, Pierre de Sève, 1680 10. Henri Gascard, Louis I Elle, dit Ferdinand, 1680 11. Hubert Drouais, Joseph Christophe, 1730 12. Hubert Drouais, Robert Le Lorrain, 1730 13. Marc Nattier, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Colbert de Seignelay, 1676 14. Marc Nattier, Gilbert de Sève, 1676 15. Florent de La Mare-Richart, Noël Coypel, 1677 16. Florent de La Mare-Richart, Antoine Paillet, 1677 17. Philippe Vignon, Philippe de Buyster, 1687 18. Philippe Vignon, Henri de Mauperché, 1687 19. Claude-François Vignon, Claude Vignon, c.1670

26. Étienne Aubry, Louis-Claude Vassé, 1775 27. Étienne Aubry, Noël Hallé, 1775 28. Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, LambertSigisbert Adam l’aîné, 1753 29. Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 1753 30. Jacques-Antoine-Joseph Aved, PierreJacques Cazes, 1734 31. Jacques-Antoine-Joseph Aved, Jean-François De Troy, 1734 32. François Lemaire, Jacques Sarazin, 1657 33. François-Hubert Drouais, Guillaume II Coustou, 1758 34. François-Hubert Drouais, Edmé Bouchardon, 1758 35. Gilles Allou, Antoine Coypel, 1711 36. Gilles Allou, Antoine Coysevox, 1711 37. Gilles Allou, Bon de Boullogne, 1711

320 académie royale: a history in portraits

38. Alexandre Roslin, Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont, 1753

65. Antoine Mathieu, Monsieur, the king’s brother, and Madame with Minerva, 1664

39. Alexandre Roslin, Étienne Jeaurat, 1753

66. Antoine Coypel, Self-Portrait, 1715

40. Alexandre Roslin, Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, 1756

67. Louis Tocqué, Louis Galloche, 1734

41. Adelaïde Labille-Guiard, CharlesAmédée-Philippe Van Loo, 1785

69. Mathieu Le Nain, Cardinal Mazarin, c.1649

42. Louis-Michel Van Loo, Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father, Jean-Baptiste Van Loo, 1762 43. Jacob Van Loo, Michel I Corneille, 1663 44. Josephe-Siffrède Duplessis, Joseph-Marie Vien, 1785 45. Josephe-Siffrède Duplessis, Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, 1774 46. Jean Le Gros, Nicolas Coustou, 1725

68. Jean Valade, Louis II Silvestre, 1754

70. Donat Nonnotte, Pierre Dulin, 1741 71. Donat Nonnotte, Sébastien II Le Clerc, 1741 72. Noël-Nicolas Coypel, Simon Guillain, 1732 73. Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, Philippe de Champaigne (after a Self-Portrait), before 1681

47. Jean Le Gros, Claude-Guy Hallé, 1725

74. Antoine Vestier, Gabriel-Francois Doyen, 1786

48. Jacques-François Delyen, Guillaume I Coustou, 1725

75. Antoine Vestier, Nicolas-Guy Brenet, 1786

49. Jacques-François Delyen, Nicolas Bertin, 1725

76. Jean-Laurent Mosnier, Louis-JeanFrançois Lagrenée, 1788

50. Adolphe-Ulric Wertmüller, Jean-Jacques Bachelier, 1784

77. Jean-Laurent Mosnier, Charles-Antoine Bridan, 1788

51. Adolphe-Ulric Wertmüller, Jean-Jacques Caffieri, 1784

78. Charles-Etienne Geuslain, Nicolas de Largillière, 1723

52. Nicolas de Largillière, Self-Portrait, 1711

79. Pierre Mignard, Self-Portrait, c.1690

53. Antoine Pesne, Nicolas Vleughels, 1723

80. Claude-Guy Hallé, Simon Hurtrelle, before 1724

54. Giovanni-Niccolo Servandoni, Self-Portrait, before 1766

81. Pierre Rabon, Antoine de Ratabon, 1660

55. Pierre Bourguignon, Madame de Montpensier holding the portrait of her father the duc d’Orléans, 1672

82. Paul Mignard, Nicolas de Mignard, 1672

56. Charles-Etienne Geuslain, François Barrois, 1723

84. Unknown portrait

57. Pierre Le Boutteux, Guy-Louis Vernansal, 1728

86. Gustave Lundberg, François Boucher, 1742

58. André Bouys, Etienne Le Hongre, 1691 59. Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron, Self-Portrait, 1672 60. Antoine Barthélemy, Louis Du Guernier, 1663 61. Nicolas Hallier, Louis Testelin, 1665

83. Portrait of Sébastien Leclerc (possibly a self-portrait) 85. Unknown portrait

87. Gustave Lundberg, Charles-Joseph Natoire, 1742 88. Alexis Loir, Clément Belle, 1779 89. Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Siméon Chardin, 1761

62. Antoine Benoist, Gabriel Blanchard, 1681

90. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Augustin Pajou, 1783

63. Étienne Aubry, Nicolas-Sébastien Adam, before 1778

91. Marie-Suzanne Giroust, Dumont le Romain, 1770

64. Nicolas Eude, Hercules painting Monsieur le Prince on a lion skin, 1673

92. Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Laurent Cars, 1745

Appendix 3 Self-portraits exhibited at the Salons (1673–1793)

Salon

Total

Artists who exhibited self-portraits (figure number if illustrated)

1673

1

Elisabeth-Sophie CHÉRON (Plate 1)

1699

5

Noël COYPEL Antoine COYPEL (Figure 4.3) Florent de LA MARE-RICHART Alexandre DESPORTES (Figure 3.9) Elisabeth-Sophie CHÉRON (Plate 1)

1704

3

Noël COYPEL François DE TROY Hyacinthe RIGAUD

1737

4

Jacques-François DELYEN François JOUVENET Jacques de LAJOUE Maurice-Quentin de LA TOUR (Figure 6.15)

1738

–

1739

–

1740

–

1741

1

1742

–

1743

–

1745

1

Jacques-François DELYEN

1746

1

Charles-Antoine COYPEL (Plate 10)

1747

–

1748

–

1750

1

1751

–

Pierre LE SUEUR

Louis AUTREAU

322 académie royale: a history in portraits

Salon

Total

Artists who exhibited self-portraits (figure number if illustrated)

1753

1

Carle VAN LOO

1755

1

Alexandre ROSLIN

1757

–

1759

–

1761

1

Jean-Baptiste GREUZE

1763

3

Jean-Marc NATTIER (Figure 4.10) Alexandre ROSLIN Louis-Michel VAN LOO (Figure 4.9)

1765

–

1767

–

1769

–

1771

1

1773

–

1775

1

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon CHARDIN (‘Tête d’étude’)

1777

1

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon CHARDIN (‘Tête d’étude’)

1779

–

1781

1

Joseph-Siffrèd DUPLESSIS (Figure 6.18)

1783

3

Adélaïde LABILLE-GUIARD Alexandre ROSLIN (Figure 6.19) Elisabeth-Louise VIGÉE-LEBRUN (Figure 6.20)

1785

1

Adélaïde LABILLE-GUIARD (Plate 16)

1787

1

Elisabeth-Louise VIGÉE-LEBRUN (Figure 6.21)

1789

–

1791

8

Alexandre ROSLIN M. TRINQUESSE Antoine VESTIER Joseph BOZE M. DESFONTS Mlle DUCREUX Mlle DUVIVIER (‘une femme peinte à son chevalet’) Louis BILCOQ (‘peintre dans son atelier’)

1793

6

Citoyen DRELING Citoyen LEFEBVRE Citoyenne CHAPENTIER Citoyenne FOULLON (‘une jeune personne à son chevalet’) Citoyenne Emilie BOUNIEU (‘une femme qui peint’) Citoyenne GUERET la jeune (‘une Artiste appuyée sur un porte-feuille’)

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon CHARDIN (‘Tête d’étude’)

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Index

Note: bold page numbers indicate illustrations; italic page numbers indicate tables. Bold numbers preceded by Pl. refer to colour plates.

Abraham and Isaac (Charles-Antoine Coypel) 173, 176 Abundance (Oudry) 109 academicians 91–92, 93, 97, 103 in Académie’s hierarchy see hierarchical relations as beholders of portraits see under display of portraits diversity of backgrounds of 166 female see women artists lodgings in/around Louvre for 122–123, 124 post- 302–304 relationship with Académie of 17 social category of 8, 18, 22, 24 Académie d’Architecture (Louvre) 122 Académie de Saint-Luc 164, 212, 273, 286, 291–292 Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres (Louvre) 122, 123 Académie des Sciences (Louvre) 68, 69, 122 Académie Française (Louvre) 18, 54, 122 Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture admission to see admission process assemblées of see assemblées

as community 4, 6, 7, 11, 112, 119, 189, 200, 308 ‒ see also under morceau-deréception portraits directeurs of see directeurs disbanding of (1793) 11, 31, 301–308 ‒ inventory from 120 establishment/development of 18, 19, 22 founding members (anciens) 42, 49, 62, 70 n. 12, 167, 178 and the French state 7 friendships in see friendship funding for 22–23, 25 gaps in scholarship on 1 and guilds see guilds hierarchies in see hierarchical relations history/identity of see under morceaude-réception portraits lectures at see Conférences locations of 22, 122 material culture of 7 patrons/protectors of see patrons/ patronage prizes awarded by 25, 49, 66, 83, 86, 252 records of 5, 7, 8 ‒ see also Statuts et Règlements

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Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (continued) rituals/ceremonial objects of 8, 46, 119, 140–142, 141, 150 ‒ see also under admission process rivalry in see rivalries rules/regulations 25, 31 size of collection of 144–145 teaching at 46–51, 56, 83, 183 ‒ status of 49, 73 n. 69 women members of see women artists written histories of 57–58 Académie Royale des Sciences (Testelin) 66–67, 67–69 Accademia di San Luca (Rome) 18, 85 Adam, Lambert-Sigisbert 84, 148, 179 adjoints à recteur 25, 62, 77, 88, 97, 171, 214, 243 admission process 79–112 and Académie’s hierarchies 92–93, 97–112, 150 for foreigners/non-Catholics 93–94, 96 regulations 79, 80, 87–88 as rite of passage 92–98 ‒ and anthropology/symbolism 8, 96–97, 103 rituals/ceremonies of 77–79, 81, 90, 92–93, 119, 150 sources on 79–81 as symbolic rebirth 103 three stages of 82–92, 82, 93 ‒ académicien 91–92 ‒ agréé/réception see agréés ‒ étudiant see étudiants for women 93, 94–96 see also morceau-de-réception portraits Agar, Jacques d’ excluded as Protestant 74 n. 96 François Girardon 30, 62, 144, 314 Michel Anguier 30, 314 agréés 86–91, 93 career opportunities for 86 and family networks 165 joining fee (présent pécuniaire) paid by 90

as liminal stage 92, 96–97, 98 punishments for 87, 88, 90–91, 107 réception ceremony/oath for 90, 92, 93, 114 n. 62 relationship with sitter of 97–102 ‒ and Académie’s hierarchy 99, 102 ‒ and age 102 stage skipped by women/foreigners 96 time limit for 86–87 as transitional phase 92 work submitted by see morceau-deréception portraits agrément 80, 81, 83–86, 92, 93, 93, 96 allegorical paintings 63–65, 67, 109, 123, 148, 215, 264–265 Allegory of the Foundation of the Académie (Loir) 63, 64 Allegrain, Christophe-Gabriel 163 Allegrain, Christophe-Gabriel (Duplessis) 37, 39, 88, 320 Allou, Gilles 31, 62, 80–81, 90, 153 n. 24, 176, 319 Alsdorf, Bridget 305, 307 amateurs 84 anatomy classes 49, 83, 144 ancien-régime France 1, 11, 25, 162, 301, 307 anciens (founding members) 42, 49, 62, 70 n. 12, 85, 167, 178 Angiviller, comte d’ 80, 189, 206 n. 123, 283, 284, 291 Angiviller, comte d’ (Duplessis) 283 Anguier, Michel (d’Agar) 30, 314 Anguier, Michel (Revel) 72 n. 49, 315 anthropology 1, 6, 7, 9, 10 and gift see gift-giving and rites of passage 8, 96 Antinoüs (classical sculpture) 44, 142, 258 apirants see étudiants Apollo presiding over the union of the Académie Royale and the Académie de Saint-Luc (Poerson) 65, 65, 153 n. 23 architectural plans 120, 129–131, 129, 130, 146

index 343

Argenville, Dézallier d’ 111, 120, 123, 124, 127, 129, 135–136, 148, 177, 179, 187, 205 n. 107, 224, 225, 253, 266 art critics/criticism 276–280, 286, 288 gendered reading of 299 n. 128 art dealers 253 see also Wille, Johann-Georg art theory, histories of 6 artist’s studio 224–226, 227, 243, 301 assemblées 22, 23, 46, 58, 81, 90, 91–92, 152 nn. 12 & 13 and family networks 165 Martin’s painting of 125–129, 126, 131–133, 145, 146 portraits at 131–133 ‒ and seating arrangements 139–140, 154 n. 35 Assenay, Louis d’ 266, 267 Assenay, Louis d’ (Largillière) 269, 270 associés libres 85, 273 Aubry, Etienne Louis-Claude Vassé Pl.6, 51, 318, 319 Noël Hallé 109–111, 110, 318, 319 Auricchio, Laura 287 Aved, Jacques-Antoine-Joseph, JeanFrançois de Troy 159, 160, 193, 317, 319 Bacherach, Monsieur (Greuze) 235, 236, 237, 238 Baillet de Saint-Julien, LouisGuillaume 209, 276, 277–280 Barrois, François (Geuslain) 51, 77, 78, 79, 316, 320 Barthélemy, Antoine see Du Guernier, Louis Barthes, Roland 142 bas-reliefs 62, 63, 64, 142 Battles of Alexander (Lebrun) 123 Beaubrun, Charles 9 Beaubrun, Charles and Henri (Lambert) 31, 31, 91, 131, 162, 263, 314 Beaubrun, Henri 9, 22 Belle, Clément 102 Belle, Nicolas-Alexis-Simon 31, 153 n. 24), 163 François de Troy 158, 159, 316

Benhamou, Reed 7 Benoist, Antoine Jacques Buirette 32, 33, 33, 37, 102, 133, 142, 153 n. 24, 304, 315 Louis-Gabriel Blanchard 52–54, 54, 315, 320 Bessé, Henri de 88 Bhabha, Honi 96 Blanchard, Louis-Gabriel 87 Blanchard, Louis-Gabriel (Benoist) 52–54, 54, 142, 315, 320 Blondel, Jacques-François 122, 124, 146, 149–150 Blunt, Anthony 44, 254 Boilly, Léopold, Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio 302–304, 303, 305–306 Bonnet, Alain 305 Bosse, Abraham 46–49, 73 n. 74 Bouchardon, Edmé 90 Bouchardon, Edmé (Drouais) 54–55, 317, 319 Boucher, François 2–4, 45, 85, 94, 189, 243, 283 Boucher, François (Carmona) 61, 61 Boucher, François (Lundberg) 2, 3, 317, 320 Boucher, François (Roslin) 3–4, 3, 61 Boucher, François (Vénévault) 273 Boucher, Mme (Roslin) 4 Boullogne family 167 Boullogne, Bon de 62 Boullogne, Geneviève de 9, 95 Boullogne, Louis I de 9, 95 Boullogne, Louis I de (Louis II/Bon de Boullogne) 62 Boullogne, Louis II de 45, 58, 62, 77, 79 Boullogne, Louis II de (Gobert) Pl.5, 37, 46, 127, 134, 153 n. 24, 315 Bourbon Restoration (1820s) 305 Bourdon, Sébastien 22, 62, 74 n. 84 Bouys, André (self-portrait) 62 Brenet, Nicolas-Guy (Vestier) 33, 34, 42, 318, 320 brevets/brevetaires 19, 25 Brice, Germain 123, 124, 129

344 académie royale: a history in portraits

Bridan, Charles-Antoine (Mosnier) 33, 34, 148, 318, 320 Buirette, Jacques, Union of Painting and Sculpture 63, 64, 264 Buirette, Jacques (Benoist) 32, 33, 33, 37, 133, 153 n. 24, 304, 315 Buyster, Philippe de (Vignon) 37, 38, 153 n. 24, 315, 319 Cabinet des Tableaux (Louvre) 123 Caffieri, Jean-Jacques 62, 212 Caffieri, Jean-Jacques (Wertmüller) Pl.3, 42, 318, 320 Carmona, Manuel-Salvador 61, 61 Carré, Jacques 100, 153 n. 24 Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne 55, 55 Carriera, Rosalba 94, 95, 96 Castanier, François de 262, 264 Cathelin, Louis-Jacques, Louis Tocqué 199, 199 Catholicism 94, 179 Caviglia-Brunel, Susanna 127 Caylus, comte de 49, 84, 85, 94, 254, 255, 262 ‘Vie de Mignard’ 270, 271–272, 273, 292 Cazes, Pierre-Jacques 45 Challe, Charles-Michel-Ange 65, 191, 199 Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de 179 Double Self-Portrait Pl.13, 215–219, 227, 243, 253 ‒ repetition/mirroring of pose in 216, 217 ‒ signatures reversed on 218, 219 ‒ symbolism in 215, 216, 217, 218 friendship with Plattemontagne 10, 215–221, 241 ‒ philosophical basis for 216–217 ‒ and self-portrait in profile 221 ‒ site of 243 Self-Portrait with his wife 220–221, 221 Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de (Carré) 55, 55 Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de, and his wife (Plattemontagne) 220–221, 220

Champaigne, Philippe de 215, 220 chanceliers 22, 24, 30, 70 n. 13, 85, 91 Chardin, Jean-Siméon 152 n. 2, 280, 298 n. 120, 322 Chardin, Jean-Siméon (La Tour) 62, 96–97, 299 n. 135 Charmois, Martin de 22, 69 n. 1 Charmois, Martin de (Simonneau) 74 n. 84 Chennevières, Philippe de 305, 307 Chéreau, François, Self-Portrait (after Nicolas de Largillière) 268–269, 268 Chéron, Elisabeth-Sophie 95, 201 n. 17 Self-Portrait Pl.1, 27, 37, 96, 133–134, 153 n. 24, 170, 205 n. 107, 231, 287, 314, 320 Christ Carrying the Cross (Lebrun) 255, 257 Christ Carrying the Cross (Mignard) 255, 257 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas 57, 163, 166, 188–189, 240 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 24, 25, 63, 68, 255, 271 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (Lefebvre) 26, 27, 131, 313 Collin de Vermont, Hyacinthe 84, 85, 97–98, 105, 164, 248 n. 67 Collin de Vermont, Hyacinthe (Roslin) Pl.7, 98–100, 104, 317, 320 Collins, Randall 98 Comaroff, Jean 7 commissaires 84 compagnie 24, 87, 94, 98, 107 conférences 6, 51–54, 61, 125, 136–139, 171, 176, 192–193, 259, 264, 270 conseillers 25, 85, 92, 103, 214 Corneille, Michel 22 Corneille, Michel I (Tournières) 103, 148, 153 n. 24, 315, 319 Corneille, Michel (Jacob Van Loo) 19, 20, 25, 27, 51, 63, 71 n. 33, 93, 145, 320 Cotte, Robert de (Rigaud) 233 Cotte, Robert de (Vivien) 72 nn. 46 & 49, 233, 315 Cour Carré 123 Coustou, Guillaume I 45

index 345

Coustou, Guillaume I 159 Coustou, Guillaume II 159 Coustou, Nicolas 159 Coypel family 10, 161, 164, 166–177, 167, 178, 195 paintings of 168–170 residency in Louvre of 168, 171, 177 and royal patronage 170–171, 176 Coypel, Antoine 45, 91, 123, 133, 164, 167, 168, 170–173, 176–177 epistle to son at conférence 171–172 Self-Portrait 130, 131, 138, 139–140, 144, 159, 176, 180, 187, 253, 320, 321 Self-Portrait with his son 12, 168, 169, 170, 184, 289 Coypel, Charles-Antoine 45, 49, 96, 122, 167, 167, 168, 170–171, 172–173, 176, 177, 179, 265 Abraham and Isaac 173, 176 agrément/réception of 172, 173 as directeur 270 and Ecole Royale 183–184 as étudiant 171 and father/grandfather 170, 173, 184–187, 200 and Lebrun–Mignard rivalry 262, 292 Medea 173 Self-Portrait (1734) 173–176, 175 Self-Portrait (1739) 174 Self-Portrait (1746) Pl.10, 159, 173–176, 187, 198, 305, 321 Coypel, Noël 164, 166–167, 167, 168–170, 171, 321 as directeur 45, 168 Coypel, Noël (La Mare-Richart) 32, 32, 33, 37, 133, 153 n. 24, 159, 289, 314, 319 Coypel, Noël-Nicolas 168, 176–177, 179, 265 Simon Guillain 62, 63, 177, 320 Coypel, Noël-Nicolas (Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne) 177, 177 Coysevox, Antoine 45, 62 Charles Lebrun 260, 262, 266 Crow, Thomas 7

Dandré-Bardon, Michel-François 62, 74 n. 95, 83 Dandré-Bardon, Michel-François (Roslin) 62, 320 Danish Academy 196–197, 198, 212 d’Antin, Duc (Rigaud) 131 Darnton, Robert 6 Daullé, Jean see Rigaud, Hyacinthe (engraving, Daullé) David, Jacques-Louis 284, 291, 301, 302 Delaroche, Marie-Madeleine see Nattier, Marie-Madeleine Delyen, François 87, 316, 320, 321 Demachy, Pierre-Antoine 121, 121 Descamps, Jean-Baptiste 235 Deshays, François-Bruno 74 n. 95 Desjardins, Martin 91 Monument to Louis XIV 140, 141, 142 Pierre Mignard 261, 262, 266 Desjardins, Martin (Rigaud) see under Rigaud, Hyacinthe Desportes, Alexandre-François 83 Self-Portrait as a huntsman 130, 131, 132, 170, 304, 315, 321 Desportes, Alexandres 72 nn. 47 & 49 Desportes, Claude-François 42, 262 ‘Vie de Lebrun’ 270–271, 272, 273, 292, 295 n. 52 Desrochers, Étienne 61 Diderot, Denis 187–188, 198, 212, 237, 277, 280, 283, 296 n. 92 directeurs 22, 24, 44–46, 45, 80, 85, 92, 111–112 as shared post 294 n. 42 display of portraits 119–151, 306 academicians’ interaction with 134–144 ‒ as engaged spectators 136–139, 140, 142, 144 ‒ Lebrun’s/Mignard’s portraits 142–144 ‒ and objects in portraits 140–142 ‒ and ‘presence’ 134, 135, 139, 140, 146 ‒ and seating at assemblées 139–140, 154 n. 35

346 académie royale: a history in portraits

display of portraits (continued) chronological 56–57, 148–149 and history/identity of Académie 147–151 impact of salle des portraits 145–151 in public exhibitions 168–170 totemic value of 9, 149, 150–151 Doria, Arnauld 195 double portraits 31, 168, 169, 263–266, 293 n. 32 see also Double Self-Portrait under Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de Douglas, Mary 238 drawing 46–49, 51–54 Drevet, Pierre 221–223, 227–233, 241–242, 243 as engraver of Rigaud’s paintings 228 morceau de réception of 232–233, 248 nn. 61 & 62 Self-Portrait (after Rigaud, 1700) 228, 229, 229, 230, 232 Self-Portrait (after Rigaud, 1714) 268–269, 269 Drevet, Pierre (Rigaud) 230–232, 231 Drouais, François-Hubert, Edmé Bouchardon 54–55, 317, 319 Du Guernier, Louis 22 Du Guernier, Louis (Barthélemy) 19, 21, 25, 27, 51, 63, 71 n. 33, 313, 320 Duchange, Gaspard 58 Duchemin, Catherine 9, 95, 96 Duchemin, François Girardon 9, 95 Dufresnoy, Charles-Alphonse 24, 217, 294 n. 36 Dumont family 167, 177 Dumont le Romain, Jacques (La Tour) 37, 317 Dumont le Romain, Jean 45, 85, 205 n. 96 Dumoustier, Nicolas 71 n. 33 Duplessis, Joseph-Siffrèd Angiviller, comte d’ 283 Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain 37, 39, 88, 320 Joseph-Marie Vien 4, 37–42, 41, 88, 318, 320

and Roslin 281–284, 291 Self-Portrait 281, 281, 283–284, 322 Durkheim, Emile 149 Duro, Paul 258 Duvivier, Pierre-Simon-Benjamin 66 L’École de la liberté (2009 exhibition) 7 école du modèle (Louvre) 119, 125, 127, 129, 252 École nationale supérieure des beauxarts (Paris) 7 École royale des Beaux-Arts 305 École Royale des Elèves Protégés 49, 145, 183, 188–189, 200, 205 n. 96 closure of (1777) 189 Edelinck, Gérard 44, 221–227, 241, 243, 251 Charles Lebrun (after Largillière) 233, 259, 266 Louis XIV 74 n. 84 Self-Portrait in a red cloak (after Rigaud) 223–224, 223, 225, 232 Edelinck, Gérard (Rigaud) 223, 224, 226, 230–232, 233, 248 n. 67 Elle, Louis 94 engravers/engravings 6, 24 in Académie’s hierarchy 45, 65–66, 103 in histories of Académie 56, 57, 58, 61 kinship networks among 163, 179 painters’ collaborations with 224–225 seals/medals/jetons by 66 techniques of 225 entrainment 98, 116 n. 95 Errard, Charles 22, 23, 30, 45, 62, 74 n. 95 Errard, Charles (Dumoustier) 71 n. 33 ethnography 1, 5, 6, 11 étudiants 82–86, 87, 93, 97, 252 ballot for 85 and genre specialisation 83–84 and introducteurs/commissaires 84 and patronage/family networks 84–85, 94, 166 and power relationships 93

index 347

presentation of agrément by 80, 81, 83–86, 92 punishment/exclusion of 83 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice 62 families 4, 9–10, 159–200, 307 and Académie’s social order 159–161, 165–166 ‒ and opposition to nepotism 176, 177, 200 and agréments/réceptions 172–173, 176 dynasties in Académie 10, 167 godparenthood 164 and guilds 164–165 hierarchical relations in 184–187, 193, 195, 196–197 importance of, in ancien-régime France 162 and marriage alliances see marriage alliances and multi-figure portraits 161, 168, 169 paintings of 168–170, 184, 188 and patronage 164, 170–171 and prizes 166 resemblances in 159 rivalries in 179 in Statuts 165, 202 n. 27 three kinds of kinship bonds in 161 women in 163–164 see also specific families Fantin-Latour, Henri, A Studio in the Batignolles 307 Félibien, André 25, 51, 68, 111 fève-ballots 77, 85, 90 Fighting Gladiator (classical sculpture) 44 Flandrin, Jean-Louis 162 foreign artists 80, 93–94, 179, 283, 292 formats of portraits 27, 32, 36, 42, 287 Franche-Compté (Lebrun) 44 Franche-Comté conquered for the second time (Lebrun) 44, 258 Frémin, René 45

Fremin, René (La Tour) 209, 210, 212 French Revolution 11, 301–302 Fried, Michael 147 friendship 4, 9, 10, 200, 208–244, 251 age/institutional age irrelevant to 241–242 ambiguity of 214 breakdown of 238–241 Champaigne–Plattemontagne see under Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de and gifts/reciprocal gestures 10, 214, 215, 224, 230, 234–235, 237–239 ‒ social taboo in 238–239 and hierarchies 214, 221, 222, 226– 227, 229–230, 232, 240, 241–243 and homoeroticism 216–218 Lemoyne–la Tour see under La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de as model for professional relationships 220 philosophical basis of 216, 227 portrait exchanges at Salon exhibitions 209, 212 and portraitist–sitter relationship 215, 237 and professional association/ collaboration 224–226, 227 Rigaud–Edelinck–Drevet see under Rigaud, Hyacinthe studio as site of 224–226, 227, 243 as virtuous relationship 218, 220, 221 Wille–Greuze see under Greuze, JeanBaptiste frontispieces 58, 59, 67 Gady, Bénédicte 42 Galerie d’Apollon (Louvre) 124, 125, 144, 145, 159 Geertz, Clifford 1, 6, 234 General Meeting of the Académie (Martin) 125–129, 126, 131–133, 145, 146 genre paintings/painters 80, 103, 105, 181 Geoffrin, Marie-Thérèse 243–244 geometry classes 46, 49, 83

348 académie royale: a history in portraits

Geuslain, Charles-Etienne 77–79 François Barrois 51, 77, 78, 316, 320 Nicolas de Largillière 76, 77, 103, 148, 316, 320 gift-giving 10, 214, 215, 224, 230, 234–235, 237–239 and exchange relation/price 238–239 Girardon, François 91 Girardon, François (d’Agar) 30, 62, 144, 314 Girardon, François (Duchange) 58, 144 Girardon, François (Revel) 62, 144, 153 n. 24, 315 Girardon, François (Vivien) Pl.8, 62, 107–109, 130, 131, 140, 144, 315 Giroust, Marie-Suzanne 95, 95, 162 Jean-Baptiste Pigalle Pl.2, 36, 37–42, 96, 145, 317 Gobert, Pierre, Louis II de Boullogne Pl.5, 37, 46, 127, 134, 153 n. 24, 315 Goodman, Dena 227, 243–244 Grand Galerie (Louvre) 168–170 grand prix 49, 79, 83, 183 display of works of 125, 145, 149–150 and family networks 166 grande salle (Louvre) 117 n. 118, 125, 145, 148, 264, 265, 287 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 104, 181, 322 Johann-Georg Wille Pl.14, 234, 235–239 Monsieur Bacherach 235, 236, 237, 238 and Wille 10, 234–241 ‒ and Académie 239–241, 242 ‒ artist–sitter relationship 237 ‒ breakdown of relationship 238–241 ‒ gift-giving/reciprocal gestures between 234–235, 237–239 ‒ professional relationship between 234–245, 243 ‒ site of friendship between 243 ‒ and Wille’s son (PierreAlexandre) 235, 241 Grimou, Alexis 87 group portraits 68, 263 n. 32, 306–307

Guérin, Nicolas 57, 58, 91, 120, 129– 133, 129, 130, 134, 140, 146, 252 guidebooks 123, 129–131, 129, 130 guild (Maîtrise) 11, 22, 90, 164 Académie of see Académie de SaintLuc and families 164–165, 170 jonction with Académie 23–24, 25, 27, 46, 165, 215, 254 rivalry with Académie 19, 254, 271–272, 274, 291–292 Guillain, Simon 167 Guillain, Simon (Noël-Nicolas Coypel) 62, 63, 177, 320 Hallé family 162–163 Hallé, Claude-Guy 45, 163 Hallé, Claude-Guy (Le Gros) 51, 52, 52, 316, 320 Hallé, Marie-Anne 163 Hallé, Noël 163 Hallé, Noël (Aubry) 109–111, 110, 318, 319 Halliday, Tony 302, 309 n. 15 Hallier, Nicolas, Henri Testelin 25, 71 n. 33, 313, 320 harpsichords 190, 192, 195, 206 n. 130 Haverman, Margareta 88, 94, 95 Heinich, Natalie 18 Hellman, Mimi 135 Hérault family 164, 167 Hérault, Madeleine 167, 168 hierarchical relations 8, 10, 24, 46, 62, 82–92, 82, 92, 97–112, 150 and age 102–103 between artist and sitter 97–102, 104–107 in display of portraits 131, 134 in families 184–187, 193, 195, 196–197, 198 and friendship 214, 221, 222, 226– 227, 229–230, 232, 240, 241–243 of genres/media 45, 65–66, 79, 104, 107–111, 226–227, 240, 242 and morceau-de-réception portraits 55–56, 62, 65, 104–112, 209 post-Revolution 302–303

index 349

and rivalry 251 and social tension 104 histories of the Académie 56–69 and engravings 56, 57, 58, 61 recueils 58–61 written 57–58, 270–273 see also history/identity of Académie under morceau-de-réception portraits historiographes/secrétaires-historiographes 44, 57–58, 57 history painting/painters 49, 62, 65, 67, 68, 80, 83, 103–104, 107, 163, 215, 240, 305 competition (1727) 265 rivalry between 284 homosexuality 216–217 honoraires amateurs 71 n. 37, 167, 293 n. 29 Horthemels sisters 163 Houasse, René-Antoine (Trouvain) 58 Houdon, Jean-Antoine 49, 144 Hulst, Henri van 27, 57–58, 71 n. 37, 226, 246 n. 42, 266 Hyde, Melissa 287 Ingold, Tim 150–151 introducteurs 84, 85, 93, 94 inventories 58, 120, 144–145, 146, 148, 152 n. 2, 200 n. 1, 319–320 James, Ariane 224 Jeaurat, Etienne 97–98, 105 Jeaurat, Etienne (Roslin) 98, 100–102, 101, 103, 104–105, 304, 317, 320 Johnson, McAllister 305 jonction 23–24, 25, 27, 46, 165, 215, 254 Jouvenet family 162–163 Jouvenet, François 62, 163, 315, 321 Jouvenet, Jean 45, 62, 91, 163, 164 Jouvenet, Jean (Trouvain) 58 Julienne, Jean de 187, 267 kinship see families La Boétie, Étienne de 216–217 La Font de Saint-Yenne 276 La Force, Piganiol de 57

La Fosse, Charles de 45, 91, 164 La Fosse, Charles de (Duchange) 58 La Hyre, Laurent de 22, 23 La Mare-Richart, Florent de see Coypel, Noël La Rochefoucauld, François de 227, 229 La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de 10, 49, 86, 94, 273 Charles Parrocel 209, 211, 212 friendship with Lemoyne 208–214, 241–244 ‒ in Académie’s minutes 212–214 ‒ and institutional hierarchies 242–243, 251 ‒ portrait exchange between 209–214 ‒ site of 243–244 Jacques Dumont le Romain 37, 317 Jean Restout 96–97, 209, 212, 317 Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne (1747) 208, 209, 214 Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne (1763) 212, 213 Jean-Siméon Chardin 62, 96–97, 299 n. 135 Louis de Silvestre Pl.12, 209, 212 and Perronneau 276–277, 280 René Fremin 209, 210, 212 and Salon exhibitions 274–280 Self-Portrait 274–275, 275, 277, 280, 321 La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de, (JeanBaptiste II Lemoyne) 209–214, 212 La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de (Perronneau) 277–280, 278 Labille-Guiard, Adélaïde 11, 95 Augustin Pajou 36, 36, 37, 49, 287, 318, 320 Charles-Amédée-Philippe Van Loo 37, 40, 318, 320 portrait submissions to 1783 Salon 287 rivalry with Vigée-Lebrun 286–291 Self-Portrait with Two Students Pl.16, 281, 289, 322 Lagrenée, Jean-Jacques 178

350 académie royale: a history in portraits

Lagrenée, Louis-Jean-François 84, 178 Lagrenée, Louis-Jean-François (Mosnier) 148, 318, 320 Lambert, Martin 90–91 Charles and Henri Beaubrun 31, 31, 91, 131, 263, 314 Lancret, Nicolas 83 landscape painting/artists 5–6, 80, 103, 148 Lanoë, Frédérique 220–221 Largillière, Nicolas de 45, 94, 104, 109, 165, 293 n. 32 Charles Lebrun 42–45, 43, 79, 87, 103, 130, 131, 140, 142–144, 254, 258–259, 287, 289, 315 ‒ Edelinck’s engraving after 233, 259 ‒ and Rigaud’s double portrait 265–266 Louis d’Assenay 269, 270 and Rigaud 251, 262–270, 292 ‒ competitive relationship between 266–270, 283 Self-Portrait 187, 266–270, 266, 281, 320 ‒ Chéreau’s etching of 268–269, 268 Largillière, Nicolas de (Geuslain) 76, 77, 103, 148, 316, 320 Le Botteux, Pierre 103 Le Gros, Jean 90 Hallé, Claude-Guy 51, 52, 52, 316, 320 Le Hongre, Etienne 87 Le Sueur, Eustache 22 Le Sueur, Eustache (Plattemontagne) 62 Le Sueur, Pierre 321 Carle Van Loo 42, 159, 182, 183, 317 Pierre Mosnier 103 Lebrun, Charles 11, 22, 23, 24, 30, 74 n. 84, 123, 245 n. 12 Christ Carrying the Cross 255, 257 conférences given by 51–52, 54 Desportes’ biography of 270–271, 273 as directeur 44–45, 45 Elevation of the Cross 255 and family networks 164 as founder of Académie 42, 49

Franche-Comté conquered for the second time 44, 258 rivalry with Mignard see under Mignard, Pierre Tent of Darius 44, 255, 256 Lebrun, Charles (Coysevox) 260, 262 Lebrun, Charles (Largillière) see under Largillière, Nicolas de Lebrun, Charles, and Pierre Mignard (Rigaud) 262–266, 263, 267, 270 Leclerc, Sébastien II (Nonnotte) 46–49, 47, 317, 320 Ledbury, Mark 104 Lefebve, Claude, Jean-Baptiste Colbert 26, 27, 131, 313 Lefrançois, Thierry 176 Lemaire, François see Sarazin, Jacques Lemoyne family 167, 200 Lemoyne, François 83, 265 Lemoyne, Jean 167, 190, 192 Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste II 10, 45, 49, 62, 122 and La Tour see under La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de Maurice-Quentin de La Tour 209–214, 212 Noël-Nicolas Coypel 177, 177 Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste II (La Tour, 1747) 208, 209, 214 Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste II (La Tour, 1763) 212, 213 Lépicié, Bernard 57, 58–61, 148, 262 lettres de provisions/réception 91, 103 lettres patentes 23, 25, 49 Levallois-Clavel, Gilberte 228–229, 233, 247 n. 55 Levrac, Robert see Tournières, Robert Life class at the Académie (Natoire) 127, 128, 129 life drawing classes 23, 46, 49 Loir, Alexis 86, 98 Loir, Nicolas, Allegory of the Foundation of the Académie 63, 64 Loir, Nicolas (Tiger) 30, 30, 46, 153 n. 24, 314 Louis XIV 25, 68, 121 Louis XIV (Edelinck) 74 n. 84

index 351

Louis XIV Protecting the Arts (Thomassin) 58, 59 Louis XIV (Testelin) 27, 44, 131, 313 Louis XV (Stiémart) 68–69, 72 nn. 46 & 49, 316 Louis XVI (Duplessis) 283 Louvois, marquis de 254, 255, 271 Louvre 9, 22, 119–151 abundance of art objects in 123–124 academicians’ lodgings in 122–123, 124, 244, 252 Académie’s first move to (1656) 22 Académie’s permanent move to (1692) 22, 119 activities conducted in 121–123 as artistic neighbourhood 122–123 changes in layout of 119 Colonnade of 121, 121 école du modèle 119, 125, 127, 129, 252 Galerie d’Apollon 124, 125, 144, 145, 159 Grand Galerie 168–170 grande salle 117 n. 118, 125, 145, 148, 264, 265, 287 images of/documents on 120, 125–134 ‒ architectural plans/guidebook 120, 129–131, 129, 130, 146 ‒ of assemblée 125–129, 126 ‒ insider/outsider perspectives 120, 127, 129 ‒ of teaching 127, 128, 129 institutions housed in 122 inventories of collections in 58, 120, 144–145, 146, 148, 200 n. 1, 319–320 location of 122 locations of Académie in 124–125, 124 Pavillon Denon 305 post-Revolution 304 reception room/salon 129–131, 129 salle d’assemblée see salle d’assemblée salle des portraits see salle des portraits salle où sont les Vases de Medicis 125, 133–134, 133, 144 see also display of portraits Lundberg, Gustave 4, 94 François Boucher 2, 3, 317, 320

McClellan, Andrew 304 Maîtrise/maîtres see guild Mansfield, Elizabeth 284 Marigny, marquis de 94, 166, 188, 239 Marmontel, Jean-François 243 marriage alliances 161, 162, 163–164, 189–190, 192 and artistic rivalry 195–196 Martin, Jean-Baptiste 125–129, 126, 131–133, 145, 146 master–student relationship 49, 93, 193–195, 230 Mauss, Marcel 214, 222, 237 Maza, Sarah 162 médailles du quartier 49 Medea (Charles-Antoine Coypel) 173 Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio (Boilly) 302–304, 303, 305–306 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’Académie Royale (van Hulst) 7, 27, 46, 57–58, 71 n. 37, 255 Mercier, Sébastien 121 Metz, Berbier du 25 Michel, Christian 6–7 microhistory 1, 6, 9 Miger, Simon-Charles 302 Mignard, Nicolas 9 Mignard, Nicolas (Paul Mignard) 27–30, 28, 153 n. 24, 314, 320 Mignard, Paul 179 Nicolas Mignard 27–30, 28, 153 n. 24, 165, 314, 320 Mignard, Pierre 11, 24, 45, 179, 217 appointed head of Académie 254 Christ Carrying the Cross 255, 257 rivalry with Lebrun 142–144, 253–262, 291–292, 305 ‒ institutional 153, 154 ‒ in later biographies 270–273 ‒ and later generations of academicians 262 ‒ origins of 254 ‒ paintings resulting from 254, 255–258 ‒ and querelle du coloris 253, 264–265

352 académie royale: a history in portraits

Mignard, Pierre rivalry with Lebrun (continued) ‒ and Rigaud’s double portrait 262–266, 263, 272, 292 ‒ in salle d’assemblée/grande salle images 259–262, 264, 265 ‒ and self-portrait 254–255 Self-Portrait Pl.5, 133, 143, 153 n. 24, 187, 254–255, 258–259, 262, 266, 281, 283, 298 n. 126, 305, 320 ‒ Vermeulen’s portrait after 259, 259 Tent of Darius 255, 256 Mignard, Pierre (Desjardins) 261, 262 Mignard, Pierre (Rigaud) see under Rigaud, Hyacinthe Minerva Discovering Truth (Coypel) 123 miniatures/miniaturists 5, 19, 142, 273, 298 n. 119 minutes of meetings 5, 7, 8, 23, 24, 42, 48, 81, 172, 214, 233, 252 Mirzoeff, Nicolas 7, 301–302 Moitte family 166 Montaigne, Michel de 216–217, 218, 219, 227 Monument to Louis XIV (Desjardins) 140, 141, 142 morceau-de-réception portraits 8–9, 11, 17, 18, 25, 87, 133, 313–318 and Académie as community 1, 2, 8, 9, 17, 37, 305–307 and admission process 77, 79, 80–81, 87–90, 91 costume/iconography in 18, 19, 27–30, 32, 33, 36, 37–56 ‒ books 18, 30, 54, 55, 68 ‒ drawing tools 52, 55 ‒ scientific instruments 68 ‒ and wealth/status 42, 51 of deceased members 56, 62, 91, 142 of directeurs/other positions 44–46 display of 119, 120, 123, 124, 131, 133–134, 140 and drawing 51–54 by engravers 56, 57, 58, 61 evolution of 27–42 and families 165

formal consistency of 27, 30, 31–36, 42, 100, 145 and hierarchy of Académie 55–56, 62, 65, 97–102, 104–112, 209 and history paintings, compared 68–69 and history/identity of Académie 1–2, 17–18, 23–24, 25, 44, 56–59, 119, 147–151 ‒ and chronological display 56–57, 148–149 ‒ and engravings 56, 57, 58, 61 ‒ and portraits as self-image 1–2, 4, 5, 8, 25, 42, 56, 66–67 institutional ideals in 17, 19, 42–56 ‘lifecycle’ of 103 likeness/ressemblance in 37, 42, 142 and liminal stage 95–97 number of, in Académie 120, 144, 145, 152 n. 3 pastel portraits 36, 107–109 plaques/biographical details attached to 61, 102–103 and portraitist–sitter relationship 97–102 post-Revolution, re-housing of 304–305 pro tem surrogate 233 of royalty/patrons 27, 30, 57 rules/ceremonies for 87–91 of sculptors 33, 33, 35, 36, 51 sizes/formats of 27, 32, 36, 42 and teaching roles 46–51 totemic value of 9, 149, 150–151, 305 by women artists 96 Mosnier, Jean-Laurent 145 Charles-Antoine Bridan 33, 34, 148, 318, 320 Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée 148, 318, 320 Mosnier, Pierre (Le Sueur) 103 Mousnier, Roland 162, 164 Musée des Augustins (Toulouse) 7 Musée des Beaux-Arts (Tours) 7 Musée spécial de l’école française (Versailles) 304 music 181, 190, 191, 192, 216

index 353

Natoire, Charles-Joseph 85 Life class at the Académie 127, 128, 129 Nattier family 10, 161, 189–199, 200, 200 Nattier, Jean-Baptiste 217 Nattier, Jean-Marc 84, 85, 164, 200 Louis Tocqué 193–195, 194 and Louis Tocqué see under Louis Tocqué Self-Portrait with his Family 190–192, 191, 198–199, 253, 322 Nattier, Jean-Marc (Tocqué) 197–198, 197 Nattier, Jean-Marc (Voiriot) 52, 53, 55, 317, 319 Nattier, Marc 30–31, 72 n. 49 Gilbert de Sève 31, 153 n. 24, 314, 319 Marquis de Seignelay 31, 153 n. 24, 314, 319 Nattier, Marie-Catherine-Pauline 190, 190, 191, 192, 199 Nattier, Marie-Madeleine (née Delaroche) 190, 190, 192 networks 4, 9, 84–85, 94, 161, 163–164, 165, 307, 308 see also under sculptors/sculpture; engravers/engravings Nocret, Jean (Jean-Charles Nocret) 27–30, 29, 153 n. 24, 314 Nocret, Jean-Charles 172 Jean Nocret 27–30, 29, 153 n. 24, 165, 314 Nonnotte, Donat, Sébastien II Le Clerc 46–49, 47, 317, 320 officiers 24, 46, 54, 69, 302 in Académie’s hierarchy 92, 93 and admission procedure 77–79, 84, 85, 88, 97, 98 Olausson, Magnus 283 O’Neill, Mary 224 Ordre de la présentation des Aspirans 80, 87, 93 Origin of Painting, The (Tournières) 103, 111 Orleans, Philippe d’ 30, 170 Orleans, Philippe II d’ 170–171

Orry, Philibert 94 Oudry, Jean-Baptiste 84, 273 Abundance 109 Oudry, Jean-Baptiste (Perronneau) 108, 109, 304–305, 317 Painting and Sculpture United by Drawing under the Protection of Louis XV (Challe) 65, 142 Pajou, Augustin (Labille-Guiard) 36, 36, 37, 49, 287, 318, 320 Palais Royal (Paris) 22, 56–57, 119, 170 Parrocel, Charles 62, 164 Parrocel, Charles (La Tour) 209, 211, 212 patrons/patronage 27, 30, 57, 84–85, 94, 131, 166 and family networks 164, 170–171 Pavillon Denon (Louvre) 305 Perreau, Stéphane 224 Perrin, Anne-Françoise 167, 168 Perronneau, Jean-Baptiste 86, 299 n. 135 Jean-Baptiste Oudry 108, 109, 304–305, 317 and La Tour 251, 276–277, 280 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour 277–280, 278 perspective classes 46–49, 83 Peyron, Jean-François-Pierre 284, 304 Philippe I 170 Pierre, Jean-Baptiste-Marie 45, 80, 84, 85, 283 Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste 94, 122, 163, 166 Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste (Giroust) Pl.2, 36, 37–42, 96, 145, 317 Piles, Roger de 37, 142, 265, 294 n. 36 Plattemontagne, Nicolas de 62 and Champaigne see under Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de Double Self-Portrait see under Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de Plattemontagne, Nicolas de (Ranc) 105–107, 106, 134, 316 Poerson, Charles-François 65, 164 Apollo presiding over the union of the Académie Royale and the Académie de Saint-Luc 65, 65, 153 n. 23

354 académie royale: a history in portraits

Poerson, Charles-François (Desrochers) 61 Pointon, Marcia 142 portraitist–sitter relationship 5, 97–102, 104–105 and friendship 215, 237 portraits 1–5 and artists’ networks see networks display of see display of portraits double see double portraits and history of Académie see histories of the Académie as honouring individuals 37 in literature 135 multi-figure 161 official/unofficial 7–10 pairs of 4, 134, 220–221, 259, 262–264, 266, 267–269, s286 as personal insight 2–4, 7 six properties of 4–5 and temporality 192, 198, 199 portraits of academicians 1–4, 7–9, 17–69 biographical notes accompanying 61 chronological display of 56–57, 148–149 dress in 18, 19 morceau-de-réception see morceau-deréception portraits origins/development of 18–25 and status of artists 18–22, 30 ‒ as gentlemen/intellectuals 18, 19, 27–30, 51 premier peintre du roi 167 présent pécuniaire 90, 165 presenteurs see introducteurs professeurs 24, 25, 46, 85 and Académie’s hierarchy 92, 97–98, 99 Protestant artists 94, 283, 284, 289, 292 banning of 57, 74 n. 96 Quadroulx, François 49 querelle du coloris 253, 264

Rabon, Pierre, Antoine de Ratabon 27, 313, 320 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 242 Radisich, Paula Rea 289 Ranc, Jean 86 François Verdier 50, 51, 134, 153 n. 24, 316, 319 Nicolas de Plattemontagne 105–107, 106, 134, 316 Ratabon, Antoine de 23, 45, 45 Ratabon, Antoine de (Rabon) 27, 313, 320 Reboul, Marie-Thérèse 95, 95, 96, 287, 298 n. 119 réceptions 80, 81, 90, 92, 93, 93, 96, 97, 111, 114 n. 62 as symbolic rebirth 103 recteurs 24, 25, 77, 85, 294 n. 42 recueils 58, 61, 148, 149, 224 Règlement sur la forme des présentations des Aspirans 80, 83, 86 religion 57, 74 n. 96, 93, 94, 164 see also Protestant artists Reni, Guido 253 Renou, Antoine 57 Restout family 162–163 Restout, Jean 45, 84, 85, 163 Restout, Jean (La Tour) 96–97, 209, 212, 317 Restout, Jean-Bernard 163 Revel, Gabriel François Girardon 62, 153 n. 24, 315 Michel Anguier 72 n. 49, 153 n. 24, 315 Riegl, Alois 68 Rigaud, Hyacinthe 10, 72 nn. 46 & 49, 77, 86, 91, 140 Charles Lebrun and Pierre Mignard 262–263, 263, 267, 270 Duc d’Antin 131 engraving collection of 224 and family networks 164 friendships of 221–233 ‒ with Edelinck 221–227, 230–232, 241, 243, 251 ‒ with Drevet 221–223, 227–233, 241–242, 243

index 355

Gérard Edelinck 223, 224, 226, 230–232, 233, 248 n. 67 ‒ 1707 version 247 n. 44 and Largillière see under Largillière, Nicolas de Martin Desjardins 88, 89, 103, 130, 131, 135–139, 140, 304, 315 Pierre Drevet 230–232, 231 Pierre Mignard 130, 131, 136–139, 137, 142–144, 259, 287, 304 ‒ and Rigaud’s double portrait 265, 266 Robert de Cotte 233 Saint Andrew 103 Self-Portrait (c.1710) 187, 266–270, 267, 281 Self-Portrait in a red cloak (1692) 222, 267, 321 ‒ Edelinck’s engraving after 223–224, 223, 225, 232 Self-Portrait in a turban 228, 228, 232, 247 n. 53 ‒ Drevet’s engraving after 228, 229, 229, 230, 232 Rigaud, Hyacinthe (Le Boutteux) 103, 287 Daullé’s engraving after 60, 61 rites of passage see under admission process rivalry 9, 10–11, 220, 251–292, 307 between Académie and guild 19, 254, 271–272, 274 and competition 251–252, 265, 266–270 and hierarchies 251 and marriage alliances 195–196 in Salon exhibitions see under Salons Robert, Hubert (Vigée-Lebrun) 289– 291, 290 Roettiers family 167 Roettiers, Charles-Norbert 66 Roettiers, Joseph-Charles 66 Rosenberg, Pierre 220–221 Roslin, Alexandre 3–4, 3, 62, 74 n. 95, 95 as agréé 94, 98 and Duplessis 281–284, 291

engraving after 61, 61 Etienne Jeaurat 98, 100–102, 101, 103, 104–105, 304, 317, 320 Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont Pl.7, 98–100, 104, 317, 320 Michel-François Dandré-Bardon 62, 320 Self-Portrait (1783) 281, 282, 283–284, 322 Self-Portrait with his wife (1767) Pl.9, 162, 263 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 135, 233, 234 Saint Martin, Mademoiselle de 273 Saint-Gelais, Dubois de 57, 58, 61, 148 Saint-Georges, Guillet de 44, 57, 61, 143 salle d’assemblée (Louvre) 65, 119, 125, 127–129, 131–133, 136, 140, 144–146, 150, 306 Lebrun’s/Mignard’s portraits in 142–144, 259, 265 size of collection in 144–145 salle des portraits (Louvre) 145–151 families in 159, 161 function of 149–150 and history/identity of Académie 147–151 salle où sont les Vases de Medicis (Louvre) 125, 133–134, 133, 144 Salmon, Xavier 191, 206 n. 130 Salons 11, 19, 82, 86, 91, 122, 181, 183, 188, 227, 247 n. 49 and rivalries 273, 274–292 ‒ between history painters 284 ‒ between women artists 284–291 ‒ and self-portraits 281–284 as site of friendships 209, 212, 240, 241, 243–244 Sarazin, Jacques 22, 23 Sarazin, Jacques (Lemaire) 16, 17, 18, 24, 27, 51, 54, 134, 148, 153 n. 24, 305, 313, 319 Schachter, Max 219 Schnapper, Antoine 23 Scott, Katie 7, 264

356 académie royale: a history in portraits

sculptors/sculpture 24, 51, 80, 83, 123, 159 networks/kinship ties among 163, 177, 179, 212 status of 18, 103, 104, 107–109 seals 66, 67 secrétaires/secrétaires-historiographes 44, 57–58, 57, 79, 85, 88, 103 Seignelay, Marquis de (nattier) 31, 72 n. 49, 153 n. 24, 314, 319 self-portraits 61, 83, 187 and rivalry 252–253 Seneca 216 Sève, Gilbert de (nattier) 31, 153 n. 24, 314, 319 Shearman, John 136 Sheriff, Mary 289, 299 n. 128 Silvestre family 167 Silvestre, Louis de 84, 94 Silvestre, Louis II de 45 Silvestre, Louis de (La Tour) Pl.12, 209, 212 Simonneau, Louis see Charmois, Martin de Somis, Christine 178, 180, 181, 184, 188–189 Sparre, comte de 94 Statuts et Règlements 18, 19, 23–24, 25, 31, 46, 54, 98, 302 on admission rules 80, 83, 86, 87–88, 90, 91, 291 ‒ voting rights 85 families in 165, 202 n. 27 prohibition of life classes in 73 n. 74 ranks in 82, 82, 103 on rivalry 251–252 Stiémart, François, Louis XV 68–69, 72 nn. 46, 47 & 49, 316 still life painters 5–6, 72 n. 49, 80, 103, 109, 148 student prizes 25, 49, 66, 83, 86, 252 studio see artist’s studio Studio in the Batignolles (Fantin-Latour) 307 Sue, Jean-Joseph (Voiriot) 48, 49 syndics 24

Taillasson, Jean-Joseph 84 Tavernier, François 57, 143 Tent of Darius (Lebrun) 44, 255, 256 Tent of Darius (Mignard) 255, 256 Testelin, Henri 9, 27, 94, 178 Académie Royale des Sciences 66–67, 67–69 Louis XIV 27, 44, 131, 313 as secrétaire 46, 57, 57 Testelin, Henri (Tiger) Pl.4, 30, 142, 314 Testelin, Louis 9, 178 Testelin, Louis (Hallier) 25, 71 n. 33, 313, 320 Thomassin, Simon-Henri, Louis XIV Protecting the Arts 58, 59 Tiger, Jean 31 Henri Testelin Pl.4, 30, 142, 314 Nicolas Loir 30, 30, 46, 153 n. 24, 314 Tocqué family 10, 189–199, 200, 200 Tocqué, Louis 84, 94, 136–139, 140, 200, 273, 316 conférence of 192–193 death/legacy of 199 and Jean-Marc Nattier 189–190, 191, 192–193 Jean-Marc Nattier 197–198, 197 and Jean-Marc Nattier 193–200, 212 ‒ and age gap/hierarchy between 193, 195, 198, 200 ‒ artistic collaboration between 195–197, 200 marriage of 195 Tocqué, Louis (Cathelin) 199, 199 Tocqué, Louis (Jean-Marc Nattier, 1739) 193–195, 194 Tocqué, Louis (Jean-Marc Nattier, c.1759–1762) 196, 197–198 Tocqué, Marie-Catherine-Pauline (née Nattier) 190, 190, 191, 192, 199 Tortebat, François, Simon Vouet 71 n. 38, 313 totems 9, 149, 150–151 Tournehem, Lenormant de 80, 183 Tournières, Robert 104 Corneille, Michel I 103, 148, 153 n. 24, 315, 319 Origin of Painting 103, 111

index 357

trésoriers 24, 85, 103, 120 Trouvain, Antoine 58 Troy family 159, 162 Troy, François de 45, 159, 161, 321 Troy, François de (Belle) 158, 159, 316 Troy, Jean-François de 96, 159–161, 172, 265 Troy, Jean-François de (Aved) 159, 160, 193, 317, 319 Tuileries 123 Turner, Victor 92, 96, 100, 103 Union of Painting and Sculpture (Buirette) 63, 64, 265 University of Paris 22 Valade, Jean 84, 317, 320 Valerius, Gudrun 6–7 Vallayer-Coster, Anne 95, 95, 287, 298 nn. 119 & 120 Van Clève, Corneille 45, 143 van Gennep, Arnold 92 Van Loo family 10, 161, 177–189, 178, 195 after Carle’s death 188–189 brother–sister relationship in 186–188 and Ecole Royale 183–184, 188 as extended ménage 179, 180–183, 184, 188, 189 residence of 183 Van Loo, Amédée 179, 180 Van Loo, Carle 45, 84, 178, 178, 179, 180, 188, 243, 322 as gouverneur of Ecole Royale 183–184, 200, 205 n. 96 Van Loo, Carle, and his family (LouisMichel Van Loo) Pl.11, 180–181, 183, 184, 188 Van Loo, Carle (Le Sueur) 42, 159, 182, 183, 317 Van Loo, Charles-Amédée-Philippe (Labille-Guiard) 37, 40, 318, 320 Van Loo, Jacob 93, 178 accused of murder 179 Michel Corneille 19, 20, 25, 27, 51, 63, 71 n. 33, 93, 145, 313, 320

Van Loo, Jean 178, 179 Van Loo, Jean-Baptiste 159, 178, 178, 179, 180, 184, 187 morceau de réception of 187 son’s portraits of see under Van Loo, Louis-Michel Van Loo, Jules-César 178, 180, 184 Van Loo, Louis-Abraham 178, 179–180 Van Loo, Louis-Michel 178, 178, 179, 180 Carle Van Loo and his family Pl.11, 180–181, 183, 184, 188, 205 n. 111 and Ecole Royale 188, 189 Self-Portrait with his sister and a portrait of his father 186, 187–188, 322 Self-Portrait with a portrait of his father 159, 161, 184–187, 185, 185, 305, 320 ‒ donation of 187 in Spain 180, 184, 188 Van Loo, Marie-Anne 178, 186, 187–188, 189 Vassé, Louis-Claude (Aubry) Pl.6, 51, 318, 319 Vénévault, Nicolas 273 Verdier, François (Ranc) 50, 51, 134, 153 n. 24, 316, 319 Vermeulen, Cornelius, Self-Portrait (after Pierre Mignard) 259–262, 259, 266 Vernet, Joseph 243, 303 Veronese, Paulo 123 Versailles, Château de 146, 258 Vestier, Antoine, Nicolas-Guy Brenet 33, 34, 42, 318, 320 Victories, Place des (Paris) 140, 142 Vien, Joseph-Marie 4, 45, 84–85, 94, 95, 283, 284, 287 Vien, Joseph-Marie (Duplessis) 4, 37–42, 41, 88, 318, 320 View of the Colonnade of the Louvre (Demachy) 121, 121 Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth-Louise 11, 95, 281 Hubert Robert 289–291, 290

358 académie royale: a history in portraits

Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth-Louise (continued) rivalry with Labille-Guiard 286–291 Self Portrait with her daughter 281, 286, 288, 289–291, 322 Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat 281, 284–287, 285, 289, 322 Vignon, Claude-François 165, 319 Vignon, Philippe, Philippe De Buyster 37, 38, 153 n. 24, 315, 319 Vincent, François-André 84, 95, 284, 291, 292, 304 Vivien, Joseph François Girardon Pl.8, 62, 107–109, 130, 131, 140, 315 Robert de Cotte 72 nn. 46 & 49, 233, 315 Voiriot, Guillaume Jean-Joseph Sue 48, 49 Jean-Marc Nattier 52, 53, 55, 317, 319 voix délibérative 85, 90, 103 Vouet, Simon 254

Vouet, Simon (Tortebat) 71 n. 38, 313 Voyer, marquis de 273 Wedding at Cana (Veronese) 123 Wertmüller, Adolf-Ulric, Jean-Jacques Caffieri Pl.3, 42, 318, 320 Wille, Johann-Georg see under Greuze, Jean-Baptiste Wille, Johann-Georg (Greuze) Pl.14, 234, 235–239 Wine, Humphrey 7, 165–166 women artists 5, 27, 80, 85, 95, 167, 202 n. 45, 292 admission process for 93, 94–96 gendered criticism of 299 n. 128 and kinship networks 163–164 and models of académicienne 287–291 officier status denied to 85, 291 rivalry between 284–291 Yvon, Claude 233–234 Zemon Davis, Natalie 7