Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France

PORTRAITURE AND POLITICS IN REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

AMY FREUND

The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania

THIS BOOK IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A COLLABORATIVE GRANT FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION.

An earlier version of chapter 2 first appeared in The Legislative Body: Print Portraits of the National Assembly, 1789–1791, Eighteenth-Century Studies 41 (Spring 2008): 337–58. © The Johns Hopkins University Press.

An earlier version of chapter 4, "The Citoyenne Tallien in Prison," was published by the College Art Association in the September 2011 issue of the Art Bulletin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freund, Amy, author.

Portraiture and politics in revolutionary France / Amy Freund.

p.   cm

Summary: Examines the genre of portraiture and the political and cultural role of images in Revolutionary France. Focuses on portraiture as a privileged site for the elaboration of modern notions of selfhood and political agency—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-271-06194-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Portraits, French—18th century. 2. Portraits—Political aspects—France—History—18th century. 3. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Portraits. I. Title.

N7604.F74 2014

704.9’42094409033—dc23

2013032622

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in Hong Kong through Asia Pacific Offset, Inc.

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 16802–1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Additional credits: frontispiece, Laneuville, The Citoyenne Tallien in a Prison Cell at La Force, Holding Her Hair Which Has Just Been Cut (fig. 53), detail; p. v, Bellier, The Citizen Nau-Deville in the Uniform of the National Guard (fig. 35), detail; p. 14, Dumont, Luigi Cherubini (fig. 8), detail; p. 48, anon., Charles-François, comte de Marsanne de Fontjuliane (fig. 25), detail; p. 80, Wertmüller, Jean-Ernest Schickler (fig. 34), detail; p. 126, Laneuville, The Citoyenne Tallien in a Prison Cell at La Force, Holding Her Hair Which Has Just Been Cut (fig. 53), detail; p. 160, Gérard, Louis-Marie Revelliere-Lépeaux (fig. 65), detail; p. 198, Vincent, Portrait of Marianne Boyer-Fonfrède and Her Son (fig. 89), detail.

   CONTENTS   

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE

Selling Citizenship

TWO

The Legislative Body

THREE

Aux Armes, Citoyens!

The Terror

FOUR

The Citoyenne Tallien in Prison

FIVE

The National Elysée

SIX

Duty and Happiness

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

   ILLUSTRATIONS   

1   Anonymous, Moyen expéditif du peuple français pour démeubler un aristocrate (The French people’s expeditious means of removing the furniture of an aristocrat), 1790. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

2   Martin Drolling, Michel Belot, 1791. Inv. 381, Musée des beaux-arts d’Orléans. Photo: Musée des beaux-arts d’Orléans.

3   Nicolas Henri Jeaurat de Bertry, An Allegory of the Revolution with a Portrait Medallion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1794. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo: Snark / Art Resource, New York.

4   Jacques-Louis David, Jacobus Blauw, 1795. Inv. NG 8495, National Gallery, London. Bought, 1984. Photo © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, New York.

5   Charles Paul Landon, The Count Pierre-Jean de Bourcet and His Family, 1791. MG 1388, Musée de Grenoble. Photo © Musée de Grenoble, © Videomuseum, © Direction des musées de France, 2007.

6   Porcelain plate with black hat motif, ca. 1792–93. Inv. C. 2006, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Patrick Pierrain / Musée Carnavalet /Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

7   Louis-Léopold Boilly, An Assembly of Artists in the Studio of Isabey, Salon of 1798. C.P.P. 35, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

8   François Dumont, Luigi Cherubini, Salon of 1793. RF157, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

9   Anonymous, The Citizen Hesmart with a Bust of Gluck, 1794. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

10   Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, Bertrand Andrieux Ice-Skating, n.d. [Salon of 1798]. Musée de la Monnaie de Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

11   Robert Lefèvre, Portrait of a Man in the Landscape, n.d. [1798]. Musée des beaux-arts de Caen. Photo © Giraudon / Bridgeman Art Library International.

12   François Gérard, Jean-Baptiste Isabey and His Daughter (studio replica), n.d. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

13   Louis Gauffier, Portrait of the Family of a Diplomat in Italy (studio replica), ca. 1797–99. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Gérard Blot.

14   Louis-Léopold Boilly, Madame Arnault de Gorse, n.d. RF1948 Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource. Photo: Franck Raux.

15   Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Bonaparte, 1797–98. RF1942-18, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

16   Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Louis XVI, King of France, 1777. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

17   Pierre-Michel Alix, after Anonymous, Honoré-Riqueti Mirabeau, ca. 1791. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

18   Anonymous, after Jean Baptiste Ponce Lambert, Charles-François Bouche, député d’Aix en Provence, ca. 1789–91. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

19   Jean Baptiste Ponce Lambert, Charles-François Bouche, ca. 1789–91. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

20   François Robert Ingouf, after a drawing by Clément-Pierre Marillier based on a pastel by Claude Pougin de Saint-Aubin, Pierre de Marivaux, 1781. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

21   Roger, after Antoine Louis François Sergent, Portrait of Ulric Frédéric Woldemar, comte de Lowendal, 1787. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

22   Jean-Baptiste Morret, after Le Barbier, Prise de Berg-Op-Zoom, 1787. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

23   Anonymous, Deputy of the Nobility to the Estates-General of 1789, ca. 1789. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

24   Anonymous, Deputy of the Third Estate to the Estates-General of 1789, ca. 1789. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

25   Anonymous, Charles-François, comte de Marsanne de Fontjuliane, ca. 1789–91. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

26   Anonymous, Pierre Hébrard de Fau, ca. 1789–91. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

27   Pierre-Charles Coqueret, after Jean Baptiste Ponce Lambert, Charles-Antoine Chasset, ca. 1789–91. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

28   Anonymous, Michel Gérard, ca. 1789–91. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

29   Jacques-Louis David, The Tennis Court Oath, 1791. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

30   Jacques-Louis David, Thirius de Pautrizel, 1795. Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1990.47.2. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

31   Wilbrode-Magloire-Nicolas Courbe, Honoré Gabriel de Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau, 1789–91. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

32   Anonymous, Ma finte, Monsieur, je crois que vot habit d’Officier m’irois ben (My word, Monsieur, I believe your officer’s uniform will suit me fine), 1789. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

33   Pierre Mérard, Bust of a National Guard Officer, 1790. Inv. 1998.4, Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Photo © Collection Musée de la Révolution française / Domaine de Vizille.

34   Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, Jean-Ernest Schickler, ca. 1789. Inv. 1998.2, Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Photo © Collection Musée de la Révolution française / Domaine de Vizille.

35   Jean-François-Marie Bellier, The Citizen Nau-Deville in the Uniform of the National Guard, 1790. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo: Scala / White Images / Art Resource, New York.

36   Hyacinthe Rigaud, Henri Louis de La Tour d’Auvergne, comte d’Evreux, Maréchal de France, ca. 1720. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund, 59.119. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

37   Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Simon-Claude, Chevalier de Grassin, 1770s. Inv. 10397, Musée de l’Armée, Paris. Photo: Musée de l’Armée / Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

38   Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux Amis de la Constitution (National Almanac, dedicated to the Friends of the Constitution), 1790. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

39   Bizard, Portrait of a National Guard Officer Protecting a Sugar Cargo (Charles-Alexis Alexandre), 1792. Inv. 1986.270, Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Photo © Collection Musée de la Révolution française / Domaine de Vizille.

40   Jean-Marie Hooghstoel, M. Estellé, Insignia Merchant, rue Saint-Honoré, in the Uniform of Captain of the National Guard in 1790, ca. 1790. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

41   Jean-Jacques Hauer, Family Portrait with National Guard Officers, 1789–90. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.1.149. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

42   Rémy-Furcy Descarsin, Portrait of a National Guard Officer and His Wife, 1791. Inv. 2004.14, Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Photo © Collection Musée de la Révolution française / Domaine de Vizille.

43   Anonymous, Matière à reflection pour les jongleurs couronnées [sic] (Food for thought for crowned jugglers), 1793. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

44   Jean-François Gilles Colson, Mademoiselle Lange, 1792. Inv. I 0208, Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française. Photo © Collections de la Comédie-Française.

45   Simon-Bernard Lenoir, Madame Vestris as Electra, n.d. [1770s]. Inv. BM-P0229, Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française. Photo © Collections de la Comédie-Française.

46   Jean Raoux, Mademoiselle Prévost as a Bacchante, 1723. Musée des beaux-arts, Tours. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Bulloz.

47   Jean-Marc Nattier, Charlotte-Louise de Rohan-Guéménée, princesse de Masseran, 1738. MV 7873, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Gérard Blot.

48   Jacques-Louis David, Louise Pastoret and Her Son, 1791–92. Clyde M. Carr Fund and Major Acquisitions Endowment, 1967.228. The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo © The Art Institute of Chicago.

49   Jean-Antoine Gros, The Republic, 1794. MV 5498, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Gérard Blot.

50   Henri-Pierre Danloux, Jean-François de La Marche, Bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, 1793. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

51   Claude Drevet, after Hyacinthe Rigaud, Henri-Oswald, Cardinal de La Tour d’Auvergne, 1749. LP 65-44, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Franck Raux.

52   Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. Inv. 3261, Musée d’art ancien, Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels. Photo © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

53   Jean-Louis Laneuville, The Citoyenne Tallien in a Prison Cell at La Force, Holding Her Hair Which Has Just Been Cut, Salon of 1796. Private collection.

54   Anonymous, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1790–92. Musée Lambinet, Versailles. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

55   Godefroy Engelmann, after Thérésia Cabarrus, Portrait of Three of Thérésia Cabarrus’s Children, 1816. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

56   Jean-Louis Laneuville, Portrait of Jean-Antoine-Joseph de Bry, ca. 1793. Inv. 77.54.1, Indiana University Art Museum. Photo: Michael Cavanagh and Kevin Montague.

57   Jean-Jacques Karpff, Revolutionary Scene: Civic Oath, 1793. Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France. Photo © Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France.

58   Jacques-Louis David, Anne-Marie-Louise Thélusson, comtesse de Sorcy, 1790. Inv. HUW 21, Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen / Art Resource, New York.

59   Charles Paul Landon, Portrait of a Woman, 1793. MG 2003-5, Musée des beaux-arts, Grenoble. Photo © Musée de Grenoble.

60   Henry Dupont, after Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Portrait of André Chénier, 1838. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

61   A. B. Massol, after François Marie Isidore Quéverdo, Marie Anne Charlotte Corday, 1795. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

62   François-André Vincent, Marie de Broutin, baronne de Chalvet-Souville, 1793. © Musée du Louvre, Paris, © Direction des Musées de France. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

63   Joseph-Benoît Suvée, The Invention of Drawing, Salon of 1793. Musée des beaux-arts, Bruges.

64   François Gérard, Madame Tallien, ca. 1805. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © The Image Works.

65   François Gérard, Louis-Marie Revelliere-Lépeaux, 1797–98. MBA J 66, Musée des beaux-arts d’Angers. Image © Musées des beaux-arts d’Angers. Photo: Pierre David.

66   Jean-Baptiste François Desoria, Charles-Louis-François Letourneur, 1796. MV 4617, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

67   Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of a Gentleman as a Hunter, 1727. BF.1992.1, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston.

68   Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of a Woman as Diana, 1735. Musée d’art et d’histoire, Cholet, France. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Michele Bellot.

69   Gérard van Spaendonck and Piat-Joseph Sauvage, The Family Meal, ca. 1797–98. MBA 488, Musée des beaux-arts d’Angers, on deposit from the Musée du Louvre. Image © Musées des beaux-arts d’Angers. Photo: Pierre David.

70   Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, Marie-Antoinette and Her Children, Salon of 1785. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Scala / White Images / Art Resource, New York.

71   Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Portrait of Madame Victoire with a Statue of Friendship, Salon of 1789. MV 3960, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

72   Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Portrait of a Man (possibly Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassincourt), 1791. Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

73   Jean-Baptiste Greuze (attr.), The Marquis de Girardin, ca. 1790. Musée de l’abbaye royale, Chaalis, France. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Bulloz.

74   Jacques-Louis David, Emilie Sériziat and Child, Salon of 1795. RF1282, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

75   Jacques-Louis David, Pierre Sériziat, Salon of 1795. RF1281, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

76   Henri Marais, after François Gérard, Alexis, 1798. Réserve des livres rares, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

77   François Gérard, Belisarius, 1797. Inv. 5005.1, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

78   François Gérard, Cupid and Psyche, Salon of 1798. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

79   Pierre-Antoine Demachy, Festival of the Supreme Being, n.d. [ca. 1794]. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo: Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.

80a   James Gillray, New Morality, or The Promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the Philanthropes, with the Homage of Leviathan and His Suite, 1798. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

80b   James Gillray, New Morality, or The Promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the Philanthropes, with the Homage of Leviathan and His Suite, 1798 (detail). British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

81   François-André Vincent, The Boyer-Fonfrède Family, 1801. MV 4788, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

82   Robert Levrac-Tournières, Portrait of a Family in an Interior, 1721. Inv. 720, Musée des beaux-arts, Nantes. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

83   Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié, Marc-Étienne Quatremère and Family, 1780. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski.

84   Anonymous, Festival of the Supreme Being, 1794. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

85   Anonymous, Portrait of Camille Desmoulins, His Wife, Lucile, and Their Son, Horace, ca. 1792–93. MV 5651, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

86   Manufacture de Niederviller, Fraternity, ca. 1794–95. Inv. 1993.23.03, Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Photo © Collection Musée de la Révolution française / Domaine de Vizille.

87   Charles Norry, Project for Meynier’s Gallery of Muses, House of M. Boyer-Fonfrède, ca. 1795. Inv. D 97–1-48, Musée Paul-Dupuy, Toulouse (on deposit from Musée du vieux Toulouse, inv. MVT 80-106 or 50-157).

88   Charles Meynier, Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, and the Fine Arts with Urania, Muse of Astronomy, 1798. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund, 2003.6.3. Photo © The Cleveland Museum of Art.

89   François-André Vincent, Portrait of Marianne Boyer-Fonfrède and Her Son, 1796. RF1938-73, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojeda.

90   François-André Vincent, Duty and Happiness, 1795. Location unknown. Image from La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot, no. 43, November 27, 1992.

91   François-André Vincent, Comfort the Unfortunate, 1795. Location unknown. Image from La Gazette de l’Hôtel Drouot, no. 43, November 27, 1992.

92   François-André Vincent, The Plowing Lesson, 1795. Location unknown.

93   François-André Vincent, The Plowing Lesson, ca. 1796–97. Prat Collection, Paris.

94   François-André Vincent, Merchants at the Port of Marseille, 1795. Musée de la Marine de Marseille. Photo: Scala / White Images / Art Resource, New York.

95   Raphael, The Holy Family, 1518. Inv. 604, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojeda.

96   François-André Vincent, Agriculture, Salon of 1798. Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux. Photo: Scala / White Images / Art Resource, New York.

97   Anonymous, The Fashionable Mother, ca. 1799. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

98   Unknown, Circular Print with Revolutionary Portraits and Assignats, ca. 1796. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

99   Jacques-Louis David, Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon and Josephine at Notre-Dame on December 2, 1804, 1808. Inv. 3699, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski.

100   Louis-Léopold Boilly, The Public Viewing David’s Coronation at the Louvre, 1810. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2012.156. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

101   Anonymous, Family Portrait, ca. 1800–1805. Musée de Tessé, Le Mans. Image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Bulloz.

   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS   

Like a portrait, a book is a collaborative enterprise, dependent on the investments—intellectual, emotional, and financial—made by a surprisingly large number of sympathetic people. I am very fortunate to have benefited from the support of numerous institutions, colleagues, friends, and family members in the course of researching and writing this book. My first thanks go to Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, who has supported this project since the beginning and who has always challenged me to expand my thinking and deepen my analysis. Darcy’s extraordinary knowledge of revolutionary art and politics, her gift for writing about pictures, and her generosity to her students serve as a model for my own research and teaching. I am also grateful to Tim Clark, Carla Hesse, and Margaretta Lovell, who helped shape the project at its origins, and who all provided models of engaged scholarship.

In Berkeley, Paris, and Dallas–Fort Worth, I have been lucky to find friends and colleagues who provided encouragement, criticism, and fellowship. Heather MacDonald shared her living space and knowledge of the eighteenth century with me on two continents; her friendship and expertise were indispensable to the writing of this book. In France, a dedicated group of historians and art historians helped me refine my work. Warm thanks go to the evolving membership of my working group in Paris: Lucia Tripodes, Jennifer Sessions, Jennifer Olmsted, Ellen McBreen, John Tain, and Steve Monteiro. Jennifer Sessions in particular has been a constant source of feedback and moral support. My understanding of French history was further enriched by conversations with Alison Matthews David, Charly Coleman, Greg Brown, Paul Cohen, Andrew Jainchill, Colin Jones, Ben Kafka, and Chuck Walton. Mary Sheriff and Ann Bermingham, who organized and led a seminar on sensibility and visual culture in the summer of 2004, created a particularly productive forum for the discussion of eighteenth-century art at a crucial stage in my project. Meredith Martin and Nina Dubin have both been exceptionally sensible interlocutors on a wide range of topics in eighteenth-century French visual culture; their responses to my work helped me refine my ideas and reframe my argument at a critical moment in the project’s evolution. Mary Sheriff and Melissa Hyde have been ideal senior colleagues and mentors, reading chapters, providing advice, and leading expeditions to museums, châteaux, and parks at the farthest reaches of the Parisian regional rail system. On the other side of the world, my colleagues at TCU have been a constant source of support and encouragement, particularly Lori Boornazian Diel, Babette Bohn, and Mark Thistlethwaite. The members of my Dallas–Fort Worth working group, Jessica May, Heather MacDonald, Amy Buono, Eric Stryker, Paula Lupkin, Ben Lima, and Sarah Kozlowski, have provided a valuable intellectual support system. Jessica May in particular patiently dispensed wise writing and career advice that helped me bring the project to a conclusion. My senior colleagues in Dallas, Olivier Meslay and Rick Brettell, have likewise provided support and feedback and have helped make the Metroplex into fertile ground for scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. My thinking about revolutionary portraiture has also been shaped by feedback from students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I presented versions of two of the chapters in this book.

My work has benefited from the help of many French scholars and curators. Philippe Bordes has been consistently generous with comments and contacts. Anne Lafont shared her understanding of revolutionary art, particularly the work of Anne-Louis Girodet. Isabelle Mayer Michalon’s knowledge of the work of Charles Meynier was extremely helpful in reconstructing the tangled web of the Boyer-Fonfrède family’s art patronage. I was also fortunate to encounter helpful and tolerant curators, registrars, and librarians in provincial and Parisian museums and archives. Their generosity with their collections and expertise considerably widened my knowledge of revolutionary portraiture.

I am particularly grateful to Ellie Goodman at Penn State Press and to the anonymous readers of the book manuscript; their comments were instrumental in shaping the final product. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers at the Art Bulletin for their helpful comments on an earlier version of chapter 4, which was published by the College Art Association in the September 2011 issue. Likewise, chapter 2 benefited from the suggestions of the anonymous readers of the version published in the spring 2008 issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Thanks are also due to Martha MacLeod, whose heroic assistance with image research and permissions was crucial to the last stages of writing and revision.

At some point in the writing of this book, I realized that most of the sitters whose portraits I was studying had followed a similar trajectory: they moved to Paris and went bankrupt. It is due to the generous support of the University of California, Berkeley, Texas Christian University, and several other fellowship-granting institutions that I did not suffer the same fate. My initial research was funded by a Berkeley Multi-Year Fellowship, the Bourse Chateaubriand, a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in the History of Art at Foreign Institutions, and a research grant from the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Northern California. A Haakon Fellowship from the Art History Department at Southern Methodist University provided the ideal introduction to a teaching career; I am especially grateful to Janis Bergman-Carton, Adam Herring, and Alexis McCrossen for making my time at SMU so rewarding. A two-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., was instrumental in the development of the book project, providing a model intellectual community and the luxury of time to deepen my research and refine my methodological framework. A semester-long John H. Daniels Research Fellowship at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia, allowed me to pursue further research on portraiture in the landscape and gave me firsthand experience of the benefits of meditation in the countryside. TCU supported the completion of the book with a Junior Faculty Research Award and a Research and Creative Activity Award.

My parents, Barbara and James Freund, have been a constant source of both emotional and financial support throughout the researching and writing of this book. They have cheerfully put up with my extended absences from the United States (the trips to visit me in Paris probably lightened the blow) and have helped, in more ways than I can list, bring this project to completion.

Finally, I want to thank Charles Hatfield, my ideal reader.

INTRODUCTION

In November 1790, a Parisian mob sacked the house of an unpopular nobleman. In an anonymous print executed soon after the event, titled Moyen expéditif du peuple français pour démeubler un aristocrate (The French people’s expeditious means of removing the furniture of an aristocrat), a group of men and women appears in the windows of the house, breaking glass and throwing furnishings out into the courtyard, where debris is already accumulating (fig. 1).¹ Conspicuous among these items are three portraits. The first, seen through a window on the second floor, appears to be a full-length portrait of Louis XVI, judging from the pose and the crown and scepter just visible in the right foreground of the image. One of the looters points to the canvas and doffs his hat. On the floor below, another man holds an oval portrait of a woman. He seems shocked by the appearance of the sitter, who is depicted bare-breasted or with a very low décolleté, her breasts separated and emphasized by a dark sash. Finally, a portrait of a prelate with a very noticeable decoration around his neck lies in the courtyard, already damaged by its flight. Next to this portrait lies an open book inscribed with the moral of the print, Ah ça va bien Puni / son Les aristocrates (Ah, everything’s going well, Punished / are [or let’s punish—the engraver’s spelling is approximate] the aristocrats).

This depiction of violence and class resentment points to the extraordinary symbolic power of portraiture in revolutionary France. The portraits in this print are part of the furniture of the despised aristocracy, three more candidates for defenestration. But they also symbolize, even more than marquetry furniture or expensive textiles, the political regime with which they are associated. In 1790, when a constitutional monarchy still seemed possible, the portrait of Louis XVI commands respect, albeit possibly tinged with irony; the looter shows the portrait the deference he would show the sitter, demonstrating the persistent belief that an image is invested with the power and status of the individual it depicts. The portrait of the scantily clad woman, held in the arms of another member of the crowd, seems to attract as well as repel—in this world turned upside down, the print suggests, a member of the peuple français might aspire to the affections of a noblewoman. No one, however, respects or desires the portrait of the clergyman languishing in the courtyard. It has already been half-destroyed, much like the clerical authority for which it stands. For the producers and viewers of this print, portraits represent all that is despicable about the ancien régime. The very vehemence of the reaction to the portraits demonstrates their power to embody not only particular people but also abstractions: aristocratic immorality, clerical corruption, good government.

The destruction of portraiture during the Revolution was far outpaced by the production of new portraits by artists and sitters eager to record their participation in the Revolution’s expanded narrative of political sovereignty. Martin Drolling’s 1791 portrait of his father-in-law, Michel Belot, a painter and color merchant, demonstrates portraiture’s ability to concretize political abstractions (fig. 2). The clarity of Drolling’s depiction of Belot’s physiognomy firmly anchors the portrait in the contingencies of personal likeness. The artist’s attention to material specificity extends to his rendering of the pamphlet in Belot’s hand, the concrete trace of the abstractions of civic identity and the individual’s sublimation in the collective. Its fragmentary title—Projet... au fran... mir—alludes to an address published by Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, a leading orator of the early years of the Revolution whose death in 1791 inspired an outpouring of public grief.² Belot, his face brightly lit and isolated against a brushy dark brown background, furrows his brow and gazes upward, as if contemplating the ramifications of the political tract he holds. Drolling’s use of bright highlights along the edges of the pages and on his father-in-law’s forehead makes a formal connection between the pamphlet, emblem of the public sphere, and the intellection of the private citizen who holds it. The agitated strokes of paint radiating from Belot’s head make visible his engagement with the world of politics.

Drolling’s portrait of Michel Belot is a modest painting. Its power lies not so much in its radical departure from the conventions of portraiture—there is nothing particularly innovative about the half-length format or the sitter’s costume and pose—as in the way it manipulates those conventions in order to make a painter and small businessman into a participant in the body politic. This transformation would have been impossible during the ancien régime, when men like Belot had no claim to political agency. Drolling’s portrait, and countless others like it, created a new kind of political identity by harnessing one of the genre’s key strengths. Portraiture is both a private and a public art form, speaking specifically about a sitter or sitters but in a language that any viewer can understand. Unlike history painting, which was traditionally considered the appropriate visual form for exalted ideas (appropriately allegorized, or packaged in dignified mythological, biblical, or historical narratives), portraiture invites bodily identification and personal empathy with a contemporary, someone whose clothes, accessories, and occupation are within the viewer’s immediate frame of reference. The portrait of Belot encourages its viewers to follow the sitter’s thought process, proposing a model for our own intellectual engagement with political change. This oscillation between individual identity and communal ideals meant that even in the most radical moments of the Revolution, when conditions for art production and consumption seemed least propitious, portraiture’s popularity and power were never in doubt. Indeed, the special concerns of portrait making—the memorialization of contemporary life, the conferral of dignity on the individual, and the evocation of bodily and psychological presence—came to dominate the visual culture of the era.

Portraiture was central to French culture between 1789 and 1804 because it grappled with the fundamental problem of revolutionary political ideology—how to make new people for the new France. The Revolution swept away the social and political structures of the ancien régime in the name of individual liberty and social equality. The absolute monarchy, and the society of fixed orders and privileged corporate bodies over which it theoretically presided, was replaced with popular sovereignty, in which political authority rests with the people. In order for this regenerated nation to function, the individuals who composed the newly anointed body politic had somehow to be transformed from subjects into citizens, and rendered both free and contributors to the common good. Portraiture was the mode of representation most sensitive to these issues because it required artist and sitter alike to think through the markers of personal identity and render them legible to viewers. Drolling and Belot responded to this challenge by working within existing portrait conventions. Other portraitists and their clients looked for more dramatic and innovative ways to reconstruct the self in revolutionary terms, developing new modes of portraiture for new social and political circumstances.

The extraordinary resilience and creativity of portraiture over the course of the Revolution is also due to its character as a collaborative art. With the exception of images produced entirely on the artist’s initiative and executed without the knowledge of the person depicted (as in the case of the many unauthorized portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, or the cottage industry in posthumous images of Jean-Paul Marat), a portrait is the product of a negotiation between an artist, a commissioner, and the sitter or sitters. In order to produce a coherent image, all of these parties must reconcile their ideas about how best to represent physical likeness, character, and social status. This negotiation became particularly fraught after 1789, as traditional social and political hierarchies were dismantled and the structures of personal identity came into question. French citizens were faced with the task of reformulating the basic elements of selfhood—the structure of the family, the dictates of religion, the relationship between wealth and social status, and the roles of men and women in the new polity. Revolutionary lawmakers attacked these problems from the top down, legislating sweeping changes in the nation’s political, social, and cultural structures. But portraits show us this process from the bottom up, providing evidence of how a wide range of newly anointed citizens reacted to revolutionary change, and how they adapted their self-images in response to national events.

The chapters that follow explore the visual language of revolutionary portraits and demonstrate how portraiture came to play such an important role in the era’s cultural imagination. My analysis of portraiture’s contribution to the reimagining of selfhood after 1789 depends, much like the portraits themselves, on striking a balance between the individual and the collective. This book about portraiture as a genre is based on the close analysis of a handful of portraits. Concentrating on a few case studies allows us to think carefully about the relationship between a portrait’s visual language and the commissioner’s and artist’s ambitions. But the look and meaning of each particular portrait also depend on the more general material and cultural circumstances of its production. A portrait is shaped by the aesthetic theories and practices of its era; it is usually (but not always) the product of a transaction between an artist and a paying customer; and it participates in discourses about the self and its relationship to larger sociopolitical categories. These three domains—the aesthetic, the economic, and the subjective—were closely intertwined during the revolutionary era, and the institutions that shaped each were undergoing dramatic change.

The first category, aesthetic theory and artistic practice, has been the center of art-historical research since the publication of Thomas Crow’s groundbreaking Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris in 1985. Crow’s focus on the evolution of public art exhibitions and art criticism provides a compelling narrative about the intersections of aesthetics and prerevolutionary political thought. In Crow’s account, artists of the second half of the eighteenth century devoted their creative energies to playing to, and against, the expectations of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the new cadre of professional art critics, and the actual audiences at the biannual Salon exhibitions. Those expectations were shaped by a very particular set of aesthetic theories promoted by the Academy. According to the hierarchy of genres codified by André Félibien in the mid-seventeenth century, portraiture was the second most important category of painting, after history painting.³ Portraiture could claim this relatively elevated rank because it represented the human body. However, its putative lack of narrative complexity and moral import, and above all its status as an imitative rather than an inventive art, undermined its prestige. Portraiture was, moreover, associated with the vanity and ambitions of its sitters, and portraitists were often stigmatized as base flatterers.⁴ Even worse, critics viewed the genre as in competition with history painting, and they commonly bemoaned the tendency of talented young artists to succumb to the temptation of portraiture’s easy money.⁵

The rise of professional art criticism in the middle of the eighteenth century gave new impetus to the condemnation of portraiture. For instance, Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne, the best-known and most vehement midcentury advocate of the revival of history painting, spoke out in the strongest possible terms against the proliferation of portraiture, which he described as the genre of painting that is today the most abundant, the most practiced, and the most advantageous to even the most mediocre brushes. In a now famous diatribe, he accused portraitists of flattering a simpering face, often misshapen or decrepit, almost always without physiognomy, multiplying obscure beings, without character, without name, without place and without merit.⁶ For La Font de Saint-Yenne, portraiture was the opposite of public art, appealing only to the relatives of the sitter, exposing worthless individuals to the public eye, and offering no example of virtue to the viewer. However, he was willing to make an exception for portraits of kings, ministers, generals, famous authors, and other people whose visages could recall for their viewers some shared notion of talent or merit.⁷ Indeed, likenesses of the royal family and of great men of France were promoted by the Academy and critics alike as the one form of portraiture capable of inspiring noble sentiments in their viewers, even as portraits of less exalted figures were condemned as socially or aesthetically offensive.

When the Revolution opened the Salon to all artists (rather than just academicians), the number of portraits in the public exhibition rose precipitously, and the critics protested in much the same terms as La Font de Saint-Yenne had nearly fifty years earlier. Now, however, portraiture had new advocates. The poet André Chénier argued in a 1792 newspaper article that the genre had progressed so much since earlier in the century that distinctions between portraiture and history painting were no longer meaningful: truth, simplicity, naiveté, are no different for a painter of portraits than for a history painter.⁸ To cast aside the distinctions between portraiture and history painting was to overturn years of academic dogma and to dignify the entire genre. The qualities of truth, simplicity, and naiveté that Chénier claimed for modern portraiture (which he contrasted with the false, tasteless, and unnatural portraiture of yesteryear) were also, not coincidentally, the qualities of a good revolutionary citizen.

Other critics defended portraiture in more explicitly political terms. For instance, in his review of the Salon of 1798, the republican art critic Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard wrote, "Portraiture, a fairly insignificant genre under a monarchy—because one man counts for everything, and the others for nothing—should acquire under a Republic a new degree of interest: it can consecrate virtues, talents, service, and memory. It is in a Republic that