“What Charm in their Brush!”: Lebrun, Boilly, and Dutch Art in Revolutionary France
By Emily Falge
The French Revolution is often touted as the era of the neoclassical history painting, with Jacques-Louis David’s epic tableau compositions cited as its most exemplary works. Though these undoubtedly exemplify the standards of the Salon and Academy artists, they misrepresent the era’s popular preferences. Ironically, while Academicians promoted grand history scenes, collectors and non-Academy painters after 1789 favored one of the ‘lowest’ modes: genre painting. Specifically, Dutch Golden Age genre paintings, alongside contemporary works emulating them in style and subject, were among the most beloved by the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary public, revealing a cultural and aesthetic movement distinct from the academic discourse of the period.
The French taste for seventeenth-century Dutch art began well before the Revolution. During the 1672-1678 Franco-Dutch War, as well as the 1740-1748 War of the Austrian Succession, French military officials in the Netherlands bought and seized numerous artworks and brought them back to France for their collections, creating an interest in the style among the elite. At the same time, writers such as Diderot and Rousseau, who encouraged a simple, moral lifestyle centered around loyal marriage and family, also sparked tastes for Dutch culture, which was thought to exemplify such values. In the words of traveler Antoine de la Barre de Beaumarchais in 1738: “nowhere is marital love more respected than in Holland.” Diderot himself, after visiting the Netherlands in 1774, described the Dutch as “modest in their clothing, frugal in their way of living, economic, compassionate, hardworking, honest, industrious.”
Though modern audiences often name Rembrandt and Vermeer as the greatest Golden Age masters, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French viewers preferred the painters known as the petits maîtres (“little masters”). Among these were David Teniers the Younger, Gabriel Metsu, Nicolaes Berchem, Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, and Paulus Potter. These artists primarily captured domestic genre scenes and landscapes (Fig. 1), demonstrating the French taste regarding subject matter. Notably, French collectors and viewers avoided bawdier iterations of the Dutch genre like brothel scenes, preferring ‘virtuous’ subjects, a taste likely influenced by Rousseau and Diderot. These preferences are reflected in heavily Dutch-inspired French genre paintings of the eighteenth century, which capture domestic, sentimental scenes of families, women, and children (Fig. 2).
Figure 1. Gabriel Metsu, The Cook, ca. 1657-1662. Oil on canvas, 40 x 33.7 cm. Madrid: Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum.
Figure 2. Jean Baptise Siméon Chardin, La Pourvoyeuse (Return from the Market), 1739. Oil on canvas, 47 x 38 cm. Paris: Louvre Museum.
Despite the political, social, and economic upheaval of the Revolution, French taste for genre painting did not disappear, though it did shift. With the monarchy dismantled and nobility scattered abroad, the new primary market for Dutch, and Dutch-inspired, art was the bourgeoisie. These buyers often obtained their art from auctions, where records demonstrate the enduring value and popularity of the little masters: between 1789 and 1815, 80% of the most expensive paintings sold at auction were seventeenth-century Dutch, most of which were attributed to these artists. Supply of these paintings was bolstered during the 1794-1795 invasions of the Low Countries, as the seizure of major collections, most notably that of the Dutch Stadthouder’s galleries, by the French military flooded the market with hundreds of these in-demand items.
Undoubtedly the most active figure in these sales of Dutch paintings was art dealer Jean-Pierre Baptiste Lebrun. Alongside art sales, Lebrun also advocated for the greatness of Dutch art through public addresses and writing. An active revolutionary working alongside Jacques-Louis David himself, Lebrun argued that the little masters’ paintings exemplified both unparalleled artistic skill and the moral values of the new Republic, especially the importance of family. Addressing the Republican Society of the Arts in 1794, Lebrun encouraged his fellow citizens to view Dutch paintings as images “of the virtuous Citizen occupied with the care of his family, or as the perfect imitation of nature.” Similarly, in his 1792 book Galerie des peintres flamands, hollandais, et allemands (Gallery of Flemish, Dutch, and German Painters), he praised the Northern style: “What harmony in their colors! What charm in their brush! What precious finish even in the most mundane details!”
Lebrun’s efforts evidently succeeded in gaining public and governmental favor of Dutch art, as demonstrated by the wall space it was given in the newly-public Louvre. In 1799, for example, 78% of the Grande Galerie section dedicated to French and Netherlandish art was composed of Flemish and Dutch paintings. Public appreciation of the style did not go unvoiced, with one art critic praising genre scenes: “If you feel afflicted by the spectacles of pious and heroic assassinations…don’t you long to dream with tender emotions in front of a beautiful site, before a sentimental scene that genre painters reveal to you?” Testimonies such as this exemplify the discrepancy between the period’s official and popular tastes, as the intimacy of genre painting is admired over the grandiosity of academic history painting.
Lebrun’s writings and speeches were not his only efforts towards building popularity of Dutch style and subjects. Until 1793, the display of paintings in the official annual Salon was strictly reserved for members of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and thus strongly biased towards history painting. During this time, Lebrun ran his own showcase of paintings, the Salon de jeunesse, which catered to up-and-coming artists, as well as those specializing in ‘low’ types of painting such as portraiture and genre. This offered such artists, whose participation in the official Salon was forbidden, a chance to display and sell their work. With Lebrun’s emphatic favor for the Northern style of painting, his Salon de jeunesse largely attracted artists whose work emulated the little maters, one of the most notable being one Louis-Léopold Boilly.
Figure 3. Gerard ter Borch II, Gallant Conversation (Paternal Admonition), c. 1654. Oil on canvas, 85 x 87 cm. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.
Figure 4. Louis-Léopold Boilly, The Dead Mouse, 1790s. Oil on canvas, 30 x 31.2 cm. London: The Wallace Collection.
Boilly established himself as a painter in Paris on the eve of the Revolution, maintaining a successful career until the end of his life during the July Monarchy. His success is widely attributed to his market-oriented production, with one of his most enduring tactics being an appeal to the enduring popularity of Northern art. For the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French, one of the most appealing aspects of Dutch paintings was their ‘system of execution,’ dubbed the système hollandais, which included the ‘precious finish’ that Lebrun emphasized in his writing. This system, characterized by clear rendering, crispness, and attention to detail, is seen, for example, in Gerard ter Borch’s rendering of satin (Fig. 3). Painters with this style, including many of the little masters, were known as fijnschilders (fine painters), and it was their technique that Boilly largely emulated in his own (Fig. 4). Many contemporaries recognized this, dubbing Boilly the ter Borch, Teniers, and/or Metsu of his time.
While earlier neo-Dutch artists such as Chardin and Greuze favored rural, peasant genre scenes, Boilly’s work reflects new preferences for genre painting and its Northern influences during and after the Revolution. His work substitutes the modest clothing and settings of earlier French genre scenes and their Dutch inspirations (Figs. 2 and 3), for elegant, contemporary fashions and refined interiors (Fig. 5). This choice of subject corresponds with changing views of seventeenth-century paintings as well, with revolutionary French viewers favoring scenes of bourgeois subjects in elegant rooms. Perhaps the most famous example is Gerrit Dou’s Woman with Dropsy (Fig. 6), whose 1799 arrival at the Louvre was accompanied by enthusiastic praise across Parisian publications. This taste for more elegant, refined images may very well be a symptom of the rising bourgeoisie, many of whom worked to assert their status through fashion and art collection in the years following the Revolution.
Figure 5. Louis-Léopold Boilly, Jeu de Dames (Game of Checkers), c. 1803. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Private collection.
Figure 6. Gerrit Dou, The Woman with Dropsy, 1663. Oil on canvas, 86 x 67.8 cm. Paris: Louvre Museum.
French reception of Dutch painting across the eighteenth and early nineteenth century thus reflects a complex network of shifting aesthetic, economic, political, and social dynamics. The popularity and influence of both original seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and the French works they inspired provides an interesting insight into the construction of French identity using existing, foreign visual cultures and vocabularies. Ultimately, the roles of both Dutch and neo-Dutch art in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France are subjects that merit further art historical exploration, as they reveal a rich visual culture beyond the alleged hegemony of the Davidian Salon.
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