In Private Salons and the Art World of Enlightenment Paris, Rochelle Ziskin explores in depth two remarkable salons that generated significant art criticism during the mid-eighteenth century. These were sites where the faculties of artistic and aesthetic judgment were intensively cultivated. One politically active group gathered at the house Mme Doublet, where the celebrated amateur Petit de Bachaumont participated regularly in her “Mondays” for artists. Mme Geoffrin collaborated with the powerful Comte de Caylus and other respected amateurs, including Pierre-Jean Mariette and Claude-Henri Watelet. In focusing on official Salons of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, historians too often overlook the cultural authority exercised by these private assemblies, where works of art were assessed and artistic taste shaped.

This book will appeal to readers interested in 18th-century French artistic culture, journalism, and women’s patronage. The painters discussed include Boucher, Van Loo, Charles Coypel, Cochin, Vien, Pierre, Lagrenée, and Hubert Robert.

Table des matières

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Maps
Abbreviations

Introduction : Two virtuoses, Mme Doublet and Mme Geoffrin

1 Mme Doublet, Bachaumont and “the Parish”
 1 The Maison Doublet in 1722
 2 The Parish : “Learned Men of All Kinds”
 3 The Maison Doublet, Breuilpont and “the Parish”
 4 The Boyer Brothers and the Parish
 5 “La jolie tête” and “les deux frères :” The Ferriol
 6 “The Good Doctor,” “Sage Mairan” and Sainte-Palaye
 7 The “Five abbés”
 8 An Outpost of the Palais-Royal

2 Shaping Taste, Academic Reform, and Saving the Louvre
 1 Reinvigorating the Academy
 2 Artists in Paris ca. 1750
 3 Saving the Louvre
 4 Essai sur la peinture, la sculpture et l’architecture (1751)

3 Politics, Art, Journalism, and Bonds of Friendship at the Maison Doublet
 1 Gallicanism, Parlement, and the Parish
 2 The abbé Laugier and the Parish
 3 The La Curne Brothers : Erudition and Art
 4 “La présidente de Meinières, Who Loves Letters”
 5 The Maison Doublet

4 Wednesdays and Mondays : Mme Geoffrin and Her bureaux d’esprit and des arts
 1 Shaping Taste : Mme Geoffrin’s “Mondays”
 2 Caylus : Leading at the Academy, Presiding at the lundis (1747–1752)
 3 Who Attended the lundis ?
 4 Collector Friends : The marquis de Voyer and comte de Vence
 5 Paintings, Manuscripts, and Books : Gaignat (1697–1768)
 6 Art and Social Mobility : Gaillard de La Bouëxière (1676–1759)
 7 “Patriotic” Collecting : Ange-Laurent La Live de Jully (1725–1775)
 8 “Nothing … but Van Loos, Bouchers, Pierres, Viens, Doyens” : The Collection of Watelet
 9 Other Amateurs at the lundis during the Fifties
 10 Marigny’s “compagnons de voyage” : Cochin, Soufflot and abbé Le Blanc
 11 Artists of the lundis

5 Paintings Made “Under My Eyes”
 1 Antiquity, Encaustic, and “Costume”
 2 Mme Geoffrin and Van Loo : They Argued, … They Laughed, They Cried … and … the Painting … Was Finished
 3 Apelles Resuscitated : Vien and Mme Geoffrin
 4 Vernet : “Imagination” and “Fire”
 5 Laborde : Vernet, Greuze, and the Painter’s Revenge
 6 Vernet, Boucher and the petit cabinet
 7 Hubert Robert : Intimate Views of Mme Geoffrin
 8 Lagrenée the Elder and Mme Geoffrin’s “Clandestine Devotion”
 9 Mme Geoffrin’s cabinet de compagnie

6 Epilogue : Mme Geoffrin : Advocate and Liaison
 1 Agent for the English
Select Bibliography
Index

Rochelle Ziskin, Ph.D., Harvard University (1992), Professor emerita, University of Missouri-Kansas City, is the author of Sheltering Art : Cultural Quarrels and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (2012) and The Place Vendôme : Architecture and Social Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1999).