The Taste for Risk
The surprising demand for genre scenes during the Reign of Terror, in particular, by the Nobility for Italianate watercolors by Jean-Baptiste Mallet (1759–1835).
The gaze cast by artists on the distress of émigrés permeates many French works from the very end of the 1790s (fig. 1). Yet already in the first half of the decade, the fate of those who fled the Revolution—largely members of high society—was captured in genre paintings. The stakes of genre scenes never lie entirely in the subject represented, but in the reception constructed by a society that projects itself into them, recognizes itself in them, or feels unsettled by them—and in what this reception reveals about its own lines of fracture. In this respect, nothing could be more fruitful than to follow the art produced between 1791 and 1794—a period of intense pressure when political upheavals, far from stifling creation, seem instead to intensify its drive. The oft-repeated claim that patrons and buyers of art disappeared as soon as the first émigrés crossed the borders offers a largely distorted picture of the period: it obscures not only the extraordinary frenzy of artistic creation but, more so, the intensity of the desire for art that animated connoisseurs who remained in Paris in the early years of the Revolution.
The example of the ‘Italianate’ watercolors of Jean-Baptiste Mallet (1759–1835) is particularly striking. As political events grew harsher, his art became charged with increasing tension, making perceptible, beneath the veneer of daily life and anecdote, the profound instability of existence and the fragility of belonging to a class under attack. From a mere follower, he became an eloquent painter, skillfully cultivating the art of suggestion and the unspoken.
Jean-Baptiste Mallet, to whom Christophe Marcheteau de Quinçay and I devoted a monograph in 2021, had been developing a picturesque ‘Italian’ repertoire as early as 1787, following in the footsteps of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and his fellow native of Grasse, Jean-Honoré Fragonard. He quickly gained mastery of their idioms, as seen in works such as La Toilette du bébé (Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay) or Domestic Interior with a Young Woman and a Wet Nurse Feeding a Child (New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; fig. 2), which we date to the years 1788–90. He handled these subjects with delicacy, producing increasingly accomplished works such as Le Dessinateur en Italie (Grasse, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Provence) and Le Peintre en Italie (Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay; fig. 3). The first known owner of the latter, like that of Le Catéchisme (1791, Chicago, Art Institute; fig. 4), was Gaspard de Bizemont (1752–1837), the French officer and amateur artist who fled France for Constantinople.
Yet, like many of his gouaches from 1791–93, the subject of Le Catéchisme departs sharply from the jovial character of his earlier ‘Italianate’ compositions. Beyond their anecdotal quality, these works evoke—like La Cérémonie secrète (Grasse, Musée Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Collection Hélène et Jean-François Costa)—the fate of refractory priests who refused to swear allegiance to the Constitution imposed on 1 December 1790. Some images are striking in their gravity, such as Le Déjeuner de l’accouchée (Grasse, Musée Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Collection Hélène et Jean-François Costa; fig. 5), whose subject is the birth of a stillborn child in an ancient ruin. Others stage melancholy young women whose posture betrays their true origins, surrounded by their families in ruined palaces—metaphors for a world they were forced to flee.
An old inscription formerly placed on the reverse of a gouache, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (fig. 6), provides eloquent testimony: ‘Young French marchioness who took refuge in Lausanne with her two sons during the Revolution of 1789’. This could be a clue for identification, whether of a real ancestor or with any one of those noble ladies, overcome by boredom and fatigue as they were relegated to material hardship after fleeing France with nothing. In this dilapidated attic, the mother struggles to talk to her children, including the eldest, who uses a drum of the Army of the Princes as a makeshift table. This process of identification was already at work between 1791 and 1793, and it is highly likely that Mallet understood that current events were giving additional meaning to his works in the minds of connoisseurs.
The now fragile nobility was a choice clientele to whom it was tempting to offer images echoing their concerns and their fear of having to abandon everything. When he died in Paris in 1797, Eugène-Claude Préaudeau de Chemilly, Treasurer General of the Maréchaussées, who did not emigrate, owned four of Mallet’s ‘Italian’ gouaches. Likewise, the inscription ‘Mallet inv. fecit 1793 / pour M. de Maussion’ appears on the back of La Distribution des rosaires (Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art; fig. 7), a perplexing fact given that 1793 was one of the most eventful years in the life of the intendant Étienne Thomas de Maussion. After accompanying his wife Jeanne Perrin de Cypierre to Rome in September 1790, where she died on 3 January 1791, he returned to Paris later that year and then departed for Flanders. On 21 July 1793, he was arrested, then released, though required to answer suspicions of political ties with his émigré brothers-in-law, while his wife’s uncle, Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, was in Hamburg. Fully aware that he was under scrutiny, by choosing to acquire a work in Mallet’s Italian vein he subtly recalled his last moments of happiness in Rome, thereby deliberately obscuring his dangerous proximity to the Army of the Princes. He was arrested again and ultimately guillotined on 24 February 1794.
Another figure who was likewise playing with fire, as his arrest could come at any moment, was Égide-Louis-Edme-Joseph de Lespinasse, chevalier de Langeac (fig. 8)—the illegitimate son of Louis XV’s minister, the comte de Saint-Florentin. While his two brothers emigrated—Auguste-Louis-Joseph-Fidèle-Armand being among the first to join the Armoy of the Princes—he remained in Paris and became one of Mallet’s most loyal clients. Seemingly ignorant of the Law of Suspects, Égide is advertised as owner in the announcement of the print by Copia, published in March 1794, of Julie, ou le Premier Baiser de l’Amour d’après Mallet (fig. 9).
What is true of Jean-Baptiste Mallet’s works also applies to the genre scenes of most artists of his generation, as shown by Le Passage du ruisseau, painted in 1791 by Michel Garnier (fig. 10). It depicts a young elegant woman carried on the back of a muscular street porter of almost Herculean strength as the plank designed to cross the stream is broken. Yet the real subject is not the contrast between the almost ostentatious vigor of the carrier and the frail body of the young woman, but rather the latent disorder inscribed in the very gesture of rescue—an effect heightened by the presence of a delicate little dog, hesitating, seemingly frightened at the thought of venturing into the water to join its mistress. The leg she would never have revealed except in privacy, and above all the discomfort of her position, at the mercy of hands slipped beneath her body, create unease in the viewer. In 1813, the work is mentioned in the posthumous inventory of Françoise Marie Felicité Ermesinde de Lynes, duchess of Chevreuse, forever associated with her mother-in-law, born Guyonne de Montmorency-Laval, the lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette, who was arrested and imprisoned during the Terror. Retrospectively, Michel Garnier’s subject—he was a supporter of the duc d’Orléans—cannot be regarded as a political manifesto in 1791; yet the link between this woman, victim of a faltering social order, and the duchesses of Chevreuse and Luynes takes on a singular, almost premonitory resonance in light of the shattered lives they endured during the Revolution and later in exile from Paris under the Empire.❖