Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
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(Material Culture of Art and Design) Rachel Gotlieb - Ceramics in The Victorian Era - Meanings and Metaphors - Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature-Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2023)
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Material Culture of Art and DesignMaterial Culture of Art and Design
is devoted to scholarship that brings art history into dialogue with interdisciplinary material culture studies. Te material components of an object—its medium and physicality—are key to understanding its cultural significance. Material culture has stretched the boundaries of art history and emphasized new points of contact with other disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, consumer and mass culture studies, the literary movement called “Ting Teory,” and materialist philosophy.
Material Culture of Art and Design
seeks to publish studies that explore the relationship between art and material culture in all of its complexity. Te series is a venue for scholars to explore specific object histories (or object biographies, as the term has developed), studies of medium and the procedures for making works of art, and investigations of art’s relationship to the broader material world that comprises society. It seeks to be the premiere venue for publishing scholarship about works of art as exemplifications of material culture.Te series encompasses material culture in its broadest dimensions, including the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles), everyday objects of all kinds (toys, machines, musical instruments), and studies of the familiar high arts of painting and sculpture. Te series welcomes proposals for monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections.Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of Missouri, USAAdvisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USAClaire Jones, University of Birmingham, UKStephen McDowall, University of Edinburgh, UKAmanda Phillips, University of Virginia, USAJohn Potvin, Concordia University, CanadaOlaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, ChileStacey Sloboda, University of Massachusetts Boston, USAKristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of echnology, USARobert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia
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Volumes in the Series
British Women and Cultural Practices o Empire, 1775–1930,
Edited by Rosie Dias and Kate Smith
Jewellery in the Age o Modernism, 1918–1940: Adornment and Beyond,
Simon Bliss
Childhood by Design: oys and the Material Culture o Childhood, 1700–Present,
Edited by Megan Brandow-Faller
Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation o Makers,
Edited by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith
Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary,
Edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones
Te Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives and Aferlives o the Domain,
Edited by Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington
Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion,
Freya Gowrley
Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920,
Edited by Claire Moran
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge,
Sarah R. Cohen
Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art,
Edited by Sharon Hecker and Silvia Bottinelli
Material Cultures o the Global 18th Century
, Edited by Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek
ransormative Jars
, Edited by Anna Grasskamp and Anne Gerritsen
Forthcoming Books
Intimate Interiors
, Edited by Tara Zanardi and Christopher M. S. Johns
Te Material Landscapes o Scotland’s Jewellery Craf, 1780–1914,
Sarah Laurenson
iv
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge
Sarah R. Cohen
BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTSBloomsbury Publishing Plc50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, IrelandBLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing PlcFirst published in Great Britain 2021This paperback edition published 2023Copyright © Sarah R. Cohen, 2023Sarah R. Cohen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Irene Martinez CostaCover image: Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon, detail of
The Monkey Painter
, 1739–40 © Getty Images / Photo Josse / Leemage / ContributorAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Cohen, Sarah R., 1957- author.Title: Enlightened animals in eighteenth-century art : sensation, matter,and knowledge / Sarah R. Cohen.Description: New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Series: Materialculture of art and design | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2020037770 (print) | LCCN 2020037771 (ebook) | ISBN9781350203587 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350203594 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350203600 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Animals in art. | Senses and sensation in art. | Animals–Symbolicaspects–Europe. | Art, European–18th century–Themes, motives.Classification: LCC N7660 .C63 2021 (print) | LCC N7660 (ebook) | DDC 700/.462–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037770LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037771 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-0358-7 PB: 978-1-3502-0362-4 ePDF: 978-1-3502-0359-4 eBook: 978-1-3502-0360-0Series: Material Culture of Art and DesignTypeset by Integra Software Services Pvt Ltd.To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.
For Martha
viii
, silver, 1730s; Paris, Louvre; photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY2. Alexandre-François Desportes,
, oil, 1717; Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble; photo: Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble—J.L. Lacroix3. Jean-Siméon Chardin,
, oil, 1740; photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY5. Detail o boudoir panel depicting “Te wo Bulls and the Frog,” rom townhouse on Place Vendôme, Paris, 1750s; Paris, Les Arts Décoratis, musée des Arts décoratis, Dépôt du Musée du Louvre; © Paris, Les Arts décoratis6. Johann Joachim Kändler,
, Meissen porcelain with enamel coloring, 1734; Chicago Art Institute; photo: Te Art Institute o Chicago/Art Resource, NY7. Anon.,
. 1760; Paris, Les Arts Décoratis, musée des Arts décoratis; photo: ©Les Arts décoratis/Jean Tolance8. Jean-Baptiste Oudry,
, oil, 1753; Paris, Musée de la chasse et de la nature; photo: Nicolas Mathéus9. Detail o Jean-Siméon Chardin,
xiii
List o Figures
, oil, 1728; Madrid, Museo Tyssen-Bornemisza; photo: Museo Nacional Tyssen-Bornemisza/Scala/Art Resource, NY
. 1728; Madrid, Museo Tyssen-Bornemisza; photo: Museo Nacional Tyssen-Bornemisza/Scala/Art Resource, NY
. 1700; Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen; photo: bpk Bildagentur/Staatliche Museen/Martin Franken
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Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art - From 1800 To The Present Day (Art Ebook) PDF
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xv
List o Figures
3.11 Anon., Boudoir panel depicting “Te wo Bulls and the Frog,” rom townhouse on Place Vendôme, Paris, 1750s; Paris, Les Arts Décoratis, musée des Arts décoratis, Dépôt du Musée du Louvre; photo: © Paris, Les Arts décoratis
, Meissen porcelain, 1731; Dresden, Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; photo: Herbert Jäger
Meissen porcelain, 1732; Dresden, Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; photo: Adrian Sauer
, Meissen porcelain, 1732; Dresden, Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; photo: Adrian Sauer
, Meissen porcelain, 1732; NY, Metropolitan Museum o Art; photo: Metropolitan Museum o Art Open Content Program
xvi
List o Figures
. 1891; published in Wilhelm Bode, “Die Italiener, Franzosen, Altniederländer, und Deutschen in der Schweriner Galerie,”
, Marseilles sof-paste porcelain, 1765–70; Paris, Louvre; photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY
, silver, 1733 or 1734; Detroit Institute o Arts; photo: Detroit Institute o Arts, USA/Bridgeman Images
, 4 vols. (Paris: Dessaint & Saillant, Durand, 1755–9/60), II:IV; photo: WKR.11.3.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University
, oil, 1750s; Washington, D.C., National Gallery o Art; photo: Courtesy National Gallery o Art, Washington
his book results rom research I have long been pursuing on animal representation in the early modern era and the value artists and audiences placed upon the animal as an independently compelling subject. he eighteenth-century component o my work, represented here, ocuses especially upon Enlightenment concerns with the sensory acquisition o knowledge and the material orces o lie, or which animals and their conigurations in art served as particularly apt exemplars. I would like to thank Michael Yonan, the editor o the Bloomsbury series on the “Material Culture o Art and Design” or his continuous support and encouragement, as well as or the astute guidance he has given me in thinking about the multidimensional signiicance o materiality both in my own objects o study and in the ield o art history as a whole. I would also like to acknowledge Paula Radisich and the late Angela Rosenthal, who included my initial study o “Chardin’s Fur” in their jointly edited issue o
Eighteenth-Century Studies
devoted to “Hair,” a topic that continues even now to merit more serious scholarly attention.Over the many years that my ideas or this book have been in ormation I have lectured at numerous institutions, and I am grateul to the individuals who invited me to speak as well as to the audiences or their questions and comments. hese include Ann Bermingham and the late Mary Sheri, who included me in their seminar series on “Sensibility” at the Getty Research Center; Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, who invited me to lecture at Harvard University; the Center or Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, in whose yearly workshops I twice participated; Jerey Collins, at whose invitation I contributed to the Selz Lectures on 18
th
- and 19
th
-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture at the Bard Graduate Center; Catherine Girard, who included me in the conerence she co-organized at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature in Paris; Mimi Hellman, who invited me to lecture at Skidmore College; and Dorothy Johnson, who invited me to lecture at the University o Iowa. All o these experiences helped me to hone my arguments and develop my thinking in new and important ways.I am grateul to Kristel Smentek and Susan aylor-Leduc or assistance with bibliography, as well as to Rebecca Bedell, JoAnne Carson, and Susan Sidlauskas or their helpul suggestions. he two anonymous readers o this manuscript
Acknowledgments
xviii
or Bloomsbury oered extremely useul advice ranging over every chapter o the book. I am also enormously grateul to Andrée and Patrick Pouyanne, who generously welcomed me into their home outside Paris on my numerous research trips to that city. he sta o the University Libraries at the University at Albany, particularly in the departments o Special Collections and Interlibrary Loan, provided indispensable assistance or my research, and signiicant parts o this book’s publication have been aided by a grant rom the University’s Faculty Research Awards Program. All aspects o the book have beneited rom the attention o my editor at Bloomsbury, April Peake, as well as the design and copy editing team.Above all, I wish to thank my research assistant, Marissa Barnes, whose extraordinary eiciency and attention to detail acilitated the acquisition and documentation o the many images that illustrate this book. And the ongoing support and encouragement o Vance Mordecai quite literally made my work possible.
From the shadow o a rocky outcropping, a howling wol thrusts itsel into the light (Figure 0.1). With its let oreleg broken almost all the way through in the closure o a metal trap, the animal lets out an anguished cry, mouth stretched wide to reveal the glistening tongue and sharp canine teeth. Its bright, staring eye ocuses our attention upon the creature’s combined sensations o pain, anger, and the terror o inescapable entrapment. he right oreleg, planted on the base o the trap, tenses rom shoulder to claw in a display o sinuous strength that contrasts pitiully with its now-useless counterpart. Given the similarity between the wol’s limb and the internal structure o a human arm, a sensitive viewer might immediately be able to identiy with the pain the animal must be suering, although one’s emotional response to such identiication would vary considerably depending upon the circumstances o history, social place, and values.Prince Friedrich o Mecklenburg, who saw and sketched the work in the studio o the artist, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, a ew years ater it was completed, wrote excitedly to his ather, “he wol is truly special!”
His rough sketch o the painting, included the letter o 1739, makes little o the trap and broken leg but heavily accentuates the gaping maw,
as i to suggest that what made the painting so “special” in his eyes was not the depiction o wol-trapping itsel—a common enough practice in Europe, where wolves were universally eared and blamed or encroaching upon livestock
—but rather the animal’s unorgettable expression. Very likely the German prince’s attraction to the painted animal as a living, emotive creature was that which a hunter might imagine in conronting a challenging adversary, especially an adversary who could easily sever his own royal limbs should the animal overpower him in the wild. Oudry’s painting is in act constructed like a portrait o animal experience, with all ive senses on display in the center o the painting: pricked ears; glistening eye, nose, and tongue; and the two eloquent orelegs. he harsh illumination o the animal’s torment, as in Baroque scenes o martyrdom, keeps us astened upon the unnerving spectacle
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
2
o a willul body orced to endure such suering. Regardless o what opinion a viewer o this painting might hold about wolves, whether it be the earsome predator o the eighteenth-century imagination or the vital keystone species heralded in twenty-irst-century rewilding initiatives, Oudry’s animal terriies in its appeal to our own experience o pain and ear.Although he was received into the French Royal Academy o Painting and Sculpture as a history painter, Oudry made a specialty o dramatic animal painting, and his works would become as prized as history painting—indeed, would sometimes be taken
as
a kind o history painting—by his eighteenth-century contemporaries.
Slowly gaining avor in France in the second hal o the seventeenth century, animal themes would become central to eighteenth-century painting, prints, tapestry, ceramics, and other portable arts, having gained added impetus through the success o Oudry’s older contemporary, Alexandre-François Desportes. Desportes, who had been received into the Royal Academy in 1699, was himsel heir to the seventeenth-century Flemish tradition o animal painting established by Frans Snyders and developed by Jan Fyt and numerous other Netherlandish painters; these included Nacasius Bernaerts, Desportes’s
Introduction
3
early teacher, who worked or the court o Louis XIV and was the irst animal specialist admitted into the Royal Academy in 1665.
With collectors’ growing avor or Dutch and Flemish painting and prints in eighteenth-century France, nonhuman subjects—animals, landscapes, still lives—which Netherlandish artists had developed into specialties gained new prominence and helped to nurture the careers o Desportes, Oudry, and other animal artists in the irst hal o the century. Jean-Siméon Chardin, who took up a number o Netherlandish themes in the course o his long career, notably transormed the animal subject into intensely ocused depictions in which actively applied paint works as an agent o vital substance, standing in or creatures’ material bodies in lie and animating them even ater death. Material ocus upon animal vitality also ound myriad expression in physical objects crated or interior spaces rom the domestic to the palatial.Oudry’s wounded, desperate wol presents an extreme example o what might have made the animal a particularly compelling subject or eighteenth-century viewers: while the lielike treatment o the animal’s anatomy and hairy coat may have inspired wonder at the artist’s ine touch, and the varied textures o the landscape, the strong lighting, and the perspectival composition oered much or the cultured eye to study, the vital heart o the painting lies in its incarnation o physical existence and sensation. By the eighteenth century, comparative anatomical study had advanced to the point that one could tell how closely related a canine oreleg was to a human limb not just rom external observation but rom the evidence o repeated dissections as well.
Violence visited upon an animal was, in the early modern era, considered a acet o human dissection as well, since anatomizing was a sentence delivered in addition to death or the worst o criminal oenses. Even i the culture o the hunt and consideration o the wol as an enemy would have steeled a viewer o Oudry’s painting rom eeling compassion or the creature, these cultural actors would not have precluded an intense vicarious response to the animal’s intensely visceral experience.Continental European art had no counterpart to William Hogarth’s well-known conclusion to the ignominious progress o om Nero in
he Four Stages o Cruelty
engravings (1751), in which the corpse o the human torturer and murderer is summarily dissected while an emaciated dog gingerly takes a bite out o the lieless heart whence it has allen to the loor.
But even such scientiic publications as Jacques Gamelin’s
Nouveau recueil d’ostéologie et de myologie
, an annotated set o etchings ater the French anatomist’s drawings illustrating the human bones and muscles, are illed with allusions to violence and destruction visited upon the human. A plate opening the section on muscles eatures a layed
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
4
corpse surveyed by two onlookers, one o whose sleeves is rolled up to show the muscular arm on his intact body (Figure 0.2). his onlooker’s hand resting on the edge o the table almost touches the hand o the layed cadaver, driving home the sensation o touch, here so vulnerably exposed. While his companion gazes at the body rom behind the table, the man with the hat, his eyes hidden, shows us that to understand the material world one must rely upon one’s senses working together: sight complements, rather than replaces, what touch can tell us.
Meanwhile the sharp instruments o dissection loom larger than lie on the raking table in the oreground. Ostensibly demonstrating how the opening and exploration o the body were achieved, they also serve as a vague yet unsettling threat o bodily violation. Gamelin noted that his publication was intended as much or artists as it was or anatomists, and dramatic illustrations throughout his text show that he clearly shared with Oudry an appeal to his audience’s lived experience o multisensory perormance.
Sensationism, as John C. O’Neal has demonstrated, held a key place in eighteenth-century philosophy and culture: what one elt through the senses, physically and psychologically, served as the oundation or those seeking knowledge about all orms o lie and the nature o material reality.
In his
Essay
Introduction
5
Concerning Human Understanding
o 1690, a translated “Epitome” o which was irst published in the French journal
Bibliothèque universelle et historique
in 1688,
John Locke set orth the essential premise o knowledge gained through sensory apprehension: “Perception is the irst Operation o all our intellectual Faculties, and the inlet o all Knowledge into our Minds. And I am apt too to imagine, hat it is Perception in the lowest degree o it, which puts the Boundaries between Animals, and the inerior ranks o Creatures.”
Locke’s ull
Essay
irst appeared in a French translation by Pierre Coste in 1700 and proved to have a ormative impact upon subsequent theorizing o knowledge and its sensory basis in France.
Although Locke himsel, as the title o his treatise implies, was primarily concerned with human understanding and took pains to distinguish human rationality rom the purely material thought processes o all other animals, later eighteenth-century philosophers would hold up the nonhuman animal as a paradigm o sensory consciousness, or, as the radical materialist physician Julien Oray de La Mettrie argued, “I there is a being steeped in eeling, it is the animal. Animals seem to have been paid completely in this coin, which (in another sense) so many men lack.”
For La Mettrie as or a number o other theorists o sensory experience, it was animals’ blunt and unapologetic physicality that gave them the git o a richly sensational lie. Objecting to theories such as that put orth by René Descartes in the previous century which posited matter as “simple extension,” or inert substance, La Mettrie argued that “motive orce and the aculty o eeling” were in act essential to material existence.
he bodily “machine” proposed by Descartes, ar rom existing apart rom desire, motivation, and eeling, according to La Mettrie constitutes in itsel everything “animate bodies … need to move, eel, think, repent and … behave in the physical sphere and in the moral sphere which depends upon it.”
La Mettrie was among the most extreme o eighteenth-century European philosophers in his eorts to downplay the exceptionality o human reason, but he shared with many o his contemporaries—including Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Denis Diderot and Paul-Henri hiry, baron d’Holbach—a conviction that the earthly existence o all animals, human and nonhuman alike, constituted the vital essence o sensory knowledge. his is what Diderot meant when he acutely declared that a blind and dea man seeking to locate the soul might quite logically ind it in the tips o his sensitive ingers.
In this book, I contend that the prolieration o animal imagery in eighteenth-century art, particularly in France, contributed uniquely to this century’s larger quest to deine knowledge acquired through sensory interaction with the
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
6
material world. Paid, as La Mettrie would have it, completely in the “coin” o eeling, the animal subject proved a compelling protagonist in the context o eighteenth-century eorts to reconstruct the building blocks o a psychology based upon lived experience rather than upon abstract notions o consciousness and thought. Oudry’s wol, although exceptional in its depiction o overt physical violence and its horriic howl, captures the essence o an artistic genre that appealed to its viewers through vicarious sensation and that “motive orce” which is derived rom and elt within the body. As noted above, a good portion o the animal art that lourished in the eighteenth century moreover took the orm o physical objects which themselves directly engaged the tangible world: Oudry himsel held key supervisory positions at the royal tapestry works o Beauvais and Gobelins,
and his creaturely imagery prolierated in chairs, soas, and screens whose woven abrics invited interaction between human users, depicted animal bodies, and the substantive ibers o colored wool, silver, and gold. Sculptural metalwork and ceramics, many intended or use or decoration at dining tables, urther materialized sensory animal experience, in eect bringing cutting-edge philosophical discourse into the realm o lived practice.My study o the material culture o animal art ocuses particularly upon the irst hal o the eighteenth century, which saw the ascendance o art ashioned in the sensually appealing style known today as the Rococo. Called in its own era simply the “Modern” style, the Rococo capitalized upon tactile, shimmering suraces, lowing orms evocative o natural movement, and a notable emphasis upon iconographic play in lieu o narratives that “read” like a book. Intra-sensory bodily experience was central to Rococo expression, and in this respect it correlated with sensationalist and materialist philosophy and ound a compelling artistic protagonist in the eeling animal. Even Oudry’s terriying, struggling wol occupies the vortex o a richly textural environment whose rocks, oliage, and long diagonal lines invite kinesthetic and tangible response.In examining the ways in which this sensually grounded art orm works to embody animal experience, I have also ound useul recent eorts on the part o scholars in science studies and social theory to consider the agential orce, or innate vitality, o all material beings, and indeed o all earthly matter. Aspects o these writers’ arguments surprisingly echo the most radical o eighteenth-century materialist theories, such as the baron d’Holbach’s contention that all matter exists in a dynamic continuum, varying only in the luctuating entities produced through momentary assemblages.
In our own era, Jane Bennett has argued, somewhat similarly, that “materiality [is] experienced as a lively orce with agentic capacity” whose pervasive vitality breaks down boundaries between
Introduction
7
entities and allows instead constant interaction between them.
Karen Barad, who draws upon quantum physics to highlight a scientist’s “material engagement with the world,” emphasizes the entanglement o all material entities, each acting upon the other with its own agential orce.
Within the material culture o animal art, tangible substance likewise operates through multiple, mutually interactive agents—depicted animal body, appeal to a user’s or viewer’s own sensory capacities, and a physical object composed o substances which sometimes directly stand in or creaturely physicality. Feeling, matter, and lively orces activate the entire experience and make the animal—the vital center o it all—uniquely captivating. Although painters who specialized in the depiction o animals tended to eature those creatures closest to the human both in anatomical likeness and in amiliarity, above all mammals and birds, beings less prone to inspire vicarious response, such as insects, reptiles, amphibians, and ish, claimed igural status as actors in portable arts that quite literally “enlivened” eighteenth-century interiors. Eighteenth-century philosophy, while generally ollowing Locke’s example in supporting the Aristotelian “scale o nature,” at the same time disrupted its hierarchy o beings by elevating the latest discoveries o empirical inquiry—such as the regenerative “polyps” that or La Mettrie proved the existence o an agential principle in every ilament o living matter.
For materialists such as d’Holbach and Diderot, mineral matter embodied its own potential or animation, a point o view I carry over into my analysis o physical objects whose mediums not only represent but incarnate animals within their material surrounds.Consider the palpable legacy o Oudry’s tableau: very soon ater the painter completed his work, the silversmith Jacques Roëttiers created a table centerpiece or Louis Henri, duc de Bourbon whose lower level showcases the same trapped and howling wol, sharp silver canines glittering in relected light (Plate 1).
A tactile rocky arch supports a pack o dogs combatting a stag above, while ierce boars’ heads glower like a porcine Greek chorus rom the our corners o the Rococo extravaganza. Lacking the utensils that such centerpieces traditionally supported, Roëttiers’s work becomes a veritable sculpture in the round whose dynamic actors are exclusively animal. Our own position as spectator o this sensuous display is appropriated by a spaniel who has wandered down rom the pack to approach the ensnared wol, cautiously sniing the dreadul trap. Cruel as it may appear to us today to so merge physical torture with sensual appeal, a legacy o art beautiying Christian martyrdom may have prompted its eighteenth-century audience to see the work not as vicious but as piercingly apt. he sculpture projects, moreover, its
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
8
own epitome o sensory knowledge and expression: canines demonstrate the senses o touch, sound, and smell, while the silver medium itsel seems “alive” with the dynamic orces o decorative scrollwork, intricately worked detail, and aceted sparkle. Human diners would have completed the material cycle with their own bodily experiences o sight, smell, and taste.Because ornamental arts such as Roettiers’s centerpiece capitalize upon sensory engagement, it is understandable that they assumed such importance during the irst hal o the eighteenth century when natural philosophy and the nascent ield o psychology were coming to terms with perception as “the irst operation o all our intellectual aculties.” Artists with a stake in the representation o animals had special access to depicting such oundational knowledge, and those who specialized in ashioning objects that could stand in materially or the animal body—metalworking, tapestry, and the “white gold” o porcelain—seized their opportunity. Ceramics, including both true, hard-paste porcelain and the sot-paste imitations still produced commonly in the irst hal o the eighteenth century, igure prominently in this book, occupying the entirety o Chapter 4, and prompt the one in-depth examination that takes us outside o France. In the 1730s, Johann Gottlieb Kirchner and Johann Joachim Kändler created or the Elector o Saxony, Augustus the Strong, a large “menagerie” o porcelain animals, many o them lie-size and all o them dynamically posed in space to emphasize their physical presence and awareness.
Kändler’s she-wol, or example (Figure 0.3), shields her two, wide-eyed pups beneath her body while turning her head to growl out a warning; ears pricked, eyes bright, and mouth open to reveal an impressive array o teeth, this wol acts as an independent agent o eeling, showing us in no uncertain terms how she understands and engages with her world. Whether one considers the she-wol as the sculpture originally appeared, covered in dark oil paint to simulate the natural coat o a black wol, or in the gleaming white condition in which it exists today, the transormative eect o iring captures the creature’s animating “orce”—a term sometimes used by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Gottried Wilhelm Leibniz to characterize the active agent that gave a creature lie, sensation, and awareness, or what many early moderns called animal “soul.”
In our own era, Bennett has used the term “vibrant matter” to characterize the vital agency o substances, a vibrancy that breaks down boundaries between the active and the inert in the physical realm. A miracle o snarling, shimmering clay ired into agential lie, Kändler’s wol airly demands that we engage with her as an energetic being.What constitutes this “orce” that imparts vitality and agency to material substance and, in the case o animals, a ull range o sensations with which they
Introduction
9
perceive and understand their world? Bennett argues that such questions o causality are necessarily “inscrutable” to human subjects, and she shares with Barad a commitment to theory drawn rom our own immediate and immersive experiences.
Eighteenth-century philosophers, or their part, debated whether the ully material bodies o animals could exercise perception and agency on the basis o corporeal substance alone, or whether they needed an insubstantial
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
10
“soul” to carry out the work o sensory understanding. he question as to whether animals
could
have a soul that gave them a conscious grasp o their own eelings as well as voluntary agency in perorming their actions had generally been resolved by the early eighteenth century: Descartes’s radical assertion in his
Discourse on the Method
o 1637 that the animal (including the human body) was a “machine” analogous to a inely worked clock had provoked considerable controversy in the seventeenth century, but Locke’s treatise, among numerous other writings, was ast supplanting this concept with the new paradigm o sensitive agency. What people called “soul,” materialists such as La Mettrie argued, could be deined as entirely physical, even in regard to human rationality; other eighteenth-century theorists perpetuated the concept o soul as immaterial but ully alive within the animal’s being.Both Catholic and Protestant institutional creeds, always suspicious o Descartes’s mechanistic theory o the body, in general supported the notion o a sensitive animal soul, which in its most conservative orm came directly rom Aristotelian philosophy.
In the irst hal o the eighteenth century, however, animals began to appear prominently as test cases in more cutting-edge writing on perception and knowledge. Some o these publications addressed head-on the problem o animal soul, the most important being the Protestant theologian David-Renaud Boullier’s
Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes
, a dense treatise which later served as the basis or the article on “Animal Soul” in the
Encyclopédie
.
o understand—to eel—the human condition in the eighteenth century, one needed to understand the condition o the animal. But as the three portrayals o wolves examined above make clear, animals also took on exemplary value o their own, perhaps especially when produced by artists or the visual delectation and physical handling o sensitive users. Eye to eye and body to body, these toothy canines share our space as material kin, even i such conrontation takes place psychologically within the ictive space o a painting. As Prince Friedrich attested, Oudry’s yowling wol captured him within a “truly special” experiential realm.In examining the agency animals wielded in eighteenth-century art, I have engaged several ields o study: the history o art and material culture, eighteenth-century philosophical considerations o animals, as well as the recent theories o material agency mentioned above. he well-known “animal turn” within cultural history and the humanities over the past twenty years, a unction o larger eorts to turn a critical eye upon any attempts to universalize lived experience, has also had a ormative impact upon my thinking.
he eighteenth century has indeed emerged as a crucial period or such re-evaluations o the
Introduction
11
nonhuman animal and its relation to the human: just as the Enlightenment itsel has been subject to scrutiny or its exclusions o whole groups o people rom the category o rational beings, so historians o eighteenth-century culture have increasingly questioned the ways in which Enlightenment society depicted, interacted with, and sought to control aspects o nonhuman lie.
Critical studies o art and literature have begun to assume a central place in the reassessment o human and animal relations in eighteenth-century France and England, the most in-depth publication to date being Diana Donald’s
Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850
.
Donald’s opening sentence is telling in identiying both her own perspective and that which prevails in much o animal studies as the ield exists today: “his is a book about a single animal species: the human race.” Donald explains that in order to evaluate the way animals were pictured, one must scrutinize the “thoughts and eelings” o those humans who were doing the picturing.
My approach diers rom Donald’s, and rom that o other scholars who have been querying the human-animal relationship, or my ocus is upon the animal itsel: as artistic protagonist, as conscious subject, and above all as a primary exponent o sensory lie in the material world. I o course acknowledge that the objects o my inquiry are complex human productions o art and philosophical writing, made or the sensory and intellectual consumption o other cultured, highly social people, and I pay due attention to these eighteenth-century humanistic intentions and responses. Indeed, the Prince o Mecklenburg’s enthusiastic reception o Oudry’s suering wol, and especially his sketch o the animal with its huge, open maw, goes a long way toward showing how an image that a twenty-irst-century observer could ind merely “gruesome”
could in act inspire great wonder and admiration within its own era. But I also take seriously the way in which the subjective experience o the animal is privileged in works such as Oudry’s and Kändler’s, and also the particular stake that a specialist in animal representation would have in taking the perspective o the creature as a means o exciting interest and vicarious response. Although not all o the artists I study in this book were animal specialists as were Oudry and Desportes, even those who also turned their talents to human subjects—Kändler and Chardin, or example—treated the animal as a worthy protagonist, especially in certain concentrated periods o their long careers.In examining eighteenth-century philosophical writings on natural history and moral concerns, I likewise give special place to those which ocus upon the animal as a compelling subject o inquiry itsel. Certain writers on animals indeed demonstrated a rank passion or their subjects and an eort to
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
12
understand the animal perspective rom the inside out. Boullier took a cautious, intellectual approach in arguing his case or the existence o animal soul—that is, consciousness and the ability to think—devoting a good portion o his treatise to weighing seriously Descartes’s objections. But he also attempted to explain the process through which animals reason by taking his reader through the imagined thought process o a dog learning what he should and should not do to avoid punishment and receive awards rom his human companion.
he best known, and most widely read, writer on animals in the eighteenth century was Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buon, whose thirty-six-volume
Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière
, published in the second hal o the century, ocused to a great extent upon animals, among which the human was placed.
Although Buon was one o those who took pains to distinguish the rational human rom the essentially instinct-based animal, his extensive project to describe and illustrate every known species o creature throughout the world in act presents a wealth o viable animal protagonists in the story o lie on earth.
he entomologist Charles Bonnet made no eort to disguise his rapture in recounting the history and imagining the intentions o a colony o caterpillars—his “little republicans”—in his early treatise on insects, and much later in his career he drew upon his lielong study o the tiny creatures in composing a treatise on the soul.
Although Bonnet declined to state deinitely that animals possessed souls, the nonhuman sel (
Moi
) in act hovers like a winged creature throughout Bonnet’s treatise on the soul. Even Christian resurrection becomes, in the entomologist’s resourceul language, the metamorphosis o caterpillar to butterly.
Since my overarching aim is to interpret re-creations o the animal in art through the lens o writings on physical agency, I also owe a great debt to the “material turn” that has taken place recently in the history o art. As Michael Yonan has argued, the ield o material culture studies has much to teach art history regarding the impact o matter—the agency o artistic materials, the spatial and temporal status o objects, the implicit logic o unctional design—and such problems have recently been taken up in many publications on eighteenth-century art.
Examinations o the animal in eighteenth-century art have heretoore ocused primarily upon iconographic analysis, with a strong emphasis upon painting and graphic art; although these approaches are richly revealing in themselves, especially as regards human social and political concerns,
material engagement—the interplay o an object’s substance with its simulation o animal lie and agency—has yet to be explored in depth. By integrating Rococo ceramics, metalwork, and tapestry with paintings and drawings, I am able to explore such
Introduction
13
entanglement o “real” and ictive materialities as a primary expressive orce. My consideration o painting likewise takes a strongly materialist bent, above all in the two sections o the book that address the painting o Chardin. Having crated a highly subtle strain o Rococo sensuality and tactility in his compositional strategies and painterly process, Chardin used the animal subject above all other eighteenth-century painters to achieve an ineable transormation o material substance into paint. Precisely because animals are capable o eeling, moving, and acting on their own, their appearance in one o Chardin’s kitchen scenes or still lives distinguishes them rom all the other substantive objects that surround them, even when the creatures are dead. Although this had been true o Netherlandish still lives eaturing animals as well, Chardin’s animation o living or once-living bodies through paint shows how apt a physically based medium could be in projecting sensory subjectivity.For example, in a painting o a suspended hare rom about 1760, Chardin used skeins o color to compose the ragile body o the creature, which he depicts as both distended and collapsed in the manner o a particularly realistic cruciixion (Figure 0.4). he lowers and onions might objectiy the animal in their suggestions o the butcher’s display and the pot o the cook, but the panoply o brush marks that stroke the body o the animal into substance convey, by contrast, the commonality o artistic and animal touch. Around the time Chardin was painting this work, “sensibility” was becoming central to French moral and scientiic philosophy alike. Merging the physical with the emotional, the sensibility movement elevated eeling in all its maniestations as a standard o critical judgment and empirical inquiry.
In France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau personalized sensibility as vicarious experience, and made much o the human tendency—nay duty—to identiy with animals’ suering, so near was it to our own.
Although artists such as Oudry and his ollower Jean-Baptiste Huet much more explicitly appealed to the culture o sensibility in rendering their animals with overt emotionality, Chardin’s late, intensely painted animal bodies oer a more undamental, physically based demonstration o how it eels to touch and be touched—above all or creatures whose very lives depend upon sensory understanding.In the chapters that ollow, I address select art works, artistic practices, and themes that illuminate the ways in which the sensory animal subject takes material shape. My trajectory takes a roughly chronological approach and stays generally within the boundaries o France, with an excursion into Germanic territory in Chapter 4, as mentioned above. I begin with Desportes, whose
Sel-Portrait as a Hunter
upended the Royal Academy’s presumed hierarchy
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
14
o genres when he submitted the painting as his reception piece in 1699. he artist depicted himsel at one with his dogs and surrounded by the animals he has just “shot” with his gun—that is, painted with his brush; he thus merged portraiture with still lie painting and at the same time made a pitch or the validity o the animal as principal subject. He may even have intended to include his own, wigless personage as an elegant animal along with the rest. I argue that in his subsequent portraits o dogs and especially in his sociable animal groups,
Introduction
15
Desportes created nonhuman versions o the sensually kinesthetic gatherings that his colleague Antoine Watteau was simultaneously constructing with people in the
ête galante
.Chapter 2 introduces the work o Chardin by taking a close look at his early depictions o live animals interacting with the dead. Drawing upon the lielike situations o Netherlandish kitchen scenes, Chardin oten used his animal subjects as surrogates or the viewer o the painting: cats, in particular, observe, touch, and leap upon stilled “prey” as i demonstrating how the various senses can be used to gain knowledge o what something is and how best it might be appropriated or a living animal’s use. I consider Chardin’s approach in relation to Locke’s presentation o “Molyneux’s question,” a problem o the relationship between sight and touch that would be taken up by later “sensationalist” French philosophers, most notably Condillac and Diderot. Chardin’s watchul, dexterous animals might be said to anticipate this French philosophical trend, just as the animal itsel oered humans a model o sensory experience as the essence o creaturely lie.Witty and sel-mocking but equally compelling as a model o animalistic sensibility was the theme o the monkey artist, which I examine subsequently in Chapter 2: artists such as Chardin, Christophe Huet, and Watteau used the monkey to make sport with received notions o ontological status among species and to identiy their own, sensory-based expertise with that o the creative animal. La Mettrie’s radical rejection o human reason in avor o creaturely eeling sheds light on the contemporary implications o the monkey artist, and I consider in particular La Mettrie’s use o monkeys and apes as paradigms o native intelligence. I argue that artistic and philosophical visions o the ingenious monkey took a parallel turn ater the middle o the century, when the Academy once again began to demand human distinction within its highest artistic subjects and Buon sought to separate the many simians that appear in his
Histoire naturelle
rom the rational man.In the seventeenth century, Descartes had used language as the inest test through which we can understand the distinctiveness o human intelligence and psychology, and his theory has persisted in many quarters through to the present day. It received a serious challenge, however, rom several eighteenth-century philosophers who attended closely to animals, including Boullier, Condillac, and Rousseau, as well as writers aiming to charm their readers, notably Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant. As I argue in Chapter 3, it is in art, above all, that we can ind the strongest case or the demonstration o an animal “language” which is ounded upon sensory and bodily communication
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
16
rather than literal text. Oudry’s illustrations or the
Fables
o Jean de La Fontaine—themselves a landmark work o literature in support o animal intelligence—transorm the poet’s incisive dialogues into a language o action and sensory inlection based upon the artist’s abundant store o “natural” animal postures and expressions. Many material outgrowths o Oudry’s able illustrations—upholstered urniture, decorative painting ensembles—brought communicative animal action into elite salons, as i oering a ully corporeal means o sociable talk. Oudry and certain other mid-eighteenth-century artists also engaged the growing culture o sensibility through their creatures’ large, appealing eyes, as i seeking urther to draw their audiences into an alternative sensory semantics.In Chapter 4, I turn to artistic medium as it was used to conjure animal existence: both hard-paste porcelain and its sot-paste, imitative cousin were used to create the illusion o ully animated creatures whose bodies encompassed porcelain’s unique transormation o inert substance into shining new lie. Particularly in Germany (and England), the process through which this transormation took place was considered a kind o alchemy which released matter’s animating “orce.” Leibniz’s theories regarding animal soul—a lie-giving agent contained within the animal body, but enduring ar beyond it—are particularly useul or assessing Augustus the Strong’s commission o so many species o porcelain mammals and birds very early in the existence o the Meissen manuactory. In eastern France and the Rhineland, sot-paste porcelain serving tureens ashioned as lie-size animals oered a more materialistic transubstantiation o creaturely lie: appearing ully animate rom the outside on the dining table, the tureens contained within them the actual substance o the animal body, ready to be consumed by diners. Such visceral reminders o the relationship between inner lesh, exterior animal allure, ired clay, and the belly o the diner can be interpreted, I argue, through the materialist philosophy o La Mettrie, d’Holbach, and Diderot, who were seeking to create out o the Aristotelian “scale o nature” an unbroken continuum o lie. D’Holbach even created a verb,
s’animaliser
, whereby pure matter gains the ineable spark o sensitivity that constitutes the lives o all animals.Materialism, in the writings o all three o these French philosophers, was inextricably bound up with sensibility: what made purely physical beings so endlessly compelling was precisely their potential to eel. In my ith and last chapter, I examine late works by Oudry and Chardin in light o this highly sensitized materialism: while Oudry’s
Bitch-Hound Nursing Her Young
o 1753
Introduction
17
appealed to the public or its sentimental evocations o vulnerability and protection, its original buyer, d’Holbach, might have recognized in the painting a more probing investigation o touch as the oundational sensation o animal (and human) lie. In Chardin’s late still lives depicting animals just past the point o death, it is the artist’s own touch that invokes sensible animation and appeals to a viewer on levels both haptic and emotional. In the 1750s and 1760s, several writers, including Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Voltaire, and Rousseau, were arguing that the sensitive animal’s vulnerability to suering served as reason alone not to cause creatures harm.
Although Chardin’s quiet paintings make no such declamatory statement, they nevertheless so elicit vicarious tactility that one cannot help but identiy with the animal, i only through physical kinship. It is, in act, Chardin’s paintings o animals that can help us to recognize commonalities among staunch materialists such as Maupertuis and those writers such as Rousseau and Bonnet who identiied with the animal subject on an emotional level but set rationality aside as the purview o man. For all agreed that the animal was material, and all agreed that the animal was a being that could eel: paintings “elt” rom the inside—through the animating substance o paint and touch—show, in eect, the very essence o how a once-eeling animal experienced and understood the world.Given the crisis state o the natural realm today, in which the plight o nonhuman animals is particularly acute, the eighteenth century occupies a critical juncture. It was, in act, during this era in France that the concept o species extinction was irst ully acknowledged and initiated as a subject worthy o scientiic study.
Although the prehistoric zoological research o the great naturalist Georges Cuvier at the Paris Museum o Natural History goes well beyond the scope o this study, it nevertheless shows the extent to which animal lie was still valued at the end o a century in which Melchior Grimm could declare Oudry’s
Bitch-Hound Nursing Her Pups
as “the premiere painting o the Salon.”
he celebrated career o the British animal specialist George Stubbs in the latter hal o the century, already examined in detail by Donald and others, also demonstrates the willingness on the part o eighteenth-century artists and audiences to see the animal sharing or even upstaging the human as dramatic protagonist.
Although this book limits itsel to France and Germany in the irst six decades o the eighteenth century, I hope that in exposing the animal’s importance as exemplar o material understanding in those places and times I might also contribute, albeit at insect scale, to our current, crucial dialogue on the value o animal existence.
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
18
Notes
1 “Der Wol ist gar extra !”; quoted by Danièle Véron-Denise and Vincent Droguet, catalogue entry in
Animaux d’Oudry: Collection des ducs de Mecklembourg-Schwerin
(Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2003), 108. Te painting, originally offered to the King o Sweden, remained in Oudry’s studio until it ound its enthusiastic princely buyer in 1739.2 See reproduction in Mary Morton, ed.,
Oudry’s Painted Menagerie: Portraits o Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Histoire de la chasse: l’homme et la bête
(Paris: Perrin, 2010), 149–62, 182–93 and
passim
. Te hunting o the wol in France was generally considered more a practicality than an exemplar o “noble” sport, although Oudry and his patrons avored the theme. Te artist included a
Wol Hunt
among the Beauvais tapestry cartoons known as
Les Chasses nouvelles
and throughout his career he painted numerous variations upon a battle between a lone wol and a pack o dogs.4 See, or example, Étienne 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 le mois d’Août 1746
(Te Hague: Jean Neaulme, 1747), 8, 68. Critical assessments o Oudry’s animal scenes as history paintings are discussed urther in Chapter 4. C. Hal Opperman,
J.-B. Oudry 1686–1755
(Seattle and London: University o Washington Press or the Kimbell Museum o Art, 1983), 70–2.5 See Hélène Meyer, catalogue entry in
Les Peintres du roi 1648–1793
, ed. Tierry Bajou (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000), 87–8. Several still lie painters had been admitted into the Academy beore Bernaerts, another sign o the growing French interest in empirical depictions o nonhuman subjects or which Netherlandish artists were known; c. idem, 222–30. Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, a specialist in elaborate still lives who had already succeeded in gaining elite patronage, was also received into the Academy in 1665; see Tierry Bajou, idem, 89–90.6 As early as 1557 Pierre Belon, in his
Portraits d’oyseaux, animaux, herbes, arbres, hommes et emmes, d’Arabie & Egypte
(Paris: Guillaume Cavellat), had juxtaposed a bird skeleton with that o a human in order to “montrer l’affinité des deux” (pp. 3v-4r; quotation rom 4r). Comparative anatomy in France in the decades around the turn o the eighteenth century had been greatly advanced by the public anatomy demonstrations o Joseph Duverney at the Jardin du Roi in Paris; see Anita Guerrini,
Te Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris
(Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 2015), 201–38. C. idem,
Experimenting with Humans and Animals rom Galen to Animal Rights
(Baltimore
Introduction
19
and London: Te Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). On the cultural uses and implications o comparative anatomical study in early modern Europe, see Jonathan Sawday,
Te Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture
(New York and London: Routledge, 1995).7 Among many scholarly treatments o this important series o prints, the most relevant to this study are James A. Steintrager,
Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 37–43 and
passim
; Stephen F. Eisenman,
Te Cry o Nature: Art and the Making o Animal Rights
Surace ensions: Surace, Finish and the Meaning o Objects
, ed. Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley (New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 26–32. For the complex interaction o sight and touch in eighteenth-century art and culture, see especially Ewa Lajer-Burcharth,
Te Painter’s ouch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard
Nouveau Recueil d’ostéologie et de myologie, dessiné d’après nature par Jacques gamelin … pour l’utilité des sciences et des arts
(oulouse: J.F. Desclassan, 1779), introduction to Part II, “De la Myologie,” n.p. Numerous battle scenes conducted by warring human skeletons set the tenor or drama among Gamelin’s tableaux.10 See especially John C. O’Neal,
Te Authority o Experience: Sensationist Teory in the French Enlightenment
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). See also Jessica Riskin,
Science in the Age o Sensibility: Te Sentimental Empiricists o the Eighteenth Century
(Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 2002). C. Anne C. Vila,
Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine o Eighteenth-Century France
(Baltimore and London: Te Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); John W. Yolton,
Locke and French Materialism
(Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1991); Michael Baxandall,
Patterns o Intention: On the Historical Explanation o Pictures
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
[1684 or 1685], translated into French by Jean Le Clerc,
Bibliothèque universelle et historique
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
[4th ed., 1700], ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1979), Book II, Chap. X, part 15 (p. 149).13 See Elisabeth de Fontenay,
Le Silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité
(Paris: Fayard, 1998), 375–83; Yolton,
Locke and French Materialism
.14 Julien Offray de La Mettre,
reatise on the Soul
[1745], in
Machine Man and Other Writings
, trans. and ed. Ann Tomson (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52.
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
20
Machine Man
[1747/8], in
Machine Man and Other Writings
, 26.17 Denis Diderot,
Lettre sur les aveugles
[1749], in
Œuvres philosophiques
, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1964), 97.18 Oudry was appointed director o the Beauvais tapestry works in 1734 and played a number o significant artistic and administrative roles at the Gobelins manuactory, beginning with his renowned series o
Chasses royales
, commissioned in 1733. See Opperman,
J.-B. Oudry
Système de la nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde morale
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology o Tings
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 51; see also Bennett’s “Systems and Tings: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology,” in
Te Nonhuman urn
, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis and London: University o Minnesota Press, 2015), 223–40.21 Karen Barad,
Meeting the Universe Halway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement o Matter and Meaning
Machine Man
, 27. Te entomologist Charles Bonnet, who eatured a scale o beings similar to the Aristotelian model at the beginning o his
Observations sur les insectes
, in act highlighted the agential complexities o insect existence in the course o his long text; Charles Bonnet,
Observations sur les insectes
[1776], in
Œuvres d’histoire naturelle et de philosophie
Versailles et les tables royales en Europe XVIIème- XIXème siècles
, ed. Béatrix Saule and Rosalind Savill (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux or the Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de rianon, 1994), 280, no. 73; idem, “Les Surtouts de table dans l’art rançais du XVIII
e
siècle,”
Estampille
126 (October 1980): 70, 72. C. Véron-Denise and Droguet,
Animaux d’Oudry
Die Galerie der Meissener iere: Die Menagerie Augusts des Starken ür das Japanishche Palais in Dresden
New System o the Nature o Substances
[1695], in
Leibniz’s “New System” and Associated Contemporary exts
, trans. and ed. R. S. Woodhouse and Richard Francks (Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1997), 11–12.26 Bennet,
Vibrant Matter
, 67; Barad,
Meeting the Universe Halway
, 49.27 Aristotle,
De Anima
, trans. J. A. Smith, in
Te Works o Aristotle
, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, 12 vols. (Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1910), III: I, 1, 402a; II, 1, 412a–b. For uses o Aristotle in fifeenth- and sixteenth-century theories o the
Introduction
21
sensitive animal soul, see Katharine Park, “Te Organic Soul,”
Te Cambridge History o Renaissance Philosophy
, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84. See also Charles H. Lohr, “Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy as Sciences: Te Catholic and the Protestant Views in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in
Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle
, ed. Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot and Brookfield, V: Ashgate, 1999), 280–95. Aristotle continued to serve as a touchstone or theorists o sensitive animal soul into the eighteenth century, as seen, or example, in David Boullier’s
Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes
[rev. ed. 1737] (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 419. On early Calvinist responses to Descartes’s
Discourse on Method
, see Teo Verbeek,
Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy
Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes
was originally published in Amsterdam in 1728, and then again in a revised and greatly expanded version o 1737. C. Fontenay,
Le Silence des bêtes
, 456.29 Te literature encompassed by the “animal turn” is vast and indeed orms the basis or an entire new discipline in the humanities known generally as “animal studies.” A oundational work in philosophy that has been particularly valuable or my own study is Fontenay,
Le Silence des bêtes
. Earlier classics, especially important or eighteenth-century studies, include Leonora Cohen Rosenfield,
From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters rom Descartes to La Mettrie
(New York: Octagon Books, 1940); Heather Hastings,
Man and Beast in French Tought o the Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore and London: Te Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936); and, or English studies, Keith Tomas,
Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800
(New York and Oxord: Oxord University Press, 1983). Important recent works addressing the animal theme in the work o particular philosophers include Jean-Luc Guichet,
Rousseau l’animal et l’homme: L’aimalité dans l’horizon anthropologique des Lumières
(Paris: Les Éditions du Cer, 2006) and Christiane Mervaud,
Bestiaires de Voltaire
,
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
2006 (Oxord: Voltaire Foundation, 2006), 1–200. Other historical studies include the writings o Nathaniel Wolloch; especially relevant to this study are Wolloch’s
Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture
(Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2006) and
Te Enlightenment’s Animals: Changing Conceptions o the Animal in the Long Eighteenth Century
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). Among numerous historically oriented anthologies, see, e.g., Arien Mack, ed.,
Humans and Other Animals
(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1995); Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman, eds.,
At the Borders o the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
22
(New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999); Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist, eds.,
Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012); Paula Cuneo, ed.,
Animals and Early Modern Identity
(Farnham, Surry and Burlington, V: Ashgate, 2014). For a critical evaluation o artistic representations o animals rom the early modern through contemporary eras, see Eisenman,
Te Cry o Nature.
30 Tis questioning has taken a number o orms. Some scholars o the so-called “Anthropocene” have attributed its origins to the later eighteenth century, both generally in terms o the rise o industrialization and, even more specifically, to James Watt’s invention o the steam engine in 1784. See, e.g., Alan Mikhail, “Enlightenment Anthropocene,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies
49 (Winter 2016): 211–31. See also this entire issue o
Eighteenth-Century Studies
(ed. J. R. McNeill), which is devoted to the topic o “Humans and the Environment.” Tere is also a growing body o ecocritical approaches to eighteenth-century studies, especially in the area o English literature. See, e.g., Christopher Hitt, “Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century,”
College Literature
31 (Summer 2004): 123–47; Erin Drew and John Sitter, “Ecocriticism and Eighteenth-Century English Studies,”
Literature Compass
8 (2011): 227–39. Critical environmental approaches are beginning to inorm thematic studies o eighteenth-century culture as well; see, e.g., Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini, eds.,
Invaluable rees: Cultures o Nature 1660–1830
,
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
2012 (Oxord: Voltaire Foundation, 2012). Eighteenth-century understandings o the hierarchical relationship between human and nonhuman lie, and its internal correlate o the relationship between mind and body, have also been subject to new scholarly evaluations; particularly important or students o French culture are the writings o E. C. Spary. See Spary’s
Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History rom Old Regime to Revolution
(Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 2000) and
Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760
Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press or the Paul Mellon Centre or Studies in British Art, 2007). Among recent examinations o the animal in eighteenth-century literature, Heather Keenleyside’s
Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century
(Philadelphia: University o Pennsylvania Press, 2015) sets a particularly important precedent or my study in its identification o a ground-shifing “animal turn” within the eighteenth century itsel. See also, e.g., Louise Robbins,
Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris
(Baltimore and London: Te Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Richard Nash,
Wild Enlightenment: Te Borders o Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century
(Charlottesville, VA: University o Virginia Press, 2003);
Introduction
23
Frank Palmieri, ed.,
Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture
(Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, V: Ashgate, 2006); Jacques Berchtold and Jean-Luc Guichet, eds.,
L’Animal des Lumières
, special issue o
Dix-huitième siècle
42 (2010); Glynis Ridley, ed.,
Animals in the Eighteenth Century
, special issue o
Journal or Eighteenth-Century Studies
33 (December 2010); Lucinda Cole, ed.,
Animal, All oo Animal
, special issue o
Te Eighteenth Century
52 (Spring 2011); obias Menely,
Te Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice
(Chicago and London: University o Chicago Press, 2015); Katherine M. Quinsey, ed.,
Animals and Humans: Sensibility and Representation, 1650–1820
(Oxord: Oxord University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2017); John Morillo,
Te Rise o the Animal and the Descent o Man, 1660–1800: oward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin
Picturing Animals in Britain
, 1. Quite different is the aim o a more recent important publication on animals in eighteenth-century art: Katie Hornstein, ed., “Animal,”
Journal 18
7 (Spring 2019). “Pushing back against the idea o the animal as a mere oil or more significant human drama … these contributions reassess the role o animals as the very actors, agents and materials o art’s histories.” http://www.journal18.org/past-issues/7-animal-spring-2019/(1-10-20)33 C. Morton,
Oudry’s Painted Menagerie
, 35.34 Boullier,
Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes
Histoire naturelle génèrale et particulière: avec la description du Cabinet du Roi
, 36 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1749–1788). Buffon’s collaborator on the first fifeen volumes, which addressed animals other than birds, was Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton. Te many subsequent versions o Buffon’s
Histoire naturelle
ofen truncated his encompassing study o nature by restricting their volumes to those on quadrupeds and simians. Many o my reerences in the course o this book are to one o these revised editions, that o 1785–1791, published in Paris by Sanon & Co. (open access URL: https://www.e-rara.ch/zut/doi/10.3931/e-rara-22933) [cited hereafer as Buffon,
Histoire naturelle
(1785–91)].36 Buffon also employed the artist Jacques de Sève to draw many o the species in pictorial tableaux, as well as to depict skeletons and internal, anatomized animal parts; a large team o specialists engraved de Sève’s drawings or publication. De Sève’s illustrations have been the subject o numerous investigations by historians o art and science. Tey are not addressed in this study owing to their primarily documentary unction, although I ully acknowledge the artist’s inventiveness, whose complexities and problems are well worthy o urther examination. See Elizabeth Amy Liebman, “Painting Natures: Buffon and the Art o the ‘Histoire naturelle’,” PhD diss., University o Chicago, 2003; Tierry Hoquet, Introduction to
Buffon illustré: les gravures de l’
Histoire Naturelle
(1749–1767)
, 2 vols. (Paris:
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
24
Publications Scientifiques du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, 2007), I, 13–175.37 Charles Bonnet,
Observations sur les insectes
, I, 271–81; quotation rom p. 273. Idem,
Essai analytique sur les acultés de l’ame
Essai analytique sur les acultés de l’ame
West 86th
18:2 (Fall–Winter, 2011), 232–48; idem, “Te Suppression o Materiality in Anglo-American Art-Historical Writing,” in
Te Challenge o the Object/Die Herausorderung des Objekts. Proceedings o the 33rd Congress o the International Committee o the History o Art (CIHA), Nürnberg, 15–20 July 2012
, 5 vols., ed. Georg Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch (Nürnberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2014), I, 63–6. Yonan cites Jules David Prown or his path-breaking integration o art history and material culture studies; see, e.g., Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Teory and Method,”
Winterthur Portolio
71:1 (Spring 1982): 1–19. I mysel owe a significant debt to both scholars as I have ormulated and developed my own methodology over many years. A ew among the many recent examples o the “material turn” in studies o eighteenth-century art give some sense o the depth and breadth o this scholarly movement; see, e.g., Eugenia Zuroski and Michael Yonan, eds.,
Material Fictions
, special issue o
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
, 2 vols. 31:2 (Fall 2018); Matthew C. Hunter, “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nyce Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s,”
Te Art Bulletin
97:1 (March 2015): 58–76; Hanna Hodacs, “Cheap and Cheerul: Chinese Silks in Scandinavia, 1731–1751,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies
51:1 (Fall 2017): 23–44; Stacey Slaboda,
Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). For the material turn in Art History considered more generally, see, e.g., the special edition o the
Art Bulletin
, edited by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer: 101 (December 2019).40 See especially Amy Freund, “Sexy Beasts: Te Politics o Hunting Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France,”
Art History
42:1 (February 2019): 40–67; idem, “Good Dog! Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the Politics o Animal Painting,” in
French Art o the Eighteenth Century: Te Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dalls Museum o Art
, ed. Heather MacDonald (New Haven and London: Yale University Press or the Dallas Museum o Art, 2016); Julie-Anne Plax, “J.-B. Oudry’s
Royal Hunts
and Louis XV’s Hunting Park at Compiègne: Landscapes o Power, Prosperity, and Peace,”
Studies in the History o Gardens and Designed Landscapes
Enlightenment and Pathology
; Riskin,
Science in the Age o Sensibility
. Particularly helpul or my analysis o Chardin’s art through the lens o sensibility
Introduction
25
is Ann Bermingham’s assessment o the work o Tomas Gainsborough, an English artist whose approach to the animal subject bears some comparison with that o Chardin; see Ann Bermingham,
Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s
Cottage Door (New Haven and London: Yale University Press or the Yale Center or British Art, 2005). C. also Sarah R. Cohen, “Tomas Gainsborough’s Sensible Animals,” in Quinsey,
Animals and Humans
, 191–218; Alexander Nemerov,
Te Body o Raphaelle Peale: Still Lie and Selfood, 1812–1824
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o Caliornia Press, 2001).42 See, e.g., Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Discourse on the Origins and Foundations o Inequality among Mankind
[1753], in Te Social Contract
and
Te First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 106.43 See, e.g., Pierre Louis Maupertuis,
Lettre VI: Du Droit sur les bêtes
in
Oeuvres de Mr. De Maupertuis
, nouv. éd., 4 vols. (Lyon: Jean-Marie Bruyset, 1756), 223; François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire,
Dictionnaire philosophique
[1769], 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1935), 72; Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Émile Or reatise on Education
De L’Interprétation de la nature
o 1753, Diderot speculated that since individual beings pass rom lie to death, the same could hold true or entire species;
Oeuvres philosophiques
, 241. On the late eighteenth-century origins o our own awareness o species extinction, see, e.g., Elizabeth Kolbert,
Te Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 24–30.45 “ … Le premier tableau du salon”; Melchior Grimm (attrib.),
Correspondance littéraire
, September 15, 1753; reprinted by Hal N. Opperman,
Jean-Baptiste Oudry
Picturing Animals in Britain
,
passim
; Eisenman,
Cry o Nature
, 110–21. Te monographic literature on Stubbs is substantial; see, e.g., Judy Edgerton,
George Stubbs, Painter
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Robin Blake,
George Stubbs and the Wide Creation: Animals, People and Places in the Lie o George Stubbs, 1724–1806
(London: Chatto and Windus, 2005); Judy Edgerton et al.,
George Stubbs 1724–1806
(London: ate Gallery, 1985).
26
Just as the appearance o Cotte’s translation o Locke in 1700 likely inspired intellectual debates over the acquisition o knowledge through the senses—a capacity the human shared with the nonhuman animal—artistic innovation around the turn o the eighteenth century was beginning to challenge the traditional hierarchy that always privileged human discourse over the more material concerns o social interaction and sensual appeal. Animal subjects proved particularly adept at capturing the vicarious response o viewers within this new artistic environment, especially when artists projected animal sociality as a central, engaging theme. I use the term “sociality” speciically or its encompassing application to nonhuman and human animals alike: unlike the term “sociability,” which conjures humanistic intercourse, “sociality” is used by ethologists to describe the deliberate behavior o animals interacting in groups, and also applies to any group o individuals associating in communities.
New orms o interior design and portable arts emerging around the turn o the eighteenth century highlighted such shared sociality by mingling animals and humans in a single realm o ludic interaction. he Royal Academy o Painting and Sculpture, newly receptive to innovations in the more sensual aspects o art—Rubensian color, buoyant compositions, amorous themes
—proved equally open to assessing the potential merits o the material, nonhuman realm.A catalyzing orce in this movement toward sociality as well as the shit in Academic expectations was the painter and designer Alexandre-François Desportes. Having received his initial training with Nicasius Bernaerts, a Flemish animal specialist who was himsel the irst in his chosen genre to receive admission into the Royal Academy, Desportes also worked as a court portraitist in Poland early in his independent career. He was thus ideally positioned to reashion the seventeenth-century genre o animal painting into sensually appealing and surprisingly social tableaux which would elicit interest and even a orm o sel-recognition on the part o cultured viewers. Like his colleague Antoine Watteau, Desportes mined the new decorative structures o
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
28
the
grotesque
or a means o integrating his groups through a seemingly “natural” physical elegance that also connoted communal interaction; but while Watteau’s characters emanated rom the theater and ashionable society, Desportes’s protagonists eatured nonhuman animals amiliar rom the hunt, the boudoir, and, on occasion, the menagerie. Reined but almost never anthropomorphized, the creatures that populate these animalistic
êtes galantes
model a new kind o engaged sensuality. Both Desportes himsel and other designers would urther develop the social animal subject as a vibrant agent in the orm o portable arts ranging rom ire screens to porcelain, yielding a veritable Rococo ecology o lively and interactive matter.
Desportes’s
Sel-Portrait as a Hunter
In 1699, Desportes publically allied his own artistic practice with the material lie o animals when he displayed his
Sel-Portrait as a Hunter
in the oicial exhibition o the French Royal Academy o Painting (Figure 1.1). He had presented the work as his
morçeau de réception
earlier in the same year, where it was described as “a huntsman surrounded by animals”; now, however, the generic “huntsman” transormed into the painter himsel and the animals into his assistants and the very substance o his art.
he work immediately impressed its audience, drawing praise or its vividly rendered creatures.
Elegantly attired with an aristocratic hunter’s slight
déshabillé
, the artist sits beneath a tree at the edge o a spacious park, his gun in one hand and his dogs attentively lanking him. A
trompe l’oeil
pile o dead game spills downward and outward rom the triangle ormed between dogs and man; ur and eathers sot and glistening, the dead animals complement the hunter’s own spiraling posture and richly textured garments. he group unites through a network o interconnected legs, torsos, heads, eet, eyes, ears, and wings, topped by the hunter’s arms and hands and his sidelong, outward gaze. Although clearly in command o the animal lie and death that surround him, the artist-hunter also demonstrates his material involvement with it, by closely allying his body with those o his dogs and his prey. I our eye at irst ollows the turned heads and gazes o the dogs to study the hunter’s ace, it then travels down the arm that embraces the spaniel to encounter the long, human ingers, which are detly matched by the dog’s outstretched oreleg and the brilliant white wing o an upturned duck. A shimmering old o the hunter’s waistcoat abuts the canine oreleg just where the avian wing touches it rom the other side, showing three ways in which a body can be clothed
Te Social Animal
29
and ornamented. Using a still lie artist’s rhymes and repetitions to assemble his careully crated orms, Desportes equally joins man to animal through the context o material display.In his studies o this painting,
Pierre Jacky has noted that the artist’s subject in eect combines two genres amiliar in France, as elsewhere in Northern Europe: the aristocratic hunt portrait and the dead game still lie. Having been asked by the Academy, upon his
aggrégation
in 1698, to decide whether he wished to be received as a portraitist or as a painter o animals—Desportes
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
30
having demonstrated skill in both capacities through the paintings he had presented—he chose the latter and promised to present as his reception piece “a subject o several animals.”
Some surprise must thus have attended the Academicians’ reception o the
Sel-Portrait as Hunter
, whose integrated theme allowed Desportes quite literally to “deliver” the promised animals, captured and presented by the hunter-artist himsel.As Jacky has argued, with his tour-de-orce combination o portraiture and painting o animals both alive and dead, Desportes was probably attempting to elevate the genre o animal painting, which ell below portraiture in the Academy’s thematic ranking.
Although the academicians ollowed their original plan to receive the artist as an animal painter, Desportes’s initiative succeeded rom a marketing standpoint, by appealing to the aristocratic culture o the hunt. Immediately ollowing the
Sel-Portrait as Hunter
, the artist began to execute numerous other portraits o hunters with their dogs and prey, and the theme was quickly adopted by other artists—portraitists and animal painters alike—such as Jean-Baptiste Santerre and Jean-Baptiste Oudry.
Having already secured royal patronage through his position as court portraitist in Poland in the mid-1690s, and, upon his return to France, in decorative work or the Dauphin at his château at Meudon, Desportes may have hoped that the
Sel-Portrait as Hunter
would urther his career in the French court. Indeed, the artist began to receive commissions o hunt paintings or French royal residences around the turn o the eighteenth century, when he undertook decorative projects or the Ménagerie at Versailles, as well as portraits o Louis XIV’s dogs or the château o Marly. Desportes would continue to execute paintings and decorative designs on hunting themes or the French court throughout the rest o his career.
hus advancing the oicial status o animal painting, Desportes also advanced the status o the animal itsel as a viable pictorial protagonist. So allied is the artist with his living and recently elled subjects, the
Sel-Portrait as Hunter
in eect becomes a new kind o group portrait. One would indeed be hard pressed to imagine this human igure sitting alone in the woods. he interaction between the man and his dogs emerges as social, even psychological: the dogs complete the hunter’s gestures with their bodies, the spaniel that receives his caress even sticking out his tongue in reciprocation, while the turned heads and gazes o the two dogs conjure the eect o silent communication with their master. Both animals indeed maniest careully observed canine modes o attending to a human companion—unwavering watchulness and aection-seeking inclination—thus putting the lie to Louis Hourticq’s anthropomorphic ormulation that the dogs show “an imploring eye embedded with a desperate
Te Social Animal
31
desire to speak with the man.”
Speaking is not at issue in this tableau o physical reciprocity.Portraits o hunters with their dogs and game had appeared in seventeenth-century English court portraiture as well as Dutch amily groups, and the
Guilden Cabinet
o Corneille De Bie, published in Antwerp in 1661, eatured an engraved portrait o Pieter Boel with his hand stroking the head o an attentive greyhound, a possible inspiration or Desportes’s use o the gesture.
But Desportes’s painting alters the conventions o group hunt portraiture by enhancing the role o the dogs and by incorporating even the creatures recently killed into the ensemble. he artully piled, still vibrant bodies o the dead animals orm a structural and tactile base or the living members o the group, as implied by the spaniel’s oreleg stretched possessively above the other creatures and by the hunter’s corresponding caress.We can observe the care Desportes took to coordinate his own igure with those o the animals by considering his preparatory chalk study or the painting (Figure 1.2), as well as a preliminary oil that closely ollows it (Private
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
34
, oil, 1683; Versailles, musée national du Château/Paris, Louvre; photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
estimation than those who only represent things that are dead and without movement.” Landscape, a living thing, is correspondingly more “noble” than inert “ruit, lowers, and seashells.”
Félibien’s hierarchy, which is generally taken to be a summary o Academic standards, echoes the Aristotelian
scala naturae
extending rom the human, through the various orders o animals; to the higher and lower plants; to, at the bottom, minerals, earth, and other inanimate substances. Conirmed by the biblical Creation story and a staple o scholastic
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Te Social Animal
35
discourse on the natural order, the “scale o nature” would continue to be reined as an organizing principle o lie (and non-lie) through much o the eighteenth century.
But as Arthur O. Lovejoy persuasively argued in his classic
Great Chain o Being
, the philosophical principle o the
scala naturae
also rested upon the assurance o “diversity and plenitude” among all beings, and thus implicitly validated the existence o even the lowliest zoophyte.
his point would be emphasized by such eighteenth-century proponents o the principle as the entomologist-philosopher Charles Bonnet, who would propose his own version o a “scale o natural beings” in the Preace to his
reatise on Insectology
o 1745, in which these tiny but pervasive animals occupied their own special place within the “beautiul spectacle” o organized and non-organized beings that ormed one existential chain.
he composition o Desportes’s
Sel-Portrait as a Hunter
, while itsel articulating a “scale” that descends rom man, to living animals, to inert bodies, to earth, also promotes through its intense, oregrounded ocus upon the group as a whole the intrinsic value that each o these natural entities holds in the world. he Academy, although institutionally and politically committed to the primacy o human history,
may have been implicitly acknowledging the value o diversity and plenitude when accepting this unusual “huntsman surrounded by animals” as the
morçeau de réception
o an animal painter.Other aspects o Desportes’s painting recall the ways seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish animal specialists had announced their proessional investment in the animal through physical double-entendres. Frans Snyders and his Flemish ollowers, or example, used red paint to stand in or animal blood in their still lives o just-dead animals. Smeared on white cloths or dribbling rom muzzles and beaks in trails o painterly impasto, the paint-blood at once signals the materiality o the artist’s creation and the biblical essence o animal lie. Several passages in the Old estament underscore the equation o animal blood with soul: Hebrew priests worshipping in the temple dipped a inger in the blood o a sacriiced bullock and sprinkled it ceremoniously, or—in the words o Leviticus—“the lie o the lesh is in the blood” and “it is the blood that maketh an atonement or the soul.”
Although less histrionic than his Flemish orebears in his use o the blood-paint metaphor, Desportes eatured a spot o red paint clinging to the ground beneath the nose o his dead hare in the lower right, like a subtle signature. Animals in Snyders’s paintings, particularly dogs, oten mimic or even stand in or humans while still retaining lielike realism, as i to demonstrate the pictorial value o the material world and its chie inhabitants. In
Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
36
direct imitation o her master’s caress upon her chest, Desportes’s spaniel plants her own paw upon the mossy belly o a elled duck. Meanwhile the greyhound that closely watches his master or visual cues rom the other side o the group reveals his own physical virility through an elegant lick upward o the tail. For Desportes, as or his Flemish predecessors, matter
mattered
as the essence o their proession, and the animal, a ully material yet sentient being, served as its primary representative.
Canine Portraiture
Having developed his artistic skills simultaneously as a portraitist and animal specialist, Desportes demonstrated the many interrelationships between the two—interrelationships that disrupted the Academy’s implicit hierarchy o genres, but did not appear unduly to trouble the Academicians themselves. Desportes’s son Claude-François, in an account o the lie and work o his ather presented to the Académie in 1748, suggested that there was a certain interchangeability between human and animal in the artist’s working method, but Claude-François’s rationale also intimates the dawning Neo-Classical imperatives o his own era: he claimed that in order to understand the anatomy and postures o his animals, his ather used human models, animals being ar too active to provide suicient time or the artist to study their bodies. he artist, in Claude-François’s account, believed that “only the antique and human igure can provide the true idea o the beauty o orms, the correct proportions, and the elegance o contours, to then apply them to living animals, and even to those that are dead.” For, he asserted, it was the painter’s responsibility to understand the body underlying the ur or eathers, rather like the history painter’s need to understand the ull orm o the bodies o human igures under their draperies.
he many studies o live animals Alexandre-François made throughout his career—and a notable lack o classically inspired human igures—belie his son’s eorts to “humanize” his working method, but they do demonstrate the artist’s concern with comprehending and capturing the physical truth o his animal subjects. Claude-François correctly perceived the symbiosis between the portraitist’s interest in the draped human body and the animal specialist’s interest in anatomically accurate mammals and birds “clothed” in coats and eathers.hree years ater he was received into the Academy, Desportes gained an opportunity once again to cross its hierarchical distinctions by painting literal portraits o Louis XIV’s avorite dogs, in this case at the king’s own behest
Te Social Animal
37
(Figure 1.4).
Commissioned or the antechamber o Louis XIV’s apartment at his pleasure palace o Marly, the large portraits eatured speciic dogs rom the royal hunting pack in almost lie-size proportions, both individually and in small groups, each posed alertly beore winged game in extensive landscape settings. Desportes painted their names in capitals directly into the portraits and highlighted the letters in gold, a technique that recalls Renaissance court portraiture, such as that o Daniel Dumonstier.
In Desportes’s triple portrait o
Ponne, Bonne, and Nonne
(Figure 1.4), the artist varied the attitudes o the dogs to suggest their dierent responses to the partridges they are about to surprise rom behind a vegetative screen. Each careully distinguished as to markings, eye color, and ur texture, the spaniels emerge as three separate canine personalities. hey are set in the oreground o the landscape, which is shaped to complement their postures in the manner o human portraiture, with vertical oliage bracketing the group and panoramic, rolling hills that echo their agile movements.
In 1714, Louis XIV commissioned our additional portraits rom Desportes to serve as overdoors at the pleasure palace o Marly; or these, the artist painted
