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Eighteenth-Century Studies 36.2 (2003) 231-240



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The Laws of Bienséance and the Gendering of Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Art Education

Laura Auricchio

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As the title of Thomas Crow's seminal book tells us, emulation played a crucial role in the development of late-eighteenth-century French artists. 1 A nexus of imitation, competition, and identification governed the art education of the period. Emulation gave structure and meaning to the concours organized by the Parisian Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and pervaded the day-to-day lives of artists studying in the ateliers of Jacques-Louis David and his contemporaries.

This pedagogical reliance on emulation--a slippery virtue that always hovered on the brink of vice--posed unique problems for women artists. Looking at examples drawn from both visual and textual sources, the following pages will explore the double bind that made emulation necessary for female artists' careers but dangerous for their reputations. Several strategies helped individual women forge uneasy alliances between gendered expectations and professional necessities.

Emulation was crucial to every step of official art education in eighteenth-century France. Throughout their years at the Royal Academy's schools, students engaged in an agonistic struggle with the art of the past. A typical student would begin his studies by copying prints after works by past masters. Once he had become accomplished at this task, he would advance to the next level, where he would create two-dimensional drawings of plaster casts modeled after classical Greek and Roman sculptures. Only after demonstrating an ability to imitate, learn from, and ideally surpass the works of previous artists would he go on to draw from the live nude model. Even when drawing from nature, though, students were often encouraged to regularize and improve upon the particular appearances of their living models by evoking the idealized bodies and faces of ancient or Renaissance artworks. 2

At the same time that Academy students imitated, competed with, and learned from the art of the past, they also vied with each other for honors and awards. A progression of concours marked students' ascent through the ranks of the Academy's schools. Aspiring artists won the approbation and attention of their teachers by triumphing over their peers. Although lesser prizes were awarded to students who mastered such skills as evoking expression or depicting perspective, the series of competitions leading up to the Rome Prize marked the pinnacle of Academic achievement. The winner of the Rome Prize--the student judged to have made the best history painting on a subject selected by the Academy--would continue his schooling at the French Academy in Rome on a government stipend. There, emulation would remain his guide as he grappled with Rome's incomparable masterpieces.

Even after completing their Academic training, artists kept the competitive spirit alive by participating in public exhibitions. The Salons that the Royal Academy organized at regular intervals offered both full and probationary members [End Page 231] opportunities to promote their art and win new patrons. Yet the Academy, which was continually struggling to distance itself from commerce, generally downplayed the Salons' marketing value. Instead, representatives preferred to discuss these exhibitions in terms of emulation, arguing that the competitive aspects of Salons paved a path to glory for the artist, the nation, and the arts. As they engaged in a cycle of rivalry and identification, painters, sculptors, and printmakers would spur each other on to make the most of their skills and to create ever-greater works of art. For instance, the Secretary of Marseilles's Academy of Painting and Sculpture proposed that his institution could provoke emulation among its artists by hanging Old Master paintings among the works on display at members' Salons. In a letter to the Parisian Academy drafted on 10 September 1783, Marseilles's Monsieur Moulinneuf reported that a group of local connoisseurs wanted to display works from their private collections in order to "add to the éclat of our exhibition, elevate the taste of the public, advance the progress of the...

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