L'Art du XVIIe siécle (review)

This two-volume edition brings together writings on eighteenth-century artists by the Goncourts which originally appeared in fascicule form between 1859 and 1870, and were then added to after Jules's death in the form of 'notules' by Edmond, before being published in book form in 1873-74. The artists featured, to whom individual monographies are devoted, are Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, La Tour, Greuze, the Saint-Aubin brothers (Vol 1), Gravelot, Cochin, Eisen, Moreau, Debucourt, Fragonard, Prudhon (Vol 2). Jean-Louis Cabanès begins his substantial and comprehensive introduction by observing that the brothers' interest in the art of the previous century represented a nostalgically compensatory counterpoint to the painful business of observing the contemporary world as novelists. Their nostalgia goes beyond the eighteenth century to a supposed origin of 'l'esprit français' which its artists embody for those disenchanted by post-Revolutionary (mainly post-1830 …) modernity. Thus develops 'un mythe du XVIII^e siècle que les écrivains se réapproprient au gré de leur imaginaire personnel' (p. 8), an imaginary realm supplemented by the poetry of Gautier, Nerval and Verlaine. Their choice of artists is informed, as much as by their prejudices, by their status as inveterate collectors. This in turn accounts for the randomness of the series, or rather, juxtaposition, of monographs, which is riddled by internal contradictions. Cabanès gives some idea of the concrete pursuit of the project by the brothers: visits to dealers all over France to view and acquire works of art. He also highlights the intertextual relationship between their art criticism and their historiography, based largely on the same research, and the more oblique intertexts to be found in their fiction. The monographs themselves employ many notions associated with nineteenth-century fiction, particularly the medical metaphors applied to the writer's work; Chardin's colours, for example, are 'ces dessous que le scalpel trouve sous la peau' (1:108); the idea is that artists are valorized for their being able, like nineteenth-century novelists, to reveal what is under the surface of things. This is one of the many rhetorical strategies which underpin the essentially literary quality of the writing. The individual texts consist of a mixture of criticism, heavily and informatively annotated documents contemporary with the artists (biographies, correspondence, etc., often found at random in second-hand bookshops), engravings from the original fascicules based on works in the brothers' collections, and Edmond's 'notules', supplemented by inventories of works and exhibitions. All the monographs are extensively documented in turn by Cabanès; names, places, events, points of detail are thoroughgoingly contextualised and elucidated in footnotes taking up one quarter of the work's pages. This profuse and informative documentation, more than any other feature, makes this meticulously scholarly edition more useful than the undocumented aggregate of the original texts, which themselves are fascinating documents saying as much about the aesthetic preoccupations of the century in which they were written as about the one which preceded it.