Exhibitions of Manuscript Verse in the Salon du Louvre

In the eighteenth century, spectators placed hand-written poems on or beside artworks in the Paris Salon du Louvre. Overlooked in the history of exhibition practice, this unofficial spectatorial response to art physically intruded on a space where only members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture were allowed to exhibit their work. The jurisdiction of the Académie over every aspect of the Salon, including the policing of its space by the Bourbon monarch's Swiss guards, is a precedent for the top-down model of curatorial control, channeling of spectatorial movement, and regulation of spectatorial behavior that characterizes modern exhibition practice. Yet, manuscript verse reveals how art exhibitions in the ancien régime were in certain respects more participatory, and, from a modern perspective, more strange than their modern inheritors.

This essay situates manuscript verse within the complex media ecosystem of the Salon. Like the information society that Robert Darnton describes in his famous article on eighteenth-century Parisian news media, in which news circulated simultaneously in oral, manuscript, and print forms, the Salon encompassed different artistic and communications media associated with overlapping social practices and cultural spheres.¹ Combinations of media, including manuscript, served different social groups there in distinct and sometimes contradictory ways. To understand the operation of media in the Salon is to grasp their interrelations.

This essay argues that interactions between artistic and communications media corresponded to social and cultural tensions in the Salon. First, this essay contextualizes manuscript verse with respect to the range of poetry about art in the Salon, including encomiastic verse and print verse. Second, this essay traces the genealogy of manuscript verse in period poetic genres and practices, notably verse for portraits and impromptu verse. Third, this essay locates manuscript verse at the intersection of competing interests in the Salon, where absolutist, aristocratic, and popular rhetorics entwined; manuscript verse represented a courtly and aristocratic response to printed art criticism.

The Writing on the Wall: Verse in the Salon

The phenomenon of manuscript verse in the Salon is unexplored in modern scholarship perhaps because the history of art criticism has been written as a history of prose. It is easy to forget that art criticism was never far from poetry in this period. Manuscript verse resembled in form and purpose other kinds of poetry associated with the Salon. Like manuscript verse, these genres of poetry in response to art testify to the continuity of poetic and exhibition cultures in this period.

Manuscript verse displayed in the Salon only survives where art criticism has preserved traces of this no doubt common but largely unrecorded practice. For example, in his review of the Salon of 1747, Jean-Bernard Le Blanc documents one such manuscript poem for a portrait bust by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (fig. 1).² Le Blanc notes that below the bust were written these lines:

    By his virtues, by his deedsSovereigns, learn how to be worthyWarriors, instruct yourself, and Englishmen blush    To have underestimated your master.³

The verse reflects the status of Bonnie Prince Charlie, pretender to the thrones of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, as a romantic hero following the unsuccessful Jacobite uprising of 1745 and his subsequent flight to France where he was in exile.

Manuscript verse was always laudatory. For example, in the Salon of 1747, the pastel portrait of the Maréchal de Saxe by Maurice Quentin de La Tour inspired two manuscript poems glorifying the marshal general of France and hero of the War of Austrian Succession (fig. 2).⁴ Le Blanc reports that "this verse has been placed below the portrait:"

Hero without vanity, courtier without baseness,Never has he felt the blow of any reversal of fortune;Condé⁵ would have envied his valour;    Turenne⁶ would have praised his wisdom.⁷

Figure 1.

After Jean Baptiste II Lemoyne, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 1746. Gilt Plaster, h. 48.3 cm. Sizergh Castle, Cumbria, UK © National Trust / Barbara Pointon / Bridgeman Images.