Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lambertson, John. The Boulevarde and The Salon.
Lambertson, John. The Boulevarde and The Salon.
Abstract
On 24 August 1824, a vaudeville entitled La St-Louis des artistes announced the
opening of the most important artistic event in France during the Restoration,
the Salon of 1824. This article analyses popular theatre in relation to French
Romantic painting and emphasises the link between popular spectacle, high art
and politics during the Restoration. The comparison of popular theatre and Ro-
mantic painting by artists like Eugène Delacroix and Charles-Emile Champmar-
tin underscores the ‘intermediality’ of visual culture during the Restoration
and suggests the importance of popular culture for the critical debate over
Romanticism, for the innovative form of Romantic painting, and for state pa-
tronage of this controversial art.
La St-Louis des artistes, où la fête du Salon, a fascinating but forgotten one act
vaudeville by Merle, Simonnin and Fd.-Laloue, made its debut at the Théâtre
de la Porte-Saint-Martin on the boulevard du Temple during the royal festival
of Saint Louis on 24 August 1824.1 The play announces the opening of the Salon
of 1824, a state-sponsored exhibition of contemporary art in the Louvre, which
was the most important artistic event in France during the Restoration. There,
writers defined Romanticism in painting as a battle between two camps: the
Shakespeareans and Homerists, the new school and the old school, or most typi-
cally the Romantics and the Classics. This article analyses the play in relation to
the French art world and emphasises the link between popular spectacle, high
art and politics in the visual culture of the Restoration. In an uncanny parallel
with artistic circles and the emergence of public debates on Romantic painting
in the early 1820s, the play focuses on the life of a young history painter,
Raimond, and his attempt to make a reputation at the Salon. La St-Louis des
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Volume 40, Number 1 (Summer 2013) © Manchester University Press
http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/NCTF.40.1.2
16 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
artistes presented the artist’s quest for a subject that would captivate the audi-
ence at the Salon, lead to state sponsorship and concluded with political com-
mentary on French military intervention and an invitation to the lower
classes to visit the Salon - the very issues that animated the practice and discus-
sion of painting in Paris in the mid-1820s.
La St-Louis des artistes and its relationship to artistic networks and the Salon
of 1824 elucidate the ‘intermediality’ of visual culture during the Restoration. In
the Restoration, as Robert Darnton found for pre-Revolutionary culture, ‘media
of all sorts - printed, written, oral and visual - crisscross and interconnect’.2
The dramatizing of history paintings on stage and the portrayal of actors’ poses
in pictures exhibited at the Salon in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century
clearly anticipated the ‘intermediality’ of cultural production rooted in the spe-
cific and unique circumstances of the Restoration.3 La St-Louis des artistes,
however, differs from the one-dimensional parodies of high culture found in
the public sphere studied by Thomas Crow and other exchanges between the-
atre and painting in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century examined by
James Rubin and David Alston, as it satirises on stage the world of the artist
and high art in its social, aesthetic and political complexity.4 In fact, the play
presents artistic, social, political and economic issues faced by Romantic artists
in the early 1820s as well as presages outcomes of the actual Salon of 1824.
Striking revelations of the vaudeville include the extent to which the classically
oriented discourses of high art had penetrated popular culture by 1824, and
conversely the infiltration of popular culture into these very discourses.5 My
discussion of the play and of the Salon of 1824 reveals that popular culture
embraced the subject matter of the artist and high art and ultimately contributed
through satire to the artistic debate surrounding Romanticism. Furthermore, my
analysis suggests that popular audiences responded to Romantic canvases as they
reacted to boulevard theatre and explains the misunderstood royal sponsorship
of this controversial painting.
La St-Louis des artistes opened to a socio-economically diverse audience on
the boulevard du Temple, where an array of popular theatres produced shows
ranging from light vaudevillian comedy to melodramatic horror. The Irish
novelist Lady Morgan, struck by the popular playhouse and its audience,
reported during the early Restoration that:
The Théâtres des Boulevards . . . divide among them dramas, melo-dramas, panto-
mime, dancing and petites piéces (sic.) of every description. And, though it is a sort
of ton for persons of fashion to go in large parties to these most amusing theatres,
two or three times in a season, yet the audience, generally speaking, appeared to
me to be extremely coarse, and so loud and vivacious in their disapprobation, or
applause, and so curious and varied in their costume and appearance, as to form
almost as entertaining a part of the spectacle, as the representations on the stage.6
St-Louis des artistes. The play’s three main roles are Raimond, a painter,
Montignac, a sculptor, and Duplan, an architect, who live together in the
faubourg Saint-Germain near the Pont des Arts. Their model is a disabled
Napoleonic veteran humorously named Duracuire, whose daughter Célestine
is one of Raimond’s students. The artists’ cleaning lady is la mère Michel
and their porter le père Trinquard. In contrast to the bohemians in the play,
the last major character to appear, M. Richardville, is a wealthy patron of
the arts and a war profiteer.
When the playwrights authored La St-Louis des artistes, the most prominent
image of contemporary artistic life was Horace Vernet’s depiction of his atelier
in the rue des Martyrs, exhibited in 1822 at his new studio a few blocks away
in the fashionable Nouvelle Athènes neighbourhood. Vernet mounted the
highly successful one-man show comprising forty-five paintings to protest poli-
tics that led to the rejection his Battle of Jemmapes and the Clichy Gate from
the Salon of 1822. Like the Clichy Gate which depicted the defence of Paris
against the Allies in March 1814, Vernet’s Studio, the painting as well as the
real place, appealed to opposition politics, and it embodied Liberal and Bona-
partist aspirations. The picture reveals that Vernet’s studio became a gathering
place for Napoleonic veterans, journalists, apprentices and artists, including
August de Forbin, Director of the Louvre and influential state art patron.
Another prominent visitor to the studio, liberal journalist Etienne de Jouy,
co-authored the catalogue for Vernet’s show.7 Jouy, in fact, had a direct connec-
tion to the principal author of La St-Louis des artistes, Jean-Toussaint Merle;
they collaborated on popular satires of Parisian life entitled L’hermite de la
Chaussée-d’Antin and on such Liberal and Bonapartist projects as the journal Le
Nain jaune.8
If La St-Louis des artistes appropriates elements of the thirty-five-year-old
Vernet and his studio, a gathering of artists and apprentices infused with
Imperial nostalgia, the play presents characters that reflect most closely younger
painters like Eugène Delacroix and Charles-Emile Champmartin who were two
of the most important artists to appear in the vanguard of the Romantic move-
ment in 1824. Delacroix and Champmartin belonged to a complex ‘communica-
tion system’ that overlapped with Vernet’s circle; the young painters knew
Vernet and worked and visited with his friend and neighbour Géricault in the
early Restoration.9 Furthermore, Delacroix produced no fewer than eight
caricatures, some dealing with politics and theatre, for Le Miroir des spectacles
co-edited by Jouy, Merle’s collaborator.10
Delacroix and Champmartin, like their theatrical counterparts but unlike
Vernet, lived in the faubourg Saint-Germain, which was an economically and
socially diverse quarter.11 Although traditionally home to the aristocracy,
appealing to the wealthy middle class, and attractive to artists and students,
Saint-Germain drew its population mostly from the lower classes in the 1820s.12
One contemporary described such intermixing of these groups: ‘opulence and
misery contrast hideously in Paris; a thin board separates them. The loud
18 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
happiness of the salons on the first floor trouble and aggravate the gloomy
sadness of rooms above’.13 The play and its characters represent an early stage
in the development of the bohemian identity and appeared two decades before
the term bohemian identified exclusively the artist on the periphery of middle-
class life. In the 1820s the public understood the bohemian as an urban social
type: the struggling young artist, the disabled veteran and the domestic labourer
as well as the gypsy and the Parisian criminal underbelly.14
The play begins as the three artists struggle humorously with their bulky
objects on their way to the Salon, aided by their porter. As they walk, they sing:
Once back at home, Raimond, the painter, tells his two friends that it is an
honour just to be admitted to the Salon, to be in the catalogue, and then places
his hand on his heart, which he says, tells him one day he will be famous.
Montignac, the sculptor, pokes fun at his friend Raimond by placing his hand
on his stomach, which says that he is hungry. Then, they realise, for the first
time in memory, that they all three have money; Duplan, the architect, asks
‘How in the devil did this happen?’16 In a dialogue that follows Raimond lays
bare his soul: ‘My good friends, I must admit to you, that I infamously allowed
myself to be seduced. I earned three hundred francs by painting a shop sign’.
‘How horrible!’, respond Duplan and Montignac.17
The theatrical juxtaposition of Raimond’s canvas for the Salon and his
commercial work for the street blurred the distinction between high and popular
art and contributed to lively debates on painting during the early nineteenth
century. Of course, such artists as Antoine Watteau and Jean-Siméon Chardin
painted shop signs in the eighteenth century; however, there seems to have been
a boom in sign painting in Paris during the Restoration encouraged by expand-
ing commercial demand as well as artistic competition. Many well-known artists
participated in this phenomenon, as documented in Edouard Wattier’s Musée en
plein air, ou choix des enseignes les plus remarquables de Paris published in 1824,
and apparently many wished to remain anonymous like Raimond in the play.
And unlike earlier periods, newspapers recorded that crowds in the street
admired new shop signs, and even a new board game based on these images
appeared. Remarking on the intersection of high art and commerce, critics
lamented that ‘Paris will soon be nothing more than a museum, and we will
find the arts everywhere apart from where they should be . . . ’.18 Conversely,
many journalists feared that the commercialism of the street had inundated
the Salon; the Journal des artistes compared the Salon in 1827 to ‘the cargo
of a shipwrecked vessel which has been haphazardly put on show in shops
completely unsuited to them, as if only there while waiting to be sorted’.19
The Boulevard and the Salon 19
Plate 1: Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, Form before Colour, 1824. Lithograph. Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
style mired in the material truth of battle, including no less than twenty
grenadier heads modelled from Duracuire’s features. The origins of Duracuire’s
disabilities, however, were actual Napoleonic battles in Egypt and Spain, where
he lost an arm and a leg. Duracuire, after seeing his features animate the Spanish
battlefield, assures Raimond that ‘you have succeeded! And my opinion on
Trocadéro is most worthy, because Duracuire was there’.29 The fusion of Resto-
ration military ambitions and Imperial nostalgia, therefore, permeates the
picture on canvas and stage and introduces an oppositional Napoleonic subtext
to the audience, a subtext that infused actual artistic circles as well as other
theatrical productions.30
If Raimond’s picture, as presented by the play, integrated a Napoleonic
subtext into an image of Bourbon foreign intervention, Delacroix’s Scenes of the
Massacres at Chios (Plate 2) and Champmartin’s Massacre of the Innocents
(Plate 3) directly challenged the Restoration’s foreign policy.31 Rather than illus-
trating victorious French military action like such images as Hippolyte
Lecomte’s Episode of the Spanish Civil War in 1823, Taking the Corner of Sainte-
Marguerite to La Cortona, 5 July 1823 (Plate 4), the pictures of Delacroix and
Champmartin appealed to public taste for the melodramatic sensation of
violence and graphically portrayed murder and bedlam permitted in part by the
French monarchy’s policy of non-intervention in the Greek Wars of Liberation.
Delacroix exhibited his painting as Scenes of the Massacres at Chios; Greek
Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc., which parallels contemporary accounts
of Turkish atrocities against innocent men, women and children at Chios that
dragged on for two months and that included the rape, murder and enslavement
of Greeks as well as the outbreak of the plague on the island. Tragically, it was
an attack by Greek insurgents from the island of Samos that provoked the mas-
sacres; the Chiots were uninvolved in the uprising against the Turks.32 In this
light, Champmartin’s Massacre of the Innocents may be read as recasting the
horrors at Chios in Biblical terms, paralleling French arguments for intervening
against the Muslim Turks. The inhabitants of Chios in 1822, like the children of
Bethlehem at the birth of Christ, were innocent victims of bloodshed. In fact,
Delacroix himself had contemplated painting an allegory of Ottoman barbarism
and probably discussed these ideas with his good friend Champmartin during
one of their many discussions in the spring of 1824 in preparation for the
Salon.33
Delacroix’s politically-charged contemporary subject the Scenes of the
Massacres at Chios, as well as Champmartin’s biblical corollary, guaranteed
popular appeal with two important audiences at the salon: liberals who opposed
Restoration policies and the lower classes who packed boulevard theatres. As
early as 1821 Delacroix wrote a friend that ‘I am planning to paint for the next
exhibition a picture whose subject will be taken from recent wars between the
Turks and Greeks. I think in the present circumstances, if it is well done, this
will be a way of drawing attention to myself’.34 As for Champmartin, one com-
mentator suggested that his Massacre of the Innocents embodied a quest for
22 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
Plate 2: Eugène Delacroix, Scenes of the Massacres at Chios; Greek Families Awaiting
Death or Slavery, etc., 1824. Oil on canvas, 419 x 354 cm. Louvre, Paris. (Photo: Erich
Lessing/Art Resource, NY).
fame at any price.35 Delacroix’s image of dying and enslaved Greeks also
evoked the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt and French imperial ambitions in the
1820s, which commentators and the artist himself underscored by comparing
Delacroix’s painting to Baron Gros’s extremely popular General Bonaparte
Visiting the Pesthouse at Jaffa, 1804.36
Imperial heroism, perhaps inevitably, penetrated aesthetic discussions in the
studio as well, rendering style political. The sculptor Montignac, for instance,
The Boulevard and the Salon 23
Plate 4: Hippolyte Lecomte, Episode of the Spanish Civil War in 1823, Taking the Corner
of Sainte-Marguerite to La Cortona, 5 July 1823, 1824. Oil on canvas, 22.7 x 25.4 cm.
Versailles, Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. (Photo: Art
Resource, NY).
know well that you put me in all sauces’.38 This burlesque exchange parodies
for its popular audience the important artistic debate on the nature of beauty
that was central to the definition of Romantic painting in the public sphere
in 1824.
During the early Restoration art critics agreed in theory that visual art
required transcendental human form in order for it to speak of timeless truths,
reflecting the persistent influence of academic doctrine in post-Revolutionary
France. Academic critics like Etienne Delécluze defined this form as ideal beauty
(beau idéal), the perfect human form inspired from the noblest ancient and
natural models, and opposed it to relative beauty (beauté relative), forms
mired in the material truth of a specific historical context.39 Other critics argued
that beauty was not the unique purview of the ancients and actually had modern
manifestations. Stendhal, for instance, advanced a pluralistic notion of beauty
and claimed that Michelangelo and Racine, now considered classic, were modern
in their day; in Stendhal’s aesthetics the artist begins with Classical models,
transforms them with modern traits, and thereby creates a modern ideal beauty
(beau idéal moderne).40 Even the most pro-Romantic critics, like Adolphe
Thiers, believed that the painter should seek ‘to penetrate the past, to seize its
The Boulevard and the Salon 25
mores, character, local colour, and to present a true and at the same time noble
and poetic history’.41 Clearly these critical positions have common ground,
stressing nobility in form and poetry in meaning. In fact, critical disagreements
about Romanticism at the Salon emerged not so much in the dispute of these
ideals, but in their application to contemporary painting. The burlesque dialogue
between Montignac and Duracuire, on the other hand, introduces relative beauty
as an aesthetic alternative, and therefore presents a more radical aesthetic
position, albeit through satire, than the most progressive criticism in 1824.
Montignac takes a crippled Napoleonic veteran as a modern surrogate for
such ancient heroes as Agamemnon, Ajax, and Priam, and Raimond actu-
ally pays the model by the head or arm, highlighting his materialist ap-
proach as well as parodying traditional academic study.
As the artists leave the studio for the Salon, they persuade Duracuire to
accompany them by stressing the ‘reality effect’ of the works on display.42
Raimond describes painting that simulates ‘cannonballs flying through the
air, here! . . . an enemy patrol surprised by our avant-garde, there! . . . further
along, a French flag that you retrieve ...’. The description of images so utterly
convinces Duracuire that he envisions the galleries of the Louvre as a battlefield:
‘I go to the Salon, as if I return to combat’.43 The paintings have a similar effect
on the porter le père Trinquard, when he helped the artists deliver their works
to the Louvre at the opening of the play. He tells la mère Michel: ‘it was amusing
the museum . . . the paintings one would say talk to you.’ Then in a playful lyric
he describes beautiful objects at the exhibition:
La mère Michel, enticed by the spectacle at the Salon, replies, ‘let’s go, let’s go
. . . I must go see that’.45 The play represents the reality of lower classes at the
Salon, disabled Napoleonic veterans, porters, cleaning ladies, among others, and
entices them to visit the exhibition at the Louvre and experience the mystical
power of life-like paintings.
Audiences at the actual Salon also apparently experienced the works of
Delacroix and Champmartin as spectacular reality. Critics Flocon and Aycard
wrote that in Delacroix’s Scenes of the Massacres at Chios, ‘All is so natural, the
tattered clothes, facial expressions, the victims’ dreary and frightening exhaus-
tion, that we forget art and the painter, and we actually witness this terrible
scene’.46 Perhaps even more telling is Auguste Jal’s description of a fictional
encounter with a lower-class woman at the exhibition:
Do you want to hear what a simple woman who stopped in front of M. Champ-
martin’s painting said yesterday? I gathered her account as we crossed the room.
26 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
‘Look, she said, what our children are exposed to! A horse carries away the rider
who was walking him on the Champs Elysée; he jumps the Tuileries barrier and
arrives at little Provence to knock over and kill the nannies and kids! If I were
the prefect of the Police! . . . ’. I wager that she let loose a stream of abuse at
the grooms, horses, guards and perhaps even the nannies who stayed in the
lower garden rather than climb up on the terrace!47
Raimond, entering, overhears the dispute and tells Richardville that his paint-
ing is not for sale. ‘If I had known that’, replies Richardville, ‘I would not have
bothered to climb four flights of stairs. You understand how difficult it is for
one who lives on the first floor’.50 Social hostility between the privileged and
lower classes increases, as Raimond asserts that those who live on the fourth
floor are more patriotic than those on the first. When it becomes clear how
much Richardville will pay for the sketch, however, Montignac negotiates a deal
between genius and fortune, as humour again diffuses class conflict.51
The play concludes as Trinquard, the porter, barges into the studio with
news that three uniformed officials, including a policeman, have arrived, ap-
parently to arrest the artists for debt. Trinquard then presents Duplan and
Montignac with official letters from the men, which, on the contrary, bring
good news. Duplan’s plan for a barracks will be built, which prompts Duracuire
to whisper to his daughter that she should have chosen Duplan! Montignac
opens his letter and learns that the Ministry of the Royal Household purchased
his bust for the considerable sum of 6,000 francs. Only poor Raimond is left
The Boulevard and the Salon 27
without glory, at least until a government representative arrives with news that
the King awarded him the cross of the Legion of Honour, and the state bought
his work. Everyone celebrates the artists’ successes around a bust of the King, as
Raimond says: ‘My friends, it is to the King, whose likeness you see, that your
adoration should be addressed’.52
On the surface, La St-Louis des artistes appears to celebrate the king and his
patronage of the arts, but a curious oppositional subtext emerges through
allusions to the glorious Napoleonic past, through references to contemporary
class conflict, and through politicized debate on aesthetics. The press observed
this, and one journal’s review of the play actually quoted word for word
Duracuire’s angry response to Richardville’s desire to replace the Napoleonic
veteran in Raimond’s painting with a war profiteer, underscoring the play’s
coded oppositional meaning.53 In fact, such king’s days often became a target
for the regime’s critics, who often booed lines in such free theatrical perfor-
mances that glorified the King, although police archives reveal that La St-Louis
des Artistes proceeded without incident.54
The denouement of the play anticipated the acquisition of Romantic paintings
from the Salon in 1824 and their complex political meaning. Among the
audience at the Louvre was at least one private patron who wished to buy
Delacroix’s painting, paralleling Richardville’s desire for Raimond’s picture.
In response, Auguste de Forbin, Director of the Louvre, successfully appealed to
his superior, Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, just weeks after the opening of the
Salon to purchase the Scenes of the Massacres at Chios, along with works by
five other painters, before it was snatched up by a private collector who wished
to embarrass the government. Painters like Delacroix, Forbin wrote, ‘have
resisted even higher prices from private patrons with the hope of having their
work placed in the beautiful collections of the Luxembourg Museum . . . ’.55 The
Luxembourg Museum opened in 1818, dedicated to outstanding works of living
French artists, and already exhibited Delacroix’s Barque of Dante purchased in
1822 as well as works by David, Gérard and Gros.56 Champmartin’s Massacre of
the Innocents also appeared on Forbin’s list of proposed acquisitions, but the
Ministry of the Interior purchased it for a provincial church, probably on For-
bin’s recommendation.57 In an unprecedented gesture, Forbin ordered that
Champmartin’s painting hang temporarily in the Luxembourg Museum, where
the picture remained for one month before departing for the provinces, unit-
ing the massacres of Delacroix and Champmartin one last time.58 The events
of the actual Salon in 1824, therefore, reflected those produced earlier on stage;
young artists acquired reputations and royal sponsorship important to make a
career in visual arts.
State acquisition of Raimond’s fictive image unequivocally endorsed the
French policy of military intervention in Spain, whereas royal patronage of
Delacroix’s Scenes of the Massacres at Chios responded to much more complex
political circumstances. The art world during the Restoration became domi-
nated by such unofficial agents as private collectors and a highly politicized
28 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
The present Salon is proof of what we have argued, that the arts must be free of all
shackles. This Salon is noteworthy for its strength derived totally from its variety,
and despite the critics, it is from clash of opinions, diversity of viewpoints and
independence that original and elevated works will be born.
Watch over talent, support it; do not force it to do what it does not feel, to obey
your own inspiration. Provide work, open careers, reveal the goal and do not
impose the means: there it is, I think, the only reasonable step indicated by the
experience of arts administration.60
Forbin’s report is astonishing since it presents the classic liberal argument for
freedom of the arts to his superior, Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, an Ultra and
recent appointee of Charles X. Forbin had nothing to gain, other than to
persuade by force of argument, by presenting such heart-felt ideas to a superior
who held antithetical views. In fact, Forbin’s argument parallels that of Ludovic
Vitet’s liberal appeal, ‘De l’Indépendance en matière de gout. Du Romantisme’
published in the opposition journal Le Globe in early 1825.61
Forbin had, in fact, nurtured and supported Delacroix and Champmartin
since their apprenticeship with Guérin, visiting Delacroix’s studio and purchas-
ing his first exhibited painting for the Luxembourg Museum and awarding
grants and commissions to Champmartin.62 Rather than censor or discretely sky
Champmartin’s Massacre of the Innocents, as a defensive administrator might,
Forbin provoked debate by placing the controversial painting in the highly
visible and honorific grand salon. In fact, Forbin later wrote his superior:
‘Exhibition in the grand salon has become a kind of reward for artists and
as a way to signal to the public the most remarkable works on display’.63
Champmartin’s Massacre of the Innocents was reported in the grand salon
by press in mid-October.64 Forbin pursued this strategy again in 1828 when
both Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus and Champmartin’s Massacre of the
Janissaries appeared in the grand salon.65 Forbin’s practice of supporting young
artists, artistic freedom and public debate - even when highly controversial -
found its way on stage in the last scene of La St-Louis des artistes when Raimond
celebrates the king’s enlightened patronage of the arts.
La St-Louis des artistes recreated on stage the world of the artist and high art
in its social, aesthetic and political complexity - a complexity absent from earlier
The Boulevard and the Salon 29
exchanges between popular culture and high art, between theatre and painting.
The play also reflected many of the same issues that emerged later at the actual
Salon in 1824, where two young artists, Eugène Delacroix and Charles-Emile
Champmartin, tantalized the public with images of murder and bedlam. La
St-Louis des artistes, which itself contained a political subtext critical of the
restored monarchy, invited the lower classes to the Salon to see the compelling
subjects and dynamic pictorial strategies of Delacroix and Champmartin which
conveyed coded critiques of Restoration foreign policy toward the Greeks.
Theatre presented the world of the artist as tableaux vivants which animated
the artist’s bohemian existence and quest for a subject that would captivate
the audience at the Salon and therefore lead to state sponsorship. The play
concluded with commentary on French military adventures and an invitation
to the lower classes to visit the Salon.
The connection of La St-Louis des artistes with the world of high art, however,
offers more profound revelations than overlaps in politics and audience for low
culture and high art. The comparison of popular theatre and Romantic painting
underscores the intermediality of visual culture during the Restoration and sug-
gests the importance of popular culture for the critical debate over Romanticism,
for the innovative form of Romantic paintings, and for state patronage of
controversial art. The play satirically challenged consensus in art criticism in
favour of ideal beauty in art and sanctioned the notion of relative beauty; the
play, therefore, represented perhaps the only endorsement for Delacroix’s and
Champmartin’s subsequent rejection of the ideal in favour of the real which
generated intense criticism at the Salon. According to critics, the Massacres at
Chios and the Scenes of the Massacre of the Innocents also created persuasive
and affecting simulations of villainy and injustice, like melodrama, which
suggests the importance of subjects, structure and mis-en-scène of melodra-
matic theatre for the development of form in the paintings of Delacroix and
Champmartin. Finally, La St-Louis des artistes celebrated state patronage of
young artists, even a painter whose picture encoded an oppositional message,
and provided popular support for Forbin’s liberal argument for freedom of
the arts from within an Ultra royalist regime. By 1824, therefore, the life of
the artist and high art infused popular culture and conversely popular cul-
ture participated in an unprecedented fashion in the debate over the aesthetics,
form and patronage of high art.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Washington and Jefferson College for the Kenneth M.
Mason, Sr. Summer Grant for Faculty Research which supported the comple-
tion of this article.
Notes
1 La St-Louis des artistes ou la fête du Salon, vaudeville en un acte, en honneur de la
fête du roi, par MM. Merle, Simonnin, et Fd.-Laloue (Paris, 1824).
30 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
Pichois, ‘Pour une biographie d’Etienne Jouy’, Revue des sciences humaines, 118
(1965), 227–52; P. Comeau, ‘Etienne Jouy: His Life and His Paris Essays’, Ph.D.
dissertation, Princeton University, 1968. On Merle, see Biographie universelle
ancienne et moderne (ed.) L.-G. Michaud (Paris, 1843), vol. 28, pp. 43–4.
9 Darnton employs the term ‘communication system’ to explain networks of
gathering and disseminating information that can elucidate a society’s political
culture. See his ‘An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-
Century Paris’, American Historical Review, 105:1 (2000), 1–35 and The Forbidden
Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995). On the relationship
between Delacroix and Vernet’s circle, see E. Delacroix, Journal (ed.) M. Hannoosh
(Paris, 2009), vol. 1, p. 174. C. Clément, Géricault: Etude biographique et critique
(Paris, 1879), p. 305.
10 On Delacroix’s cartoons, see N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Eugène Delacroix: Prints,
Politics, and Satire, 1814–22 (New Haven, 1991).
11 The Salon catalogue reveals that Delacroix lived at rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain,
number 118 and Champmartin just up the street at number 86.
12 A. Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 à 1848 (Paris, 1963), pp. 181–211.
Daumard based her analysis on voting, tax, and census records. See also J. Seigel,
Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930
(New York, 1986), pp. 40–2. For a discussion of housing and the lower class,
see L. Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First
Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. F. Jellinek (New York, 1973), pp. 186–99.
13 Quoted in Daumard, p. 181: ‘l’opulence et la misère offrent à Paris des contrastes
hideux; un léger plancher les sépare. Les joies bruyantes des salons [du premier
étage] troublent et enveniment la morne tristesse des chambres plus élevées’.
14 M. Gluck, ‘Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist’, Modernism/
Modernity 7:3 (2000), 352–53. On the historical background and development of
bohemian identity, see M. Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture
in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge MA, 2005), pp. 1–64.
15 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 4: ‘Allons, amis, mettez-vous en voyage, / Songez que
l’on nous attend au salon; / Ne brisez rien; tâchez que notre ouvrage / Arrive intact
au palais d’Apollon’.
16 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 8: ‘Duplan: Comment diable ça se fait-il?’
17 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 8: ‘Raimond: Mes bons amis, je dois vous l’avouer, . . .
j’ai eu l’infamie de me laisser séduire. J’ai gagné trois cent francs la semaine
dernière; j’ai peint une enseigne .... / Montignac et Duplan: Quelle horreur!’
18 R. Wrigley, ‘Between the Street and the Salon: Parisian Shop Signs and the Spaces
of Professionalism in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries’, Oxford Art
Journal 21:1 (1998), 57.
19 Wrigley, ‘Between the Street and the Salon’, 57.
20 My discussion follows Wrigley, ‘Between the Street and the Salon’, 56–66.
21 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 9: ‘Raimond: Un toisé de bâtiment! ô infamie! Un
architecte! . . . / Montignac: O calamité des beaux arts!’
22 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 15: ‘Duracuire: Doucement, doucement: chacun à sa
poste, passez à l’avant-garde, moi je veille sur la réserve’.
23 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 17: ‘Montignac: Jé vais té débarrasser du papa’.
24 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 20: ‘Raimond: Le feu du désir / L’espoir du plaisir’.
32 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
25 E. Delacroix, Journal, vol. 1, pp. 131, 132, 143, 145, 163. On Delacroix’s sexual
relations in his early years, see R. Escholier, Delacroix et les femmes (Paris, 1963),
pp. 9–76; Jack Spector, The Death of Sardanapalus (New York, 1974), pp. 98–101;
Darcy Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New
Haven, 2002), pp. 253–60. Once women became too old to be models, they often
turned to prostitution to earn a living. See M. Lathers, Bodies of Art: French
Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln, 2001), p. 55.
26 Delacroix, Journal, vol. 1, pp. 101, 105. See also Escholier, Delacroix et les femmes,
p. 61.
27 On the image of Louis XVIII and politics during the Restoration, see M. Wrede, ‘Le
portrait du roi restauré, ou la fabrication de Louis XVIII’, Revue d’histoire moderne
et contemporaine, 53:2 (2006), 112–38.
28 For a discussion of paintings of the Spanish campaign and politics in 1824, see
N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, ‘Liberals of the World Unite: Géricault, his Friends,
and La Liberté des peuples’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 116 (1990), 227–42.
29 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 17: ‘Duracuire: Mille cartouches! je vous réponds que
vous avez réussi! Et mon suffrage sur le Trocadéro en vaut bien un autre, car
Duracuire y était’.
30 On veterans in Restoration theatre, see Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, ‘Imago Belli’, 271.
31 The historiography on Delacroix’s painting is vast, whereas the importance of
Champmartin’s painting has gone unnoticed by scholars. The central study of the
Delacroix’s painting and the Greek revolt is N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer,
French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821–30 (New Haven, 1989),
pp. 25–37. Other important treatments of Delacroix’s painting are: F. Trapp, The
Attainment of Delacroix (Baltimore, 1971), pp. 29–48; L. Johnson, The Paintings of
Eugène Delacroix (London, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 83–91; F. Haskell, ‘Chios, the
Massacres, and Delacroix’, in J. Boardman and C. E. Vaphopoulou-Richardson
(eds.), Chios, A Conference at the Homereion in Chios 1984 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 335–
58; Wright, Painting and History, pp. 148–53; E. Fraser, ‘Uncivil Alliances:
Delacroix, the Private Collector and the Public’, Oxford Art Journal 21:1 (1998),
87–103; B. Jobert, Delacroix (Princeton, 1999), pp. 70–8; Darcy Grigsby,
‘“Whose colour was not black nor white nor grey,/ But an extraneous mixture,
which no pen/ Can trace, although the pencil may:” Aspasie and Delacroix’s
Massacres at Chios’, Art History, 22:5 (1999), 676–704; Grigsby, Extremities, pp.
237–79; Fraser, Delacroix, pp. 39–114; Margaret MacNamidhe, ‘Delécluze’s
Response to Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824)’, Art
Bulletin, 89:1 (2007), 63–81.
32 Haskell, ‘Chios, the Massacres, and Delacroix’, pp. 340–1.
33 Delacroix, Journal, vol. 1, p. 100. Delacroix recorded meetings with Champmartin
on 1, 24, 27, and 30 April and 5 May 1824 in Journal, vol. 1, pp. 131, 146, 149,
150, 154. Delacroix and Champmartin met nine years earlier in P.-N. Guérin’s
studio, worked together with Théodore Géricault as he prepared the Raft of the
Medusa in 1818, studied horses together in 1823, and maintained a strong
friendship though the 1840s. On their relationship in the studio and later creative
relationship, see J. P. Lambertson, ‘The Genesis of French Romanticism: P.-N.
Guérin’s Studio and the Public Sphere’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois,
1994, pp. 16–59; J. P. Lambertson, ‘Delacroix’s Sardanapalus, Champmartin’s
The Boulevard and the Salon 33
Janissaries, and Liberalism in the Late Restoration’, Oxford Art Journal, 25:2 (2002),
65–85; J. P. Lambertson, ‘Friendship in the Romantic Studio: Charles-Emile
Champmartin’s’ Portrait of Eugène Delacroix and Alphonse Vée, Burlington
Magazine, 151:1274 (May 2009), pp. 293–7.
34 Eugène Delacroix, Correspondance générale (ed.) André Joubin (Paris, 1935), vol. 1,
p. 132: ‘Je me propose de faire pour le Salon prochain un tableau dont je prendrai
le sujet dans les guerres récentes des Turcs et des Grecs. Je crois que dans les
circonstances, si d’ailleurs il y a quelque mérite dans l’exécution, ce sera un moyen
de me faire distinguer’.
35 F., ‘Beaux-Arts. Exposition de mil huit cent vingt-quatre’, Drapeau blanc, 17
January 1825, p. 4.
36 T. Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–
1836 (Princeton, 1998), pp. 127–9.
37 La St-Louis des artistes, pp. 10–11: ‘Montignac: . . . quelle superbe académie! quel
dommage qu’il n’y en ait que la moitié. / Duracuire: Si la moitié d’ ma personne est
à r’faire, / Pour bien poser cependant j’ai le fil; / . . . / Mais j’ai laissé par d’glorieux
oublis, / C’te jamb’ d’Hercule au pieds des Pyramides, / Et c’ bras d’Ulyss’ sous les
murs de Cadix’.
38 La St-Louis des artistes, p. 11: ‘Montignac: tu seras mon Agamemnon, mon Ajax,
mon Priam; enfin tous les héros qué mon ciseau enfantera. / Duracuire: Ah! je sais
bien que vous me mettez à toutes sauces . . . ’.
39 E. J. D. ‘Beaux-Arts,’ Le Lycée français, vol. 2, 1819, pp. 237–38. On the
development of the concept of ideal beauty, see R. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The
Humanistic Tradition of Painting (New York, 1963), pp. 9–16. Delécluze did
believe that modern and contemporary subjects could conform to the
principles of Greek art and offered Girodet’s Atala, the tragic love story of an
eighteenth-century Christian, as evidence in Le Lycée français, vol. 2, 1819,
p. 240. Delécluze argued that to create a history painting that transcends its
own fixed historical period, an artist must be steeped in ancient art and
theory as understood by the academic tradition. So, for Delécluze, ‘those who
have best treated subjects drawn from modern or contemporary history are
again those who studied antiquity the most, those who, like M. David,
Girodet, Gérard, Gros and Guérin [Delécluze’s emphasis], merit the title
history painter’. See E.J.D. ‘Beaux-Arts,’ Le Lycée français, vol. 1, 1819, p. 277.
On Delécluze’s criticism of the 1824 Salon, see MacNamidhe, ‘Delécluze’s
Response’, 63–81.
40 E. Talbot, Stendhal and Romantic Esthetics (Lexington, 1985), pp. 46–68. D.
Wakefield insightfully analyzed Stendhal’s relationship to the visual arts in Stendhal
and the Arts (London, 1973), pp. 1–32 and ‘Stendhal and Delécluze at the Salon of
1824’, in F. Haskell, A. Levi, and R. Shackleton (eds.), The Artist and the Writer in
France: Essays in Honor of Jean Seznec (Oxford, 1974), pp. 74–85.
41 A. Thiers, ‘Peinture française. Salon de 1824’, La Revue Européene, vol. 1 (1824),
p. 681: ‘on cherche à pénétrer dans les temps reculé, à en saisir les moeurs, les
caractères, la couleur locale, et à rendre l’histoire fidèle, et en même temps noble
et poetique’.
42 R. Barthes suggested that it is detail - detail irrelevant to narrative structure - that
guarantees a sense of authenticity to an historical account in ‘The Reality Effect’ in
34 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 40/1
Contributor
John P. Lambertson is Professor and Edith M. Kelso Chair of Art History at
Washington and Jefferson College. He has published on Géricault, Delacroix
and French Romanticism and his most recent article appeared in the Burlington
Magazine. He is currently at work on a book on French Romantic painting,
politics and popular culture. E-mail: jlambertson@washjeff.edu.