“C’est un bourgeois, mais non un bourgeois ordinaire”: The Contested Afterlife of Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-François Bertin

Ingres’s portrait of Louis-François Bertin (1832) has been universally accepted as a visual “apotheosis” of the newly powerful early 19th-century bourgeoisie in France. Here, we study the inconsistencies and contestation which contributed to this identification. Beginning with the moment of its first public exhibition in the 1833 Paris Salon, this article traces Bertin’s evolving reputation as an image of its epoch, focusing on its reappearance in public first at the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle in 1846, and then in the display of Ingres’s works at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. This leads to a critical assessment of how the picture’s role as a political emblem has been related to later assertions that it also exemplified the artist’s incipient modernism. The exhibition of works by Ingres at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1905 allows us to take stock of claims made about the picture’s status in the early 20th century. However, in contrast to the habitual desire to modernise Ingres (and thereby to detach him from a lingering taint of academicism), this article argues that a key element in the reception of Ingres’s portrait in the second half of the 19th century is a recognition of its rootedness in values emanating from the Revolution of 1789, embodied both in the person of LouisFrançois Bertin and Ingres’s representation of him.

Artists at Play

The exhibition of Russian folk art at the Paris “Salon d’Automne” of 1913 has been generally overlooked in scholarship on folk art, overshadowed by the “All-Russian Kustar Exhibitions” and the Moscow avant-garde gallery shows of the same year. This article examines the contributions of its curator, Natalia Erenburg, and the project’s instigator, Iakov Tugendkhold, who wrote the catalogue essay and headed the committee—both of whom were artists who became critics, historians, and collectors. The article elucidates the show’s rationale and selection of exhibits, the critical response to it and its legacy. It also discusses the artistic circles of Russian Paris in which the project originated, particularly the Académie russe. Finally, it examines the project in the context of earlier efforts to present Russian folk art in Paris, and shows how it—and Russian folk art as a source and object of collecting and display—brought together artists, collectors, and scholars from the ranks of the Mir iskusstva [World of Art] group, as well as the younger avant-gardists, and allowed them to engage Parisian and European audiences with their own ideas and artworks.

Never Black and White: Representing Black Women in Revolutionary France

My research focused on Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait d’une Femme Noire, exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1800. This remarkable picture of a free woman of African descent was painted in the decade between the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s reinstatement of it in 1804. I addressed the question of what we can make of the existing visual and literary representations of black women in this period, and how these representations can be used to understand something of the kind of roles or experiences the women had in French society. In the absence of firsthand accounts of art and writing by black women, I have analyzed the conditions of their existence, ideologies that shaped their experiences, and a varying range of representations of them made by white artists and writers.