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Hyacinthe Rigaud and the Making of the Marquis De Gueidan

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Hyacinthe Rigaud and the Making of the Marquis De Gueidan ART, ILLUSION, AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE: HYACINTHE RIGAUD AND THE MAKING OF THE MARQUIS DE GUEIDAN Christopher Currie A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Art Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Mary D. Sheriff E. Jane Burns Neil McWilliam Mary Pardo Daniel Sherman ABSTRACT CHRISTOPHER CURRIE: Art, Illusion, and Social Mobility in Eighteenth-Century France: Hyacinthe Rigaud and the Making of the Marquis de Gueidan (Under the direction of Mary D. Sheriff) Cultural capital was essential to social mobility in eighteenth-century France. Rising through the nobility required more than economic and social capital; one was also required to demonstrate familiarity with discourses on the arts and to show through one’s appearance and behavior that one had internalized qualities associated with literature, rhetoric, music, dance, and painting. This dissertation examines the role of cultural capital in the social ascendancy of Gaspard de Gueidan (1688-1767), the great-grandson of a merchant who, through his career in the Parlement de Provence, the publication of his writings, and the collecting and commissioning of works of art, became a notable figure in the society of Aix- en-Provence. Aside from the publication of his Discours, Gueidan’s most significant engagement with the arts was his commissioning of three portraits of himself from the most sought-after portraitist of his day, Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743). Gueidan also published a false genealogy of his family, claiming that their nobility derived from service to the crown in the crusades, and he commissioned a mausoleum to his fictional forbears from the Provençal sculptor Jean-Pancrace Chastel (1726-1793). Gueidan’s campaign of social ascendancy was in many respects very effective, and yet he was also harshly criticized by certain of his contemporaries, notably his nephew Pierre-César de Charleval and the author ii of the Virelay en vers provençaux, a poem ridiculing Gueidan that circulated in manuscript among the nobility of Aix-en-Provence. The works Gueidan produced and commissioned fashion images of him as inherently noble, as naturally possessing noble qualities such as grace, moderation, and nonchalance, as well as a sense of duty and a zeal for filling his role within the social order. This dissertation examines the means by which these qualities were given visual forms and the ways in which those forms were used to fashion elite identities. Essential to these processes is the concept of decorum (la bienséance); it is the ideal to which artists hoped not only their portraits but all of their works would conform and it is the standard by which individuals and works of art were judged. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter I. THE NOBLEMAN…………………………………………………………24 La Négligence: the hand of the painter, the comportment of the nobleman, a simple portrait type………………………………………..27 La Noblesse: an inner quality figured on the body………………………….35 The authority of the Ancients, discoverers of Nature’s secrets……………..41 La Modération and the boundaries of taste…………………………………44 La Bienséance, the principle that gives order to Nature and society………..50 The figuring of La Noblesse in Rigaud’s first portrait of Gaspard de Gueidan……………………………………………………...54 Collecting and appropriation………………………………………………...58 Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d’Eguilles’ Recueil des plus beaux tableaux……….69 Gaspard de Gueidan as collector…………………………………………….74 II. THE ORATOR ……………………………………………………………..78 Rigaud’s second portrait of Gaspard de Gueidan…………………………...79 Rigaud, Le Bret, and Provençal Politics…………………………………….92 Gaspard de Gueidan’s Discours……………………………………………..95 Madame La Présidente……………………………………………………..117 iv III. THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERD……………………………………………..129 The sources of Rigaud’s pictorial vocabulary: Van Dyck, Watteau, and Lancret………………………………………………………..132 Les Indes Galantes…………………………………………………………..141 Provence and Le Tambourinaire…………………………………………….145 La Musette…………………………………………………………………...151 Celadon, the faithful shepherd………………………………………………157 The quarrel of the ancients and moderns……………………………………163 An audience for Gueidan’s performance of the faithful shepherd………….168 IV. THE WOULD-BE GENTLEMAN…………………………………………178 The Mausoleum of the Gueidan Family…………………………………….180 Gueidan’s invented genealogy and the discourse on nobility ………………185 The Virelay en vers provençaux…………………………………………….189 Pierre-César de Charleval’s livre de raison…………………………………194 Pierre-Claude-Secret de Gueidan, Chevalier of the Order of Malta………...196 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme…………………………………………………205 ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………………..208 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………………………266 v Introduction This dissertation explores the function of the arts in the construction of elite identities in early eighteenth-century France. At its heart are Hyacinthe Rigaud’s three portraits of Gaspard de Gueidan, paintings that evoke the various strategies by which Gueidan (1688- 1767) sought to fashion himself as a member of a social elite. Gueidan rose in society through his career in the Parlement de Provence, publication of his Discours, the induction of his sons into the Order of Malta, the collecting and commissioning of paintings, and an extensive correspondence with some of the most powerful people in France. He also invented and published an illustrious genealogy for himself and commissioned a cenotaph to his fictional forebears. Placing the various manifestations of Gueidan’s ambitions within a broader constellation of objects produced for the Gueidan family and their contemporaries among the nobility of Aix-en-Provence, I argue that the products of Gueidan’s activities present not a stable identity determined by birth, education, or marriage alliances, but rather an identity ever-changing in response to different social and political contexts. I examine the degree to which a patron’s choices could be less products of social rank and more matters of the desire to be perceived in particular ways in order to facilitate one’s social advancement. This is not, however, a patronage study; I am not so much concerned with the role of the patron in the creation of works of art as I am with the function of works of art in the fashioning of the patron. Stephen Greenblatt’s classic concept of self-fashioning provides me with an apt way of describing Gueidan’s project.1 I take the term in the broadest sense to mean the construction of human identity as a self-conscious and artful process, one that draws upon and is embedded within social structures and literary or artistic discourses. Through the various works created and commissioned by Gueidan I trace the discourses he deploys in his project of self-fashioning. Rather than using documents (such as Gueidan’s letters and his Discours) to explain works of art I treat each object and document as a discreet instance of self-fashioning produced in response to a particular situation. Freed from the expectation that they provide windows into Gueidan’s personality, I allow the texts and the paintings to stand as what they were in Gueidan’s day: attempts to enter into particular social discourses while controlling the way in which he was perceived within them. The sum total of what these objects and documents present is not Gueidan the man, but rather the various strategies by which he sought to rise in society. My research is focused on material culture and remnants of sociability in early eighteenth-century Aix: the letters, account books, inventories après décès, libraries, and works of art created by and for the elites of that city. I turn to fiction, theater, and opera to reveal the “forms of reasoning and the structures of the imaginary” of the period; but moreover, I turn to treatises on connoisseurship and social comportment to find the forms of reasoning and structures of the imaginary which governed responses to all of these social, material and artistic exchanges and productions.2 The overriding question which I bring to all of these objects is: how does this object and the multiple associations it invokes position 1 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 2 These terms are borrowed from Daniel Roche, La Culture des Apparences: Une histoire du vêtement, XVIIe- XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1989). 2 its owner within the overlapping discourses of taste and nobility? However, I am not solely interested in the ways in which texts conditioned the expectations Gueidan’s contemporaries brought to works of art; I am also concerned with the ways in which Gueidan performed these discourses - taste, judgment, knowledge and nobility - through the works he created, collected and commissioned. My work builds on Thomas Crow’s Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris and Charlotte Guichard’s Les Amateurs d’Art à Paris au XVIIIe Siècle;3 but while they note the institutionalization of the amateur within the Académie Royale as a means of creating a public for art within the control of that institution and of lending authority to it through association with the noble pursuits of the amateur, I am concerned with an earlier phase and a different dynamic in this history; namely, the linking of taste and knowledge of the arts with nobility and the invoking of this discourse as a means to social mobility. Thus I seek to explain not only
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