The Huguenots and Art, C. 1560–1685*

chapter 7 The Huguenots and Art, c. 1560–1685*

Andrew Spicer

1 Introduction

At an extraordinary meeting of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris on 10 October 1681, the president Charles Le Brun read a command from the king’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. On the orders of Louis xiv, those who were members of the Religion Prétendue Reformée were to be deprived of their positions within the Academy; their places were to be taken by Catholics, and membership in the future was to be restricted to this confes- sion. The measure particularly targeted seven men: Henri Testelin (1616–95), Secretary of the Academy; Jean Michelin (1623–96), Assistant Professor; Louis Ferdinand Elle, père (1612–89), Samuel Bernard (1615–87), Jacques Rousseau (1630–93), council members; Mathieu Espagnandel (1616–89) and Louis Ferdinand Elle fils (1648–1717), academicians. The secretary, Testelin, who had painted several portraits of the young king during the 1660s, acquiesced to the royal order but requested that the Academy recognize that he was deprived of his position not due to any personal failings concerning his honesty and good conduct. The academicians acknowledged this to be the case and similarly noted that the other Huguenots present—Bernard, Ferdinand Elle and Michelin—had acquitted their charge with probity and to the satisfaction of the company.1 The following January, the names of Jacob d’Agard and Nicolas Eude were struck from the Academy’s registers because they had both sought refuge in England.2 The expulsion of these artists and sculptors from this learned society was part of the increasing personal and religious restrictions imposed on the Huguenots by Louis xiv, which culminated in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685. While some abjured their faith (Bernard, Ferdinand Elle, père and fils, Lespagnandel) and were readmitted to the

* The research and writing of this essay was completed while Faculty Visiting Fellow at the H. Henry Meeter Center, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am grateful to the Center for its support, as well as to Dr. Margit Thøfner for her helpful comments on an earlier ver- sion of this essay. 1 Procès-verbaux de l’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture 1648–1793, (eds.) Anatole de Montaiglon, Paul Cornu, vol. 2 (11 vols. Paris: 1875–1909), 197–98. 2 Procès-verbaux de l’Académie Royale, 2: 215.

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Academy, others (Michelin, Rousseau, Testelin) sought exile in Britain, the Dutch Republic and Germany. When the Academy was founded in 1648, the Huguenots were dispropor- tionately well-represented. At a time when they comprised around five to six per cent of the French population, about a third of the twenty-four founder members were adherents of the Reformed faith. These included Samuel Bernard, Louis Ferdinand Elle père and Henri Testelin as well as Sébastien Bourdon (1616–71), Louis du Guernier (1614–59), Thomas Pinagier (c. 1616–53) and Louis Testelin (1615–55).3 Henri Testelin was later described as “the father of the Academy, having done more than any other towards its establishment.”4 This new institution sought to elevate the status of the arts, from the applied arts of a highly skilled artisan to an intellectual profession. While they eschewed certain activities associated with trade guilds, the academicians provided instruction in drawing as well as other skills such as anatomy and perspective which were considered necessary for producing the higher artistic forms, spe- cifically history painting.5 Although the Reformed representation in the Academy declined in subsequent decades, a further thirteen Huguenot artists, engravers and sculptors can be identified as members before 1681.6 The Academy, however, represented the elite of the artistic establishment; Heinich has calculated that between its foundation in 1648 and 1700, only 178 artists were members representing a mere eight per cent of French painters in the

3 Nathalie Heinich, Du peintre à l’artiste. Artisans et académiciens à l’âge classique (Paris: 1993), 240; Menna Prestwich, “Patronage and the Protestants in France, 1598–1661: Architects and Painters,” in L’âge d’or du Mécénat, (eds.) Roland Mousnier and Jean Mesnard (Paris: 1985), 82–83; Philip Benedict, “Calvinism as a Culture? Preliminary Remarks on Calvinism and the Visual Arts,” in Seeing Beyond the Word. Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, (ed.) Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids, mi: 1999), 36–37; Jacques Pannier, L’Église réformée de Paris sous Louis xiii de 1621 à 1629 environ (Paris: 1932), 416–21. 4 Richard Beresford, “Jacque Bullart on French Artists: Poussin, Le Brun, Testelin, Mignard and Van der Meulen,” The Burlington Magazine 137 (1995), 23. 5 Paul Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: 1997). 6 Abraham Bosse (1653), Jean Michelin (1661), Jacques Rousseau (1662), Isaac Moillon (1663), Pierre Du Guernier (1663), Etienne Picart (1664), Mathieu Lespagnandel (1672), Nicolas Heude (1673), Pierre Lombard (1673), Jean Forest (1674), Jacob d’Agard (1675), Jean Ecman (1675) and Louis Ferdinand Elle fils (1681). Bosse was only an honorary member as at the time printmaking was regarded as an artisan skill. L. Vitet, L’ l’Académie Royale de peinture et de la sculpture. Étude historique (Paris: 1861), 330, 332, 334, 336, 337, 339, 340, 341, 344; Pannier, L’Eglise réformée de Paris, 416–21; Carl Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France. Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: 2012), 6.