The Duc d'Antin, the royal administration of pictures, and the painting competition of 1727

Given the imprecision of a certain quantity of of these ancien regime institutions, they were ofttimes only worth the worth of their incumbents, who fashioned them to their characters and drew from them absolutely unexpect issues - Roger Guillemet, Essai sur la Surintendance de Batiments du roi . . (1)

Studies of eighteenth-century French painting as practiced before the certain establishment of regular Salon exhibitions from 1737 upon have traditionally stressed its private, unofficial face, enshrined especially in the career and work of Antoine Watteau. nevertheless all members of the Paris Academie Royale de Peinture et de statuary including Watteau, worked under and quite repeatedly for a royal department, the Direction de Batiments et Jardins du Roy Arts, Manufactures et Academies Royales, usually called simply Batiments. From 1708 to 1736 Batiments was headed by dint of a single man, Louis-Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, marquis, then duc d'Antin (1665-1736; [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]).(2) He was probably the first court noble at any time to be appointed to this essentially administrative support and certainly the first since its thorough transformation at the hands of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, himself of bourgeois birth. D'Antin's boundary in office opened with the completion of the chapel of the palace of Versailles, a culmination of grand patronage in the service of Louis XIV, and clos with the decoration of the Salon of Hercules in the same palace, a conscious renewal of that tradition [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].

His drawn out interim administration of Batiments, however, has generally been characterized as incompetent, uncaring, corrupt, or all three It was, his critics say, nearly completely lacking in official exhibitions, and relatively unproductive of major or interesting novel art.(3) An indisputable if rare interruption of this lackluster record came in 1726 when d'Antin propos a contend against between history painters of the academy. This occurrence which lasted into 1727, occasioned twelve large history paintings, a public exhibition, and considerable strife of words Yet the competition of 1727 too, has been bounded a retrograde curiosity in a period repeatedly (and justifiably) studied as that of the erosion of state support for la grande peinture, and the consecration of private taste for the sensual, heterogeneous Rococo(4) Thomas chuckle however, in his study of the public for painting in eighteenth-century Paris, rest the competition of 1727 revealing in a different way. It was, he recognized, an exceptional incident both in its time and in d'Antin's administration. It is, he argued, best understood as the proceed of gathering oppositional forces pressuring level a hidebound aristocrat to search for public ratification for his decisions.(5)

Such forces and crushings existed, but they should be resituated, I suggest in a complicated and unpredictable exchange among the institutions and individuals greatest in quantity directly involved. The competition occurrence itself, although structurally unprecedented, was les isolated than it at first appear to bes in d'Antin's history, and replyed partly to conditions intrinsic to his institutional and personal position after the death of Louis XIV in 1715 This article will near other episodes from d'Antin's early administration in order to elucidate that position. My interest is not only with biographical and institutional history, however. I want also to characterize, if single partially, the official uses of pictorial art at a volatile joint between two rules (Louis XIV's and Louis XV's) and sum of two units administrative ideologies (court performance and civic service) bridged by means of d'Antin's term in office.

By uses I mean not solitary the patronage of new work in the service of the diadem but the deployment of aged and the production of explicit or implicit rhetorical constructions justifying both. In my reading of his story, the circumstantial and ephemeral aspects of d'Antin's administrative practices enumerateed for at least as abundant as its concrete and lasting yields The last part of the article will examine the best case in point, d'Antin's proposal of the competition of 1727 the timing and form of which were for him probably the real initiatives. It was the impromptu execution of the proposal that had unexpect effects to adapt the sense of my epigraph. more [i]or[/i] less of these consequences, as I will bring to an end may be seen to have stretch outed significantly beyond the old duke's aims and ken, and to have lay opened a way toward the more egalitarian spaces of later exhibitions, the Salons and their offspring so much better known today.

D'Antin and Louis XIV

In its medieval origins, Batiments was a practical material part concerned with the construction and maintenance of royal chateaux, and was staffed primarily by means of masons and notaries. Later reforms refined its administrative practice and theoretical basis, and incorporated with it a number of privileged manufactories producing furnishings for royal residences.(6) From 1664 upon Jean-Baptiste Colbert decisively transformed the department with the idea of rendering it a centralized instrument of cultural propaganda and sway His Batiments, as Roger Guillemet deposit it, like other royal institutions after the Fronde was tailored to subserve less an abstract ideal of monarchy than "a quite definite someone in flesh and blood, Louis the fourteenth of that name."(7) Les able and les devot surintendants following Colbert, lower horizontals of funding during the late reign, and a 1691 reform returning its jurisdiction to sole buildings, arts, and manufactories, sapped the production and effectiveness of Batiments without changing its orientation.