Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie Antoinette's Court by Grant Sarah

Author:Grant, Sarah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

It is important to stipulate that the presence of prints in these interiors alone would not necessarily signal a particular enthusiasm for print collecting, these objects being afterall a common feature of most affluent bourgeois and aristocratic interiors of their day. But when coupled with the knowledge that numerous other English prints were on display in the princess’s Passy residence, it becomes conclusive. 153

The eighteenth-century Paris trade in English prints has been well documented by Antony Griffiths and Stéphane Roy.154 In the first half of the century, Hogarth’s prints (though in fact executed by French engravers) enjoyed great success, but it was particularly during the late 1770s and throughout the 1780s that interest intensified specifically in English compositions produced by English printmakers with new, English-derived techniques. The extent of the trade in English prints in France during this period was such that it was even thought to have exceeded the trade for English prints in Britain. As these prints were not subject to the heavy duties of their outbound French counterparts their popularity was perceived by those in the industry to have a detrimental impact on the French economy and the work of French engravers.155 One of Paris’s leading print publishers and merchants, Pierre-François Basan (1723–1797), was also one of the city’s principal dealers in English prints and travelled to London to source his stock as well as maintaining accounts with well-known London print publishers and dealers Thomas Burke, Valentine Green, Andrew Pond, W. W. Ryland, J. R. Smith, Robert Strange and J. Young.156 The presence too, of English engravers in Paris throughout the 1780s confirms the demand for these works and if the French held, for the most part, a low opinion of the English School, this did not extend to the medium of the print,157 as a critic’s judgement of the work of one English engraver, William Byrne, who exhibited in the June 1786 Salon de la Correspondance demonstrates:

Si les anglais sont inférieurs aux autres nations de l’Europe dans les arts relatifs à la science du dessin, on doit avouer cependant qu’ils l’emportent souvent dans quelques genres de gravure, et principalement dans la gravure du paysage.158

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