Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality and the Pursuit of Volupté

Abstract

Enlightenment writers proposed the existence of an animal soul, refuting the Cartesian beast-machine. Arguments credit the caresses of a dog to its master as direct visual evidence of the capacity of an animal to feel and show . A focus on paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard sets the Rococo representation of lapdogs within the context of changing ideas about the relationship between animal and human. Eroticized images of lapdogs are related to radical materialist theories that assert the role of physical pleasure in human motivation.

Notes

1. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Les petits chiens,” chap. 244 of Tableau de Paris, 12 vols. (Amsterdam, 1782–88), vol. 3, 134–35: “Jamais une femme ne sera Cartésienne: jamais elle ne consentira à croire que son petit chien n’est ni sensible ni raisonnable quand il la caresse. Elle dévisageroit Descartes en personne, s’il osoit lui tenir un pareil langage; la seule fidélité de son chien vaut mieux, selon elle, que la raison de tous les hommes ensemble. J’ai vu une jolie femme se fâcher sérieusement & fermer sa porte à un homme qui avoit adopté cette ridicule & impertinente opinion. Comment a-t-on pu refuser la sensibilité aux animaux?”

2. The painting has been included in all the major studies of Fragonard but is summarily treated. See Georges Wildenstein, The Paintings of Fragonard (London: Phaidon, 1960), 262, no. 280; Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, vie et oeuvre: Catalogue complet des peintures (Fribourg: Office du Louvre, 1987), 182–84, 313, no. 282; Pierre Rosenberg, Fragonard (Paris: Grand Palais, 1987), 232–34, cat. no. 110; and Colin Bailey, ed., The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 284–85, no. 80. See also Münchener Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 3, no. 29 (1978): 242–44.

3. A notable exception is Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Genre and Sex,” in French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 200–219.

4. The philosophical writings of La Mettrie have been connected to the art of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin by Sarah Cohen in “Chardin's Fur: Painting, Materialism and the Question of the Animal Soul,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 48, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 39–61.

5. For a recent summary of the central debates, see Matthew Senior, “The Souls of Men and Beasts, 1630–1764,” in A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

6. Claude Yvon, “Âme des bêtes,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 1, 343–53 (University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project [Spring 2013 Edition]), ed. Robert Morrissey, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu; and Charles Bonnet, Essai de psychologie, ou considérations sur les opérations de l’âme, sur l’habitude et sur l’education: Auxquelles on a ajouté des principes philosophiques sur la cause première et sur son effet (London, 1755).

7. J. L. Wyett, “The Lap of Luxury: Lapdogs, Literature, and Social Meaning in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” Lit: Literature Interpretation and Theory 10, no. 4 (1999): 275–301.

8. Craig Harbison, “Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Double Portrait,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 249–91.

9. On dog symbolism, see Maria Leach, God Had a Dog (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 325–31.

10. In allegorical portraits of women as Diana from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sitters are often depicted with hounds: the Fontainebleau school paintings of Gabrielle d’Estrées as Diana attributed to Ambroise Dubois (ca. 1595–99); Claude Deruet's Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse as Diana (1630); Charles Beaubrun, Portrait of a Lady as Diana (1650); and Claude Lefèbvre's Louise de La Vallière as Diana (1667) are a few examples in French art. Kathleen Nicholson observed this shift from hound to pet in female portraits connected to the hunt by comparing Nicolas de Largillière's portraits Woman in the Guise of Diana (1685) and The Countess of Montsoreau and Her Sister as Diana and an Attendant (1717), noting that in the earlier work the dog is threatening, while in the later painting there appears “an affectionate pet to be caressed by its charming owner.” This is one of three dogs in the painting, two conventional hounds further in the background and the pet spaniel, which sits partially on the lap of the countess. Nicholson presented this material in the seventh annual Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture, entitled “‘Beguiling Deception’: Allegorical Portraiture in Early 18th-Century France,” on January 27, 2011, at the Dallas Museum of Art. The unpublished text is online at http://museum.dma.org/idc/groups/public/documents/web_content/dma_412000.pdf (accessed August 26, 2014). Also useful is Juliana Schiesari's chapter “Versions of Diana: Gender and Renaissance Mythography,” in Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

11. There have been several studies of the dog specifically, and animals more generally, in the history of art. Among the most useful in offering a broad survey of imagery and potential meanings are Robert Rosenblum, The Dog in Art from Rococo to Post-Modernism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988); Edgar Peters Bowron et al., Best in Show: The Dog in Art from the Renaissance to Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Kenneth Clark, Animals and Men: Their Relationship as Reflected in Western Art from Prehistory to the Present Day (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1977); and Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Rosenblum analyzed the “sea change” in the depiction of dogs that took place during the eighteenth century in his essay “From the Royal Hunt to the Taxidermist,” in Best in Show, 39–55. The examples chosen by Rosenblum demonstrate the continued use of hounds in images connected with the hunt, but a greater focus on smaller dogs in portraits, both of pets on their own and with their owners.

12. Madame Adélaïde's attachment to her pet dogs was remarked on by the comtesse de Boigne, who describes a rivalry between herself and a favorite spaniel for the princess's attention. See Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1971), 66–67.

13. Toy spaniels were originally known as the “epagneul nain,” or dwarf spaniel. Until the eighteenth century, the breed was commonly shown with drooping ears, as in Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) and the Portrait of Hercule-François, Duke of Alençon, Anjou and Brabant attributed to the studio of François Clouet (ca. 1557, Weiss Gallery, London). This variant of the breed is now known as the Phalène Papillon. On the basis of visual evidence found in European paintings, the Papillon Club of America has noted in various handbooks the appearance of an occasional dog with sufficient strength in the leathers for the ears to stand erect during the eighteenth century. This variant on the breed with erect ears and feathering edges has been known as the Papillon since at least the nineteenth century. For a comprehensive history of the breed, see Peggy Roberts and Bob Russell Roberts, The Papillon Handbook: Giving the Origin and History of the Breed, Its Show Career, Its Points and Breeding (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1959).

14. Hélène Mouradian and Xavier Salmon, eds., Jean-Jacques Bachelier, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy; Versailles: Musée Lambinet, 1999).

15. The account of a bourgeois woman who had portraits painted of her twenty-five cats, noted with some disdain by Nicolas Contat in his Anecdotes typographiques: Où l’on voit la description des coutumes, moeurs et usages singuliers des Compagnons imprimeurs (Brussels: Pierre Hardy, 1762), suggests that the practice was widespread: “Cette dame est passionnée pour les chats ainsi que plusieurs Maîtres Imprimeurs; un d’entr’eux en avait vingt-cinq qu’il avait fait tirer en portrait et qu’il nourrissait de roti et de volaille.” Anecdotes typographiques, ed. Giles Barber (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1980), 52. See also Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 76–104.

16. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and Verdun L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 452, bk. 2, chap. 12. “Quand je me joue à ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passé son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d’elle.”

17. Donald Posner initiated an emblematic study of this type of imagery in Watteau: A Lady at Her Toilet (London: Allen Lane, 1973).

18. While I am particularly concerned with the use of the lapdog in specific paintings by Fragonard, he had a much broader engagement with the use of the dog in his artworks. A review of the 305 works included in Rosenberg's Fragonard catalog that accompanied the 1987 Grand Palais exhibition found that approximately 15 percent included dogs as part of the scenes. These varied in subject matter from fantasy portraits, allegories, and history paintings to scenes of everyday life. Many of Fragonard's genre scenes with lower-class figures include working dogs, as in The Laundresses (Saint Louis Art Museum), and larger dogs that signal family harmony as part of domestic scenes, as in Happy Fecundity (private collection, pictured in Rosenberg, Fragonard, cat. no. 222) and The First Riding Lesson (Brooklyn Museum, New York). Lapdogs are common in scenes with erotic connotations: The Girls’ Dormitory (Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) and If Only He Were as Faithful to Me! (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) are just two examples. Most interesting are the works in which the type of dog confounds these generalizations of category: The Parents’ Absence Turned to Account (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), for example, includes working dogs in a scene of a girl resisting a young man's physical advances, and Education Does It All (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) depicts lower-class children and adolescents dressing up a pair of small spaniels.

19. My focus here is on the treatment of the lapdog in Fragonard's paintings; however, further analyses of his erotic scenes would serve to support a broader materialist reading of the anthropomorphic treatment of objects that tend to surround the female nude, most evident in the suggestive openings of canopied bed curtains in paintings such as The Bolt (Musée du Louvre, Paris) and Girl Making Her Dog Dance in Munich.

20. Louis de Jaucourt, “Plaisir, Délice, Volupté,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 689: “Celui de voluptés désigne proprement des excès qui tiennent de la mollesse, de la débauche & du libertinage. … ”

21. Ibid.: “Les femmes poussent ordinairement la sensibilité jusqu’à la volupté, mais ce moment de sensation ne dure guère, tout est chez elles aussi rapide que ravissant.”

22. “Passions,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 143: “Le mot de volupté est en quelque sorte affecté à cette sorte de plaisirs. Le voluptueux est celui qui y est trop attaché; & si le gout que l’on a pour eux va trop loin, on appelle cette passion sensualité.”

23. Jaucourt, “Plaisir, Délice, Volupté,” vol. 12, 689.

24. Denis Diderot, “Jouissance,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 8, 889.

25. Ibid.

26. Denis Diderot, “Le rêve d’Alembert,” in Oeuvres comple`tes de Diderot, ed. Assézat Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875), vol. 2, 122–81.

27. Thomas M. Kavanagh has explored the relation drawn during the Enlightenment between the goal of maximizing pleasure in Epicurean philosophy and the maintenance of Stoic distance and control through the vicarious experience of pleasure that was enjoyed by viewing a painting. The reconciliation between Epicureanism and Stoicism during the Enlightenment, according to Kavanagh, was owed to the perception of a shared basis in materialist thought that presupposed “a continuity between the physical world of things and the human world of consciousness.” See Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 4–5. Kavanagh explores the place of pleasure within the arts in chapter 4, which addresses the writings of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos and the paintings of François Boucher. Further consideration of the relation between Epicureanism and materialism is found in the essays by Charles Wolffe, “A Happiness Fit for Organic Bodies: La Mettrie's Medical Epicureanism,” and Natania Meeker, “Sexing Epicurean Materialism in Diderot,” in Epicurious in the Enlightenment, ed. Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 69–84 and 85–104.

28. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’école de la volupté (“Dans l’Isle de Calypso,” 1747), represents his most extended treatment of the subject.

29. Julian Offray de La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Claude Morilhat, La Mettrie, un matérialisme radical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). See also Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy and the Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); and John Flavey, “A Critical Edition of the Discours sur le Bonheur,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 134 (1974): 1–140.

30. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 28; and Julian Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine (Leyden: Elie Luzac, 1748), 76–77: “Tous les mouvemens vitaux, Animaux, naturels, & Automatiques se font par leur action . . . n’est ce pas machinalement qu’agissent tous les Sphincters de la Vessie, du Rectum, etc. que le Cœur a une contraction plus forte que toute autre muscle que les muscles érecteurs font dresser la Verge dans l’Homme, comme dans les Animaux qui s’en batten le ventre.”

31. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 28; and La Mettrie, L’homme machine, 77: “… un autre plus subtil, & plus Merveilleux, qui les anime tous; il est la source de tous nos sentimens, de tous nos plaisirs, de toutes nos passions, de toutes nos pensés. . . .”

32. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 29; and La Mettrie, L’homme machine, 78: “Pourquoi la vüe, ou la simple idée d’une belle femme nous cause-t-elle des mouvemens & des desirs singuliers?”

33. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 29; and La Mettrie, L’homme machine, 79–80: “Voiez le Portrait de ce Fameux Pope, au moins le Voltaire des Anglois. Les Efforts, les Nerfs de son Génie sont peints sur sa Physionomie; Elle est toute en convulsion; ses yeux sortent de l’Orbite, ses sourcils s’élèvent avec les muscles du Front. Pourquoi? C’est que l’origine des Nerfs est en travail & que tout le corps doit se ressentir, d’une espèce d’accouchement aussi laborieux. S’il n’y avoit une corde interne qui tirât ainsi celles du dehors, d’ou viendroient tous ces phénomènes?” The exact portrait to which La Mettrie is referring is unknown. One possibility is the portrait by Jean-Baptiste Van Loo, of about 1742, variations on which were widely circulated in print form.

34. Referring to the painting as La colombe retrouvée or La volupté in a letter written by Greuze to the painting's owner, Prince Nicolai Yusupov, the artist confirmed the common emblematic connection of animals with male lovers: “This dove, which she presses against her heart so lovingly, with her two hands, is nothing other than the image of her lover hidden beneath this emblem.” See Louis Réau, “Lettres de Greuze au Prince Nicolas Borisovitch Iousoupov,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français, 1922: 398. See also John Ingamells, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures III: French before 1815 (London: Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1989), 183–84, 195–96; and Clive Hart and Kay Gilliland Stevenson, Heaven and the Flesh: Imagery of Desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 172.

35. Louis-Marie Lebas de Courmont sale catalog, May 26, 1795, no. 40: “une légère ébauche du subject d’une jeune fille sur son lit qui fait danser son chien.”

36. Sale catalog, August 10, 1795 (23 thermidor, an III), no. 77: “une jeune fille couchée sur le dos et dans un lit voluptueux, s’amusant avec un joli épagneul auquel elle present une gimblette. . . . ” For a complete listing of sales, see Rosenberg, Fragonard, 232.

37. Subsequent to reading my article in manuscript form, Patricia Simons decided to pursue the sexual significance of the gimblette in Fragonard's paintings. She is currently preparing a short article on this topic.

38. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, L’art du XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1910), vol. 3, 275: “C’est la volupté ingénue de cette heure badine, les ébats libres et souriants du réveil, qu’il a voulu peindre dans ce joli tableau: le bonnet échappé, les yeux gais et pleins de ses seize ans, un large sourire à la bouche, une fillette sans souci de ce que montre sa chemise plissée en ceinture, soutient en l’air, au bout de ses pieds, un caniche frisé à figure de conseiller en perruque . . . c’est la Gimblette, une fleur d’érotisme toute fraîche, toute française. . . .”

39. Noted in Rosenberg, Fragonard, 235. This catalog reproduces the various paintings attributed to Fragonard known as La gimblette and now lost or in private collections. There are several print versions of Fragonard's scenes, with and without the gimblette, held at the Musée du Louvre and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris: two by Bertony (both with the ring biscuit) and one by Victor-Marie Picot (without the ring biscuit) produced in England and bearing the title “New Thought,” which demonstrates the international market for these subjects. Another print version by Laurent Guyot is recorded in Roger Portalis and Henri Béraldi, Les graveurs du dix-huitième siècle, 3 vols. (1881; New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), vol. 2, 366–67. Imitations of Fragonard's scenes are found in print variants by Augustin-Claude-Simon Legrand and Nicolas Lavreince. Clodion found a market for small, sculpted versions of Fragonard's basic figural arrangement of girl and dog, an example of which is in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. These are all dated to the late eighteenth century.

40. “Cette pièce était aussi connue sous le nom de La Caroline, par allusion à des femmes auxquelles certain vice était attribué, et au Carlin qui joue un role important dans le tableau. . . . Mais pourqui ‘la Gimblette’? Parce que la Gimblette était une petite patisserie sous forme d’anneau dont les petits chiens étaient aussi friands que leurs petites maîtresses, et que M. Fragonard était un libertin!” L’Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux, August 10, 1875, 473.

41. Henri Rochefort, “La collection de M. Henri Rochefort,” Les Arts, no. 43 (July 1905): 2–22, at 10.

42. Jules Renouvier, Histoire de l’art pendant la Révolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1863), vol. 1, 167.

43. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (“Genre and Sex,” 214) has referred to the “corporeal alcove” in Girl Making Her Dog Dance—“large, pliant, and palpable pouch of her bed's canopy resembles the interior of a giant uterus”—the girl's pose is thus treated like a fetus in the womb.

44. Lynda Neade, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Desmond Collins and John Onians, “The Origins of Art,” Art History 1, no. 1 (1978): 1–25.

45. Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, in Sade, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings / The Marquis de Sade, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965), 491.

46. Alan Corkhill, “Kant, Sade and the Libertine Enlightenment,” in Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and License in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Cryle and Lisa O’Connell (Houndsmill, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 62.

47. Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 489.

48. Julie Peakman, “Bodily Anxieties in Enlightenment Sex Literature,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 1 (2005): 19–30.

49. Samuel Auguste David Tissot, L’onanisme: Dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (Lausanne: Chez François Grasset, 1760).

50. Mary Sheriff, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 5.

51. Melissa Percival has drawn together recent technical evidence confirming that this group of half-figure paintings of individual sitters, often referred to as fantasy portraits, were done fast, but not necessarily in an hour or a single sitting. Percival, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 20–21. The sitter in Portrait of a Woman and Her Dog is identified in a recently discovered sketch as Marie-Émilie Coignet de Courson. See Carole Blumenfeld, Une facétie de Fragonard: Les révélations d’un dessin retrouvé (Paris: Éditions Gourcoff Gradenigo, 2013); and Jennifer Milam, review of Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure, by Melissa Percival, H-France Review 14 (2014): no. 120.

52. The self-conscious artistic gesture is compounded by a reference to Peter Paul Rubens's portrayal of Marie de Médicis in Henri IV Entrusts the Rule of His Kingdom to the Queen (Musée du Louvre, Paris)—all part of the painterly performance.

53. As Nicholas Chare has argued, “Medium is never gender neutral.” See Chare, “Sexing the Canvas: Calling on the Medium,” Art History 32, no. 4 (2009): 664–89. In the section “The Macho Impasto,” Chare describes how oil paint was encoded with seminal meanings.

54. Posner, Watteau: A Lady at Her Toilet, 77–79.

55. There are numerous examples of lapdogs accompanying seductive women in northern and southern European painting from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. In addition to works by Jan van Eyck and Lucas Cranach in Netherlandish art, Jan Steen and Frans van Mieris depicted dogs with women in bedrooms in Dutch painting. Venetian artists such as Titian, Vittori Carpaccio, and Paolo Veronese also represented courtesans and goddesses, such as Venus, with small dogs.

56. André Girodie, Un peintre de fêtes galantes: Jean-Frédéric Schall (Strasbourg: A. & F. Kahn, 1927), 19–20. See also Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 35–36. Although Goodman's concern is with the eroticization of letter paintings, she similarly finds a connection between this type of work and an experience of volupté, as described by Diderot in response to a work by Greuze.

57. Friedrich Melchior Grimm referred to it as “le premier tableau du Salon” in the Correspondance littéraire, ed. U. Kölving (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du XVIIIe Siècle, 2006), vol. 1, 66. Oudry's painting would have been known to Fragonard.

58. See Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Katharine MacDonogh, “Prison Pets in the French Revolution,” History Today 46 (August 1996): 36–42.

59. The terms used by Diderot correspond most closely to the contemporary breeds of a toy spaniel, a greyhound, and two pugs, but this is not exact.

60. Denis Diderot, Les bijoux indiscrets ([Paris:] Monomotapa, 1748), chap. 26: “Collé sur les cuisses de sa maîtresse, les yeux enflammés, le poil hérissé, et la gueule béante, il fronçait le muffle, et présentait à l’ennemi deux rangs de dents des plus aiguës.”

61. Ibid.: “Sindor s’en empara, mais non sans effusion de sang.”

62. Ibid.: “Sachez, une bonne fois pour toujours, que mes chiens étaient longtemps avant vous en possession de mon lit, et que vous pouvez en sortir, ou vous résoudre à le partager avec eux.”

63. Ibid.: “qu’elle aimait ses chiens; qu’ils l’amusaient; qu’elle avait pris goût a leurs caresses. . . .”

64. This threat assumes additional currency in Diderot's writing when it is connected with his philosophical contemplation of the connection between human and nonhuman animal species in “Le rêve d’Alembert,” 138: “Every animal is more or less a man [Tout animal est plus ou moins homme].”

65. Diderot, Les bijoux indiscrets, chap. 25: “ils amusent quelquefois, et ne nuisent jamais. Si on leur fait des caresses, c’est qu’elles sont sans consequence. D’ailleurs, croyez-vous, prince, qu’un amant se contentât d’un baiser tel qu’une femme le donne a son gredin?”

66. Comte de Buffon, Natural History (London, 1797), 286.

67. Bonnet, Essai de psychologie, 326: “Les Caresses que le Chien fait à son Maître, après une absence, sont l’expression du Rapport qui est entre l’Objet & les Sensations agréables qu’il a fait éprouver au Chine. Le rappel de ces Sensations par l’Objet monte la machine; elle jouë. Nous nous plaisons à trouver dans cette Scène les traits les plus touchans: nous substituons sans y penser l’Homme au Chine.”

68. The exception is Ganymede, a common subject in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art that is rare in eighteenth-century painting. Some notable examples exist in prints, but as reproductions of works by Roman and Italian Renaissance artists. See Jupiter s’appuie sur Ganimède from Peintures de la Ville Altoviti à Rome, inventées par Michelange, Peintes par Giorgio Vasari et Gravées par Thomas Piroli: Faisant partie de la Calcographie Piranesi (Paris: F. Piranesi, 1807), pl. 11, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

69. To amuse himself and the other attendants at the coucher du roi, the marquis de Champcenetz bet that he could make the cat dance in the few moments that the king would be out of the room. Amid the laughter that followed, Champcenetz took out a flask and rubbed l’eau de mille fleurs (an alcohol-based medicine) on the cat's paws. Once it set in, the sting of the alcohol caused the cat to jump wildly around the room. When the king came in and saw what was happening, he asked Champcenetz what he had done to his cat. After hearing the tale, Louis XV replied, “Gentlemen, if you are going to amuse yourselves, I ask that it is not at the expense of my cat.” Jean-Nicolas, comte Dufort de Cheverny, Mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1909), vol. 1, 122. See also Olivier Lafont, “L’eau de mille-fleurs qui fit danser le chat du roi,” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, 87e année, no. 323 (1999): 343–46.

70. Regardless of whether or not this happened regularly, renovations of the king's private apartments at Versailles in 1738 ensured close proximity between the king and his hunting dogs, so that he could see to their care personally. Within the newly constructed petits appartements, access was established between the king's bedchamber and the cabinet des chiens, a room occupied by the king's valets, who in turn shared the space with the king's favorite dogs. Pierre Verlet, Château de Versailles (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 227, 442–44.

71. Élisabeth-Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, The Letters of Madame, trans. and ed. Gertrude Scott Stevenson, 2 vols. (London: Arrowsmith, 1924–25), vol. 1, 121.

72. Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, “Chien,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vol. 3, 328: “ils partagent avec nous nos logements; ils nous accompagnent lorsque nous en sortons; enfin ils savent plaire au point qu’il y a bien des gens qui en portent avec eux, & qui les font coucher dans le meme lit.”

73. Ibid.: “Les males s’accouplent en tout tems; les femelles sont en chaleur pendant environ quatorze jours; elles portent pendant soixante out-soixante & trois jours, & elles rentrent en chaleur deux fois par an.”

74. In matters of law in late eighteenth-century France, zoophilia and bestiality were subsumed into other forms of sexual crimes against nature. Before formal sodomy laws in 1791 were established, bestiality was punishable by death (both person and animal). It is worth noting, however, that putting the animal to death was not the result of any assignment of blame to the animal but is more in accordance with the antique idea that an animal was incapable of crime, and therefore it was killed because the sight of this animal might excite another person to commit the same act. See John Disney, “Of Sodomy and Bestiality,” in A View of Ancient Laws, against Immorality and Profaneness (Cambridge, 1729), chap. 10, in Rictor Norton, ed., “Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook,” January 30, 2011, http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1729disn.htm.

75. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 11 (1788), 344: “Le chien de berger est le héros de la race; il est utile. Le dogue suit & defend son maître; c’est encore un bon chien. Je le distingue, je lui fais grace; mais je souhaite la mort à tous ces petits chiens dont s’environnent les femmes, & qui sont auprès d’elles des enseignes de dépravation.”

76. Ibid.: “Comment baiser la bouche que lèche incessamment la langue de ces petits animaux colères & vicieux? Quand je vois sortir du lit d’une jolie femme un épagneul, qui en fait sa loge, je n’ai plus envie d’y entrer. Comment les femmes qui se rapprochent tant des chiens, osent-elles offenser à ce point la délicates de leurs semblables?”

77. Katharine MacDonogh presents a thorough survey of pet keeping in European court culture in Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court since the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate, 1999). Although the focus is on a slightly later period, there is some discussion of pet keeping during the ancien régime in Kete, Beast in the Boudoir. For an analysis of picturing dogs during this period, see Richard Thomson, “‘Les Quat’ Pattes’: The Image of the Dog in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art,” Art History 5, no. 3 (September 1982): 324–38.

78. Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1782), vol. 3: 133–34: “Mais ce qu’on ne voit qu’à Paris, ce sont de grands imbécilles qui, pour faire leur cour à des femmes, portent leur chien publiquement sous la bras dans les promenades & dans les rues.”

79. Katharine MacDonogh, “Prison Pets in the French Revolution,” History Today 46, no. 8 (August 1994): 36–42. Kete (Beast in the Boudoir, 41) also mentions the killing of pedigree breeds at the Place de Grève, but the original reference quoted (Almanach des hônnetes femmes pour l’année 1790 [Paris: de l’impr. de la Société Joyeuse, 1790] does not include this source material. Almanach, 25, nevertheless provides some “Notes historiques” describing illicit sexual practices with little dogs, which are linked with the behavior of ancient courtesans listed in François Rabelais, Erotica verba, in Oeuvres (Paris: Ledentu, 1835), 587. The origin of Kete's reference to the murder of dogs at the Place de Grève is Girodie, Un peintre de fêtes galantes, 20. Girodie mentions that “little dogs, according to the almanacs . . . were burned in the Place de Grève ‘for a crime that good morals prohibit from being revealed’ [petits chiens, dits lexicons . . . furent brûlés en Place de Grève ‘à cause d’un crime que les bonnes mœurs défendent de révéler’].” There were a number of motions in 1793 that sought to eradicate dogs with no practical purpose (that is, all but guard dogs). See Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: 1793–1795 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 127. The killing of dogs during the Revolution is considered from a sacrificial perspective by Jesse Goldhammer in The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 46.

80. Geneviève Bollème, Les almanachs populaires au XVIIe et au XVIII siècle: Essai d’histoire sociale (Paris: Mouton, 1969).

81. Almanach des hônnetes femmes pour l’année 1790, 6: “Les dames françaises ont porté la lubricité aussi loin que les grecques et les romaines. …”

82. Ibid.: “mais notre langage n’a pas fait les mêmes progrès que notre libertinage; nous puiserons donc dans le dictionnaire de voluptés des anciens des expressions simples et énergiques.”

83. Ibid., 25: “Les phicidisseuses prétendent que l’espèce humaine n’est pas seule capable d’exciter le plaisir. Elles tremblent aux approaches d’un homme vigoureux, et leur préfèrent la langue delicate de leurs petits chiens. Envions le Bonheur de ces petits animaux, ils sont souvent plus aimés que nous.”

84. Annie Scottez-De Wambrechies, ed., Boilly 1761–1845: Un grand peintre français de la Révolution à la Restauration, exh. cat., Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille (Lille: Le Musée, 1988), 32–33. The catalog entry for the painting describes Boilly's treatment of his subject as typical for a bourgeois professional and inspired by the art of seventeenth-century Dutch masters. While detailing the furniture and other accessories, the entry is silent on the presence of the dog in the scene. A more recent exhibition catalog includes only a skeletal entry on the painting: Annie Scottez-De Wambrechies and Florences Raymond, eds., Boilly (1761–1845) (Lille: Palais des Beaux-Arts; Paris: Éditions Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 117.

85. One example is the Portrait of Louis XIII attributed to Ferdinand Elle (ca. 1634, Chiswick House, London), showing a full-length portrait of King Louis XIII with his pet spaniel. As the spaniel was a breed that was also used in the hunt, there is some potential for multiple meanings to be attached to the dog in this painting. Undoubtedly, there is a residual connection with the hunt, as the leisure pursuit of princes, but the dog is simultaneously emblematic of the king's authority over the natural world and representative of his compassion for all living creatures in his kingdom. While the man directly addresses the beholder, the dog looks away from the viewer and toward the king, a diffident pose that directs response toward subservience. Another early example is Titian's Portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua (1529–30, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), who, like Louis XIII, apparently had a keen fondness for his dogs. Edgar Peters Bowron, “An Artist's Best Friend: Dogs in Renaissance and Baroque Painting and Sculpture,” in Bowron et al., Best in Show, 1–37, at 8–9. Bowron's essay provides a useful survey of the relationship between dogs and people.

86. John Caius, De canibus Britannicis, published as Of Englishe Dogges, trans. Abraham Fleming (London: Richard Johnes, 1576) is a book that describes the “Spaniel Gentle” in England by a second name, “Comforter.” For the longer history of lapdogs in Renaissance culture, see Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties.

87. In mid- to late eighteenth-century portraiture, specifically of English sitters, there are examples of men with their dogs that evoke sensibility. Often these combine an air of detachment on the part of the male sitter with feelings of emotion produced by the positioning and responsiveness of the animal. Jeanette Hoorn is currently working on this problem as part of her research into dogs and portraiture, with a particular focus on Thomas Gainsborough's An Officer of the 4th Regiment of Foot (ca. 1776–80, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). Another example is Pompeo Girolamo Batoni's General Lord George Henry Lennox (1755, Goodwood Collection, Chichester, U.K.), which suggests affection between the sitter and his pet through gesture and the sense of touch. Significantly, in both paintings, the dog is a full-size spaniel with the same residual connection to the hunt as in the portrait of Louis XIII, rather than a lapdog. In this regard, the Boilly portrait remains distinctive.

88. Stéfane-P [Paul Coutant], Autour de Robespierre: Le conventionnel Le Bas, d’après des documents inédits les mémoires de sa Veuve (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1901), 107: “Il avait un chien, nommé Brount, qu’il amait beaucoup; la pauvre bête lui était très attachée.” Some secondary sources on Robespierre describe this dog as a great Danish hound, but I have not found any primary source materials that confirm this identification of the breed.

89. Ibid.

90. Robespierre (to Mlle Duhay?), Arras, June 6, 1788, in Charles Vellay, “Une lettre inédite de Robespierre,” Annales Revolutionnaires 1, no. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908): 107–9: “Le petit chien que vous élevez pour ma soeur est-il aussi joli que le modèle que vous m’avez montré, quand je passai à Béthune? Quel qu’il soit, on l’accueillera toujours avec distinction et avec plaisir. On peut même dire que, quelque laid qu’il puisse être, il sera toujours joli. Un homme d’esprit n’est jamais laid, disait une femme célèbre, je crois que c’était Mme de Sévigné. On pourrait dire sans doute de votre chien quelque chose d’honnête et de vrai, dans le même genre.” Also quoted in Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 48.

91. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 11 vols. (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1912–2007), vol. 3, 30–35. In visual imagery, the erotic symbolism of birds was commonly deployed. See Philip Stewart, Engraven Desire: Eros, Image and Text in the French Eighteenth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972), 272.

92. McPhee, Robespierre, 3.

93. Susan L. Siegfried has analyzed Boilly's extended engagement with art making as a dynamic interpretative process, involving viewers through emblematic codes that were well worn and open to a range of meanings. See Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 186.

94. The dating of the painting has been debated, at times assigned to 1791. While Scottez-De Wambrechies, Boilly 1761–1845 is most convincing in setting the date at 1783, a date during the Revolutionary period would serve to reinforce an interpretation of the lapdog as an emblematic critique of the ancien régime.

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Jennifer Milam

Jennifer Milam is professor of art history and eighteenth-century studies at the University of Sydney. With her interdisciplinary interests, she seeks to identify unconventional visual processes stimulating and directing the production and reception of art in the intersecting fields of art history, intellectual history, and eighteenth-century studies [Department of Art History, University of Sydney, NSW, 2105, Australia, [email protected]].