Reviews #14
Paris through the Eyes of Saint-Aubin (26 Sep 2024 - 4 Feb 2025)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Reviewed by J. Cabelle Ahn, PhD
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780), Les fêtes vénitiennes, after 1759, 20.5 × 15.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975, 1975.1.702
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780), Revelers at a Table in the Countryside, 1760s, 25.3 × 19.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975, 1975.1.701
In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire names Gabriel de Saint-Aubin as one of the artists whose drawings operate as “precious archives of civilized life.” More than 160 years later, Saint-Aubin’s commitment to chronicling quotidian drama has been reinforced in “Paris through the Eyes of Saint-Aubin” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nes York, September 26, 2024 - February 4, 2025). Curated by Perrin Stein, this exhibition is the first on the draughtsman since the monographic show jointly organized by the Frick and the Louvre in 2007-08. This latest display is thematically divided into nine topics, ranging from types of sites (such as “Church and the City”) to artistic subjects (such as “Glory and Allegory”), and supplemented with works by family members and artists from Saint-Aubin’s professional circles, including his mentors Étienne Jeurat and François Boucher. Sprinkled throughout the show is the promised gift of twenty-one Saint-Aubin drawings from Stephen A. Geiger, whose donation will more than triple the number of drawings by the artist in the Met’s permanent collection.
The exhibition affirms Saint-Aubin’s pre-existing reputation as an unparalleled archivist of commercial affairs and metropolitan happenings, while also offering new insights into the understudied academic elements of his practice. As eighteenth-century specialists would expect, the section titled “Parks, Fairs, and Diversions” features the largest number of sheets, upholding an account in an anonymous Salon pamphlet from 1779 that asked, “Who has not seen [Saint-Aubin] copying, sketching, drawing in our public gardens, our Salons, our auctions, our public squares?” Together, these works underscore the considerable impact his interest in theatre had on both his choices of subject matter and his compositional preferences.
Elsewhere, dense studies incite an urge for the type of source hunting common among many early modern scholars. For instance, a neatly rendered pen and black chalk drawing of the lots from the 1777 Prince de Conti sale features stolid Netherlandish portraits (attributed to Frans van Mieris and Anthony van Dyck) alongside squares of hazy Italianate landscapes and sweeping configurations of Baroque limbs. Sheets such as this confirm why Saint-Aubin’s miniature renditions of the Salon hangs and outlines of auction lots have long operated as Rosetta stones for the pre-nineteenth-century art market.
Geiger’s promised gifts add important nuance to Saint-Aubin’s own under-researched aspirations as a history painter. He was never admitted to the Académie Royale and instead taught courses at the École des Arts (founded by the architect Jacques-Francois Blondel) on human proportions, historical attributes, secular and sacred allegories, and more from 1747 to 1764. Yet a watercolour and gouache drawing of Lot and his Daughter (c. 1750-55), displayed here alongside an etching of Joseph Marie Vien’s treatment of the same subject, reveals not only Saint-Aubin’s interest in mimicking his academic contemporaries but also, in turn, suggests his greater institutional ambitions during this time. In related fashion, two sweeping chalk and grey wash drawings glorifying the French capture of Grenada in 1779 gesture toward his lifelong preoccupation with the iconography and the format of history paintings.
Ultimately, the exhibition situates Saint-Aubin’s cultural, institutional, and commercial gaze within his manifold projects. In one of the wall texts, Stein notes that “the delightful conundrum of Saint-Aubin’s style” is that his works are often “miniature in scale and panoramic in effect.” Similarly, “Paris Through the Eyes of Saint-Aubin” reveals that the artist’s inspirations and technical prowess too are more expansive and encompassing than they might first seem.
