Caricature, Pedagogy, and Camaraderie at the French Academy in Rome, 1770–1775 Jessica L. Fripp (bio) Caricature's prominence in the visual culture of France during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has gained the attention of art historians in the last decade.1 These studies have tended to emphasize publicly circulated social and political caricature. However, by focusing on graphic satire intended for a wide audience, such discussions overlook other uses that the genre had for artists in the eighteenth century, which are inseparable from sociable practices of drawing. This essay considers the caricatures of the French history painter François-André Vincent and others like them produced by his fellow pensionnaires at the French Royal Academy in Rome between 1770 and 1775 as responses to their shared academic training, to eighteenth-century drawing pedagogy, and to the homosocial environment of Rome. The apparent lack of topical subject matter has relegated the pensionnaires' caricatures to mere examples of artistic versatility and humorous formal experimentation among more serious forms of artistic practice.2 The caricatures were fundamentally an artistic pastime that resulted in valued mementos of the pensionnaires' experience abroad, and references to these drawings and etchings often include the word "friendship" to describe the relationship between the men involved in their creation. The inclination to situate these works within amicable relationships is understandable. The drawings and etchings represent a group of artists and were reproduced and exchanged amongst the individuals in the group, and thus the caricatures exist within a long tradition of portrait production and [End Page 43] exchange that was part and parcel of artistic social life, both in France and abroad.3 However, these unusual portraits were very much the product of the specific social experience of a pensionnaire in Rome, and this particular context offers a rich opportunity to consider the social lives of artists in the final stages of their training. A stay in Rome was the capstone of aspiring European artists' training in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it offered an unparalleled opportunity to study the works by Renaissance and Baroque masters as well as the antiquities in the ancient city and its environs. The trip was held to be so important that, in 1664, only sixteen years after the founding of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the institution created the Prix de Rome: a three-year funded trip to Rome for the institution's most promising young history painters and sculptors. The establishment of this prize was followed in 1666 by the creation of an official satellite Academy in Rome, the Palais Mancini, to house and support the young pensionnaires.4 By 1793, when the Rome Academy was briefly closed because of the French Revolution, 310 official pensioners had spent time there.5 In Rome, student artists worked under the auspices of the French Royal Academy but were physically separated from it. Pensioners were exclusively male, usually unmarried, in their early twenties, and living in an exceptionally homosocial city.6 Such a context created what historian and cultural anthropologist William Reddy has called an "emotional refuge," where men could establish connections that were not based on kinship or rank, even if on a temporary basis.7 It provided an opportunity to foster camaraderie and close relationships that were central to the formation of masculine identity, creating a space for young men to act out and misbehave.8 I argue here that the more than one hundred caricatures and caricature-like drawings produced by and exchanged between Vincent and his cohort make evident the male bonding made possible by artists' experiences in Rome. Caricature was a means for the Academy's most privileged student-artists to not only create souvenirs of their time together but also to respond to their academic training. While these satirical drawings represent people, they provide visual evidence that, in addition to the individuals chosen as subjects, the pedagogy and practice of drawing itself may be equally read as an object of satire. CARICATURE AND CAMARADERIE Vincent's drawings range from several series of handsomely finished, full-length figures and profile medallion portraits in black chalk or sanguine, to one-off images of day-to...
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Jun 30, 2024
Puji Rahayu + 1
Open Access