Assistant Professor of Art History
Parsons The New School for Desig

Fig. 1. A. Maucert, Exposition de tableaux sur la Place Dauphine, 1784, sepia wash over watercolor
and gouache. Location unknown (artwork in the public domain, reproduced from Chronique des Arts,
no. 17 (April 25, 1914), 135.  Click here for full version.

Although this 1784 watercolor by A. Maucert nominally depicts the art exhibition held annually at the Place Dauphine (a triangular courtyard on the tip of Paris’s Île de la Cité), the work offers less information about the show or its site than about the diversity of the urban experience. (Fig. 1) Maucert’s image yields a playful critique of Parisian mores in the spirit of Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s contemporaneous publication Le Tableau de Paris (1781-1788).1  Both text and image offer a vision of pre-Revolutionary Paris as a city whose multiple publics and competing interests thwart any singular description.

The Place Dauphine exhibition had its roots in traditional celebrations of the feast of Corpus Christi. One day each June, the streets of Paris played an integral role in festivities honoring the Holy Eucharist (i.e., the body of Christ, or Corpus Christi), which was carried through the city in a grand procession. Creating a splendid backdrop for the religious spectacle, artists, collectors, and gallery owners would drape buildings with tapestries from which, in turn, they hung paintings. While temporary altars dotted the urban fabric and works of art were to be seen everywhere, the Place Dauphine was the favorite spot for exhibiting paintings by up-and-coming artists.

In Maucert’s rendering, however, the crowd–not the art, and certainly not the consecrated Host –provides the primary interest. Lining the façades in the background, schematically rendered paintings suspended from lengths of fabric can barely be discerned. But the people are endlessly engaging. Clustered in groups and facing every which way, men, women and children chat, play, pose or, like the three figures perched on the balconies at the left, simply observe the throng.  Varied classes are represented: a porter at the left is seen from behind, trudging along with a framed painting strapped to his hunching back; a nobleman in the center left sports a sword – a mark of privilege; a cassocked priest wearing a skullcap is paired with a woman at the right; and, enjoying pride of place in the center foreground, a boy plays with a small dog while a fashionably attired girl looks on.

Closer inspection also reveals other, more untoward, goings on. At the far left, a woman lifts a protective cloth to reveal the porter’s painting, while her male companion also uncovers a visually enticing object. Unaccountably, the man tugs at the woman’s bodice, sneaking a peek at her left breast. In another act of open voyeurism, a bewigged gentleman at the right center ogles a woman through the magnifying lens of a lorgnette.

Admittedly, this is a quirky scene painted by a little-known artist. Yet its approach to describing the city is close to that of Mercier’s Tableau de Paris. Together, text and image offer an understanding of Paris in the 1780s as a subjective, ever-changing, and even contested, territory. 

Mercier is explicit about his theoretical framework.  His preface warns that “anyone who expects to find in this work a topographic description of public squares and streets, or a history of the city’s past will be disappointed."2  Instead, Mercier claims only that “I have sketched what I saw.”  Underscoring the essentially personal nature of the urban experience, he adds, “if a thousand people followed the same route, if each one were observant, each would write a different book on this subject….” 

Text and image also share a structure, with both presenting vignettes in surprising juxtapositions. Mercier’s first volume contains 142 chapters, most just two or three pages long, on topics ranging from the monarch to manure. For instance, Mercier toys with a centuries-old tradition of social typology when he describes Parisians not only by the usual professions (lawyers, policemen, notaries, spies), but also by such subjective categories as “the decidedly superficial man,” and even a group of one – “my grandfather.”

Ultimately, Mercier’s Tableau de Paris, like Maucert’s Exhibition at the Place Dauphine presents 1780s Paris as a vital and unruly entity that refuses to be pinned down.
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1 Click here for Volumes 1-4. For translated excerpts and an excellent critical discussion see Jeremy D. Popkin, ed., Panorama of Paris (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).

2 Quotes in this paragraph are from Popkin, Panorama of Paris, 23-24.