Welcome back to my Neo-Victorian Voices series, where I review books set in the nineteenth century but written in the twenty-first!
Today’s novel is a dual timeline historical that alternates between the perspectives of a present-day American divorcee, who finds herself in Paris after unexpectedly becoming single in her fifties, and the widow behind the Veuve Clicquot champagne house, who writes letters to her great-granddaughter about how she navigated the Napoleonic era as a businesswoman, in a time when the wine industry was almost entirely controlled by men.
MacIntosh’s research into the fascinating life of Barbe Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot is clear. She does a great job fictionalizing Clicquot’s biography and turning it into a digestible story that maintains human interest, even as it covers complex swathes of French history.
The modern-day storyline, following Natalie, is lighter and even easier to read. Natalie is the quintessential American in Paris, charmed by French fashion, food, and wine, and stumbling through the capital asking everyone she encounters if they speak English. She’s swept up in a romance with a dashing man named Gabriel and connecting with the famous champagne widow, via a book of her letters, within what seems like seconds of stepping off her plane from Chicago, but some fun plot twists keep the story fresh and entertaining.
Overall, the book left me with the impression that MacIntosh wrote it for readers like Natalie–those in love with the idea of Paris and excited by the effervescence of champagne, even if their grasp of French history and wine is a little loose. We often talk about beach reads, but this is a city break read: I’d recommend it if you’re dreaming of a trip to Paris…or if you’re looking for a summer book club pick that gives you the excuse to break open the bubbles.
Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the fifth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last year. (Here are the links to check out the 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 editions if you’d like to travel back in time!)
In 2024, as in 2023, I read 50 books, an average pace of approximately 50 pages a day.
My preference for fiction over non-fiction remains clear, with 41 vs. 9 books read. But my non-fiction reading covered topics of particular interest to me, such as art (All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley, and The Art Thief, Michael Finkel), ballet (Turning Pointe, Chloe Angyal), and the nineteenth century (Stranger in the Shogun’s City, Amy Stanley, reviewed here, and The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, Margalit Fox), and expanded into less expected areas (e.g., memoirs by Flea, Esmeralda Santiago, and Patricia E. Beattie, and the story of an eighteenth-century naval mutiny, in David Grann’s The Wager).
When it comes to fiction, for the first time in one of these reviews, one contemporary author dominates—I read six (!) novels by Tana French in 2024 and continue to love her work.
My interest in my own genre, historical fiction, remains strong, accounting for 20% of books I read last year. Other strong themes for the year in fiction included witches (The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub, The Manningtree Witches, A.K. Blakemore, The Witches of New York, Ami McKay, and Weyward, Emilia Hart), ballet (Tiny Pretty Things, Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra, and The Dance of the Dolls, Lucy Ashe), and, as ever, books by friends/acquaintances (Marvelous, Molly Greeley, The Last Star Standing, C.G. Twiles, and What's Eating Jackie Oh?, Patricia Park).
Thirty-five books I read this year were by women, and 15 by men, which is slightly more gender-balanced than in 2023.
In 2025, I’ll again be aiming to read 50 books. My reading resolutions? Continue to embrace the unexpected (one of my favorite 2024 reads was Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger, a book about a female cannibal!), prioritize joy in reading, and continue to support writer friends.
What books did you enjoy reading in 2024 that I should continue adding to my list? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.
I very much enjoyed reviewing French Decadent writer Rachilde’s 1887’s The Marquise de Sade for this blog back in 2020, which was one reason why I was so delighted when publisher Rachilde & Co. got in touch about their new translation/edition of her 1893 novel, The Animal.
The Animal, Rachilde (1893)
Available in English for the very first time, The Animal tells the story of Laure Lordès, a woman with a love of sex, food, and cats. Move aside Mary Barbe (heroine of The Marquise de Sade)—Laure is potentially an even more shocking nineteenth-century heroine. Precociously sexual, she introduces all the neighborhood boys to sin before even reaching puberty. Casually cruel, she drives her father’s one-eyed clerk to suicide, following their affair. And distinctly feline herself, both in appearance and attitude, she reaches a violent end at the hands paws of the one living creature she really loves.
Intrigued yet? You should be. This is a novel that will make you revisit your assumptions about the nineteenth century and potentially understand the perspective of those British Victorians who were so alarmed by the literature of the French on the other side of the Channel.
But the importance of The Animal isn’t just in its shock value. Some of the book’s most memorable moments, for me, were about not Laure, but the more conventional characters surrounding her. Laure’s in-born love of sex is contrasted with the transactional nature of intimacy in the social sanctioned arenas of both sex work and marriage. In one passage, Rachilde passes this damning verdict on Laure’s lover, whose approach to both eating and lovemaking is functional and prosaic:
“He would marry because romantic relationships are not very safe despite numerous pharmaceutical discoveries, and he would have children modeled after him, other samples of the irreproachable modern bourgeois factory: molds from other molds, loaded in the belly with the same meter that regulates both the needs of the stomach and those of love…! No, these men do not have the gift of loving, even like animals do; they are, in the scale of beings, below animals, between the mineral diamond and the mineral oyster shell!”
Overall, I’d like to thank Rachilde & Co. for such a fascinating read and to recommend this novel to every English-speaking adult—mostly because I want more people to talk about it with! Read The Animal already? Let me know—here, on Instagram, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want regular updates from me? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter.
I’ve previously reviewed Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel, A Sentimental Education, for this blog, but this month I’m back with a post about a lesser-known work—his collection of Three Tales, published eight years later in 1877.
In the first story, ‘A Simple Heart,’ a servant woman, Felicité, suffers through a difficult existence, despite the love she has to give. She ends her days unable to distinguish between her stuffed and moldy parrot, the one creature that ever showed her any affection, and the Holy Ghost.
Meanwhile in the second story, ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier,’ a much-loved son with a sadistic passion for hunting finds himself subject to a terrible curse. Destined to kill his own parents, Julian abandons his former life to save theirs, but fate soon catches up with him with terrible consequences.
Finally, in his third story, ‘Hérodias,’ Flaubert expands on the biblical tale of the beheading of John the Baptist.
All three tales, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation, have a modern feel, especially when contrasted with Flaubert’s full-length novels. ‘A Simple Heart’ and ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier’ are both incredibly readable, while ‘Hérodias’ is denser, packed as it is with proper nouns and theological references.
I found ‘A Simple Heart’ emotionally arresting, even as the old woman’s veneration of a taxidermied parrot borders on the absurd, and the descriptions of Julian’s blood lust as he hunts will stay with me. ‘Hérodias’ left me a little cold, but that could be due to familiarity with later works, such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893), which Flaubert’s story is said to have inspired.
Overall, Flaubert’s Three Tales succeed in feeling fabulistic, while remaining unexpected. They’re peopled by characters with depth—these men and women aren’t just archetypes—that show off Flaubert’s range and far-reaching empathy. If you’re looking for a shorter work of nineteenth-century literature to read next, check the collection out, or dive into my full “Victorians in Brief” list here.
What book would you like me to review next on the Secret Victorianist? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
I can hardly believe it, but I’ve now been running this blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture for over a decade! The blog has changed a lot over the years as I’ve made the move from London to New York City, my interests have evolved, and I’ve become a published author myself.
So, in a belated anniversary celebration, I decided to look back through the archives to revisit my top 10 performing posts of all time.
I started my blog with a bang and a LOT of enthusiasm, publishing 13 posts in the first month alone (nowadays my goal of two a month is more achievable). This post, a tongue-in-cheek look at whether I would cut it as an Austen heroine, was one of them. Pride and Prejudice (1813) remains such a cultural touchstone I’m not surprised this article still sees traffic every day—I mean, the 1995 BBC adaptation even got a shout-out in the recent Barbie movie!
You’ll see a lot of poetry-focused posts in this top 10 list, which was initially surprising to me. When I write about poetry my promotional posts don’t gain a lot of traction on social media, but when it comes to search engine traffic, those articles rise to the top. My hypothesis is that students are stumbling across my blog when looking for homework help analyzing poems like Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil.’ I can only hope they’re enjoying my write ups, and not just plagiarizing my analysis!
More poetry, but this time with a #KidLit twist. In this blog post I share some more accessible Victorian poems to get children excited about reading verse from the period.
This 2018 post is focused on my personal opinions about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to historical fiction tropes (and spoiler alert: I’ve already changed my stance on a few of these issues!). I’d be fascinated in hearing other readers’ views on this topic and what makes a historical novel great to them.
The high bounce rates I see from this page suggest that maybe an academic blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture isn’t quite what people are looking for when they Googled “incest” (!), but despite this I selfishly wish more people would read Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (serialized 1892), one of the strangest Victorian novels out there.
I’ve written quite a lot about nineteenth-century French literature over the years, but this review of the premier text of the French Decadent movement is far and away the best performing.
In 2013-2015 I published a series of posts making a nineteenth-century connection to every single letter of the alphabet (yes, some were easier to think up than others!). While the Victorian period isn’t the one we most associate with witchcraft, this post has been a perennial top performer, especially as we approach Halloween. Here, I focus on the accusations of witchcraft leveled against the character of Eustacia Vye in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). I also link to my review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella, Lois the Witch (1861).
As a blogger focused on nineteenth-century literature and culture, I often have to contend with people’s preconceptions and misconceptions about what Victorians were like. In this early blog post I tackle the misinformation.
This is the only writing craft post to make the top 10 and I’m not surprised it’s about lessons we can learn from the master of Victorian literature himself—Charles Dickens. While I do references Dickens’s most famously repetitious passages—the openings of Bleak House (serialized 1852-1853) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859)—it’s his lesser-read 1848 novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain that I do a close reading of here.
What would you like to see me write about next as the blog goes into its second decade? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Interested in getting regular updates from my blog and on my fiction? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.
The last nineteenth-century French novel I reviewed, Rachilde’s The Marquise de Sade (1887), introduced us to a heroine who plumbed the depths of sexual depravity. By contrast, Germaine de Staël’s Delphine, another French novel by a woman writer, from the opposite end of the century, takes great pains to depict the purity of its titular character.
Delphine d'Albémar, a widow, is young, beautiful, compassionate and unrelentingly “good” for ~500 pages, as de Staël uses her story to depict the inequalities women faced in the years of the French Revolution.
The man she loves, Léonce de Mondoville, is weaker and more volatile, unwilling to be satisfied by merely platonic affection, when fate (in the form of the scheming Sophie de Vernon) divides him from Delphine. Still, it is the woman in this unfortunate would-be coupling who bears the brunt of social shame and suffering throughout the story, which unfolds through a series of letters.
De Staël’s use of the epistolary form is a wonderful window into the social life of the French upper classes, even if certain letters, especially Delphine’s confessional/diary-like messages to her sister-in-law, strain our credulity. We’re introduced to a social scene in which reputation is more important than innocence. Women are ostracised for sexual misconduct, and men for cowardice. Modern readers may find themselves yelling “just move somewhere else and live together!” but our characters’ cages are in their own minds.
Sophie de Vernon is the most fascinating character. She’s manipulative without being cartoonish-ly evil, and adept at playing by this society’s rules to get ahead. But after her early exit (spoiler alert: she dies), the ill-starred lovers seem to be each other’s worst enemies. Meanwhile, Madame de Vernon’s daughter (and Léonce’s wife!), Mathilde, never really comes into her own to become the crucial missing piece of our love triangle.
Recently, I’ve been reviewing twenty-first-century novels set during the French Revolution (roundups here and here), so I was particularly keen to see how Germaine de Staël incorporated this historical backdrop. However, despite the novel being set between 1789 and 1792, the political context isn’t foregrounded. There are moments when historical events intersect with the plot (e.g. a character fleeing arrest, or the novel’s denouement, which plays out against a battlefield), but, anxious to avoid Napoleon’s displeasure, de Staël kept much of her commentary subtle.
The book is most political in that it shows how a woman could do everything “right” and still have her life become a tragedy. But, unfortunately, Delphine’s “goodness”—crucial for landing this message at the time the book was written—makes this a slightly eye roll-inducing read today.
What nineteenth-century novel (French or otherwise) would you like to see me review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
My own novel, Bronte’s Mistress, is available in hardcover, audiobook, and e-book now. For updates on my writing and reading, please sign up for my monthly email newsletter below.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Marquise de Sade, by Rachilde (first published in French in 1887).
I’ve read books by other writers who were part of the late nineteenth-century Decadent Movement. I’ve blogged, for instance, about Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 À Rebours (Against Nature), which is often held up as representative of the excesses of the artistic and literary movement. I’ve read Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, some of the most famous Decadent writers in English. And I’ve enjoyed the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, probably the most famous British visual artist in this group.
However, I had no idea until recently that there was a woman writer amongst the leading French Decadent authors—Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, who published under the pen name Rachilde.
The Marquise de Sade, Rachilde (1887)
The novel of Rachilde’s I picked up was The Marquise de Sade (1887), though her 1884 Monsieur Venus is perhaps slightly better known. Flicking through its front pages, I discovered that it had taken more than a hundred years (!!) for The Marquise de Sade to be published in English, with this translation, by Liz Heron, appearing in 1994.
An intriguing writer, a racy title, and a recent translation? I was in, and flew through the novel within days. Now I’m blogging to tell you all about it. Warning: spoilers ahead, as this one’s a little off the beaten track…
CN: Sexual Violence, Animal Cruelty, Transphobia, Homophobia
First up, the title is pretty misleading. The novel has nothing directly to do with the nobleman, philosopher, and sexual libertine who put the “S” in “BDSM.” Rather, the feminisation of the title (this is the Marquise de Sade, rather than the masculine Marquis) is a reference to the novel’s central theme. Rachilde’s book is a bildungsroman about how a girl grows into a woman with a perverse taste for cruelty.
Second, if you’re expecting sex on every page, you’re going to be disappointed. Mary Barbe, our protagonist, is seven years old in the opening chapter and the book mainly deals with her childhood. This, of course, includes references to her nascent sexuality, but it’s only in the last quarter of the novel, when Mary is an adult, that the content becomes overtly and consistently sexual.
What I was least prepared for was how (deliberately!) funny the book was in parts. Mary is the daughter of a colonel and Rachilde’s satirical depiction of the social life of officers in the French army is incredibly entertaining.
As a writer, I was also impressed by Rachilde’s convincing use of a child’s point of view, while the narrative still winks at what’s really going on between the grown-up characters. Even as the book plays with the excessive and the absurd (e.g. a brawl between the officers’ children over live lambs, which have been given out as gifts at a kids’ party), I felt like the writer really knew and could empathise with children—something that’s pretty rare in nineteenth-century novels.
I’m no psychiatrist, but Rachilde’s psychological portrait of Mary reads as proto-Freudian and progressive. Mary is initially a sensitive and caring child. But neglected by her family, who would prefer her to be a boy, she is starved of affection and has several early experiences that lead to her associating love and pain. Her first (pretty innocent) fumblings with a boy in her tweenage years are also linked to power play, as she convinces him to steal a prized rose from his employer for her in return for a kiss.
As the novel progresses, her development becomes less believable. She ends the novel fantasising about murder, having tasted every other excess. And, in a strange twist I didn’t see coming, it is a “transvestite man” that she considers killing. She talks of men who sleep with other men as “fallen” and “ill-equipped to defend [themselves] against women.” And says, “her conscience would be clear if the chosen victim were among that kind!”
While the ending is a clear escalation in violence, there are also plenty of other moments readers will find problematic, distasteful and shocking throughout the book.
There are various instances of animal cruelty. The opening scene sees Mary faint as she watches an ox being butchered and its blood drained as a cure for her consumptive mother. As a small child, Mary’s beloved companion is a cat (even though it scratches her). I won’t go into details, but, predictably, the cat and her kittens meet unpleasant ends, further cementing Mary’s misandry and misogyny.
Mary’s own “cruelty” as an adult at first revolves around exercising her newfound power to deny men. She pretends she loves them, but refuses to have sex with them, or goads them into making sexual advances, but then blackmails them about what they have done. Eventually, one of the young men she’s been playing with rapes her, cuckolding his father in the process. The narrative suggests that he is the victim.
But it’s not only men who Mary can captivate and torture. In one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, Mary has a woman who wishes to sleep with her strip naked before her, and then, without warning, brands her with a red-hot poker. Reader, I gasped.
I’ve written before about the misconceptions people can have about the nineteenth century. This was certainly not a period when everyone was swooning at the sight of an ankle or an uncovered table leg. French Decadent literature may be more out there than the novels of British novelists in the time period, but you can be sure that many of our literary greats were reading books like this one. Overall, I’d recommend The Marquise de Sade to enthusiasts for the period with a strong constitution, and to adventurous readers with a taste for more than Fifty Shades of Grey…
Compared to The Marquise de Sade, my own novel, Bronte’s Mistress, seems almost wholesome, but, if you love the nineteenth century, please consider buying a copy for yourself or as Holiday gift this Christmas season! Want to get in touch? You can always message me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (no creepy DMs please), and you can also sign up for my monthly email below.
Back in October, to celebrate the release of Ribbons of Scarlet (2019)—a multi-authored historical novel about the women of the French Revolution—I strayed out of the nineteenth century and into the late eighteenth, with a round up of the best novels I’d read set during that tumultuous period.
I reviewed Andrew Miller’s Pure (2011), Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety (1992), Daphne du Maurier’s The Glassblowers (1963), and the most iconic of all novels of the French Revolution, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
Eight months later, I’m back, with thoughts on three more novels, which take this bloody conflict as their backdrop.
Mistress of the Revolution, Catherine Delors (2008)
Delors’s novel centres on noblewoman Gabrielle—first, on the trials and tribulations of her childhood, doomed adolescent love and horrific forced marriage, and, later, on how she becomes embroiled in the events of the revolution. Gabrielle’s lot is a believable, if dramatic, one, but her character is underdeveloped and she seems to offer little beyond her attractiveness (her main bargaining chip throughout the book). There’s plenty of sexual content to titillate and horrify by turns, and Delors covers a lot of ground historically, incorporating some great details. Yet, on occasion, passages of political exposition become a little skim-worthy.
Becoming Josephine, Heather Webb (2013)
Webb’s protagonist’s biography would strain our credulity were it not true! This novel takes the future Empress Josephine as its subject, from her childhood in Martinique, to her terrible first marriage (there’s a theme here), to her love with Napoleon, to the pressures mounted on her to produce an heir, and beyond. Josephine was placed to be a great observer of the revolution, so these sections in particular are well wrought, and the nuances of her relationship with Napoleon come through. However the later parts of her life are a little rushed. I wish Webb had ended sooner, so the book had a clear novelistic arc vs. bordering on dramatized biography.
Little, Edward Carey (2018)
Carey’s Little (my most recent revolutionary read) is a very different beast. Like Webb, he takes a real person, who had a front row seat at the revolution, as his main character. In this case, it’s Marie Grosholtz, still famous the world over as Madame Tussaud. However, Carey isn’t constrained by history. His novel reads as an imaginative response to the art of waxworks, against the backdrop of a violent period when real bodies were frequently dismembered. His Marie (referred to by other characters as “Little” due to her diminutive size) is obsessed with bodies—their innards and their outer flaws and features. Illustrated by the author, this isn’t a read for the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, but it captures the madness and horror of the French Revolution, as well as the obsession with objects (clothes, wigs, locks, wax figures), which gave so many eighteenth-century Parisians their livelihood.
Do you know of any more great books set during the French Revolution? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
My first novel, Bronte’s Mistress, about the older woman who had an affair with Branwell Bronte, is available for pre-order now. Subscribe to my newsletter for monthly updates below.
Back in June, the Secret
Victorianist attended the Historical Novel Society Conference in Maryland (read
my full review of the event here). While there, I was lucky enough to receive a
signed advanced reader copy of Ribbons of
Scarlet (2019), a novel jointly written by six historical novelists
depicting the lives of many of the women who played an important role in the
French Revolution, which began in 1789.
Ribbons of Scarlet is
now top of my TBR (to be read) list, but in honour of the novel’s release on
October 1, in this week’s blog post, I’m straying out of the nineteenth century
and back into the eighteenth to share with you some of my favourite reads set
during, or inspired by, the revolution that rocked Europe and changed France
forever.
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles
Dickens (1859)
Dickens’s depiction of the revolution, written seventy years later, influences how its events live on in
popular imagination to this day. Expect narrow escapes from the guillotine,
long imprisonments and rampant blood lust.
Aside from being a classic, A Tale of Two Cities offers a great
glimpse into British responses to the revolution on England’s doorstep. It also
has one of the best openings of any novel in English (check out my close
reading here). Bonus fun fact: I once appeared as Monsieur (yes, Monsieur, not
Madame) Defarge in a school play.
The Glass Blowers, Daphne du
Maurier (1963)
Daphne du Maurier dug into her
own family history to inspire her 1963 The
Glass Blowers, a wonderful novel that examines the revolution through the
eyes of a middle class family in the provinces. The novel deals with the
divisions within families occasioned by any civil war and the misinformation
that fuelled much of the paranoia that dominated the French Revolution.
Her main character, an
unobtrusive first person, is representative of many men and especially women of
the period, who tried to maintain domestic normality, while war and political
strife ravaged the country.
A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary
Mantel (1992)
Reading Hilary Mantel’s dense and
captivating novel is as close as we can come today to experiencing the French
Revolution blow by blow. Focused on Paris, Mantel illuminates the lives of
three of the conflict’s main actors—Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien
Robespierre—with a huge cast of supporting characters.
The novel is replete
with interpersonal as well as political drama but this isn’t a story of
ordinary people. If you want to dig into the nitty-gritty of factions,
espionage and corruption, this is the book for you.
Pure, Andrew Miller (2011)
The most recent novel on my list,
Pure isn’t really a novel of the
Revolution at all, but of the years preceding it. Our protagonist is an
engineer tasked with clearing the graveyard at Les Innocents in Paris, which is
literally overflowing with corpses and therefore endangering the health of the city's residents.
The book captures the rising
tensions in Paris in the 1780s, the bureaucracy of Versailles, the autonomy of
different parts of the city and the fading influence of the Catholic Church.
There’s even a cameo for Dr Guillotine himself as social discord rumbles,
creating a dramatic stage for our central story. It’s dark, compelling, and
beautifully told.
Other French Revolution related
novels that are on my radar include Catherine Delors’s Mistress of the Revolution (2008), Edward Carey’s Little (2018), and, of course, Ribbons of Scarlet. But I’d love to hear
what other books on the topic you’d recommend I check out! Let me know—here, on
Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
Recently the Secret Victorianist
found herself back in London and on the hunt for nineteenth-century culture in
the British capital.
‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832)
The National Gallery’s ‘Scenes of
Parisian Life’ exhibition is the first dedicated to lesser-known French painter
Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) in the
UK. It features around twenty paintings but what the exhibition lacks in scale
it more than makes up for in variety, demonstrating the range of Boilly’s
subjects and media.
Looked
down on as ‘just’ a genre painter in his day without the support of the
establishment given lauded neoclassical history painters like Jacques-Louis
David (1748-1825), Boilly’s output was dictated by public taste and market
forces.
'Comparing Little Feet' (1791)
After
arriving in Paris in 1785, he did a brisk trade in scenes featuring young woman
in elegant interiors, often with a risqué edge. One of these, ‘Comparing Little
Feet’ (1791) was on display at the National Gallery. In it, two women strip off
their stockings, ostensibly to compare their shoe sizes.
However,
in the tumultuous time of the Revolution, Boilly found himself in hot water for
his brand of titillating art. He survived with his head but pivoted—to more
patriotic subjects, visual illusions and the Parisian crowdscapes for which he
is most remembered.
'The Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio’ (1799)
His
‘The Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio’ (1799) (also on view) is a ‘who’s
who’ of the Parisian art world at the advent of the nineteenth century, including
31 painters, sculptors and architects and, of course, Boilly himself. Notably,
not a single woman is invited to this idealised meeting of the minds, despite
the Revolution being an unprecedented period of freedom for women artists.
Crowd scenes featured in the exhibition include ‘The Barrel Game’ (1828), ‘The
Poor Cat’ (1832) and ‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832). All depict the colourful menagerie
of nineteenth-century urban life, with city-dwellers of every class side by
side. Hidden in the paintings are dramatic incidents that provoke a smile—a
child grasps at an apple, a man urinates against a wall, a boy picks a pocket,
a dog runs off with a carnival mask.
'The Poor Cat’ (1832)
Boilly’s
humour is distinctive, even if his expression in his self-portraits is usually
stern. He coined the term ‘trompe-l’oeil’ (a trick of the eye) for works in
which uses one medium to imitate another. His painting of crucifix appears 3D,
while his signature seems to be pinned beside it, a slightly blasphemous
advertisement.
'A Trompe-l'oeil: Crucifix of Ivory and Wood' (1812)
Observing Boilly’s Paris is like reading Dickens’s London. Never has the nineteenth century
looked so alive. ‘Boilly:Scenes of Parisian Life’ is free and open to the public at The National Gallery
until 19th May 2019. Visit if you can.
Do you
know of any New York-based nineteenth-century-focused exhibitions you’d like
the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by
tweeting @SVictorianist.
