Chapter 7 - Yielding an Impression of Women Printmakers in Eighteenth-Century France

Summary

This chapter offers a reassessment of the life and work of the French professional printmaker Catherine Elisabeth Cousinet (born 1726), also known as Madame Lempereur through her marriage to fellow printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur. Over the course of three decades, Elisabeth Cousinet created a range of impressive, single-sheet engravings after landscape and genre paintings owned by important and well-appointed individuals in Paris, Europe’s cosmopolitan cultural center. Her connections to these collectors integrated her into networks in the French printmaking industry and, by extension, abroad. Despite the dearth of historical evidence, her biography provides a broad outline of, and a few tantalizing glimpses into, what the career of a successful women professional printmaker in eighteenth-century France might have looked like.

In 1767, Pierre François Basan (1723–1797) published his two-volume Dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes depuis l’origine de la gravure, a work that would quickly become a standard printmaking reference on the library shelves of European print collectors.¹ As a professional printmaker turned print publisher, printseller, and auction specialist, Basan was embedded in the networks of the international print industry.² The twenty-six women, predominantly French, included in these volumes were a small fraction of the printmakers identified.³ Like their male counterparts in eighteenth-century France, most were professional printmakers who specialised in replicating the designs of other artists.⁴ When Basan brought out the second, expanded edition of his Dictionnaire in 1789, he nearly tripled the number of entries on women printmakers – evidence that women artists had come to play a greater role in the expansion and diversification of the print market in the decades leading up to the French Revolution.⁵

One printmaker Basan listed in both editions was Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet (born 1726), also known as Madame Lempereur through her marriage to fellow printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur (1728–1807).⁶ Basan cited her engravings La Pyramide de Sextius and Les Trois Colonnes de Campo Vaccino, after pendant paintings by the eighteenth-century Roman view painter Giovanni Paolo Panini, as two of her most significant works (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). These same prints were praised in the December 1760 issue of the French journal L’Année littéraire by the editor and art critic Élie Catherine Fréron, who noted that the paintings were dedicated to the ‘amateur’ Marguerite Le Comte, who also owned them. Fréron not only praised Cousinet’s works as ‘pleasing’ and ‘well made’, but also cited them as emblematic of eighteenth-century ‘progress’:

One of the most honourable traits of our century, & that proves with the most lustre and evidence the progress of the Sciences & the Arts … is that we count [among us] many women of merit who have truly succeeded in several genres of Literature or the Fine Arts.⁷

Cousinet ‘truly succeeded’, but what, we might ask, does the career of a successful woman professional printmaker in eighteenth-century France look like? And how do we even measure success, much less attempt to flesh out a biographical narrative, given the dearth of historical information and the predominance of male voices? An assessment of the life and work of Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet gestures towards some answers.

Figure 7.1 Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet, after Giovanni Paolo Panini, La Pyramide de Sextius, 1760.

Etching and engraving, 31.5 × 36.4 cm (cut to image). British Museum, London.

Figure 7.2 Catherine Élisabeth Cousinet, after Giovanni Paolo Panini, Les Trois Colonnes de Campo Vaccino, 1760.

Etching and engraving, 31.5 × 36.5 cm (cut to image). British Museum, London.

As with most eighteenth-century French professional printmakers, male and female alike, very little is known about Cousinet’s early career.⁸ Most reproductive engravers began their training as teenagers.⁹ For comparison one might point to Cousinet’s contemporary Claire Tournay (1731–1773), the future (second) wife of professional printmaker Jacques Nicolas Tardieu. An impression of Tournay’s 1750 engraving Le Miroir, after François Boucher, is annotated ‘Second plate of Mlle. Tournay, given in March 1750’, that is, when she was eighteen or nineteen.¹⁰

More often than not, the main figures in the early biographies of women artists are men. Most women artists in early modern Europe were taught by members of their families, be it a father, brother, husband, or uncle.¹¹ Such support was essential: women artists lacked access to the educational and professional opportunities enjoyed by their male counterparts. Sister engravers Rose Angélique Moitte (active 1768–1781) and Élisabeth Mélanie Moitte (active late eighteenth century), for example, learned the trade from their father Pierre Étienne Moitte (1722–1780); in fact, all six of his children took up careers in the arts.¹² Cousinet, however, does not appear to have hailed from a family of printmakers.¹³

Acknowledging its limitations, the information provided by Cousinet’s first two biographers is nonetheless a useful starting point in considering her career. Basan, in his Dictionnaire’s second edition (1789), stated that Cousinet studied with Étienne Fessard (1714–1777) and Laurent Cars (1699–1771).¹⁴ The German print scholar Carl Heinrich von Heineken wrote in his Dictionnaire des artistes dont nous avons des estampes (1790) that Cousinet had been instructed by Pierre Aveline II (1702–1760).¹⁵ Both authors make pointed use of Cousinet’s maiden name in discussions of her work, which signifies that she was an established printmaker well before she married Louis Simon Lempereur in c. 1756.¹⁶

It was unusual for women artists to operate on their own. Invariably, most navigated existing male-dominated networks of the art world. And yet it has too often been assumed that male artists guided the careers – and may even have executed the work – of their female students.¹⁷ Certainly Fessard’s work with amateur women printmakers, including King Louis XV’s official mistress Madame de Pompadour and Louise Le Daulceur, was well known.¹⁸ In the case of Aveline II, there are records of early states of two undated compositions signed with Cousinet’s name, now lost, in two prominent late eighteenth-century European print collections: Le Charme de la musique and Le Triomphe de Flore.¹⁹ It was customary in the printmaking industry for engravers to sign their names to plates made in part, if not in full, by their apprentices, assistants, and/or subcontractors.²⁰ It is entirely plausible that Cousinet worked with Aveline, Cars, and Fessard, though the first projects that firmly connected Cousinet with these established professional printmakers date from the mid-1750s, when she was around thirty years old.

The earliest work by Cousinet for which her authorship and the dating can be ascertained, however, links her to yet another printmaker, the aforementioned Pierre Étienne Moitte, who published her engraving Le Bénédicité Flamant after a painting by the seventeenth-century French artist Louis Le Nain.²¹ In the lettering below the image that informed interested parties where to obtain impressions of Cousinet’s engraving, the listing of Moitte’s address on a previously unrecorded state corresponds with other prints he made and published between 1747 and 1752.²² When Moitte moved, he updated his address on the plate.²³

It usually took years to master control of the burin and gain fluency in the visual language of reproductive engraving. The achievement of Le Bénédicité Flamant shows Cousinet to be fully in command of her métier. Akin to how most eighteenth-century French professional printmakers would have worked, Cousinet made Le Bénédicité Flamant through a combination of etching and engraving in a proportion expertly tailored to the style and subject of her source. She dexterously employed the burin, articulating the details that imbued Le Nain’s peasants with dignity and translating the tonal range of the painter’s composition – from the brightly lit foreground figures to the hearth’s soft glow and to the dark recesses of the armoire in the background.

Cousinet’s next prints arose out of endeavours to provide engravings of several European art collections in the 1750s. So ambitious were these projects that they necessitated the efforts of numerous European printmakers over many years. For example, Aveline, Cars, Fessard, and Moitte all contributed engravings to two enterprises that reproduced important paintings in Dresden: the Recueil d’Estampes d’après les plus célèbres Tableaux de la Galerie Royale de Dresde (1753, 1757) and the Galerie du comte de Brühl (1754). Both undertakings were overseen by Heineken, then the director of the Dresden print room and formerly the secretary and librarian for the comte de Brühl.²⁴

Although Cousinet does not appear to have made prints for either enterprise, she did engrave Le Moulin de Quinquengrogne after Nicolas Lancret’s painting that hailed from Heineken’s own collection.²⁵ Published by Moitte, this print of a charming mill scene outside Paris was made before February 1757, when Heineken sold the painting in Paris.²⁶ Because the calligraphic and tremulous quality of etched lines was so well suited for depicting atmospheric skies and verdant foliage, this intaglio technique often predominated in landscape prints, as it does in Cousinet’s soft and shimmering Le Moulin de Quinquengrogne. Here the engraved marks accent the architectural structure of the mill and impart solidity to tree trunks; they strengthen shadows and enhance modelling and the variegated play of light and dark.

Around this time Cousinet also reproduced François Boucher’s Départ de Jacob painting in another famous collection in Paris, that of Claude Alexandre de Villeneuve, the comte de Vence, lieutenant-général du roi.²⁷ The engraving of the comte de Vence’s collection, in the words of W. McAllister-Johnson, occasioned a ‘printmaking laboratory’ in that the project brought together a range of artists, including many young and lesser-known professional printmakers; Cousinet was the only woman to engrave one of the paintings. In January 1757 in L’Année littéraire, Fréron announced Cousinet’s Départ de Jacob, after Boucher, stating that she engraved it for Cars.²⁸ Boucher’s Départ de Jacob painting, made in the manner of the seventeenth-century Genoese artist Castiglione – and, notably, Cousinet’s print after it – were subsequently cited in the discussion of the comte de Vence’s collections in Antoine Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville’s 1757 guidebook to Paris.²⁹ So, too, were painting and print listed in the book commissioned by the comte de Vence to describe his collection in 1759 and in the catalogue of his posthumous auction in February 1761.³⁰

Presumably Cousinet made Départ de Jacob in 1756 (if not earlier). In his discussion of the print Fréron identifies Cousinet as ‘Madame Lempereur’, which parallels the inscription of her maiden and married names in the plate. Lempereur also studied with the reproductive engraver Aveline II – did Cousinet and Lempereur meet through him, if not through the larger community of printmakers in Paris?³¹ No one – man or woman – could participate and establish themself in the French printmaking industry without relationships and networks. In lieu of a family of printmakers, Cousinet’s initial art world connections were allied with and built on those of Aveline, Cars, Fessard, and Moitte. By marrying her fellow reproductive printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur in c. 1756, Cousinet became part of a professional alliance that would expand her network and offer greater opportunities to participate in the print market, not least because Lempereur possessed the means to publish, distribute, and sell her engravings.³²

Indeed, in the late 1750s the husband Lempereur’s star was on the rise. Although no female professional printmakers became members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in pre-revolutionary France,³³ Lempereur, for his part, became a provisional member (agréé) of this prestigious arts institution in Paris in 1759, garnering him the privilege of exhibiting his work in the biennial public Salon at the Louvre.³⁴ At the very least, Cousinet could benefit from his expanding circle and heightened visibility.

In addition to engraving contemporary French paintings and portraits, Louis Simon Lempereur also was actively involved in engraving book illustrations, which from the mid-1750s forward became a mainstay of his work.³⁵ One of the most prominent illustrated book enterprises underway in Paris at this time was the new edition of the seventeenth-century French poet Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Fables, with illustrations based on Jean Baptiste Oudry’s designs. Les Fables, like many eighteenth-century book projects, was long in the making, its four volumes published from 1755 to 1759. The engraving of the illustrated plates took place under the direction of Charles Nicolas Cochin II, official secretary to the Académie royale and one of the foremost illustrators, draftsmen, and printmakers of his time.³⁶ Cousinet engraved one plate, which was published in the fourth and last volume.³⁷ When the completed publication was written up in the prestigious Journal des sçavans in 1760, Cousinet was the only woman among the more than twenty printmakers – including Aveline II, Moitte, Fessard, Cars, and Lempereur – mentioned by name in conjunction with the illustrations.³⁸

For printmakers, there were many benefits to be had in engraving book illustrations. The publisher – or the contractor who was overseeing the engraving of the illustrations – could easily farm out the plates to several printmakers, compensating them by the plate. Usually small in scale, such prints could be executed relatively quickly. It was stable work, providing a steady source of income, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century when there was a burgeoning market for illustrated books.³⁹ The book trade was also a form of commerce that had long involved women.⁴⁰

Cousinet also made one plate for the 1757 edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone,⁴¹ a project to which Lempereur contributed as well, but it appears that engraving book illustrations would never be a specialty of hers, as it was for her husband. In this way Cousinet did not adopt the spousal strategy taken by Renée Élisabeth Lépicié (née Marlié) (1714–1773), the subjects of her reproductive engravings of the 1740s closely paralleling those of her husband François Bernard Lépicié, be they seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes or the eighteenth-century French compositions under their influence.⁴²

Cousinet distinguished her work by focusing on single-sheet engravings of paintings, primarily landscapes, but sometimes also genre scenes. In the December 1758 issue of the Mercure de France, Moitte advertised four engravings he had ‘recently engraved’ after the paintings of the seventeenth-century Flemish artist David Teniers. Although Cousinet was not cited in the announcement by name, she was the engraver of the first composition on the list, La Crédule Laitière.⁴³ This print, along with her single-sheet engravings Le Bénédicité Flamant, Le Moulin de Quinquengrogne, and Départ de Jacob, demonstrated how Cousinet could interpret paintings of various genres, centuries, and styles. But there was considerable competition for such work in Paris. When the Swedish printmaker Per Gustaf Floding wrote to his patron the comte de Tessin in June 1759, he stressed: ‘It is very difficult to find beautiful paintings to engrave, even though this capital is well endowed with them.’⁴⁴ And here Cousinet’s husband’s professional standing and art world connections proved fruitful for her future endeavours.

Louis Simon Lempereur worked with and was close to several amateurs – cosmopolitan, like-minded collectors who embraced drawing and printmaking to enhance their connoisseurship, expand their art historical knowledge, and forge social bonds within the milieu of the French cultural elite. Chief among Lempereur’s amateur connections was Claude Henri Watelet, for whom Rembrandt’s etchings were a passion.⁴⁵ Watelet also wrote about art. His authorship of the epic poem L’Art de peindre, published in 1760, led to his appointment to the Académie française. It was Lempereur who helped Watelet etch and engrave the illustrations for this publication based on the designs of the rising history painter Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre.⁴⁶ Watelet’s companion Marguerite Le Comte, with whom he would travel to Italy in 1763–1764, was herself a collector and amateur etcher.⁴⁷

Le Comte possessed Panini’s two paintings of architectural capricci, imaginary compositions in which he generalised upon antique ruins, that Cousinet engraved (Figures 7.1 and 7.2) and Lempereur published.⁴⁸ Fréron’s praise for Cousinet’s engravings, cited at the outset of this chapter, broadcasts the meaningful relationship between female printmaker and collector. As the announcement noted, because Le Comte had kindly lent her paintings La Pyramide de Sextius and Les Trois Colonnes de Campo Vaccino to Cousinet, the printmaker honoured and curried favour with her patron by dedicating both prints to her. Le Comte’s ownership of the paintings is recorded on Cousinet’s prints themselves, the elegantly engraved lettering interlinking patron and artist, valorising the latter’s status. Women collectors, and by extension women collector dedicatees, were unusual in eighteenth-century France. Two of the most important precedents were the comtesse de Verrue, who collected seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings,⁴⁹ and Madame de Pompadour, who favoured eighteenth-century French creations.⁵⁰

The Lempereurs’ relationship with Watelet and Le Comte continued bearing fruit. In 1762, Cousinet engraved Le Calme and La Tempête, after Joseph Vernet’s pendant paintings of seascapes from Watelet’s collection, dedicating both to the amateur.⁵¹ Published and sold by her husband, Cousinet’s engravings were promoted in no fewer than three journals that summer.⁵² The prints couldn’t be issued at a more propitious time, as the famous painter had settled in Paris in 1762 after spending years in Italy and then travelling in France. Vernet’s most important commission was to paint a series of large-scale canvases of the ports of France for the monarchy;⁵³ it was his cabinet paintings of seascapes, however, that built his international reputation.⁵⁴ The time was ripe, accordingly, to offer engravings of Vernet paintings for sale.⁵⁵ Eighteenth-century taste encouraging the collecting and display of pendant prints promised a doubling of profits.⁵⁶ It is not difficult to imagine Cousinet’s prints after the ‘calm’ and ‘storm’ imagery of Vernet’s paintings serving as forms of entertainment in social gatherings. Viewers could delight in comparing and contrasting the effects of weather on sky and sea, appreciate the various motifs of ships and rocky coastlines, and concoct narratives based on their reading of the anecdotal figure details, especially the unfolding drama of the shipwreck.

Did Cousinet’s reproductive engravings of Vernet’s seascapes catch the attention of the younger and less-established professional printmaker Anne Philiberte Coulet (b. 1736), prompting her to approach Lempereur as a publisher for her own prints?⁵⁷ Coulet’s first known engraving, La Belle Après-dinée, after Vernet, was published and advertised in L’Avant-Coureur in December 1762 by the printseller Denis Charles Buldet,⁵⁸ but by the following year Coulet was working with Lempereur. From 1763 to 1776, Lempereur published eight of her engravings,⁵⁹ beginning with Le Départ de la chaloupe and L’Heureux passage, two of her ‘superbly executed’ engravings after paintings by the ‘immortal Vernet’, as praised by Fréron in L’Année littéraire in December 1763.⁶⁰ Coulet found support for her work with the Lempereurs, and they, in turn, benefited from publishing and selling her reproductive prints.

Basan and Heineken identify Lempereur as Coulet’s teacher, but might not Cousinet have played a role in mentoring Coulet as well?⁶¹ It is tempting to imagine that a mutual support system emerged between these two women printmakers. In June 1765, Lempereur published and advertised Cousinet’s engraving Les Commerçants Turcs, after a Vernet from the collection of Armand Pierre François de Chastre de Billy, premier valet de garde-robe du roi.⁶² Earlier that same year Lempereur published Coulet’s Les Pêcheurs napolitains, also after a Vernet from the comte de Billy’s collection.⁶³ Did Cousinet’s opportunity to engrave Les Commerçants Turcs arise through the connections of her husband or of Coulet? The lettering on Les Commerçants Turcs, intriguingly, was engraved by another woman artist who signed her name to the plate at lower right: ‘Jeanne Louise Coulet Scrip.’ There is precious little information on this professional letterer, but surely she was related to – and most likely a sister of – Anne Philiberte Coulet.⁶⁴ In fact Jeanne Louise Coulet also engraved the lettering for Anne Philiberte Coulet’s aforementioned Les Pêcheurs napolitains and its pendant Les Pêcheurs florentins, also after a Vernet in the comte de Billy’s collection, published by Lempereur in 1766.⁶⁵

Cousinet’s Les Commerçants Turcs lacked a dedicatee. Although the comte de Billy’s ownership of Vernet’s painting is duly noted in the lettering, Cousinet’s name takes centre stage below the image, broadcasting its creation by a woman artist.⁶⁶ And broadcast her work abroad such prints did. In the eighteenth century, an international network of art agents ensured that French reproductive engravings could be acquired by a wealthy and cosmopolitan clientele spread across Europe. ‘If in any of the arts the French have been and are superior to the rest of Europe, it most undoubtedly is in that of engraving.’ This assertion was made in 1769 by the English writer Arthur Young, his statement prefacing his praise for Cousinet’s (and Coulet’s) expertise in interpreting Vernet’s paintings, Les Commerçants Turcs among them.⁶⁷

Collectors eager to acquire the pendant engraving to Cousinet’s Les Commerçants Turcs had to wait until 1772 for the publication of Les Suites d’un naufrage, also after a Vernet painting in the comte de Billy’s collection. With their detailed burin work, reproductive engravings could take months – sometimes even years – to execute. Here we are reminded as well of the overwhelmingly invisible labour performed by women which imposed other demands on Cousinet’s time. To what extent was she increasingly devoted to helping Lempereur run the business, to say nothing of caring for their daughter Geneviève Françoise Sophie (c. 1762–1775)?⁶⁸ The lettering of Les Suites d’un naufrage explains that the composition was etched by Nicolas Delaunay, a student of Lempereur, and finished in burin by Cousinet.⁶⁹ As with Cousinet’s other prints advertised by her husband, the release of this long-awaited engraving was featured in several French journal advertisements, providing information that was in turn picked up by discriminating editors of German periodicals.⁷⁰

In 1776, the publication Almanach historique et raisonné des architectes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et cizeleurs offered a guide to the French art scene. Although Cousinet doesn’t have her own entry – her ‘talents’ are praised under those of her husband – she is the only woman mentioned in the section on printmakers who excelled in historical subjects.⁷¹ A few women have entries in the section devoted to printmakers specialising in landscapes and seascapes, including Coulet, though she is erroneously referred to – and her identity confused with – the ‘wife of Lempereur’.⁷² With similar names, professions, and subjects – not to mention their mutual publisher, Lempereur – the confusion of Cousinet and Coulet in the Almanach historique may have been an honest mistake, but it nonetheless feels like a slight: both artists had worked for years in a male-dominated industry to establish their respective reputations as reproductive engravers.

When Laurent Guiard, first sculptor to the duc de Parme, wrote to an Italian colleague in October 1783 during his visit to Paris, he spoke of seeing ‘beautiful things by the sister of M. Cousinet’, referring to her brother, Jean Baptiste Cousinet, adjunct sculptor to Guiard in Parma.⁷³ After this mention, however, the trail goes cold.⁷⁴ As with many eighteenth-century women printmakers, even Cousinet’s date of death is unknown.⁷⁵ Yet the continued listing of her prints in European auction catalogues underscores a widespread recognition of her oeuvre.⁷⁶ It is hoped that my reassessment of Cousinet’s life and work suggests both a certain success and the historical hindrances that make her only so visible to us. Over the course of three decades, Cousinet created an impressive range of engravings after European paintings owned by important and well-appointed individuals in Paris, cosmopolitan capital of Europe. Her connections to these collectors integrated her into networks in the French printmaking industry and, by extension, abroad. Eliciting respect and admiration, the professional achievements of Cousinet offer tantalizing glimpses of what an eighteenth-century French woman professional printmaker might have been.