« Connoisseurship. Art and antiquities », The Saint-Aubin Livre de caricatures: Drawing Satire in eighteenth-century Paris, Colin Jones, Juliet Carey et Emily Richardson (dir.), Oxford, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2012, p. 283-300. (original) (raw)

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin is commonly presented as the typical Parisian flâneur, whose drawings, sketches and watercolours reveal his enduring passion and interest for the Salons de peinture and the art auctions which took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. His brother Charles-Germain was also very familiar with the Parisian art world and its latest novelties. In his Livre de caricatures, Charles-Germain displays an authentic artistic culture and a great mastery at pointing out the ridicules of the Parisian world of collecting. The book was composed between the 1740s and the 1770s, at a time when Paris claimed to be the new European artistic capital, whose supremacy was based on the recent reform of the Académie royale de peinture and on the strong visibility of art collections and auctions. 1 Charles-Germain certainly attended Parisian auctions and also enjoyed them as a spectacle and as a piece of human comedy, as he wrote himself on the sale catalogue of an auction which took place in 1782: