Singerie: The Sculptor
Christophe Huet·c. 1739
Historical Context
The Sculptor panel from Huet's Singerie series depicts a monkey chiseling a bust, completing the series' survey of the visual arts — dance, fishing, picnicking, painting, and now sculpture — as activities undertaken with simian gravity. By placing monkeys in the roles traditionally celebrated by academic art theory, Huet questions the hierarchies that elevated artists above craftsmen and fine arts above decorative practice. The joke was especially pointed given that Huet himself worked in the so-called minor arts of interior decoration. Around 1739, when these panels were created, such distinctions mattered enormously in Parisian culture. The series together forms an unusually coherent satirical programme, making it a key document of Rococo attitudes toward art, class, and the nature of creative imitation.
Technical Analysis
The Sculptor panel uses a cooler, more sculptural palette of grey-whites and pale stone tones to echo the medium being depicted. The monkey figure dominates the composition, posed in a self-consciously classical contrapost that amplifies the comic incongruity. Brushwork throughout is light and dexterous.
Provenance
Commissioned by François Jules Duvaucel [1672-1739] for a salon in the Château de La Norville, France; remained in the château through successive owners until sometime between 1901 and 1906; (Fauché, Paris), by 1907;[1] purchased 1922 through (André Carlhian, Paris) by Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice [1875-1956] and his wife, Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice [1861-1937], for the dining room of their Fifth Avenue manion, New York;[2] by inheritance 1956 to Mrs. Rice's children, George D. Widener, Jr. [1889-1971] and Eleanor Widener Dixon [1891-1966, Mrs. Fitz Eugene Dixon]; gift 1957 to NGA. [1] The history of the decoration of the Château de La Norville is thoroughly described by Bruno Pons, _Grands décors français, 1650-1800: reconstitués en Angleterre, aux Etats-Unis, en Amérique du Sud et en France_, Dijon, 1995: 221-426. See also Abbé A.E. Genty, _Histoire de la Norville et de sa seigneurie_, Brussels and Geneva, 1885: 112-129. [2] Mrs. Rice was born Eleonor Elkins in Philadelphia. Her first husband was George Dunton Widener, who perished with their elder son, Harry, in the sinking of the _Titanic_ in 1912. She married Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice in 1915. Her two other children with Widener inherited the New York residence after Dr. Rice's death. Records of the Carlhian firm are in the Special Collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, accession no. 930092. Copies of documents referring to the wall paneling are in the NGA curatorial files; see in particular the letter of 6 July 1923, from André Carlhian to Mrs. Rice, in which he tells her that "the Pineau boiserie which you bought from Fauché comes from the Chateau de la Norville, near Arpajon - about 20 miles from Paris." Both the six Huet paintings (NGA 1957.7.1-6) and the paneling (_boiserie_) by Pineau were given to the National Gallery of Art; the latter is NGA 1957.7.7.
