A watercolourist, painter and lithographer, William Parrott was one of the British artists who travelled to France in the early 19th century, after 1815 and the lifting of the British blockade of continental Europe. He stayed in Paris in around 1843-1844, and on a number of occasions in Normandy and Brittany – some of his works are now in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and the Musée Dobrée in Nantes – before continuing on his Grand Tour of Italy in around 1844-1845, where he spent time in Rome, Naples and Pompeii. He drew picturesque scenes from his travels, assuming the role of a chronicler of local daily life, with a dash of light-hearted mockery, as can be seen in A Fair in the Champs Elysées, “(Grand tintamarre) Voila, Voila, v’la, v’la Messieurs! (…)”, shown at the Royal Academy in 1853.¹ Indeed, although Parrott is often described as a landscapist, he was just as much a genre painter. This is borne out by one of his most famous paintings: J. M. W. Turner on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy (ill. 1).

From 1835, Parrott exhibited regularly at the British Institution, the Royal Academy and the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street.² In 1839, for his first exhibition at the British Institution, he submitted a work entitled Students of [sic] the British Gallery (cat. No. 232). The catalogue stated the outside dimensions of the frame as being 1ft 2ins high by 1ft wide, i.e. approximately 35.5 x 30.5 cm.³ It is highly probable that this was the subject we are presenting, or even the work exhibited in 1839.⁴ Four elegant young women are drawing from a bust, while a painter – perhaps William Parrott himself – gives advice, and a woman who seems to be a lady’s companion is reading something.Furthermore, the relationship between the dimensions stated in the catalogue and those of our sheet is virtually identical, although our sheet has been cut – the drawing was both higher and wider (especially on the right), as indicated by the curved framing line partially visible in the upper corners. Interestingly, this arch is reminiscent of the composition of the Turner on Varnishing Day… mentioned above; the two works, which are more or less contemporaneous, may well be the result of research into the same theme, exploring with humour and finesse the life of London’s public painting galleries.

Founded in 1805, the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, more commonly known as the British Institution or British Gallery, was located in St. James’s at 52 Pall Mall, a building originally designed for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. The British Institution was a private foundation created to promote living painters of the English school and provide them with opportunities to sell their work; it was also a place for exhibiting Old Masters. The British School was set up within the gallery, for the benefit of art students and art lovers alike. It became possible to copy from Old Masters, thanks to loans from private collectors, most of whom were members of the institution. In the first few years these paintings were only accessible to students at the British School, but from 1813 the Summer Exhibitions were also open to the public, a move which contributed greatly to the institution’s success.⁵

The British School was open to both men and women, as can be seen in a print by Auguste Charles Pugin after Thomas Rowlandson that appeared in The Microcosm of London in 1808 (ill. 2), and two satirical drawings by Alfred Edward Chalon, dating from the late 1800s, described and reproduced in the article by Frederic George Stephens (ill. 3 and 4).^6 7 In 1809, of the 33 students enrolled, 6 were women; in 1818, the ratio was holding steady at around a dozen women out of a total of 72 students.⁸ And at the end of the 1830s? Parrott’s work suggests that the British School may not have been exclusively reserved for pupils aspiring to a professional career, but may also have been a place of education and social contact for well-to-do, cultured young English women, a hypothesis that can only be confirmed by a more in-depth study of the British School.

Charles Nicolas Cochin was a talented drawer and printmaker and regarded as one of the most brilliant illustrators of his time. Trained by his father, the engraver Charles Nicolas Cochin the Elder, and in the atelier of the painter Jean Restout, he was a sociable, well-read man with an eclectic culture. He accompanied Monsieur de Vandières, the future Marquis de Marigny and Superintendent of the King’s Buildings, on his famous Grand Tour of Italy with Jacques Germain Soufflot and Abbé Leblanc between 1749 and 1751, a trip that had a profound effect on his work. On his return, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture – skipping the customary first stage – and then appointed keeper of the King’s drawings in 1752, before becoming permanent secretary of the Academy in 1755.

For the famous edition of La Fontaine’s Fables, an opulent book financed by subscription and published in four folio volumes between 1755 and 1759, Cochin was commissioned to adapt for engraving 276 drawings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, produced between 1729 and 1734. 

These drawings were done using a particularly painterly technique, in black ink with white highlights on blue paper. Cochin redrew each of the plates in black chalk, taking care to leave a cartouche for the lettering in the lower part. These drawings were then sent to the engravers – chosen by Cochin – as can be seen from the back of this sheet, which has been rubbed with red chalk to allow the composition to be transferred to the matrix. He supervised the production of each plate, directing the engraving and correcting the proofs.¹

It seems that Cochin’s drawings were quickly dispersed. In 1913, the Marquis de Girardin located around eighty of them in the collections of Eugène Rodrigues, Alfred Piat and André Hédé-Haüy.² The Dragon with Many Heads and the Dragon with Many Tails, (Book I, Fable XII) is one of the eighteen fables that have two illustrations; The Dragon with Many Heads has not yet been located.

Juliette Hébert came from a tradition of Geneva miniaturists founded by her grandfather, Nicolas Didier Hébert (1754-1820), who was originally from the Champagne region. She was taught by her father Jules (1812-1897) – the only one in the family to have eschewed painting on enamel in favour of traditional painting and lithography – and she received further training in the studio of the miniaturists Louise and Gaspard Lamunière in Geneva. She was also the goddaughter of the painter Barthélémy Menn (1815-1893), a friend of her father’s and a prominent figure in the nineteenth-century Geneva school. Menn had worked in Ingres’s studio in Paris and then joined him in Italy. It was while Menn was in Rome that Jules Hébert, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence, asked him to be godfather to his first child, and to choose the first name if it was a girl. He chose the name Juliette.¹

Like her father, Hébert tried her hand at lithography, but she gained recognition for her miniatures.² She started exhibiting at the Geneva Salon in 1857, and that same year produced a portrait on enamel of Henriette Rath (1773-1856), one of the founders of the Musée Rath in Geneva. It was based on a work by her uncle Pierre Hébert (1783-1867), who had been taught by Henriette Rath.³ Juliette’s choice of subject, almost certainly meant as a tribute to Henriette Rath, who had died the previous year, introduced the young artist to the public as an heir both to the famous miniaturist and her uncle.

This Italian shepherd, from Lazio or Campania, is based on a painting by Juliette’s father, Jules Hébert (ill.).⁴ The latter produced a series of shepherds in the 1840s, in the tradition of his fellow Swiss, Léopold Robert (1794-1935), who, during his visit to Italy,  created those particularly evocative figures of Italian brigands and shepherds, which became popular throughout Europe in the 1820s.

There are a few differences between the two works, particularly in the details of the costume. But the main departure lies in the choice of black, with a few highlights in gouache, to express the picturesque nature of the subject. The softness of the black chalk allows for great subtlety of execution and demonstrates the skill of the miniaturist, particularly in the modelling of the face.

Eduardo Dalbono was born into a cultured family with a love of the arts. His father, Carlo Tito, collector, historian and critic, imbued him with a solid literary, historical and artistic culture. In 1850, Eduardo was taught drawing by the engraver Augusto Marchetti, before continuing his training in Naples. An eclectic artist, he embraced Domenico Morelli’s preference for naturalist painting; he also painted landscapes, showing a sensitivity to the styles of Giacinto Gigante and the Scuola di Posillipo, and later to that of the Scuola di Resina, which championed plein air painting. He lived in Paris between 1878 and 1882 where he worked for the art dealer Adolphe Goupil, to whom, like a good few southern Italian artists of the same period, he had been introduced by Giuseppe de Nittis.

Dalbono began exhibiting in the late 1850s. In 1871, he submitted The Legend of the Sirens to the exhibition of the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti; it is an illustration of the myth of the foundation of the ancient city of Parthenope, named after the siren who threw herself, along with her sisters, into the sea because Ulysses had ignored their song.¹ The painting was hugely successful: it was exhibited in Milan in 1872 and at the Universal Exhibition in Vienna the following year, where it won a bronze medal. Back in Naples after his stay in Paris, Dalbono painted many private and public interiors, most notably for the Prince and Princess Caravita di Sirignano in their palazzo on the Riviera di Chiaia, which became the first headquarters of the Società Napoletana degli Artist.² It was at this time that he produced The Sirens, probably for the decoration of a ceiling (ill. below), the subject matter − as well as the features of the “sirens”, who are represented as women − evoke his masterpiece of 1871.³

This preparatory study in oil on tracing paper depicts the female figure on the right of Sirens, playing castanets, the traditional instrument used in the Neapolitan dance, La Tarantella. The entire focus is on the effect of light on the curves of the female body; it is very powerful, although the light comes from a different direction in the finished painting.

Karl Bennewitz von Löfen the Younger was active in Munich before moving to Berlin in the 1890s. He was involved in the important Berlin art events: the jubilee of the Akademie der Künste in 1886, the Internazionale Kunstausstellung in 1891, and the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung from 1894 to 1917, for which he was also a member of the exhibition commission. He exhibited genre scenes and pastel portraits, which won him critical acclaim.

In 1904, at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung, he was awarded a “small” gold medal for a portrait of his mother.¹ That same year, he was due to exhibit two portraits of the iconic Yvette Guilbert, as Karl Erich, German correspondent for the weekly review Le Monde Artiste, reported:

“Yvette Guilbert is leaving for Hamburg, after a month’s stay in our city. The great artist has been feted as never before; her popularity here is very clear: after the great Lenbach, who painted a superb portrait of her, now Bennewitz von Löfen will be exhibiting two curious heads of the diva, and the sculptor Julius Steiner will be impressing our public with a superb, quietly ironic bust at the opening of the next Salon.”²

Bennewitz von Löfen had already done two portraits of Yvette Guilbert, one in 1899 and the other in 1901. Yvette Guilbert acquired the first, drawn in Berlin during her first visit to the city, and hung it in her sumptuous town house on the boulevard Berthier (ill.).³

Although Yvette Guilbert’s image was immortalised by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was fascinated by this “red-haired lady in black gloves, dressed in green satin”, Guilbert herself resented the exaggerated expressivity of his portraits and could only see them as caricatures. In 1894, a sketch for a poster that was to become famous prompted her to this cruel comment: “You little monster! You’ve produced a horror!”⁴ She does indeed seem to have preferred Bennewitz von Löfen’s pastels. They may appear a trifle solemn, but they are by no means devoid of sensitivity, and she probably found them more flattering. They were reproduced in a first bilingual version of her memoirs published in 1910, with an essay by the English songwriter Harold Simpson, and then in the English translation of her autobiography, The Song of My Life, published during her lifetime in 1929.⁵ It is quite conceivable that the two portraits by Bennewitz von Löfen, which failed to appear in the 1904 Berlin Salon, had, like the 1899 pastel, been acquired by Yvette Guilbert.

Yvette Guilbert came from a humble background and made her mark on the Parisian café-concert scene by forging a different identity for herself – one that contrasted with the contemporary trend of cheeky, vulgar entertainers. Her repertoire was different, as was her style: more artistic and intellectual. And she created her own unique “profile”, as she herself put it. She regarded her image as a crucial aspect of her career, and went on to become a distinctively recognisable international media figure.