In The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher, art historian and curator David Pullins masterfully interrogates the status of the image as an object in eighteenth-century French art. Exploring a trove of “image-objects”—defined by the material status and site of a visual image rather than its subject—the author seeks to shift our focus from artistic reception to material production. Responding to sociohistorical interrogations pioneered by Thomas Crow; the materialistic turn espoused by the scholarship of Ewa Lajer-Burcharth; serious inquiries into the decorative arts led by Katie Scott; the market-driven analyses of the late Hans Van Miegroet; and the critical historiographic reevaluation of rococo art evocative of Melissa Hyde; Pullins positions his work within a broad intellectual expanse while forging his own object-focused approach. 

The book is significant for envisioning the foreseeable trajectory of European modern art. It advances a thesis that deconstructs the perceived hegemony of the French Royal Academy, its hierarchy of pictorial genres, and its nascent myths of the artist as author and genius. The text transcends artificially constructed categories that have ranked painting above decorative art since the eighteenth century. Pullins dismantles the hierarchy of genres by illuminating a pervasive reliance on recycling imagery among eighteenth-century artists. Exemplified by a “cut-and-paste modality,” the author’s central idea of the image as a material and mobile object elucidates the practices of image reuse and collaboration that structured the workshop and studio productions of three preeminent eighteenth-century French artists: Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and François Boucher. Mobilizing a breadth of archival documents and visual sources, and various methodological approaches, such as art criticism, connoisseurship, biographies, sales catalogs, lexicographic analysis, and technical X-radiographic studies, Pullins argues that the ideological conception of eighteenth-century French painting desperately endeavored to distance the pedagogical and practical modes of image making shared across “high” and “low” spaces of artistic production. Written in direct prose, the text develops over four chapters organized by ways of “thinking, seeing, and producing,” while chronicling three case studies of professional development and artistic production from the workshop and studio to the salon (42).

Chapter one, “Learning the Image as an Object,” introduces the reader to the book’s methodology by applying it to a paradigm of drawing instruction in eighteenth-century France. Foundational to both academic and artisanal training was the copying of two-dimensional, isolated motifs, before graduating to three-dimensional casts and fragments, and finally complete bodies. The Academy’s monopoly over posing life models ideologically cemented the institution’s privileged authority over the Paris guild. It also obfuscated the realities of artistic production that included a shared pedagogy emphasizing drawing, copying, and collaborative studio methods to distance the exclusive Academy from the artisanal realm of the mechanical arts. Pullins conducts an incisive analysis of prints and académies published in the drawing books produced by Charles-Antoine Jombert and Charles-Nicolas Cochin fils. The Academy’s primary reliance on the copying of two-dimensional corporeal models paralleled guild instruction and the use of drawing books. Demonstrated by Jean-Jacques Bachelier’s application of crayon-manner engravings called originaux and development of a workshop system at the École Royale Gratuite de Dessin that exposed the mechanical processes of copying, Pullins defines this method as a cut-and-paste modality. Although seemingly rudimentary, training artists and artisans to “see in parts” was a ubiquitous mentality mobilized throughout their careers (38, 41–42).

The second chapter, “Objects and the Arabesque,” explores Watteau, Oudry, and Boucher’s affairs with the arabesque—a decorative motif identified by its serpentine pattern of unfurling scrolls and organic tendrils. Tracing the formative experience gained by Watteau and Oudry in the workshop of Claude Audran III, the logic of collaboration and divided labor across specialties proves integral for understanding “. . .  how studio practices normally discounted as decorative hold concrete ties with studios led by academic painters. . . ” (52–53). For Pullins, the modest workshop beginning enabled the prospect of professional advancement through the artists’ early exposure to the productive process of a collaborative rationality and cut-and-paste modality. As the author insists, the translation of Watteau’s figural motifs operated bidirectionally between arabesque designs and easel paintings that used the same motifs—thus, blurring the distinctions between fine and applied art. In a similar vein, Oudry extracted and repurposed figures, animals, and inanimate objects for a multitude of fine and decorative visual confections over decades of his career. The flexibility of the arabesque in uniting “image-objects” climaxes with Boucher’s appropriation of chinoiserie (the European appropriation and reinterpretation of Chinese iconography and design) figures by Watteau and persistent engagement in a commercial print market. Not only does the solidity of a contained image anchor a decorative composition, but Boucher’s mode of copying and recycling the exotic motif simulates the choreography of early drawing instruction, while also fracturing assumptions of solitary authorship.

The penultimate chapter, “Fractured Canvases: Recycling and Collaboration,” directly challenges scholars of eighteenth-century art who have traditionally eschewed the practicalities of collaboration to consolidate authorship in the wake of a burgeoning art market driven by connoisseurship. In this chapter, the author also posits that the redeployment of motifs and the imitation of extant passages originated by other artists constituted a practical solution to commercial demands rather than an erudite citation (95). By examining Watteau’s activity in Claude Gillot’s studio, Oudry’s apprenticeship with Nicolas Largillière, and Boucher’s commercial endeavors, Pullins exposes “a deeply entrenched, efficient modality of recycling images” (91). Watteau’s early biographers begrudgingly noted the guild practices that had a lasting impact on his craft, born out of his early career situated in the mercantile nexus on the Pont Nôtre-Dame. Referencing Gabriel Huquier’s engraving of Arlequin, empereur dans la lune (ca. 1729), the author suggests that the original painting was a product of master-apprentice collaboration. Artists engaged in other acts of remote partnership with the addition of figures to extant paintings at the request of collectors and dealers—thus, reifying the mobility of images resurrected from artists’ recueils, albums operating as a collection of figural studies which were plucked from and redeployed throughout their careers. Despite his own reliance upon collaboration, Oudry cautioned against the risk of multiple hands treating the surface of a canvas destined for exhibition at the salon. Multiauthored works, organized according to studio practices that employed apprentices specializing in various genres including landscapes, figures, animals, and still life objects or drapery, invited disparate “fillings-in” of a composition which produced a “fractured canvas” (115). The chapter concludes with Boucher’s prolific and strategic production of drawings destined for a collector’s market. While biographers since Boucher’s time have masked the realities of his commercial tact by emphasizing the artist’s “prodigious fecundity,” Pullins exposes the master’s habit of retouching apprentice copies of original drawings to fetch higher prices while simultaneously erasing the collaborative scheme embedded in his, and other academicians’, early training and workshops (128).

“Miserable Places to Fill,” the fourth and final chapter, addresses nonrectilinear paintings—or tableaux chantournés. Building upon the preceding chapters that disclose academicians’ collaborative praxis, Pullins probes painting’s subordination to predetermined architectural configurations modeled in André Jacob Roubo’s boiserie manual and Juste-Aurèle Meisonnier’s panel decorations. Inherent to the modular scheme of decorative interiors is their ephemerality. The afterlife of a private room’s initial commission rendered the once cohesive architectural collation of decorative parts liable to disassembly, dispersal, and redeployment. In response to the commercial demand for chantourné canvases, the academician Charles-Joseph Natoire lamented the need “to fill in a few miserable spaces” that restricted painters from pursuing “serious” projects embodied by didactic history painting (159). Thus, Natoire regretted, how the once triumphant paintings of the grand genre were reduced to mere “furniture” (159). Pullins confronts the mechanical construction looming over decorative painting, likening the process of “filling in” spaces to Cochin’s bout-rimés (a poetic game of rhymes) and the use of printing plates in the book trade. The chapter culminates in the exhibition of nonrectilinear paintings in the early decades of the Salon, where the tableau chantourné disrupted aesthetic cohesion of the salon-style hang. Tracing the linguistic roots of the term “chantourné,” Pullins shows that its early association with the applied arts troubled those who sought to distinguish painting from artisanal trades. Yet, the influence of female patronage exemplified by Madame de Pompadour ennobled commissions by high-profile artists, despite critics fanning a misogynistic war on feminine frivolity and consumption. The decorative quality effused by tableaux chantournés in the public salon declared a painting’s objecthood and association with modes of making shared across artistic echelons to exhibition viewers.

The epilogue marks the final crescendo in Pullin’s interrogation of the “image-object,” by surveying the metamorphoses of two-dimensional forms of itinerant figural compositions into three-dimensional decorative objects. Finally, the author’s discussion of the tendency in postwar American art to deny painting’s objecthood draws transhistorical connections while exposing how “Only through tremendous ideological effort did oil on canvas come to occupy the highest stratum of visual culture, a position that remains precarious” (185–86).

Abounding with a wealth of objects, the curatorial eye scintillates off the pages of The Mobile Image. The book constitutes an important contribution to historicizing the primacy of painting in the European tradition while calling into question obstinate historiographic claims to the stability of that tradition. While Pullins’s study remains within the contours of revered male members of the Academy, it opens the door for a serious investigation into decoupage in the feminine domain as raised in chapter one. Furthermore, amidst the global turn in eighteenth-century art, the book urges one to think about the powerful effects of stereotyped images through the mobility and reproduction of racialized types pervading the aesthetics of chinoiserie, turquerie (the European appropriation and reinterpretation of Turkish iconography and design), and allegorical representations of the four continents. In other words, one could ask: how does viewing a work of art’s objecthood reinforce the objectification of exoticized “image-objects”?