19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2004 by DeCourcy E. McIntosh

After breakfast, accompanied by Mr. Boilly, call'd on Mr. Rit[t]ner, printseller, in the Boulevard des Italiens, with a proof of Ariadne, discovered that there was no chance of sale in Paris except at a great sacrifice [...] conclude, therefore, to make no further efforts, but leave the impression I have with me, in the bands of Mr. Boilly until my return in the spring. (1)

Thus did Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) chronicle his first order of business in Paris, the second capital on his grand tour in 1840 and 1841. On August 5, 1840, he called on Henry Rittner (1802-1840), the leading publisher of fine art reproductions in Paris, in hopes of selling impressions of the line engraving he had made in 1835 after his own copy (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) of John Vanderlyn's Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos of 1812 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). This is the earliest documented contact between an American artist and the Maison Goupil, the increasingly powerful publishing house that Rittner founded in 1827 and re-formed in 1829 in partnership with Adolphe Goupil (1806-1893). In February 1848, the Maison Goupil would repay Durand's call by establishing a branch in New York City, the first foreign art merchants to do so on a permanent basis.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is no wonder Durand sought out Rittner. His Ariadne engraving had been an unrewarding labor of love: most of the edition remained on the shelf five years after the plate was completed. Rittner and Goupil had ascended to the pinnacle of the fine art publishing trade, their reputation for superb line engravings by the finest practitioners of that esteemed craft second to none in France. Bailly, Ward and Company, "fancy goods" merchants on William Street in New York City, (2) had been importing their productions since 1828, and these prints could not have escaped Durand's notice.

The unfortunate Rittner did not live to see Durand resurface in Paris in May 1841, on his way back from Italy to the United States. (3) Because the pages of Durand's travel diary covering his return trip are lost, we cannot know exactly what happened that May; but an entry in the journal of John F. Kensett, who accompanied Durand part way on his journey, hints at the high regard in which the American artists held the French publishers. On January 5, 1841, Kensett wrote:

Dropped in at Rittner & Goupil's--in the Boulevard des Italien[s] to see
proofs of some two or three eng's--that are now under the artists
hands--subscription prints--one by [Francois] Forster after Del Roche
[Paul Delaroche], and the other by [Louis Pierre Henriquel-] Dupont
after Schaeffer [Ary Scheffer], a most capital work. (4)

Never mind that Kensett had his facts and spelling slightly wrong (5)--his respect for Rittner and Goupil comes through. It would seem that Durand called again at the firm's premises (in the Boulevard Montmartre, not the Boulevard des Italiens) and accepted the terms, however sacrificial, offered by Adolphe Goupil, now the sole proprietor, because impressions of Ariadne scattered in various American public collections bear the imprint "Rittner & Goupil a Paris." (6)

Ariadne may, thus, be considered the first American production published by the Maison Goupil, unless, of course, we count the mezzotint after John Trumbull's icon, The Declaration of Independence. To be sure, this was not Durand's line engraving of 1823 but a mezzotint by the leading French practitioner of the technique, Jean Pierre Marie Jazet (1788-1871). Jazet had actually published the mezzotint himself in 1832 and afterwards ceded the plate to a partnership he maintained briefly in the late 1830s with his son-in-law Theodore Vibert (1816-1850). When Vibert joined Goupil after Rittner's death, the plate entered the stock of Goupil and Vibert, where, as a measure of the respect accorded its subject, it was marketed as a companion piece to Jazet's mezzotint after Jacques Louis David's Oath of the Tennis Court.

With Bailly, Ward and Company retailing their wares, the Maison Goupil could, by 1840, provide Americans with a mixture of serious and light fare: Delaroche and Scheffer line engravings for the serious-minded; Victor Adam alphabet books for parlor entertainment (see Pl. II); a portfolio of plans for cottages and country houses for the homebuilder, "designed and executed in the different countries of Europe and the United States" (see Pl. III); and other items selected from the publisher's gamut of high, middle, and low art. Moreover, as the beneficiary of Bailly, Ward and Company's broad market experience, the Maison Goupil possessed at least a rudimentary familiarity with American taste, and, with artists like Durand and Kensett dropping by, the firm also knew something of American art. As befitted a house whose origins lay in the Anglo-French artistic exchanges of the late 1820s, (7) Goupil's instinctive practice would have been to incorporate this secondhand experience of the United States into their fundamentally international approach to the print trade. Placing The Declaration of Independence on equal footing with David's Oath of the Tennis Court made perfect commercial as well as artistic sense to an expansionary French publisher and merely underscored the ready adaptability of American subject matter to the international market.