PRINTS BY GABRIEL HUQUIER AFTER OPPENORD’S DECORATED “RIPA”

1

Scholars have long remarked on the liberties taken by the printmaker, publisher and art dealer Gabriel Huquier (1695–1772) in reproducing drawings by Antoine Watteau. [1] Prior to embarking on these etchings, Huquier invariably ‘finished’ Watteau’s arabesque designs, which were little more than rapid sketches. Without compunction, he ‘enhanced’ his prints after Watteau by incorporating elements commissioned from other artists and even altered the plates of the Figures de Différents Caractères he had acquired from François Chéreau I’s widow. [2] Huquier’s casual approach to the originals shows his lack of concern for reproductive accuracy. His desire to supply the decorative print market with a constant flow of fresh products outweighed fidelity to his models.

2

To be sure, Huquier’s architectural and ornamental prints were meant for a clientele altogether different from painting connoisseurs – primarily artists, artisans and their pupils, as well as art lovers who wished to decorate their homes. [3] These groups relied on images as sources of inspiration, teaching material, or ornamental objects and rarely considered them collectible items in their own right. They sought novelty over exact duplication or printmaking virtuosity. Indifferent to the original inventors’ identity, they embraced the variety afforded by images that might combine the work of several artists. They had no objection to Huquier’s rearranging elements taken from other draughtsmen, who probably practised the same sort of bricolage themselves. Far from betraying the artists he was reproducing, Huquier’s modifications imitated their mode of invention. [4]

3

Huquier’s reproduction of a copy of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia decorated by the architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672–1742) demonstrates how the printmaker mirrored Oppenord’s creative process of appropriation and transformation. [5] Around 1713 Oppenord drew vignettes, head- and tailpieces, borders and other ornamental motifs in the margins of a copy of Jean Baudoin’s French translation of the Iconologia, illustrated by Jacques De Bié and published in Paris in 1636. [6] A subsequent owner of this copy rearranged the material, but a reconstruction of its original appearance shows that the architect’s decorations were a graphic commentary on the printed text and 

engraved illustrations. Oppenord sketched elegant vignettes and delineated graceful grotesques to illustrate the Ripa-Baudoin descriptions. He also elaborated on De Bié’s original plates, which depict Ripa’s emblems as personifications disposed in groups of six roundels. Around these roundels, he devised fantastical grotesques that included elements selected at random from De Bié’s engraved figures. In the book’s second plate, for example, Oppenord inserted an elongated trophy between De Bié’s vertical rows of roundels (fig. 28). 7 For this design, he borrowed from the engraver, from top to bottom, a tree and zodiacal rings copied from the emblem ‘Agriculture’; a dolphin from the emblem ‘Âme courtoise et tractable’ (Courteous and kind soul); a star from the emblem ‘Âme raisonnable et heureuse’ (Reasonable and happy soul); and a laurel wreath and flames from the emblem ‘Amour vers sa patrie’ (Love for one’s country). Oppenord’s striking composition resulted from the combination of elements brought together solely by the alphabetical order De Bié adopted to organize his figures. Disregarding the didactic nature of the publication, Oppenord generated his decorations from a playful, haphazard reworking of another illustrator’s compositions.

4

Oppenord’s decorated copy of Ripa, with the drawings trimmed from the margins and pasted into an album of sixty folios, is now at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. [8] The Montreal album was probably the creation of Huquier, who is thought to have arranged the contents in their current form. Not only are the reorganized drawings numbered from one to 247 in a different hand than Oppenord’s – corresponding exactly to the number given in the description of the volume in the 1772 sale of Huquier’s collection – but also the reorganization, which groups the drawings according to format, anticipates the layout of Huquier’s plates. [9]

5

Huquier did not appropriate Oppenord’s Ripa in its entirety or follow the sequence of drawings as they must have appeared in Oppenord’s original. Instead he produced three series of etchings –the Moyen and Grand Oppenord and his own Iconologies – featuring elements randomly chosen from it. [10] Huquier etched the largest number of plates derived from Oppenord’s Ripa for his 

own series known as the Moyen Oppenord of 1737–38, whose full title reads Premier [- XIe ] Livre de Differents morceaux A L’Usage de tous ceux qui s’appliquent aux beaux Arts Inventé par G. M. Oppenort Architecte du Roy Et Gravé par Huquier. Later, in 1749–51, he included other designs from Ripa in the series Œuvres de Gille Marie Oppenord Ecuier Directeur General des Batiments et Jardins de son Altesse Royale Monseigneur Le Duc D’Orleans Regent du Royaume, known as the Grand Oppenord. He turned to the Ripa album one last time for his own Iconologies of 1767–69.

6

In the Moyen and Grand Oppenords, Huquier chose the architect’s designs as frontispieces[11] and for sequences of decorative motifs such as pilasters, cartouches and fountains. [12] By grouping Oppenord’s designs according to theme and format Huquier optimized the use of space in the layout of his plates and made them easier for readers to refer to. Thus horizontal panels and cartouches were grouped together, and vertical pilasters and fountains formed separate sequences in the Moyen and Grand Oppenord publications. [13] Huquier relied on the same pragmatic approach in other suites he published, such as the first reissue of Watteau’s Figures de Différents Caractères. [14]

7

As with Watteau’s drawings, Huquier did not hesitate to alter Oppenord’s original designs. He simply cropped the architect’s sketches that proved too wide for a given layout. Thus, when he etched plate D 2 of the Moyen Oppenord (fig. 29), he eliminated the pair of putti in the drawing on fol. 21r of the Montreal album (fig. 30). Huquier also devised new compositions by rearranging elements from different drawings in the book, as occurs with the title-pages. For fig. 31, the title-page of the Grand Oppenord, [15] for example, he combined a trophy from fol. 13v (fig. 32) with the left border of fol. 4v (fig. 33). [16] Huquier also added elements to Oppenord’s inventions, thereby disrupting the architect’s compositional strategy that had relied on De Bié’s alphabetical ordering of the engraved emblems. Finally, as he had done in his second reworked edition of Watteau’s Figures, he added backgrounds to Oppenord’s originals. To plate HH 3 of the Grand Oppenord (fig. 34), based for the most part on fol. 10r (fig. 35), as noted by Peter Fuhring, [17] Huquier added a statue of a nude female seen from the front, taken from the left margin of the middle register of fol. 54r (fig. 36) and a landscape background from a source that has not been identified. Huquier also enriched other sequences of the Grand Oppenord with landscapes, most likely borrowed from Jacques de Lajoüe. [18]

8

Huquier returned to the decorated Ripa one last time at the end of his printmaking career. In his own set of Iconologies, he pushed creative license to the point of plagiarism. [19] He simply plundered designs from Oppenord’s Ripa without the inscription Oppenord inv. he had scrupulously added to his previous plates after the architect. For a composition symbolizing ‘Artifice’ (fig. 37), [20] Huquier duplicated a composition from fol. 15r (fig. 38). He plagiarized the architect again for plates D 12, the emblem ‘Bellonne’, and S 8, ‘L’Art militaire’. Perhaps Huquier was reluctant to divulge his debt to an architect whose reputation had by then been besmirched by critics of the Rococo. These mid-century promoters of a return to Antiquity in the visual arts had identified Oppenord as one of the principal instigators of the despised goût moderne (modern taste). Undoubtedly issued to compete with JeanCharles Delafosse’s celebrated Nouvelle Iconologie Historique of 1768, Huquier’s Iconologies adopted Delafosse’s severe style, popular in the second half of the century. [21] Huquier’s Iconologies discloses a shrewd businessman wanting to make the most of his stockpile of Oppenord drawings despite a decline in the designer’s standing.

9

In their creative work Oppenord and Huquier were both bricoleurs who had no qualms about rearranging others’ compositions. However, they pursued different objectives in their interpretative projects. In his decorated copy of Ripa, Oppenord let both the Ripa-Baudoin text and De Bié’s images stimulate his inventiveness. He illustrated passages from Ripa with decorative compositions that were thematically related to the text. With De Bié’s plates he played even more complex games, using the engraved attributes as building blocks for grotesque compositions that gave new currency to Ripa’s emblematic system.

10

On the other hand, Huquier’s eye for profit guided his

etching of Oppenord. Insensitive to the architect’s complex use of decorative interplay, Huquier dismembered Oppenord’s original, both physically and conceptually. By grouping Oppenord’s embellishments according to theme and format in easily marketable suites, Huquier obscured the architect’s sophisticated dialogue with Ripa, Baudoin, and De Bié. And in publishing his Iconologies, he concealed the Oppenord provenance in order to mitigate a growing disenchantment with the architect.

11

Had Oppenord been alive, he would rightly have objected to Huquier’s dishonesty and no doubt condemned his blatant methods. Yet, he might have appreciated Huquier’s flair for business, as he himself had derived considerable profit from the sale of drawings throughout his career. All in all, despite their different approaches to invention, Oppenord may have felt a certain affinity with his etcher. Huquier’s radical alteration of Oppenord’s designs was perhaps less a betrayal of the architect than an adaptation of his own graphic bricolage to the demands of a changing market.

Appendix: Drawings from Oppenord’s Decorated Ripa Etched by Huquier

* Identified by P. Fuhring in Design into Art, pp. 82-110