Tracing Voltaire’s Built History: A Closer Look at Works on Paper from the Taylorian’s Collections
Amongst the more than 50 works of art now represented on this site are prints, drawings, posters, and watercolour paintings which form a varied collection of works on paper. In many respects this collection is a refreshing contrast to the Taylorian’s more staid, albeit imposing, paintings and sculptures that perhaps too easily enable a ‘great man’ approach to the study of history. Digitally gathered here, it is possible to appreciate how the works on paper collection facilitates a balanced study. Mediums in the collection range from fine engravings and commercially produced prints to watercolors and drawings, some of which are by women and non-white artists, covering subjects that range from a 1921 Dada exhibition to academics associated with the Taylorian.
The collection also contains a number of architectural studies, some of which depict the Taylorian’s history, reflecting a time within living history when grass covered the Ashmolean forecourt and different sculptures sat atop the Main Reading Room’s mantlepiece.
The rest of the architectural works in the collection pertain to François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), an indication, perhaps, of the Taylorian’s strength in French literary and visual culture. I was drawn to look into these further as they provide an opportunity to examine Voltaire’s adult life through the great châteaux associated with his later years. The first of these works, a painting by early 19th century artist Jean-Antoine Linck, depicts Voltaire’s home, Les Délices in Geneva, where he lived from 1755 to 1760. Titled O maison d’Aristippe! ó jardins d’Epicure! in reference to Voltaire’s 1755 ode, the work was given to the Taylorian by American professor of French and Voltaire specialist, George Remington Havens in 1978.[1]
Linck depicts Les Délices largely hidden from direct view, obscured by a statuesque pine in the middle ground and cut off entirely on the right-hand side by the edge of the paper. It appears almost as if the dense forest on the surrounding land is closing in, relegating the built and non-natural to the perimeter. Certainly, Voltaire saw his estates as offering a respite from the sprawling European cities where he previously lived and wrote. This work by Linck in many ways illustrates Geoffrey Turnovsky’s argument that estates like Les Délices provided Voltaire with an opportunity to exercise total freedom and explore ideas of autonomy in his writing through rustic property ownership.[2] Linck seems to play with this notion of pro-prietorship here, allowing the boundaries between the natural world and Les Délices to blur, as manicured shrubbery battles the vines that encroach on the entry steps and the dense forest which surrounds the home casts a long shadow across the front lawn.
Voltaire left Les Délices and Switzerland in 1760 for Ferney where he built a grand château and surrounding estate just across the French border. The Taylorian’s works on paper collection contains both a drawing and a lithograph of this château, showing its 18th century grandeur. These works may have joined the collection following the establishment of the Voltaire Reading Room, formed following a donation to the university by Theodore Besterman, a scholar of Voltaire and founder of the Institut et Musée Voltaire at Les Délices. The first of these, a drawing by Sir Thomas Phillips (1792-1872), prolific English antiquarian and book collector, dates either from his August 1823 visit to France or to his childhood, as is written on the verso.
The work itself reveals a trajectory of reproduction tracing back to an original drawing of Ferney by Louis Signy (fl. 1768-82) in c.1769, engraved shortly thereafter by L.M.Y Quéverdo (b.1788). Voltaire himself describes Signy as “un prodige de l’art” [an art prodigy] saying that his prints of Ferney and Les Délices were “un honneur que ni elles ni moi ne méritons” [an honour that neither they nor I deserve] and that “vos dessins dureront plus que mes maisons” [your designs will outlast my homes]. [3] This is not the case in regard to Ferney, however, which remains very much intact and can be toured virtually here. Sir Thomas’s drawing of Ferney indicates a memorializing of Voltaire’s estates as he knew them, and although his work closely mirrors Signy’s original, the composition lends itself particularly well to the medium of printing where the château and mountain range can be appreciated in more precise detail.
The other work in the collection depicting Voltaire’s château at Ferney is by the French painter and draughtsman François Alexandre Pernot (1793-1865). The composition of this lithograph allows the nearby lake and trees to fill the foreground, thereby emphasizing the picturesque landscape which surrounds the château and stretches beyond its stone boundary wall. Pernot also includes the figure of a man, almost certainly Voltaire himself, standing with book in hand as if surveying his estate. While the inscription that accompanies the lithograph clearly labels the work as the “Château de Voltaire à Ferney” it also includes the text which Voltaire had carved above the doorway of his former apartments at the Château de Cirey where he lived prior to Les Délices and Ferney.
It reads:
“Asile des beaux arts, solitude où mon cœur
Est toujours occupé dans une paix profonde,
C’est vous qui donnez le bonheur
Que promettait en vain le monde.”[4]
– Voltaire, 1744
English translation:
Refuge of fine art, solitude where my heart
Is always busy in deep peace
It is you who gives the happiness
That the world promised in vain.
Ultimately, although this praise for a house which offers “le bonheur que promettait en vain le monde” is not in reference to Ferney at all, Pernot’s inclusion of this annotation alongside his lithograph nonetheless serves to underline the consistent enjoyment and rural solitude that Voltaire’s châteaux granted him through his later years.
– Madeleine Ahern (Graduate Trainee 2019-2020, Taylor Institution Library)
Works Cited
Cronk, Nicholas. Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Desnoiresterres, Gustave Le Brisoys. Iconographie Voltairienne. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970.
Geoffrey Turnovsky. “The making of a name: a life of Voltaire.” The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, ed. Nicholas Cronk. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 17-30.
Voltaire. Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, avec des notes et une notice historique sur la vie de Voltaire, Volume 2. Paris: Furne, 1835.
Voltaire. Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: avec des remarques et des notes historiques, scientifiques, et littéraires. Paris: Delangle Frères, 1828.
References
[1] Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: avec des remarques et des notes historiques, scientifiques, et littéraires (Paris: Delangle Frères, 1828), 238.
[2] Geoffrey Turnovsky, “The making of a name: a life of Voltaire” in The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 25.
[3] Gustave Le Brisoys Desnoiresterres, Iconographie Voltairienne (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 48.
[4] Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, avec des notes et une notice historique sur la vie de Voltaire, Volume 2 (Paris: Furne, 1835), 778.