Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality

and the Pursuit of Volupt
e

Jennifer Milam
Never a woman will be a Cartesian: never will she agree to
believe that her little dog is neither sensitive nor reasonable when he caresses her. She would stare down Descartes in person, if he dared to hold him to a similar
language; only the fidelity of her dog is better, according
to her, than the reason of all men together. I have seen a
beautiful woman seriously annoyed and shut the door on
a man who had adopted this ridiculous and impertinent
opinion. How could one refuse the sensitivity of animals?Louis-S

ebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 1782,
vol. 3, 134351
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the
engagement with philosophical ideas that use the animal to
understand the human and mind/body debates was both
popularized and widespread, ranging from numerous entries
about dogs and Parisian society in Louis-S

ebastien Merciers
Tableau de Paris to a rise in the portrayal of intimate relationships between women and their lapdogs in both texts and
images. Two of the most affective versions of this theme in
painting are by Jean-Honor

e Fragonard: Portrait of a Woman
and Her Dog at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
and Young Girl in Bed, Making Her Dog Dance, which hangs in
Munich (Figs. 1, 2). These paintings are not provided as illustrations to Merciers text but instead as an introduction to
the ways in which feelings of attachment and companionship
between humans and animals were communicated visually.
Situated in private enclosed spaces, contained within a circular flow of pose and gesture, interconnected through tactile
conflations of painterly flesh and fur, the intimate relationship between doggy and woman is presented as mutually
determined by interspecies sensuality. Beyond analyzing how
these shared feelings of care and affectionlovebetween
the human and nonhuman animal were communicated, evaluated, and received in fictional texts and images, I want to
focus on a particular paintingJean-Honor

e Fragonards
Girl Making Her Dog Dance (Fig. 2)as an example of Enlightenment thought processes that sought to push the accepted
boundaries of human sexuality in an effort to argue the merits of a life of pleasure. While widely considered one of
Fragonards most masterful works, this painting is rarely discussed in any meaningful way.2 It is as if the sexual intensity
of the image, conveyed through the tactility of paint and suggestion of bestial transgression, has silenced art historical
critique.3 Yet these very featuresmateriality and overt sexualityserve to guide interpretation. Not only is Fragonards
painting a corollary of philosophies of happiness expounded
by radical materialists Julien Offray de La Mettrie and the
Marquis de Sade, but it also enacts a visual experience exposing Enlightenment anxieties about gender differences and
the subjectivity of response.4

Pets and Portraits

Enlightenment writers and philosophers proposed the existence of an animal soul, refuting the Cartesian beastmachine.5 Arguments set forth in texts as diverse as Claude
^
Yvons entry Ame
des b^
etes in L encyclop
e die (1751), Charles
Bonnets Essai de psychologie (1755), and Merciers Tableau de
Paris (178288) credit a dogs caressing its master as direct
empirical evidence of the capacity of an animal to feel and
show emotion.6 But animal emotions appear to be gendered
and to depend on whether they are evoked by a man or a
woman. When associated with male masters, these signs of
animal emotions were explained positively in terms of loyalty
and protection, whereas, when considered through the
examples of women and their lapdogs, the animal was characterized as angry and vicious. By contrast, literary representations frequently linked the lapdog through description to
the womans body and her bed, with thinly veiled intimations
that the dog has usurped the place that properly belongs to a
male lover.7 Yet another approach is found in visual representations of the lapdog in eighteenth-century French painting, which are far more open-ended and permissive.
As a long-standing convention in European portraiture,
dogs accompanied people in portraits as animal companions,
but without a fixed symbolic meaning.8 From the Middle
Ages on, the dog in painting referred variously to carnality,
fertility, nobility, fidelity, protection, and seduction.9 Traditions of showing animal companionship continued in French
portraiture, but further developments took place as pet-keeping practices evolved within court culture and urban society.
While dogs most commonly figured in seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century portraits to connect male sitters with the
noble pastime of the hunt, as in works by Alexandre-Franc ois
Desportes and Nicolas de Largilli
ere (Figs. 3, 4), during the
second half of the eighteenth century dogs appear more
often in female portraits, attended by an expanded use of
dogs in genre scenes.10 A shift in the type of dog is also
noticeable, from the hound to the lapdog.11
Well-known examples include Franc ois Bouchers Portrait
of the Marquise de Pompadour (Fig. 5) and Jean-Marc Nattiers
Portrait of Madame Ad
e la de (Fig. 6), both of which depict
high-ranking women of the courtrespectively, the kings
official mistress and his daughterat leisure with their pet
dogs at their feet. In the portrait of Pompadour, the dog can
be read as a sign of fidelity, referring to the king and reinforced through the gaze of the animal up toward his mistress,
but the lapdog that sits with Ad

elade is more companion
than symbol.12 As his mistress reads music, the dwarf spaniel
listens to the performancewith erect ears perfectly suited
to emphasize the sense of hearing in the scene.13 Nevertheless, as in portraits that reference the hunt, it is the dog that

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

accompanies the human subject as an ancillary figure and

attribute.
Portraitists who specialized in painting animals, as
opposed to those who painted humans, developed a separate
genre of pet portraiture midcentury. Works by Jean-Jacques
Bachelier, for example, were sought after and admired for
this category of painting by high-ranking patrons at court
(Fig. 7).14 The expansion of pet keeping in bourgeois households contributed to the popularity of the genre as an independent category.15 Such paintings brought the dog into
focus as the primary sitter, with the conventions of portraiture adapted to suit the canine subject. Historically, the dog
as ancillary figure to the human subject functions as a symbolic attribute to be decoded in relation to the sitter. This is
true in portraits where the animal is known to be a favorite
pet of the human subject, as in the Boucher or Nattier portraits of court women. When the dog becomes the sitter, however, it alters the subjectivity of both the painted animal and
the human viewer. Like Michel de Montaignes well-known
observation When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not
a pastime to her more than she is to me, the direct gaze of
the subject in A Dog of the Havannah Breed highlights this fundamental intersubjectivity of animal-human relationship.16
We are looking at the dog, but he is also looking at us. The
dog performs for the beholder in an attempt to please, at the
same time that he manipulates the reception of the performance by urging further intimacies, suggested by the fact
that the owners slipper has been dragged by the dog on to
the threshold of his luxurious doggy bed.
Women and Volupt
e
The visual subjectivity initiated in pet portraiture during the
mid-eighteenth century resonated with the treatment of the
dog in other types of painting, specifically, erotic images of
women with lapdogs.17 Fragonards scenes of this type draw
on such an awareness of animal subjectivity to portray the
dog as an erotic stimulus to the pleasures of the imagination.
Moreover, these paintings depict the human and the animal
in scenes of mutual sensation as a form of communication
that resulted in intersubjective experiences of knowing the
othernot only of the human and the animal but also of the
man and the woman, and of the nobility and the third
estate.18
In two works by FragonardGirl Making Her Dog Dance
(Fig. 2) and Young Girl with Puppies (Fig. 8)besides making
intimate contact with female flesh, dogs are put in positions
that erode boundaries and distinctions between the animal
and the human. In both paintings, physical parts of the animals are painted to draw attention to female sexual organs,
whether bare bottom or bare breast.19 While such paintings
have their origins in emblematic associations with a male
lover, there is something more curious at work in these
scenes, which can be related to materialist theories of animal
sensibility and human experiences of volupt
e .
In the Encyclop
e die Louis de Jaucourt defined volupt
e as an
inferior experience completely bounded by sensuality. In
contrast to pleasure and delight, volupt
e is limited and base.
Volupt
e in particular was degraded by an inability to control
the senses: The practices that create a feeling of voluptuousness have in common the notion of excess leading to softness

193

1 Jean-Honor

e Fragonard, Portrait of a Woman and Her Dog,
ca. 1769, oil on canvas, 32 253/ 4 in. (81.3 65.4 cm). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1937,
37.118 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by
www.metmuseum.org OASC)

of character, debauchery, and licentiousness; those practices

sought out by outrageous taste, seasoned by excessive leisure,
and bought at a price.20 More important, it is gendered:
Women typically push their sensibility up to the point of sensual pleasure. However, this level of feeling lasts but a
moment. For them things are as rapid as they are ravishing.21 Sensuality, moreover, is identified as a passion that
has gone too far in becoming an immoderate taste for the
love of sexual pleasure.22 Delight is a more intense feeling
than pleasure, but it is also limited to the power of sense and
concerned with achieving the highest sensual levels.23 In
contrast, pleasure is envisaged more positively as broad and
varied, involving more than the senses to engage both the
heart and the mind.
In his article Jouissance, also for the Encyclop
e die, Denis
Diderot explored volupt
e as an experience of uncontrolled
pleasure. In a definition of enjoyment that involves a description of orgasm, Diderot concluded that Reason is made a
slave to instinct and Nature is satisfied.24 Although
Diderot considered the positive aspects of volupt
e , including
the propagation of the species, he mistrusted the ability of
monogamous love to control the natural impulses of sexual
pleasure. Once the last exhilaration had been experienced,
the dedication of two lovers to one another alone was sworn,
but this was believed to be true only by the innocent soul
who knew neither suspicion nor remorse.25 At risk for most

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ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

2 Jean-Honor

e Fragonard, Young Girl in
Her Bed, Making Her Dog Dance, ca. 1768,
oil on canvas, 35 27 in. (89 70 cm).
Alte Pinakothek, Munich (artwork in the
public domain; photograph provided
by BPK j Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen j Sammlung HypoVereinsbank, Member of UniCredit)

philosophes was their interest in constructing a moral society in

which man was motivated by reason to seek out the good.
Reason was located in the mind, and in a reasonable man,
the mind had authority over the body.
Diderot takes up this point in more detail within Le r^e ve
d Alembert (1769). In the imagined conversation between Dr.
Bordeu and Mlle de lEspinasse, the center of the network
is determined to be the mind, where the memory and comparison of impressions create thoughts and reason. The man
of sound mind (mentis compos) is in complete control over
the impulses of his body. It is only in times of passion, delirium, and danger that impulses take over, and the mind is no
longer a supreme authority.26 Volupt
e thus presented a
threat to the domination of reason and the power of the
mind. It therefore had to be framed as an inferior form of
pleasure providing false or fleeting moments of happiness.
But there are other examples from the same period where
volupt
e is seen otherwise.
La Mettrie, as one of the more radical materialists, had an
alternative impression of volupt
e as a source of motivation

among men.27 While he did not go as far as the Marquis de

Sade to associate volupt
e with criminal pleasures, La Mettrie
nevertheless understood the experience as an instinctual
and innate physical impulse toward happiness that was
accomplished through sexual satisfaction.28 As Ann Thomson and Claude Morilhat have argued, La Mettries concept
of volupt
e cannot be reductively identified as sexual pleasure,
as it is by Diderot and Jaucourt in the Encyclop
e die; nonetheless, it is connected to sexuality and erotic love.29 Volupt
e succeeds and culminates the pleasures of the sensesit is their
end and completionbut the path that it follows is one
determined by the body rather than the mind. La Mettries
philosophy of happiness is thus a form of embodiment,
which confirmed the continuities of animal and human
nature.
In L homme-machine, La Mettrie wrote:
All the vital, animal, natural and automatic movements
are carried out thanks to [the springs of the human
machine]. . . . When all the sphincters of the bladder, the

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

3 Alexandre-Franc ois Desportes, Self-Portrait as a Huntsman,

1699, oil on canvas, 77 641/ 8 in. (197 163 cm). Mus

ee du
Louvre, Paris, Collection of the Acad
emie (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by St
ephane Mar
echalle, RMNGrand
Palais [Mus
ee du Louvre])

rectum, etc. work; when the heart contracts more strongly

than any other muscle; when the erector muscles make
mans penis stand upright, like that of an animal, where it
beats against its stomach . . . surely all this happens
mechanically.30
From here La Mettrie moves away from what he calls minor
springs to what he asserts as another more subtle and wonderful one, which drives them all. It is the source of all our
feelings, all our pleasures, all our passions and all our
thoughts.31 La Mettrie here is referring to the soul, which
he seats in the brain, where it exerts control over the rest of
the body, including the imagination. La Mettries thought
process then leads him to ask his first question in relation to
the movements caused by this mind/body connection: Why
does the sight, or the mere idea of a beautiful woman cause
singular movement and desires in us?32 With this question,
La Mettrie attempts to explore the physical effects of the
imagination. And what is interesting for the purposes of art
criticism is that he works through this question by turning to
a work of art, albeit one that depicts a philosopher:
Look at the portrait of the famous A. Pope, the English
Voltaire. The efforts and nerves of his genius are etched
on his physiognomy; it is totally convulsed, his eyes are
staring out of their sockets and his eyebrows are lifted by
the muscles of his forehead. Why? Because the source of
his nerves is in the labour and all his body must feel the

195

4 Nicolas de Largilli
ere, Portrait of a Boy in Fancy Dress, ca. 1710,
oil on canvas, 57 451/ 4 in. (146 114.9 cm). J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Gettys Open Content Program)

effects of such a difficult birth. Where would all these phenomena come from if there were no internal string pulling thus on the outer ones?33
In this passage and in connection with the perceived reception of a painting, La Mettrie expressed the working imagination as a form of birth, physically felt and experienced by the
male body in the act of poetic creation. Yet when artists turn
to the womans body in their treatment of sexual pleasure as
an embodied theme, as in Jean-Baptiste Greuzes La volupt
e
(Fig. 9), interpretation of the physical expression of volupt
e
gave rise to certain anxieties concerning incivility and loss of
physical control. Relaxed, head thrown back, with heavy lids
and open mouth, neck and breasts exposedthe pose and
expression of the painted embodiment of volupt
e in female
form are overtly erotic and sexualized.34

Deviancy and Response

These varied conceptions of volupt
e can be seen to inform a
range of responses to Fragonards painting Young Girl in Her
Bed, Making Her Dog Dancepleasurable, sensual, sexual,
debauched, and licentious. The earliest account we have of
this work is in the sale catalog of the widow of Louis-Marie
Lebas de Courmonts collection in 1795: a light outline of
the subject is of a young girl on her bed who is making her
dog dance.35 As with most sale catalog entries from the eighteenth century, one sees here a straightforward description

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ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

5 Franc ois Boucher, Portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour, 1756,

oil on canvas, 791/ 8 617/ 8 in. (201 157 cm). Alte Pinakothek,
Munich, on permanent loan from the HypoVereinsbank
(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by
BPK j Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen j Sammlung
HypoVereinsbank, Member of UniCredit)

without critical reflection. A similar painting by Fragonard of

a related subject, La gimblette, was part of a different sale in
1795 with the entry, a young girl lying on her back and in a
voluptuous bed, amuses herself with a pretty spaniel to which
she presents a gimblette.36 A gimblette was an eighteenth-century dog treat made of dry, ring-shaped pastry. The conceit
was used regularly in Rococo art, especially in prints, which
reproduced a number of images with scantily clad women on
unmade beds leading the pet to beg for a treat.37 Girl Making
Her Dog Dance, although lacking a gimblette, is often given this
title because of its association with the convention. As one
would expect, the author of the sale catalog does not explore
the painting as an image of volupt
e , yet the connection is
nonetheless made by diverting the association through metonym from woman to bed.
It was not until the nineteenth century that discussion of
the image was directly linked to an eroticized male viewing
experience (albeit one of nineteenth-, rather than eighteenth-century male connoisseurs). The Goncourts, for
example, gave a full rendition of the scene:
It is the ingenious voluptuousness of this playful hour, the
free frolicking and smiling of awakening. Her nightcap
has fallen off, her eyes are gay and full of youth, she has a

6 Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Madame Ad
e la de, 1766, oil on

canvas, 91 57 in. (231 146 cm). Ch^ateau de Versailles
(artwork in the public domain; photograph by G

erard
Blot, RMNGrand Palais [Ch^ateau de Versailles])

broad smile on her lips, and does not care what her raised
nightshirt reveals; with her feet, this adolescent girl lifts
up into the air a little poodle that has the face of a
bewigged barrister. . . . This is La Gimblette, a flower of
eroticism, very fresh and very French. . . .38
Moralized judgments of eroticism were more common in
response to the prints by Charles Bertony after Fragonards
La gimblette (Fig. 10). Even in the eighteenth century, a version in which the figure is barely clothed was inscribed with a
note to print dealers stating, The subject should not be displayed.39 By the late nineteenth century, the subject
brought deviant behavior to the minds of certain writers. An
issue of L Interm
e diaire in 1875 is characteristic, noting that
the engraving was known by another title, La Caroline, which
was an allusion to women suspected of a certain vice and to
the lapdog that plays an important role in the painting.40
One author went so far as to claim that this strange distraction was a taste of Louis XVs mistress Mme du Barry.41
None of this indicates an eighteenth-century viewers
response, but it nevertheless demonstrates the extent to
which, by the nineteenth century, the painting was connected directly with erotic viewing experiences and interspecies sensualityand, at the extreme, a deviant sexual act.

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

197

7 Jean-Jacques Bachelier, A Dog of the

Havannah Breed, 1768, oil on canvas,
27 357/ 8 in. (69.8 91.1 cm).
The Bowes Museum, Durham, U.K.
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by The Bowes
Museum, Barnard Castle, County
Durham, England)

At times in the nineteenth century, Fragonards act of

painting was humorously characterized as deviant. In Histoire
de l art pendant la R
e volution, Jules Renouvier quoted Fragonard, perhaps erroneously, as claiming, I would paint with
my ass [Je peindrais avec mon cul].42 In her psychoanalytic
reading of Fragonards approach to painting, Ewa LajerBurcharth interprets this declaration as a sign of regression
to infantile sign-making in which the body, rather than the
mind, is in charge of the process. While based more on twentieth-century thought processes flowing from a Freudian paradigm, which is more pertinent to our own ways of seeing
than perspectives taken during the Enlightenment, LajerBurcharths proposal of Fragonards bodily engagement with
the act of painting is provocative in a number of ways that
help us to understand the centrality of materialist thought to
his erotic picturing of a woman and her lapdog.43
The anecdote recounted by RenouvierI would paint
with my assconfigures art making as linked with excremental bodily functions, something that is expelled from the
body after digestion. Creativity is thus expressed in material
terms that insist on the embodiment of the imagination, in
turn emphasizing a preoccupation with the obscene. There
is no question that Young Girl in Her Bed, Making Her Dog
Dance has the capacity to provoke obscene thoughts through
the process of reception. Orthogonal lines converge on the
bare bottom, where the eye is tantalized by strokes of white
paint, visually associated with the tail of a dog that covers (or
even enters) the female body, but equally suggestive of the
hand that held the brush, stroking these same parts. More
important, this deviance in paint opens up an interpretation
of Fragonards sexualized doggy images as a confrontation of
Enlightenment morality, specifically related to sexuality as an
instinctual urge, continuous with that of animals, which
many authors (including La Mettrie) contended could and
should be controlled through education and socialization.

As a product of culture, Fragonards painting visualizes

this control. Studies of the nude, by Lynda Neade and
others, have emphasized that the female body signifies
the raw material of nature, which is subsequently turned
into art by the controlling hand of the (male) artist.44 Yet
there is an additional tension here that counters the
sense of cultural control. The grip of represented sexuality in which Fragonards painting holds the viewerstimulated by the material quality of brushwork, the liquid
quality of paint expelled by the creative force of the artist,
and contained within the womblike enclosure of the
bedactivates the free play of the erotic imagination,
which is furthered by the physical, bodily continuities of
dog and woman, animal and human.
Sexual Pleasure and the Materiality of Paint
The Marquis de Sades writings provide a useful source for
understanding the relation between radical materialism and
the subversive aims of erotic art, which sought to liberate the
imagination from artificial moral constraints derived from
regret and remorse. As the libertine character Dubois advised
the young novice in Justine, moral feelings are made to
deceive; none but physical sensations are authentic.45 Sades
ethics of pleasure takes a distinctly different path from that of
La Mettries philosophy of happiness, one that is fully
informed by the imperative to follow ones natural impulses
and drives as a duty in itself, no matter how depraved the
action or diabolical the consequences.46 While Sades contentions are extreme, his narrativization of sexual fantasies in
Justine, The Philosophy of the Bedroom, and 120 Days of Sodom
share a common emphasis on the potency of the phallus as
synonymous with the fertile imagination, particularly once it
is liberated from procreation. Turning to the teachings of
Dubois once again, who provides a defense of sodomy: Once
it is demonstrated that . . . situating this semen in our loins is

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ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

8 Jean-Honor

e Fragonard, Young Girl
with Puppies, ca. 1770, oil on canvas,
241/ 8 195/ 8 in. (61.2 50 cm). Private
collection (artwork in the public
domain; photograph Christies
Images Limited 2015)

by no means enough to warrant supposing that Natures purpose is to have all of it employed for reproduction, what then
does it matter?47 Sade thus offers an alternative view of sexuality in nature whereby its direction is not predetermined by
the reproductive organs themselves. Natures purpose was
not to have all of it employed for reproductionall of it
bringing to mind notions of excess that could be directed
toward pure pleasure.
As Julie Peakman has noted, the focus on the erotic body
in sex literature, advice manuals, and erotic fiction during
the eighteenth century invariably involved discussion of
bodily fluids.48 In both men and women, excess fluids were
grounds for concern: the female body for the incivility of
abundance (menstruation, breast-feeding, orgasm) and the
male body for potential weakness resulting from the expulsion of fluids during sex or masturbation. These ideas were
foregrounded in medical literature as much as in erotica;
specifically and best known is Samuel-Auguste Tissots treatise Onanism, or a Physical Dissertation on the Illnesses Produced by
Masturbation (1760).49

The sexualized representation of fluids in erotic and medical texts can be brought to bear in different ways on the
nature/culture debates usually associated with the depiction
of the nude in high art (in brief, the female body as uncontrolled raw material of nature; the male hand of the artist as
the civilizing force that brings raw nature under control in
the form of beauty). In his doggy pictures, Fragonard treated
the subject in a new way. As scholars of Fragonards art have
long noted, his distinctive handling of the materiality of
paint was interpreted as a form of creative enthusiasm.50 His
contemporaries admired the fantasy portraits, one of which
is Portrait of a Woman and Her Dog (Fig. 1), for having been
painted in an hour.51 In this example, fur and flesh merge
through the dissolution of the portrayed physical subjects
into the material objects of paint, specifically at the point
where the womans hand grasps the dogs body and becomes
intertwined with the blue ribbon. As the viewer seeks to distinguish between the three materials (human flesh, animal
fur, and silk ribbon), she becomes more aware of the variable
textures of paint and rapid brushworkthe bravura touch of

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

the artist that brings the substance of a visual idea to life

immediately on the canvas.52 This issue of the artists touch
as a point of creative energy when the hand takes over from
the mind is even more evident in Girl Making Her Dog Dance
(Fig. 2), once again at a revealing point. The dogs tail that
caresses the bare bottom of the girl dissolves at the point of
contact, causing viewers uncertainty in their perception of
fur, flesh, paint, and brush. Eroticism is thereby enhanced
through the visual perception of the sense of touchthat of
the artist touching the canvas with the fluid handling of paint
to create the tail that touches the body of the young girl,
which suggestively covers her vulva. The minds eye is led to
touch where the artist has left a painterly trace (the flick of
the brush on the canvas) to stimulate erotic excitement.
Moreover, creative enthusiasm, as described by La Mettries
analysis of the portrait of Alexander Pope, involved the physical conditions of volupt
e . What I would add to this argument,
in a consideration of the sexualized representation of a
woman and her lapdog, is that this materiality of paint was
also a metaphor for the excess discharge of bodily fluids that
involved the viewer in an erotic viewing experience through
a lack of narrative control.53 There is no narrative subject
matter that serves to redirect a reading of the image away
from its erotic content, which is both thematic and visual.
The lascivious function of lapdogs in both art and literature was a familiar trope long before Fragonard turned his
brush to the subject of a young girl and her dog playing on a
bed. Donald Posners brief consideration of the lapdog in
Watteau: A Lady at Her Toilette recounts the varied emblematic
usage of the dog, deployed as often as a symbol of virtue and
fidelity as it was of lust and animal passion.54 French artists in
the eighteenth century were influenced by the use of the dog
in Dutch cabinet paintings and prints, which often referenced simultaneously fidelity and sexuality by using the dog
ed

eric
as a stand-in for the absent male lover.55 In Jean-Fr

Schalls erotic version of such a scene, The Beloved Portrait
(Fig. 11), the dog looks up the skirts of his mistress, who is
reading a letter while kissing a miniature portrait.56 Three
references work together to recall the absent loverthe letter, the portrait, and the lapdog, who assumes an advantageous position for the imagined male gaze. A similar
painting by Schall that is not as overtly erotic depicts a lapdog
who sits and begs at his mistresss direction, a thinly veiled
visual critique of the man who assumes a subservient position
to his lover (Fig. 12).
Fragonards paintings are distinguished from these parallel examples primarily through the way that dogs appear as
real or potential sexual partners within the images themselves. Young Girl with Puppies (Fig. 8), for instance, depicts a
seminude woman carrying two sleeping dogs in a pose that
resembles a mothers cradling of twin infants, but without
any evident maternal sentiment. This is a sexualized image of
interspecies intimacy rather than a humanized painting of
dogs, contrasting with the work of this type by Jean-Baptiste
Oudry, Bitch Hound Nursing Her Puppies (Fig. 13), which
appeared in the Salon of 1753 to much critical acclaim.57 In
Fragonards canvas, the animals paws curl around the curves
of the young womans breasts, the paws of the puppy on the
left serving to frame the womans right breast, the bent paw
of the pup on the right falling at the top of her nipple.

199

9 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La volupt
e , 178990, oil on canvas, 181/ 8

145/ 8 in. (46 37 cm). The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts,
Moscow (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by
the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow)

Similarly, in Girl Making Her Dog Dance, the dog sits on the
girls shins, paws on her hands, tail falling through her calves
to curl up between her legs. On one levelperhaps obvious,
but at the same time remarkably limitingthese aspects of
the painting function as skillful pictorial devices. Appendages of the dog lead the beholder visually to the most sensual parts of the female body. Yet once there, vision is
exposed as a sensory organ that relies on the imagination to
experience pleasure. The beholder can only imagine what is
hidden from sight by the dogs tail or project sensations of
touch that are felt by the puppies paws as they caress a
nipple or the curves of a breast.
On occasion, in both the art and literature of eighteenthcentury France, the dog was suggestively depicted as a real
sexual partner. The best-known examples of this zoophilic
conceit are Fragonards paintings of semiclad young girls
holding dogs in sexualized positions, reproduced many times
through prints, and Diderots novel Les bijoux indiscrets
(1748), which sets up the dog as a sexualized rival of the legitimate male lover. What is at question is the varying means by
which the imagination is engaged to stimulate an erotic
response to the image and textto imagine the sexual
engagement between animal and human without actually
seeing or reading about the bestial sex act.
It was a commonplace in French Rococo painting and
Enlightenment literature for conventional themes to be
reworked from the perspective of the everyday. Thus, it is

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ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

10 Charles Bertony, after Jean-Honor

e
Fragonard, La gimblette, engraving,
Cabinet des Estampes, Biblioth
eque
Nationale de France, Paris (artwork
in the public domain; photograph
provided by the Biblioth
eque Nationale
de France)

11 Jean-Fr
ed
eric Schall, The Beloved Portrait, 1783, oil on panel,

115/ 8 9 in. (29.5 22.8 cm). Private collection (artwork in the
public domain; photograph provided by Wildenstein & Co., Inc.)

possible to see Fragonards Girl Making Her Dog Dance as a secularized version of zoomorphic tales in classical mythology.
In one such story, Zeus disguised himself as a swan to seduce
Leda, with the associated conventional imagery drawing on
the phallic semblance of the swans neck, in serpentine form,
insinuating itself across the womans hips or between her
legs. An extreme example of the erotic potential of this subject matter is the highly immodest Leda and the Swan, attributed to Boucher (Fig. 14), which depicts a seminude woman
reclining on a bed with her upper torso framed by bed curtains, her legs splayed open and extending off the bed. The
neck and head of the swan curve up from the bottom edge,
on the verge of entry. This is a humanized swan, read as Jupiter in disguise, and a metaphor for the triumphant libertine
lover engaged in the serial accumulation of conquests. Similar to other commissions for nudes extended to popular
Rococo painters, it was most likely intended for the private
cabinet of a male collector. In all probability, Fragonards
doggy painting sprang from the same motivation, yet his subject matter should not be dismissed entirely as a superficial
stimulus to an erotic response.
Fragonards Girl Making Her Dog Dance is a reinvention of
classical subject matter in modern terms. By removing the
narrative structure of classical myths, the beholder is left to
interpret the dog in relation to a broader series of associations, some based in the conventions of art and literature,
but others located within modern experience. Certainly
some memory of zoomorphic conceits evident in the pictorial depictions of stories from Ovids Metamorphoses would
have resonated for more experienced viewers. The visual

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

201

12 Jean-Fr
ed
eric Schall, Lady at a

Dressing Table with Her Lapdog, oil on
wood, 123/ 4 95/ 8 in. (32.3 24.6 cm).
Private collection (artwork in the
public domain; photograph by
Christian Mitko, provided by R
obbig
Munich)

reference to modern life, however, brought new frames of

reference into the viewing experience, which involved an
appreciation of the opportunity for interspecies connections
and intimacies occasioned by the rise of modern pet keeping
as it expanded beyond court culture to urban life and the
bourgeoisie in Paris.58
Human-Animal Sexuality
During the middle of the eighteenth century, literary tropes
and print-culture traditions established the dog as a sexual
rival of the legitimate male lover. This point is made most
famously in literature within Diderots libertine novel Les
bijoux indiscrets, written as a comic satire of Louis XVs court.
The titles reference to female genitalia provokes a particular
reading of the use of dogs within the novel, directing the
reader toward a sexualized interpretation of the affections
shown by a woman to her dogs. The story told of Sindor and

Haria in this text revolves around four dogs (a petit-gredin, a

danoise and two doguins) that inhabit Harias room.59 The first
night Sindor tries to rid his new wifes bed of her lapdogs
results in a bloody battle. Three of the dogs are tossed and
driven off the bed, leaving Harias faithful greyhound to
defend his mistress against Sindors assault: Fixed on his
mistresss thighs, with eyes inflamed, hair standing on end
and open mouth, he grinned and showed his enemy two
rows of very sharp teeth.60 While Sindors objective is
secured (he took possession of her, but not without effusion
of blood),61 the problem was by no means solved, as the
dogs remain the preferred rivals to her husbands affections: Know this once and for all, my dogs were long before
you in possession of my bed, and you may choose either to
quit it, or be content to share it with them.62 His proposal to
keep the dogs out of the room is dismissed and all attempts
to exile the dogs fail. The narrators justification of the

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ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

13 Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Lice Feeding Her Pups, also known as Bitch

Hound Nursing Her Puppies, 1752, oil on canvas, 40 515/ 8 in.
(103 131 cm). Mus
ee de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris
(artwork in the public domain; photograph by Nicolas Math

eus,
Mus
ee de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris)

emotional pleasures derived from an intimate relationship

with dogs, from the female point of view, is telling: she loved
her dogs; they amused her; she had taken a liking to their
caresses.63 In their relationships with pets, women found
(or are configured fictionally to have found) emotions of
love, amusement, and affection. Yet this emotional attachment is constructed as a threat rather than a benefit. The
presence of the dogs in the marriage bed allows Haria to
assert power over her new husband. Read as a critique of
Louis XVs court, the story emphasizes the displaced authority of the king, who has given himself over to the influence of
women and a love of luxury. The sociopolitical purpose of
the conceit is fulfilled by collapsing woman with the lapdog
and pitting both against the man, whereby positive aspects of

the relationship between humankind and pets are subsumed

into a represented threat against Enlightenment hierarchies
of authorityman over woman and human over animal.64
The significance of this tale within the text highlights several important aspects of the relationship between pets and
people in eighteenth-century France. First and foremost, it
acknowledges the fundamental emotional bond that humans
developed with animals in court culture. This is the factual
basis of the conceit. More important, the text sets up this
bond as inherently gendered and sexualized, which is at
odds with actual accounts of pet keeping in ancien r

egime
memoirs.
In Diderots Les bijoux indiscrets, a somewhat conventional
commentary on the womans attachment to lapdogs signals
why they were preferred over the human male lover. The
character Mirzoza tells the sultan that there is something
wonderful in having dogs: they sometimes amuse, and
never injure. If they are caressed, it is because such caresses
are of no consequence. Besides, do you believe, prince, that
a lover is satisfied with a kiss such as a woman bestows on her
lapdog?65 This issue of no consequence is pertinent to an
understanding of the painted image of intimate relationships
between women and dogs that allow for subjectivity in the
experience of pleasure. What I am trying to get at is how the
use of the dog in art and literature engages the imagination
in particular waysthinking about responsenot as a
human surrogate for sexuality but instead as an alternative
companion that provides a different form of sensual pleasure
binding humankind and animals. Certainly in the eighteenth
century, there was considerable recognition of the complexity of sensations experienced by dogs: Dogs, the eyes of
which have much expression, are animals too lively to allow
us to distinguish their successive sensations; but as the elephant is naturally grave and sedate, we may read in his eyes,

14 Attributed to Franc ois Boucher,

Leda and the Swan, ca. 1750, oil on
canvas, 221/ 4 273/ 4 in. (56.5 70.5 cm).
Private collection (artwork in the
public domain)

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

whose motions are slow, the order and succession of his interior affections.66 This comment indicates that to the eighteenth-century mind, dogs were seen as more capable of
sensuality than other animals.
Bonnets Essai de psychologie (1755) confirms this in describing the process by which the pleasures of a dogs caresses
were experienced and therefore led to thoughts and eventually to reason:
The caresses that the dog gives to his master, after an
absence, are the expression of the correspondence between
the object and pleasant sensations that are felt by the dog.
The memory of these sensations by the object gives rise to
the machine; it plays. We are pleased to find in this scene
the most touching traits: without thinking, we transfer the
man to the dog.67
Men, like women, had an emotional attachment to animals,
but male partners do not play into zoophilic conceits of the
late eighteenth century.68 Memoirs written at the time of
Louis XV note the kings affection for his pet cat, a white
angora that slept in the Council Chamber on a cushion of
crimson damask, and record that Louis XV responded with
curt disapproval when he learned that his premier valet de
chambre had played a joke on his cat by making it dance.69
Moreover, the architecture of Versailles ensured that the
king would have ready access to his favorite hunting dogs,
housed in a special room within the suite of the kings private
apartments, so that he could see to their care personally.
While the valets des chiens undoubtedly slept with these dogs
as part of the obligations of their post, the king was also able
to enjoy the company of his pets at night.70
Royal men and women shared their beds with pets as a
form of companionship, discounting any notion that they
were kept as playful diversions without emotional connec

tion. Louis XIVs sister-in-law Elisabeth-Charlotte,
duchesse
dOrl
eans, commented that a pretty little dog is all very well
for amusement, but not to console oneself with, I do not like
Boulognes [sic], because they are too delicate. I much prefer
French spaniels. I have usually four of them at my heels and
at night they sleep beside me.71 The Encyclop
e die includes in
the entry for Chiens mention of the appeal of dogs kept as
pets to people more generally. The good qualities of dogs
are those that are most admired in them (primarily linked to
fidelity) and make them worthy of man, so much so that
their admired characteristics are seen as having led to dogs
being kept as pets: they share our residences with us; they
accompany us when we go out; finally they know to please to
the point that there are many people who carry them from
here to there, and who sleep in the same bed.72 Companion
animals are thus perceived to have the ability to manipulate
the human through their position as household pets.
In the next paragraph, the Encyclop
e die article moves
directly into a discussion of canine sexuality and gender differences, beginning with the observation that Males are able
to couple all the time, whereas females are bound by nature
and times in which they are in heat.73 The proximity of these
descriptions to one anothernoted increasing levels of interspecies intimacies followed by observations on the natural
sexuality of dogsis suggestive. If people can recognize that

203

the dog knows how to please to gain entry to the bed, and
dogs are able to manipulate the human in this way, then recognition of alterity becomes intrinsic to the companion species relationship. With the natural sexuality of the animal
confirmed, and male dogs at the ready, this intersubjective
knowing of the other had further implications for both the
cultural fantasy of and anxiety toward the potential similarities between human and animal experiences of sexuality and
sensual pleasure.
Sexualized Politics of Pet Keeping
It is women, rather than humankind more generically, who
were presented in texts and images as inclined toward zoophilia during the mid- to late eighteenth century.74 In part,
this is the result of distinctions drawn as part of the Enlightenment project of the categorization of knowledge between
working dogs, seen as useful and serving a male master, and
pet dogs that fulfilled emotional needs and challenged analogous forms of human contact. But it also has something to
do with reading the lapdog in the bed of the woman as a
highly sexualized space of intersubjective knowing. Justifications of preferred forms of emotional attachment (pet dogs
over male lovers) became part of the general critique against
lapdogs in the later eighteenth century. In a chapter entitled
Tueurs de chiens within the Tableau de Paris (1788),
Mercier distinguishes between working dogs and those kept
as pets: the chien de berger (sheepdog) is the hero of the race
because it is useful; the dogue (French mastiff) follows and
defends his master; it is still a good dog; the petits chiens are
kept by women and through this proximity (woman to animal) are signs of depravity.75 The exact nature of this moral
corruption is explained in the passage that follows:
How can one kiss the mouth that is incessantly licked by
the tongue of these angry and vicious little animals? When
I see a spaniel leave the bed of a beautiful woman, having
made it his home, I no longer want to enter there. How
can women who come together with so many dogs, dare
to offend at this delicate point their fellow creatures?76
While these observations by Mercier pick up on visual and literary tropes related to the lapdog as either a stand-in for or
rival of a male lover, the actual resonance with readers relies
on a reframing of these fictions through an image of the
everyday and some presumed knowledge of pet keeping in
eighteenth-century Paris.77 The passage is overt in assigning
types of dogs to each gender (note the dogue serves a master,
not a mistress). A mocking of transgression in the newly constructed gender norms of pet keeping furthered this divide.
In a separate chapter entitled Petits chiens, Mercier
described with considerable disdain the pretensions of young
men who appeared on the streets of Paris with lapdogs
great imbeciles who, in order to court women, publicly carry
their dog under the arm on promenades and in the
streets.78 This is a change in attitude located in the second
half of the eighteenth century that is as much a response to
growing anxieties about gender and society as it was to dissatisfaction with the ruling elite.
Like their noble and well-heeled owners, little dogs purportedly became murder victims of the Revolution of 1789.79

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ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

15 Louis-L

eopold Boilly, Portrait of
Maximilien de Robespierre, 1783, oil on
canvas, 161/ 8 125/ 8 in. (41 32 cm).
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille (artwork
in the public domain; photograph by
St

ephane Mar

echalle, provided by PBA
de LilleR

eunion des Mus

ees
Nationaux)

Petits chiens featured in Revolutionary almanacs, which were

cheap alternatives to newspapers, selling at lower prices and
reaching a larger audience.80 L Almanach des honn^e tes femmes
pour l ann
e e 1790 is one such text, written to compare the virtuous abstinence of bourgeois women with noble ladies who
carried lustfulness as far as the Greeks and Romans.81 Each
month is given over to a different type of courtesan, using
ancient terms found within an invented dictionary of the sexual pleasures of the ancients because our language has not
progressed as much as our libertinage.82 September is given
over to the Phicidisseuses, who claim that mankind is not
alone capable of exciting pleasure. They tremble at the
approach of a vigorous man, and prefer the delicate tongue
of their little dogs. Let us envy the happiness of these little
animals, they are often more loved than us.83 The conceit
was thus quickly politicized less than a year after the events of
1789, maintaining gender tropes established in the conventions of eighteenth-century art and literature, but joining
these with Revolutionary issues of class that had not been previously established. Bourgeois Parisians had been keeping

pets throughout the eighteenth century, and Merciers condemnation of dogs in the city was directed as much at wellheeled urban members of the third estate as at the nobility.
The description of courtesan practices in the Almanach des
honn^e tes femmes serves to emphasize a divide of decency
between courtly women of the ancien r

egime, who since the
seventeenth century had been defined as honn^e tes femmes,
and bourgeois women, who are portrayed as living in
abstinence and to whom the label honn^e tes femmes has been
reassigned. Issues of moral ascendancy for women were
thereby directly linked to control over any sexual (and
animal) urges.
Despite this evidence of the cultural fantasy that existed
between women and lapdogs, the meaning of little dogs in
paintings was not fixed to lascivious behavior during the
period leading up to the Revolution. It could be put to additional social and political purposes, particularly when the
gender of the sitter shifted from female to male. LouisL

eopold Boillys Portrait of Maximilien de Robespierre (Fig. 15)
reworks both the sympathetic and emblematic significance

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

of dogs in male portraits.84 Whereas there was a long tradition of portraying noble men with hunting dogs, it was
unusual for men to be represented with little dogs kept
exclusively as pets and without any function other than providing amusement and companionship.85 The fact that spaniels were known as comforters from the seventeenth
century on indicates the essential role of small dogs in court
society as providers of emotional attachment in court culture,
which carefully guarded the display of emotion.86 Moreover,
the manner by which a prince treated dogs was often seen as
a sign of his future treatment of his subjects. These associations continued, but were transformed when attached to the
nonnoble male sitter in the late eighteenth century.87
Robespierres affection for his own pet is documented in


the memoirs of Elisabeth
Le Bas: He had a dog, named
Brount, that he loved a lot. The poor beast was very
attached to him.88 In this same passage, she recounts his
treatment of poor Savoyard children in the Champs
ees to whom he gave money, noting, he was so
Elys

good.89 In one stroke, the man is described as kind to the
poor, children, and dogsproviding evidence of his true


character, appropriate to a Revolutionary leader (Elisabeth
is chronicling a period during the National Convention).
Although Robespierre did not have his pet Brount in his
possession until 1791, it is possible that the dog was one of
the puppies that he referred to in a letter of 1788, presumably to Mlle Duhay:
Is the puppy you are raising for my sister as pretty as the
one you showed me when I came to B

ethune? Whatever it
is like, it will be received with discrimination and with
pleasure. We may even say that however ugly it may be, it
will always be pretty. A witty man is never ugly, a famous
woman once said, I believe it was Madame de S

evign

e.
Without a doubt one might say some polite truth of your
dog, in the same style.90
There is a seductive suggestion meant to charm the letters
recipient within this discussion of the dog. The passage is
preceded by a plea to this pretty woman to let him know
when his legal memoranda that he was sending her became
boring. Robespierre had flattered Duhay similarly by comparing her beauty to the canaries that she had raised.91 Thus, in
his own practice of letter writing, Robespierre aligned
women and animals, albeit as a mode of flattery.
Although the exact breed of the dog in Boillys portrait is
difficult to identify with certainty, it appears to be a toy spaniel and is obviously a lapdog. Its inclusion within the painting
has been interpreted as a sign of Robespierres love for
dogs.92 While human-canine affection may have been a motivation behind the dogs depiction here, the wider context of
Rococo imagery involving a gendered and class-based understanding of the lapdog was pervasive and undoubtedly
impacted the production and reception of the painting.
Moreover, the actual structure of the painting and the way
that the animal is portrayed signals that other meanings are
at work in this image of Robespierre, bringing into question
the dogs status as pet.
Boillys Portrait of Robespierre represents the dependence of
the animal on the human, reinforced by the expressed

205

confidence and authority of the sitter, but it is also a demonstration of visual wit, relying on the viewers knowledge of
court portraiture and identification of luxury items to come
in on the joke.93 Robespierre addresses the viewer with a
direct gaze and self-assured pose, seated upright to align with
the central vertical line of the composition. This defines his
strength and authority. Other aspects of his position, however, are relaxed. Crossed legs and bent arms break the
strong vertical orientation of the image and redirect the
viewer along contrasting diagonals. These visual breaks indicate informalitythe viewer has caught the sitter at a
moment of leisure in which the true man is revealed, following the conventions of bourgeois portraiture established in
the middle of the eighteenth centurybut they also bring
the viewers attention to what appear to be luxury items associated with a ruling elite of the ancien r

egime. In his left hand,
Robespierre seems to be holding a snuffbox, and with his right
he gestures toward a lapdog. Looking more closely, the viewer
realizes the snuffbox is used to hold treats for the pet dog. Yet,
in spite of the offered treat, there is no indication of compassion between the sitter and the dog. Robespierres gaze is
entirely disconnected from the begging animal, which is miniaturized to the point that it looks grotesque. The fact that the
dogs face cannot be made out further distances an emotional
reaction to the dog as pet on the part of the viewer. Read in
conjunction with the snuffbox, the lapdog can be seen to represent the nobility, who now depend on and beg from the leading members of the third estate.94
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the lapdog as portrayed in fictional text and image played a significant role in the acceptance of intersubjective human-animal
relationships and the continuities between human-animal
sexuality. The Revolutionary view of volupt
e aligned the concept with a base form of sensation that was characterized by a
lack of control, associated with upper-class women. As such,
the lapdog became a metaphor for the excesses of pleasure
and luxury that defined the Enlightenment critique of the
nobility, seen to have given themselves over to base physical
and sensual pleasures. This is the didactic, coded narrative
through which to read Boillys portrait of Robespierre. The
grotesqueness of the dog supports this reading, at the same
time that it references the continued relevance of protoanthropological Enlightenment philosophy in framing the
debate. Analysis of the animals nature is used as a form of
self-critique, in this case, with social and political purpose.
The outward appearance of the dog reflects the inward corruption of the nobility. But more than this, the tightness of
brushwork and controlled surface texture indicate a loss of
material connection between human and animal, creativity
and instinctual response provoked by the materiality of paint
that is so extraordinary in Fragonards picturing of the imaginative life force of volupt
e .
Jennifer Milam is professor of art history and eighteenth-century studies at the University of Sydney. With her interdisciplinary interests,
she seeks to identify unconventional visual processes stimulating and
directing the production and reception of art in the intersecting fields
of art history, intellectual history, and eighteenth-century studies
[Department of Art History, University of Sydney, NSW, 2105,
Australia, jennifer.milam@sydney.edu.au].

206

ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

Notes
I am indebted to Jeanette Hoorn and Barbara Creed for sparking my interest
in the relation between the visual arts and human-animal research. In addition to their own projects in this area, Creed and Hoorn lead the Human
Rights & Animal Ethics Research Network at the University of Melbourne.
This article results from research I carried out in collaboration with Hoorn,
having spent many hours together looking at eighteenth-century images of
pets and people. I am grateful for the ideas and references that she has
shared with me from her own research, which informs my writing here. Parts
of this article were presented in talks at the conference The Enlightenment
and the Development of Philosophical Anthropology (November 2013) and
the Insights Lecture Series (May 2014), both at the University of Sydney; the
Centre for Modernism Studies at the University of New South Wales (March
2014); and the 102nd Annual Conference of the College Art Association in
Chicago (February 2014) in the panel The Erotic Gaze in Early Modern
Europe, chaired by Elizabeth Pilliod and Joe Thomas. Audiences at these
presentations provided useful feedback from which I benefited. I would also
like to thank Glenda Sluga, Barbara Caine, Danielle Celermajer, Helen
Groth, Katherine Biber, Tess Lea, Katja Heath, Chip Van Dyk, and the anonymous readers for The Art Bulletin for their helpful suggestions.
Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
1. Louis-S

ebastien Mercier, Les petits chiens, chap. 244 of Tableau de Paris,
12 vols. (Amsterdam, 178288), vol. 3, 13435: Jamais une femme ne
sera Cart

esienne: jamais elle ne consentira a croire que son petit chien
nest ni sensible ni raisonnable quand il la caresse. Elle d

evisageroit Descartes en personne, sil osoit lui tenir un pareil langage; la seule fid

elit

e
de son chien vaut mieux, selon elle, que la raison de tous les hommes
ensemble. Jai vu une jolie femme se f^acher s
erieusement & fermer sa
porte a un homme qui avoit adopt
e cette ridicule & impertinente opinion. Comment a-t-on pu refuser la sensibilit
e aux animaux?
2. The painting has been included in all the major studies of Fragonard but
is summarily treated. See Georges Wildenstein, The Paintings of Fragonard
(London: Phaidon, 1960), 262, no. 280; Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Jean-Honor
e
Fragonard, vie et oeuvre: Catalogue complet des peintures (Fribourg: Office du
Louvre, 1987), 18284, 313, no. 282; Pierre Rosenberg, Fragonard (Paris:
Grand Palais, 1987), 23234, cat. no. 110; and Colin Bailey, ed., The Age of
Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),
28485, no. 80. See also M
u nchener Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 3, no. 29
(1978): 24244.
3. A notable exception is Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Genre and Sex, in French
Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington,
D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 200219.
4. The philosophical writings of La Mettrie have been connected to the art
of Jean-Baptiste-Sim
eon Chardin by Sarah Cohen in Chardins Fur:
Painting, Materialism and the Question of the Animal Soul, EighteenthCentury Studies 48, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 3961.
5. For a recent summary of the central debates, see Matthew Senior, The
Souls of Men and Beasts, 16301764, in A Cultural History of Animals in the
Age of Enlightenment (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
^
6. Claude Yvon, Ame
des b^etes, in Encyclop
e die, ou Dictionnaire raisonn
e des
sciences, des arts et des m
e tiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond
dAlembert, vol. 1, 34353 (University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclop

edie
Project [Spring 2013 Edition]), ed. Robert Morrissey, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu; and Charles Bonnet, Essai de psychologie, ou consid
e rations sur les op
e rations de l a^me, sur l habitude et sur l education: Auxquelles on
a ajout
e des principes philosophiques sur la cause premie re et sur son effet (London, 1755).
7. J. L. Wyett, The Lap of Luxury: Lapdogs, Literature, and Social Meaning
in the Long Eighteenth Century, Lit: Literature Interpretation and Theory
10, no. 4 (1999): 275301.
8. Craig Harbison, Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan Van Eycks Arnolfini Double Portrait, Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 249
91.
9. On dog symbolism, see Maria Leach, God Had a Dog (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1961), 32531.
10. In allegorical portraits of women as Diana from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sitters are often depicted with hounds: the Fontainebleau school paintings of Gabrielle dEstr
ees as Diana attributed to
Ambroise Dubois (ca. 159599); Claude Deruets Marie de Rohan, Duchesse
de Chevreuse as Diana (1630); Charles Beaubrun, Portrait of a Lady as Diana
(1650); and Claude Lefebvres Louise de La Vallie re as Diana (1667) are a
few examples in French art. Kathleen Nicholson observed this shift from
hound to pet in female portraits connected to the hunt by comparing
Nicolas de Largillieres portraits Woman in the Guise of Diana (1685) and
The Countess of Montsoreau and Her Sister as Diana and an Attendant (1717),
noting that in the earlier work the dog is threatening, while in the later
painting there appears an affectionate pet to be caressed by its charming
owner. This is one of three dogs in the painting, two conventional
hounds further in the background and the pet spaniel, which sits partially

on the lap of the countess. Nicholson presented this material in the seventh annual Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture, entitled Beguiling
Deception: Allegorical Portraiture in Early 18th-Century France, on January 27, 2011, at the Dallas Museum of Art. The unpublished text is
online at http://museum.dma.org/idc/groups/public/documents/web
_content/dma_412000.pdf (accessed August 26, 2014). Also useful is Juliana Schiesaris chapter Versions of Diana: Gender and Renaissance
Mythography, in Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in
the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
11. There have been several studies of the dog specifically, and animals more
generally, in the history of art. Among the most useful in offering a broad
survey of imagery and potential meanings are Robert Rosenblum, The Dog
in Art from Rococo to Post-Modernism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988);
Edgar Peters Bowron et al., Best in Show: The Dog in Art from the Renaissance
to Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Kenneth Clark, Animals and Men: Their Relationship as Reflected in Western Art from Prehistory to
the Present Day (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1977); and Simona
Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill,
2008). Rosenblum analyzed the sea change in the depiction of dogs
that took place during the eighteenth century in his essay From the
Royal Hunt to the Taxidermist, in Best in Show, 3955. The examples
chosen by Rosenblum demonstrate the continued use of hounds in
images connected with the hunt, but a greater focus on smaller dogs in
portraits, both of pets on their own and with their owners.
12. Madame Ad

elades attachment to her pet dogs was remarked on by the
comtesse de Boigne, who describes a rivalry between herself and a favorite spaniel for the princesss attention. See M
e moires de la comtesse de Boigne
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1971), 6667.
13. Toy spaniels were originally known as the epagneul nain, or dwarf spaniel. Until the eighteenth century, the breed was commonly shown with
drooping ears, as in Titians Venus of Urbino (1538, Galleria degli Uffizi,
Florence) and the Portrait of Hercule-Franc ois, Duke of Alenc on, Anjou and
Brabant attributed to the studio of Francois Clouet (ca. 1557, Weiss Gallery, London). This variant of the breed is now known as the Phal
ene
Papillon. On the basis of visual evidence found in European paintings,
the Papillon Club of America has noted in various handbooks the appearance of an occasional dog with sufficient strength in the leathers for the
ears to stand erect during the eighteenth century. This variant on the
breed with erect ears and feathering edges has been known as the Papillon since at least the nineteenth century. For a comprehensive history of
the breed, see Peggy Roberts and Bob Russell Roberts, The Papillon Handbook: Giving the Origin and History of the Breed, Its Show Career, Its Points and
Breeding (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1959).
14. H

el
ene Mouradian and Xavier Salmon, eds., Jean-Jacques Bachelier, exh.
cat. (Paris: Somogy; Versailles: Mus

ee Lambinet, 1999).
15. The account of a bourgeois woman who had portraits painted of her
twenty-five cats, noted with some disdain by Nicolas Contat in his Anecdotes typographiques: O
u l on voit la description des coutumes, moeurs et usages
singuliers des Compagnons imprimeurs (Brussels: Pierre Hardy, 1762), suggests that the practice was widespread: Cette dame est passionn

ee pour
les chats ainsi que plusieurs Ma^tres Imprimeurs; un dentreux en avait
vingt-cinq quil avait fait tirer en portrait et quil nourrissait de roti et de
volaille. Anecdotes typographiques, ed. Giles Barber (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1980), 52. See also Robert Darnton, The Great Cat
Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic
Books, 1984), 76104.
16. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and Verdun L. Saulnier
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 452, bk. 2, chap. 12.
Quand je me joue a ma chatte, qui sc ait si elle pass

e son temps de moy
plus que je ne fay delle.
17. Donald Posner initiated an emblematic study of this type of imagery in
Watteau: A Lady at Her Toilet (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
18. While I am particularly concerned with the use of the lapdog in specific
paintings by Fragonard, he had a much broader engagement with the use
of the dog in his artworks. A review of the 305 works included in Rosenbergs Fragonard catalog that accompanied the 1987 Grand Palais exhibition found that approximately 15 percent included dogs as part of the
scenes. These varied in subject matter from fantasy portraits, allegories,
and history paintings to scenes of everyday life. Many of Fragonards
genre scenes with lower-class figures include working dogs, as in The
Laundresses (Saint Louis Art Museum), and larger dogs that signal family
harmony as part of domestic scenes, as in Happy Fecundity (private collection, pictured in Rosenberg, Fragonard, cat. no. 222) and The First Riding
Lesson (Brooklyn Museum, New York). Lapdogs are common in scenes
with erotic connotations: The Girls Dormitory (Fogg Museum, Cambridge,
Mass.) and If Only He Were as Faithful to Me! (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles) are just two examples. Most interesting are the works in which
the type of dog confounds these generalizations of category: The Parents
Absence Turned to Account (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), for
example, includes working dogs in a scene of a girl resisting a young
mans physical advances, and Education Does It All (Museu de Arte de S~ao

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

Paulo) depicts lower-class children and adolescents dressing up a pair of

small spaniels.
19. My focus here is on the treatment of the lapdog in Fragonards paintings;
however, further analyses of his erotic scenes would serve to support a
broader materialist reading of the anthropomorphic treatment of objects
that tend to surround the female nude, most evident in the suggestive
openings of canopied bed curtains in paintings such as The Bolt (Mus

ee
du Louvre, Paris) and Girl Making Her Dog Dance in Munich.
20. Louis de Jaucourt, Plaisir, D
elice, Volupt
e, in Diderot and dAlembert,
Encyclop
e die, vol. 12, 689: Celui de volupt
es d
esigne proprement des
exc
es qui tiennent de la mollesse, de la d
ebauche & du libertinage. . . .
21. Ibid.: Les femmes poussent ordinairement la sensibilit
e jusqua la volupt

e, mais ce moment de sensation ne dure guere, tout est chez elles
aussi rapide que ravissant.
22. Passions, in Diderot and dAlembert, Encyclop
e die, vol. 12, 143: Le mot
de volupt

e est en quelque sorte affect
e a cette sorte de plaisirs. Le voluptueux est celui qui y est trop attach
e; & si le gout que lon a pour eux va
trop loin, on appelle cette passion sensualit
e.
23. Jaucourt, Plaisir, D
elice, Volupt
e, vol. 12, 689.
24. Denis Diderot, Jouissance, in Diderot and dAlembert, Encyclop
e die, vol.
8, 889.
25. Ibid.
26. Denis Diderot, Le r^eve dAlembert, in Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed.
Ass

ezat Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1875), vol. 2, 12281.
27. Thomas M. Kavanagh has explored the relation drawn during the
Enlightenment between the goal of maximizing pleasure in Epicurean
philosophy and the maintenance of Stoic distance and control through
the vicarious experience of pleasure that was enjoyed by viewing a painting. The reconciliation between Epicureanism and Stoicism during the
Enlightenment, according to Kavanagh, was owed to the perception of a
shared basis in materialist thought that presupposed a continuity
between the physical world of things and the human world of consciousness. See Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the
New Epicureanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 45. Kavanagh explores the place of pleasure within the arts in chapter 4, which
addresses the writings of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos and the paintings of
Franc ois Boucher. Further consideration of the relation between Epicureanism and materialism is found in the essays by Charles Wolffe, A Happiness Fit for Organic Bodies: La Mettries Medical Epicureanism, and
Natania Meeker, Sexing Epicurean Materialism in Diderot, in Epicurious
in the Enlightenment, ed. Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 6984 and 85104.
28. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L
e cole de la volupt
e (Dans lIsle de Calypso,
1747), represents his most extended treatment of the subject.
29. Julian Offray de La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings, trans.
and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); and Claude Morilhat, La Mettrie, un mat
e rialisme radical (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). See also Kathleen Wellman,
La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy and the Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1991); and John Flavey, A Critical Edition of
the Discours sur le Bonheur, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 134 (1974): 1140.
30. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 28; and Julian Offray de La Mettrie, L homme
machine (Leyden: Elie Luzac, 1748), 7677: Tous les mouvemens vitaux,
Animaux, naturels, & Automatiques se font par leur action . . . nest ce pas
machinalement quagissent tous les Sphincters de la Vessie, du Rectum,
etc. que le Cur a une contraction plus forte que toute autre muscle que
les muscles

erecteurs font dresser la Verge dans lHomme, comme dans
les Animaux qui sen batten le ventre.
31. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 28; and La Mettrie, L homme machine, 77: . . . un
autre plus subtil, & plus Merveilleux, qui les anime tous; il est la source de
tous nos sentimens, de tous nos plaisirs, de toutes nos passions, de toutes
nos pens

es. . . .
32. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 29; and La Mettrie, L homme machine, 78:
Pourquoi la v
ue, ou la simple id
ee dune belle femme nous cause-t-elle
des mouvemens & des desirs singuliers?
33. La Mettrie, Machine Man, 29; and La Mettrie, L homme machine, 7980:
Voiez le Portrait de ce Fameux Pope, au moins le Voltaire des Anglois.
Les Efforts, les Nerfs de son G
enie sont peints sur sa Physionomie; Elle est
toute en convulsion; ses yeux sortent de lOrbite, ses sourcils s

el
event
avec les muscles du Front. Pourquoi? Cest que lorigine des Nerfs est en
travail & que tout le corps doit se ressentir, dune espece daccouchement aussi laborieux. Sil ny avoit une corde interne qui tir^at ainsi celles
du dehors, dou viendroient tous ces ph
enomenes? The exact portrait to
which La Mettrie is referring is unknown. One possibility is the portrait by
Jean-Baptiste Van Loo, of about 1742, variations on which were widely circulated in print form.
34. Referring to the painting as La colombe retrouv
e e or La volupt
e in a letter
written by Greuze to the paintings owner, Prince Nicolai Yusupov, the

207

artist confirmed the common emblematic connection of animals with

male lovers: This dove, which she presses against her heart so lovingly,
with her two hands, is nothing other than the image of her lover hidden
beneath this emblem. See Louis R

eau, Lettres de Greuze au Prince
Nicolas Borisovitch Iousoupov, Bulletin de la Soci
e t
e de l Histoire de l Art
Franc ais, 1922: 398. See also John Ingamells, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures III: French before 1815 (London: Trustees of the Wallace
Collection, 1989), 18384, 19596; and Clive Hart and Kay Gilliland Stevenson, Heaven and the Flesh: Imagery of Desire from the Renaissance to the
Rococo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 172.
35. Louis-Marie Lebas de Courmont sale catalog, May 26, 1795, no. 40: une
l

eg
ere

ebauche du subject dune jeune fille sur son lit qui fait danser son
chien.
36. Sale catalog, August 10, 1795 (23 thermidor, an III), no. 77: une jeune
fille couch

ee sur le dos et dans un lit voluptueux, samusant avec un joli
epagneul auquel elle present une gimblette. . . . For a complete listing of


sales, see Rosenberg, Fragonard, 232.
37. Subsequent to reading my article in manuscript form, Patricia Simons
decided to pursue the sexual significance of the gimblette in Fragonards
paintings. She is currently preparing a short article on this topic.
38. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, L art du XVIIIe sie cle, 3 vols.
(Paris: Biblioth
eque-Charpentier, 1910), vol. 3, 275: Cest la volupt

e
ing

enue de cette heure badine, les

ebats libres et souriants du r

eveil, quil
a voulu peindre dans ce joli tableau: le bonnet

echapp

e, les yeux gais et
pleins de ses seize ans, un large sourire a la bouche, une fillette sans souci
de ce que montre sa chemise pliss

ee en ceinture, soutient en lair, au
bout de ses pieds, un caniche fris

e a figure de conseiller en perruque . . .
cest la Gimblette, une fleur d

erotisme toute fra^che, toute franc aise. . . .
39. Noted in Rosenberg, Fragonard, 235. This catalog reproduces the various
paintings attributed to Fragonard known as La gimblette and now lost or in
private collections. There are several print versions of Fragonards scenes,
with and without the gimblette, held at the Mus

ee du Louvre and the Biblioth
eque Nationale de France, Paris: two by Bertony (both with the ring
biscuit) and one by Victor-Marie Picot (without the ring biscuit) produced in England and bearing the title New Thought, which demonstrates the international market for these subjects. Another print version
by Laurent Guyot is recorded in Roger Portalis and Henri B

eraldi, Les
graveurs du dix-huitie me sie cle, 3 vols. (1881; New York: Burt Franklin,
1970), vol. 2, 36667. Imitations of Fragonards scenes are found in print
variants by Augustin-Claude-Simon Legrand and Nicolas Lavreince. Clodion found a market for small, sculpted versions of Fragonards basic figural arrangement of girl and dog, an example of which is in the Mus

ee
des Arts D

ecoratifs, Paris. These are all dated to the late eighteenth
century.
40. Cette pi
ece

etait aussi connue sous le nom de La Caroline, par allusion a
des femmes auxquelles certain vice

etait attribu

e, et au Carlin qui joue un
role important dans le tableau. . . . Mais pourqui la Gimblette? Parce que
la Gimblette

etait une petite patisserie sous forme danneau dont les
petits chiens

etaient aussi friands que leurs petites ma^tresses, et que M.
Fragonard

etait un libertin! L Interm
e diaire des Chercheurs et Curieux,
August 10, 1875, 473.
41. Henri Rochefort, La collection de M. Henri Rochefort, Les Arts, no. 43
(July 1905): 222, at 10.
42. Jules Renouvier, Histoire de l art pendant la R
e volution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1863),
vol. 1, 167.
43. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Genre and Sex, 214) has referred to the
corporeal alcove in Girl Making Her Dog Dancelarge, pliant, and palpable pouch of her beds canopy resembles the interior of a giant uterusthe girls pose is thus treated like a fetus in the womb.
44. Lynda Neade, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Desmond Collins and John Onians, The Origins
of Art, Art History 1, no. 1 (1978): 125.
45. Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, in Sade, The Complete Justine,
Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings / The Marquis de Sade, trans.
Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,
1965), 491.
46. Alan Corkhill, Kant, Sade and the Libertine Enlightenment, in Libertine
Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and License in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Cryle
and Lisa OConnell (Houndsmill, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 62.
47. Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 489.
48. Julie Peakman, Bodily Anxieties in Enlightenment Sex Literature, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 1 (2005): 1930.
49. Samuel Auguste David Tissot, L onanisme: Dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (Lausanne: Chez Franc ois Grasset, 1760).
50. Mary Sheriff, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), chap. 5.
51. Melissa Percival has drawn together recent technical evidence confirming that this group of half-figure paintings of individual sitters,

208

ART BULLETIN JUNE 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 2

often referred to as fantasy portraits, were done fast, but not necessarily in an hour or a single sitting. Percival, Fragonard and the Fantasy
Figure: Painting the Imagination (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 20
21. The sitter in Portrait of a Woman and Her Dog is identified in a


recently discovered sketch as Marie-Emilie
Coignet de Courson. See
Carole Blumenfeld, Une fac
e tie de Fragonard: Les r
e v
e lations d un dessin


retrouv
e (Paris: Editions Gourcoff Gradenigo, 2013); and Jennifer
Milam, review of Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure, by Melissa Percival,
H-France Review 14 (2014): no. 120.
52. The self-conscious artistic gesture is compounded by a reference to Peter
Paul Rubenss portrayal of Marie de M
edicis in Henri IV Entrusts the Rule of
His Kingdom to the Queen (Mus
ee du Louvre, Paris)all part of the painterly performance.
53. As Nicholas Chare has argued, Medium is never gender neutral. See
Chare, Sexing the Canvas: Calling on the Medium, Art History 32, no. 4
(2009): 66489. In the section The Macho Impasto, Chare describes
how oil paint was encoded with seminal meanings.
54. Posner, Watteau: A Lady at Her Toilet, 7779.
55. There are numerous examples of lapdogs accompanying seductive
women in northern and southern European painting from the fifteenth
to the eighteenth century. In addition to works by Jan van Eyck and Lucas
Cranach in Netherlandish art, Jan Steen and Frans van Mieris depicted
dogs with women in bedrooms in Dutch painting. Venetian artists such as
Titian, Vittori Carpaccio, and Paolo Veronese also represented courtesans and goddesses, such as Venus, with small dogs.
56. Andr

e Girodie, Un peintre de f^e tes galantes: Jean-Fr
e d
e ric Schall (Strasbourg:
A. & F. Kahn, 1927), 1920. See also Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman
in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 3536.
Although Goodmans concern is with the eroticization of letter paintings,
she similarly finds a connection between this type of work and an experience of volupt
e , as described by Diderot in response to a work by Greuze.
57. Friedrich Melchior Grimm referred to it as le premier tableau du Salon
in the Correspondance litt
e raire, ed. U. K
olving (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre


International dEtude
du XVIIIe Siecle, 2006), vol. 1, 66. Oudrys painting would have been known to Fragonard.
58. See Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century
Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Katharine MacDonogh, Prison Pets in the French Revolution, History Today 46 (August
1996): 3642.
59. The terms used by Diderot correspond most closely to the contemporary
breeds of a toy spaniel, a greyhound, and two pugs, but this is not exact.
60. Denis Diderot, Les bijoux indiscrets ([Paris:] Monomotapa, 1748), chap. 26:
Coll

e sur les cuisses de sa ma^tresse, les yeux enflamm
es, le poil h

eriss

e,
et la gueule b

eante, il fronc ait le muffle, et pr
esentait a lennemi deux
rangs de dents des plus aigues.
61. Ibid.: Sindor sen empara, mais non sans effusion de sang.
62. Ibid.: Sachez, une bonne fois pour toujours, que mes chiens

etaient
longtemps avant vous en possession de mon lit, et que vous pouvez en
sortir, ou vous r

esoudre a le partager avec eux.
63. Ibid.: quelle aimait ses chiens; quils lamusaient; quelle avait pris go^
ut
a leurs caresses. . . .
64. This threat assumes additional currency in Diderots writing when it is
connected with his philosophical contemplation of the connection
between human and nonhuman animal species in Le r^eve dAlembert,
138: Every animal is more or less a man [Tout animal est plus ou moins
homme].
65. Diderot, Les bijoux indiscrets, chap. 25: ils amusent quelquefois, et ne nuisent jamais. Si on leur fait des caresses, cest quelles sont sans consequence. Dailleurs, croyez-vous, prince, quun amant se content^at dun
baiser tel quune femme le donne a son gredin?
66. Comte de Buffon, Natural History (London, 1797), 286.
67. Bonnet, Essai de psychologie, 326: Les Caresses que le Chien fait a son
Ma^tre, apr
es une absence, sont lexpression du Rapport qui est entre
lObjet & les Sensations agr
eables quil a fait
eprouver au Chine. Le rappel de ces Sensations par lObjet monte la machine; elle jou
e. Nous nous
plaisons a trouver dans cette Scene les traits les plus touchans: nous substituons sans y penser lHomme au Chine.
68. The exception is Ganymede, a common subject in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art that is rare in eighteenth-century painting. Some notable examples exist in prints, but as reproductions of works by Roman and
Italian Renaissance artists. See Jupiter s appuie sur Ganime de from Peintures
de la Ville Altoviti a Rome, invent
e es par Michelange, Peintes par Giorgio Vasari
et Grav
e es par Thomas Piroli: Faisant partie de la Calcographie Piranesi (Paris:
F. Piranesi, 1807), pl. 11, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York.
69. To amuse himself and the other attendants at the coucher du roi, the marquis de Champcenetz bet that he could make the cat dance in the few

moments that the king would be out of the room. Amid the laughter that
followed, Champcenetz took out a flask and rubbed l eau de mille fleurs
(an alcohol-based medicine) on the cats paws. Once it set in, the sting of
the alcohol caused the cat to jump wildly around the room. When the
king came in and saw what was happening, he asked Champcenetz what
he had done to his cat. After hearing the tale, Louis XV replied,
Gentlemen, if you are going to amuse yourselves, I ask that it is not at the
expense of my cat. Jean-Nicolas, comte Dufort de Cheverny, M
e moires, 2
vols. (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1909), vol. 1, 122. See also Olivier Lafont,
Leau de mille-fleurs qui fit danser le chat du roi, Revue d Histoire de la
Pharmacie, 87e ann

ee, no. 323 (1999): 34346.
70. Regardless of whether or not this happened regularly, renovations of the
kings private apartments at Versailles in 1738 ensured close proximity
between the king and his hunting dogs, so that he could see to their care
personally. Within the newly constructed petits appartements, access was
established between the kings bedchamber and the cabinet des chiens, a
room occupied by the kings valets, who in turn shared the space with the
kings favorite dogs. Pierre Verlet, Ch^
a teau de Versailles (Paris: Fayard,
1985), 227, 44244.


71. Elisabeth-Charlotte,
duchesse dOrl

eans, The Letters of Madame, trans. and
ed. Gertrude Scott Stevenson, 2 vols. (London: Arrowsmith, 192425),
vol. 1, 121.
72. Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, Chien, in Diderot and dAlembert, Encyclop
e die, vol. 3, 328: ils partagent avec nous nos logements; ils nous
accompagnent lorsque nous en sortons; enfin ils savent plaire au point
quil y a bien des gens qui en portent avec eux, & qui les font coucher
dans le meme lit.
73. Ibid.: Les males saccouplent en tout tems; les femelles sont en chaleur
pendant environ quatorze jours; elles portent pendant soixante outsoixante & trois jours, & elles rentrent en chaleur deux fois par an.
74. In matters of law in late eighteenth-century France, zoophilia and bestiality were subsumed into other forms of sexual crimes against nature.
Before formal sodomy laws in 1791 were established, bestiality was punishable by death (both person and animal). It is worth noting, however,
that putting the animal to death was not the result of any assignment of
blame to the animal but is more in accordance with the antique idea that
an animal was incapable of crime, and therefore it was killed because the
sight of this animal might excite another person to commit the same act.
See John Disney, Of Sodomy and Bestiality, in A View of Ancient Laws,
against Immorality and Profaneness (Cambridge, 1729), chap. 10, in Rictor
Norton, ed., Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A
Sourcebook, January 30, 2011, http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen
/1729disn.htm.
75. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 11 (1788), 344: Le chien de berger est le
h

eros de la race; il est utile. Le dogue suit & defend son ma^tre; cest
encore un bon chien. Je le distingue, je lui fais grace; mais je souhaite la
mort a tous ces petits chiens dont senvironnent les femmes, & qui sont
aupr
es delles des enseignes de d

epravation.
76. Ibid.: Comment baiser la bouche que l
eche incessamment la langue de
ces petits animaux col
eres & vicieux? Quand je vois sortir du lit dune
jolie femme un

epagneul, qui en fait sa loge, je nai plus envie dy entrer.
Comment les femmes qui se rapprochent tant des chiens, osent-elles
offenser a ce point la d

elicates de leurs semblables?
77. Katharine MacDonogh presents a thorough survey of pet keeping in
European court culture in Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court
since the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate, 1999). Although the focus is
on a slightly later period, there is some discussion of pet keeping during
the ancien r

egime in Kete, Beast in the Boudoir. For an analysis of picturing
dogs during this period, see Richard Thomson, Les Quat Pattes: The
Image of the Dog in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art, Art History 5,
no. 3 (September 1982): 32438.
78. Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1782), vol. 3: 13334: Mais ce quon ne voit
qua Paris, ce sont de grands imb

ecilles qui, pour faire leur cour a des
femmes, portent leur chien publiquement sous la bras dans les promenades & dans les rues.
79. Katharine MacDonogh, Prison Pets in the French Revolution, History
Today 46, no. 8 (August 1994): 3642. Kete (Beast in the Boudoir, 41) also
mentions the killing of pedigree breeds at the Place de Gr
eve, but the
original reference quoted (Almanach des h^o nnetes femmes pour l ann
e e 1790
[Paris: de limpr. de la Soci

et

e Joyeuse, 1790] does not include this
source material. Almanach, 25, nevertheless provides some Notes historiques describing illicit sexual practices with little dogs, which are linked
with the behavior of ancient courtesans listed in Franc ois Rabelais, Erotica
verba, in Oeuvres (Paris: Ledentu, 1835), 587. The origin of Ketes reference to the murder of dogs at the Place de Gr
eve is Girodie, Un peintre de
f^e tes galantes, 20. Girodie mentions that little dogs, according to the
almanacs . . . were burned in the Place de Gr
eve for a crime that good
morals prohibit from being revealed [petits chiens, dits lexicons . . . furent
br^
u l
e s en Place de Gre ve a cause d un crime que les bonnes murs d
e fendent de
r
e v
e ler]. There were a number of motions in 1793 that sought to

ROCOCO REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERSPECIES SENSUALITY

eradicate dogs with no practical purpose (that is, all but guard dogs). See
Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: 17931795
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 127. The killing of dogs during the
Revolution is considered from a sacrificial perspective by Jesse Goldhammer in The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 46.
80. Genevi
eve Boll
eme, Les almanachs populaires au XVIIe et au XVIII sie cle:
Essai d histoire sociale (Paris: Mouton, 1969).
81. Almanach des h^o nnetes femmes pour l ann
e e 1790, 6: Les dames franc aises
ont port

e la lubricit
e aussi loin que les grecques et les romaines. . . .
82. Ibid.: mais notre langage na pas fait les m^emes progres que notre libertinage; nous puiserons donc dans le dictionnaire de volupt

es des anciens
des expressions simples et
energiques.
83. Ibid., 25: Les phicidisseuses pr
etendent que lespece humaine nest pas
seule capable dexciter le plaisir. Elles tremblent aux approaches dun
homme vigoureux, et leur pr
eferent la langue delicate de leurs petits
chiens. Envions le Bonheur de ces petits animaux, ils sont souvent plus
aim

es que nous.
84. Annie Scottez-De Wambrechies, ed., Boilly 17611845: Un grand peintre
franc ais de la R
e volution a la Restauration, exh. cat., Mus
ee des Beaux-Arts
de Lille (Lille: Le Mus
ee, 1988), 3233. The catalog entry for the painting
describes Boillys treatment of his subject as typical for a bourgeois professional and inspired by the art of seventeenth-century Dutch masters.
While detailing the furniture and other accessories, the entry is silent on
the presence of the dog in the scene. A more recent exhibition catalog
includes only a skeletal entry on the painting: Annie Scottez-De Wambrechies and Florences Raymond, eds., Boilly (17611845) (Lille: Palais des


Beaux-Arts; Paris: Editions
Nicolas Chaudun, 2011), 117.
85. One example is the Portrait of Louis XIII attributed to Ferdinand Elle (ca.
1634, Chiswick House, London), showing a full-length portrait of King
Louis XIII with his pet spaniel. As the spaniel was a breed that was also used
in the hunt, there is some potential for multiple meanings to be attached to
the dog in this painting. Undoubtedly, there is a residual connection with
the hunt, as the leisure pursuit of princes, but the dog is simultaneously
emblematic of the kings authority over the natural world and representative of his compassion for all living creatures in his kingdom. While the
man directly addresses the beholder, the dog looks away from the viewer
and toward the king, a diffident pose that directs response toward subservience. Another early example is Titians Portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of
Mantua (152930, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), who, like Louis
XIII, apparently had a keen fondness for his dogs. Edgar Peters Bowron,
An Artists Best Friend: Dogs in Renaissance and Baroque Painting and
Sculpture, in Bowron et al., Best in Show, 137, at 89. Bowrons essay provides a useful survey of the relationship between dogs and people.
86. John Caius, De canibus Britannicis, published as Of Englishe Dogges, trans.
Abraham Fleming (London: Richard Johnes, 1576) is a book that
describes the Spaniel Gentle in England by a second name,
Comforter. For the longer history of lapdogs in Renaissance culture,
see Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties.

209

87. In mid- to late eighteenth-century portraiture, specifically of English sitters, there are examples of men with their dogs that evoke sensibility.
Often these combine an air of detachment on the part of the male sitter
with feelings of emotion produced by the positioning and responsiveness
of the animal. Jeanette Hoorn is currently working on this problem as
part of her research into dogs and portraiture, with a particular focus on
Thomas Gainsboroughs An Officer of the 4th Regiment of Foot (ca. 177680,
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). Another example is Pompeo
Girolamo Batonis General Lord George Henry Lennox (1755, Goodwood
Collection, Chichester, U.K.), which suggests affection between the sitter
and his pet through gesture and the sense of touch. Significantly, in both
paintings, the dog is a full-size spaniel with the same residual connection
to the hunt as in the portrait of Louis XIII, rather than a lapdog. In this
regard, the Boilly portrait remains distinctive.
88. St

efane-P [Paul Coutant], Autour de Robespierre: Le conventionnel Le Bas,
d apre s des documents in
e dits les m
e moires de sa Veuve (Paris: E. Flammarion,
1901), 107: Il avait un chien, nomm

e Brount, quil amait beaucoup; la
pauvre b^
ete lui

etait tr
es attach

ee. Some secondary sources on Robespierre describe this dog as a great Danish hound, but I have not found
any primary source materials that confirm this identification of the breed.
89. Ibid.
90. Robespierre (to Mlle Duhay?), Arras, June 6, 1788, in Charles Vellay,
Une lettre in

edite de Robespierre, Annales Revolutionnaires 1, no. 1
(Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908): 1079: Le petit chien que vous

elevez
pour ma soeur est-il aussi joli que le mod
ele que vous mavez montr

e, quand je passai a B

ethune? Quel quil soit, on laccueillera toujours avec distinction et avec plaisir. On peut m^
eme dire que,
quelque laid quil puisse ^
etre, il sera toujours joli. Un homme
desprit nest jamais laid, disait une femme c

el
ebre, je crois que
c

etait Mme de S

evign

e. On pourrait dire sans doute de votre chien
quelque chose dhonn^
ete et de vrai, dans le m^
eme genre. Also
quoted in Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2012), 48.
91. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 11 vols. (Paris:


Soci

et

e des Etudes
Robespierristes, 19122007), vol. 3, 3035. In visual
imagery, the erotic symbolism of birds was commonly deployed. See Philip Stewart, Engraven Desire: Eros, Image and Text in the French Eighteenth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972), 272.
92. McPhee, Robespierre, 3.
93. Susan L. Siegfried has analyzed Boillys extended engagement with art
making as a dynamic interpretative process, involving viewers through
emblematic codes that were well worn and open to a range of meanings.
See Siegfried, The Art of Louis-L
e opold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic
France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 186.
94. The dating of the painting has been debated, at times assigned to 1791.
While Scottez-De Wambrechies, Boilly 17611845 is most convincing in
setting the date at 1783, a date during the Revolutionary period would
serve to reinforce an interpretation of the lapdog as an emblematic
critique of the ancien r

egime.

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