Singerie: The Concert
Christophe Huet·c. 1739
Historical Context
Christophe Huet was a French decorative painter and engraver who specialised in the singerie genre — decorative compositions featuring monkeys dressed in human clothes and engaged in human activities, an elaborate visual joke on human pretension popular in Rococo interiors. The Singerie: The Concert, ca. 1739, belongs to his series of musical singeries in which monkey musicians perform with the earnest self-importance of Parisian concert performers. Singerie decoration had been developed at Chantilly and Versailles from the 1720s onward, and Huet was its supreme practitioner — his designs for tapestries and painted decorative panels were widely reproduced. The concert scene allowed the genre's central joke to take a specifically cultural form: monkeys imitating the fashionable Parisian concert life of the eighteenth century with the solemnity of those who take entertainment seriously.
Technical Analysis
Huet designs the singerie composition with the decorative lightness and wit that the genre demanded — the monkey musicians posed with absurd earnestness against a light rocaille background. The handling is graceful and fluid, the animals' expressions carefully observed to suggest both animal reality and human comedy.
Provenance
Commissioned by François Jules Duvaucel [1672-1739] for a salon in the Château de La Norville, France; remained in the château through successive owners until sometime between 1901 and 1906; (Fauché, Paris), by 1907;[1] purchased 1922 through (André Carlhian, Paris) by Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice [1875-1956] and his wife, Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice [1861-1937], for the dining room of their Fifth Avenue manion, New York;[2] by inheritance 1956 to Mrs. Rice's children, George D. Widener, Jr. [1889-1971] and Eleanor Widener Dixon [1891-1966, Mrs. Fitz Eugene Dixon]; gift 1957 to NGA. [1] The history of the decoration of the Château de La Norville is thoroughly described by Bruno Pons, _Grands décors français, 1650-1800: reconstitués en Angleterre, aux Etats-Unis, en Amérique du Sud et en France_, Dijon, 1995: 221-426. See also Abbé A.E. Genty, _Histoire de la Norville et de sa seigneurie_, Brussels and Geneva, 1885: 112-129. [2] Mrs. Rice was born Eleonor Elkins in Philadelphia. Her first husband was George Dunton Widener, who perished with their elder son, Harry, in the sinking of the _Titanic_ in 1912. She married Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice in 1915. Her two other children with Widener inherited the New York residence after Dr. Rice's death. Records of the Carlhian firm are in the Special Collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, accession no. 930092. Copies of documents referring to the wall paneling are in the NGA curatorial files; see in particular the letter of 6 July 1923, from André Carlhian to Mrs. Rice, in which he tells her that "the Pineau boiserie which you bought from Fauché comes from the Chateau de la Norville, near Arpajon - about 20 miles from Paris." Both the six Huet paintings (NGA 1957.7.1-6) and the paneling (_boiserie_) by Pineau were given to the National Gallery of Art; the latter is NGA 1957.7.7.
