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This Pierre Baudouin (1709–1787), bourgeois de Paris (the name is common, and he is not necessarily a relation of Boucher’s son-in-law), is discovered again in a series of documents in the registres de tutelles concerning his 36-year-old daughter Félicité-Marguerite, born mentally retarded but looked after by her mother, Jeanne-Marguerite Le Clere, until the latter’s death resulted in a need for formal certification (“interdiction”). But the burial entry in the registers of Saint-Eustache for 1.iv.1761 (the day after Mme Labille’s death) reveals three new facts: her age – she was 44 – unsurprising, but hitherto unremarked that her burial was attended not by her widower, but by a son, Edme, of whom Passez makes no mention and that another witness was “Pierre Baudoin, garde meuble du roi.” (They were married at Saint-Sulpice on 16.ii.1740.) I will leave it to others to explore the psychological significance of losing a mother at the age of 12 rather than 19 (as previously thought), particularly for an artist renowned for her “neuf muses au berceau”, the female pupils she protected. Whatever the challenges, Labille’s involvement in high finance and court circles must have been far more important for his daughter’s social success than would have been the opportunity to sell ribbons with a girl who had not yet progressed far on that ladder.Īnother reason for Labille’s retirement in 1761 (when he was aged 56 or so) was that (contrary to Passez, who gives a much later date), his wife, Marie-Anne Martin or Saint-Martin, had just died. And this I suggest is what Labille-Guiard meant by “toutes ses pertes” in the impassioned letter she wrote to the comtesse d’Angiviller in 1783 about the distress caused to him by the pamphlets attacking her. He was still active at the lottery, although by then the idea was struggling, as we can see from documents such as this memorandum proposing revisions to the Loterie royale militaire bearing his signature in 1776:ĭespite the various attempts to fix its problems, the lottery was never a success. Shortly before, he was described in another document as “receveur de la loterie de l’École-militaire.” This was the ambitious scheme suggested by Casanova and promoted by Mme de Pompadour and Joseph Paris-Duverney for financing a military education for impoverished nobility: Labille had been involved from the start, as this entry in the Journal historique et littéraire for June 1758 makes clear:īy 1764 he was also “directeur de la Poste de Paris”. So it is unlikely that (as Passez surmised) Labille-Guiard rubbed shoulders with the royal favourite for any length of time. He was indeed a marchand mercier, but it doesn’t seem to have been noticed that, on 18.ix.1761, he sold the “fonds de boutique de mercier” at the rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, to a Mlle Josèphe Blondelu, fille majeure d’un marchand mercier.

Claude-Edme Labille is normally presented as the fashion shopkeeper, best known for employing the future Madame Du Barry in 1761–62. įirst, her father – whose bust (by Pajou) you can just see peeping out behind the canvas above.

You can follow the discussion by referring not only to the Labille-Guiard article in the main Dictionary of pastellists, but also to supplementary documents such as the Labille genealogy. Perhaps you will think them all trivial but the theme that emerges (here, and in so much of the archival work I do) is just how close-knit were the artistic families in the ancien régime.

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But despite recent publications, some basic facts about her family seem to have escaped everyone (the assumption seems to have been that Marie-Anne Passez, author of the 1973 monograph on the artist, will have found anything worth gleaning from archives), and so I’ve gathered together some observations I’ve made in the hope that future publications will make full use of these minutiae. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (whose famous self-portrait with pupils, above, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, having been rejected by the Louvre in 1878 as “sans valeur artistique”) needs no apology for detailed attention – although, as a female artist, she is sure not to lack it from a new generation of academics for whom gender seems to dominate other considerations.

La poste rue dupin paris