The painting trade in Diderot's Salons

The institution of the Salons by the Académie royale de peinture, at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, probably did not have an economic objective from the outset : the king created academicians ; it was up to the academicians to offer in return the beginnings of their productions to the king¹, who in the early days was supposed to preside over the exhibition gallery². The Salon is about glory, not commerce  it is offered to the public as a representation of this immeasurable glory, not handed over to public judgment, evaluation, commerce.

From glory to commerce

Diderot never forgets this glorious principle. The preamble to the Salon de 1763 opens with this somewhat unusual monarchist benediction from his pen :

" Blessed be forever the memory of him who, by instituting this public exhibition of paintings, excited emulation among artists, prepared for all orders of society, and especially for men of taste, a useful exercise and a gentle recreation ; set back among us the decadence of painting by more than a hundred years perhaps, and made the nation more learned and more difficult in this genre!  " (Versini IV 237, DPV XIII 339-340³.)

Whether the praise is aimed at Louis XIV directly, or indirectly in the person of his minister Colbert, it is a reminder of the Salon's institutional objective : the competition must bring to the nation's attention the excellence of the painting that represents it ; the excellence of painters, stimulated by " the emulation " of the competition, must manifest itself in public judgment, by means of " useful exercise " and " gentle recreation " ; the progress of painting goes hand in hand with the artistic instruction of the public and the elevation of general taste. This system of glory rests on a whole series of equivalences: of the king and the nation he represents  of the nation and the painting exhibited before it  of the excellence of that painting and the acuity of public judgment.

.

But the competition, even instituted in the system of monarchical glory, introduces into it a second principle, which no longer has anything to do with the celebration of the king :

" It's the genius of one that makes the arts blossom; it's general taste that perfects artists. Why did the Ancients have such great painters and sculptors? It's because rewards and honors awakened talent, and because the people, accustomed to looking at nature and comparing the productions of the arts, were a formidable judge. " (Continued from previous.)

From the appeal to the memory of the founder to the convocation of the orders of society, from these separate orders to the entire nation constituted as a common body endowed with a " goût général ", from general taste to the people setting themselves up as " un juge redoutable ", we have slipped from celebration to judgment, from a court ceremonial to a popular tribunal, from a monarchical organization to a democratic organization of the Salon, which is not reduced here to the space of the square Salon in the Louvre where the works of academicians and approved artists were exhibited every two years, but deploys this space in the competition of visitors, in their exchanges, in their transactions, and in the interference of these transactions in the Salon with the very internal arrangement of the scenes of representation on the painters' canvas.

The public judges and the public buys  the sociability of the Salon is /// inseparable from its commercial vocation. Diderot evokes this in the Preamble to the Salon de 1767 :

" But these people who don't care about the glory of the nation, the progress and duration of art, public instruction and amusement, hear nothing of their own interest. How many paintings would have remained for years in the shadow of the studio, had they not been exhibited? Some people go to the Salon in idleness and boredom, where they develop or recognize a taste for painting. Another who has a taste for it, and had only gone there to find a quarter of an hour of amusement, leaves a sum of two thousand ecus. Such a mediocre artist announces himself in an instant to the whole town as a skilled man " (Versini IV 519, DPV XVI 59)

What Diderot denounces in those he pejoratively calls amateurs is not the mercantile interest in the works they collect, but the dissociation they make between " the glory of the nation " and " their own interest " : the Salon gives their value to the objects it exhibits precisely because it contributes to this glory that amateurs scoff at. Glory creates the market, and the market deconstructs glory. The Salon gives rise to an exhibition value that amplifies representation, but at the same time detaches it from its function of political and ideological glorification⁴. The global space of the glorious Salon is replaced by a series of fragmentary, individualized journeys, strolls, and the occasional objects one goes in search of. To exhibit is no longer so much to signify in one fell swoop the incomparable brilliance of a French school, as to offer a selection of works, and provide the viewer with something to discriminate, evaluate, buy.

A sociability of coalescence develops in the new space. One point in the Salon, one object suddenly crystallizes attentions, focuses desires, reorders journeys⁵, as evidenced by this anecdote Diderot reports from the Salon of 1753 :

" That's where this so beautiful dog by Oudry that decorates our synagogue on the right was waiting for the baron our friend. Until him, no one had looked at her. No one had felt its merit, and the artist was sorry. But, my friend, let's not shy away from recounting honest processes. It's even better than criticizing or praising a painting. The baron sees this bitch, buys her, and immediately there are all those disdainful, furious, jealous amateurs. They come; they obsess him; they offer him twice the price of his painting. The baron went to the artist and asked for permission to sell his dog for his own profit. No, monsieur. No," says the artist. I'm too happy for my best work to remain with a man who knows its price. I won't agree to anything. I won't accept anything; and my bitch will stay with you." (Continued from previous)

The Baron d'Holbach had spotted the Lice suckling her six pups, today one of Oudry's most famous canvases⁶. His choice produces value, and at the same time sanctions social recognition. In 1753, Oudry was 67 years old; he had been a professor at the Académie royale for ten years, so his career was not yet over: but Oudry, the son of a modest picture dealer on the Pont Notre-Dame (where Diderot explains that the crusts are sold), had begun his career at the old Académie de Saint-Luc. Unlike Boucher, a favorite of Madame de Pompadour and member of the Société du Caveau, or Natoire, who had just been appointed director of /// Although Oudry was admitted to the Académie de France in Rome and ennobled in 1753, he never made the trip to Italy and owes most of his income to the protection of an intendant of finance, Louis Fagon. Oudry was a hard worker, preparing his palette before dawn so he could start work at first light. The public space of the Salon assured him, through the gesture of d'Holbach fetching his Lice suckling her young, a recognition that had nothing to do with the favor of the Court, nor with those parvenus that Diderot detests, the Pompadour and her brother Abel Poisson, the future Marquis de Marigny (1754)⁷.

The three shops

There is thus a commerce of art, commoner, merchant, deserving, which is set up against the courtly game of fame. The word "commerce" must be understood in its classical triple sense of trade, conversation and seduction. Trévoux's dictionary begins its article Commerce as follows: " means in general reciprocal communication, & more particularly communication that men make among themselves of their goods, ordinarily by sale & by purchase⁸. " Exchange takes precedence over the economic game, and in a way precedes it : first there is a community that is constituted, a meeting space for this community, a certain exercise of speech that takes place in this space, based on reciprocity, equality, friendship :

" Commerce is also said of the correspondence, the intelligence that is between individuals, either for particular business or simply to maintain friendship. This Savant has commercé with all the clever people of Europe. These friends have a commerce of wit & friendship together. There is something easier & more polite, in the commerce of women, than in that of men. S. Evr. Our eyes made a commerce continual of eloquent glances. Vill⁹. " (Trévoux, 1771, II, 720¹⁰)

This is exactly what plays out in Diderot's Salons, what Diderot perceives of the social phenomenon of the Salons and recovers, reinvests to make work : on the basis of his exhibition reviews for the Correspondance littéraire, he places his friendship with Grimm, a friendship, which is an intelligence, a connivance between individuals, and is communicated via a private " correspondence ", or which pretends to be. He reminds us of this in the final lines of Salon de 1763 :

" And above all, remember that it is for my friend, and not for the public that I write. Yes, I'd rather lose a finger than upset honest people who've exhausted themselves with fatigue, to please us. Because a painting has not won our admiration, must it become the shame and torment of the artist? If it's good to be severe about the work, it's even better to spare the worker's fortune and happiness. Whether a piece of canvas is smeared, or a cube of marble spoiled, what is this loss compared to the bitter sigh that escapes from the heart of the afflicted man  these are faults that never merit public correction. Let us reserve our whip for the wicked, the dangerous fools, the ungrateful, the hypocrites, the concussionists, the tyrants, the fanatics and the other scourges of the human race; but let our love for the arts and letters, and for those who cultivate them, be true and as unalterable as our friendship. " (Versini IV 290, DPV XIII 414)

The art trade will rely on, will develop on this intimacy into which readers of the Correspondance littéraire, and beyond that the reader of published Salons, enter only by breaking and entering. Judgment, /// the appraisal of works of art is not a public judgment : not only must it not be confused with the political blame and punishment aimed at the " scourges of mankind ", but its decrees are pronounced from an intimacy (the commerce of friends unofficially sharing their admirations and severities) meant to remain rigorously separate from the other intimacy it necessarily targets, that of the artist, pathetically betrayed by the " bitter sigh that escapes from the heart of the afflicted man ".

This intimate trade on which the judgment of taste is based, and from which the public art market is constituted, is not only a trade of the mind and of conversation : it protects itself from publicity, it shelters itself in a mute complicity, it places itself in the background of public conversation, listening and as an invisible third party. He is both seducer and voyeur. Le Trévoux cites the trade in eloquent glances evoked by Mme de Villedieu. The pure fire of the passion of the nouvelles galantes should not deceive us: this trade frays with the filth of promiscuity, illicit contact and discourse, with the triviality of immediate exchange, far from the distinction of social orders and the ceremonial of glorious celebration at the heart of the Salons. It is in and through the intimacy of commerce that the shift from representation to evaluation takes place, from monarchical public space to commercial public space. Commerce is the device of this shift:

.

" The word of commèrce, in our language is of itself indifferent to good & to evil, & it is the tèrme we attach to it, or the matter it deals with, that determines it to one or the other ; thus we say with regard to morals, un bon commerce, un mauvais commerce, un commerce innocent, un commerce légitime, un commerce illicite, un commerce de débauche, un commerce d'esprit, un commerce de lettres. In all these examples, the term attached to commerce determines its meaning. In the following examples, it's the subject matter: such and such consorts with such and such a woman, whose conduct is not regular: he has commerce with her, they have commerce together. It is dangerous to have commerce with debauched women. " (Trévoux, 1721, II, 26¹¹.)

Commerce is a breeding ground for scoundrels  there's something of the Halle and whores in it, a vile " matter " that needs to be tracked down, flushed out, turned inside out. It's all about turning bad business into good, spotting the illicit in the legitimate, marking the boundary between wit and debauchery. Diderot describes this sociability at the Salon of 1765, in reference to a painting by Leprince that projects him in imagination to Russia, nostalgic for Parisian " commerce ":

" If I were in Moscow, do you doubt, dear Grimm, that the sight of a map of Paris would not give me pleasure ? I'd say  Here's the rue Neuve de Luxembourg, that's where the one I love lives  maybe he's thinking of me right now  he misses me, he wishes me all the happiness I can have away from him. This is the rue Neuve des Petits Champs  how many times we have dined in this little house ! It's the home of gaiety, jokes, reason, trust, friendship, honesty, tenderness and freedom. The kind hostess had promised the Genevan Aesculapius¹² to fall asleep at ten, and we were still chatting and laughing at midnight. This is Rue Neuve S^t Roch  it's where all the capital's honest and clever people gather. It's not enough to find this door open, to be titled or learned; you still have to be good. This is where business is safe; this is where history, politics and finance are discussed, /// belles-lettres, philosophy, it's there that we esteem ourselves enough to contradict ourselves. It's where you find the true cosmopolitan, the man who knows how to use his fortune, the good father, the good friend, the good husband  it's where any foreigner of any name and any merit wants to have access and can count on the gentlest and most polite welcome. And that nasty baroness¹³, is she still alive? Does she still mock many people who love her no less? Here's rue des Vieux Augustins¹⁴. There, my friend, I'd be speechless. I would lean my head on my two hands ; a few tears would fall from my eyes, and I would say to myself: She is here ; how is it that I am here ? " (Versini IV 410 ; DPV XIV 230-1)

In the midst of this lyrical condensation of Diderotian sociability, the little phrase goes almost unnoticed : " C'est là que le commerce est sûr ". Because intellectual connivance, the warmth of conversation and the intimacy of friends are assured, a trade can be established, a trade that Diderot frames with friendship with Grimm, who opens it, and love for Sophie, who closes it and makes him lose his speech : between the two, Mme d'Epinay's Salon, rue Neuve des Petits Champs, and Baron d'Holbach's, rue Royale Saint Roch, where all kinds of visitors meet, where all kinds of discussions heat up.

Conversation, dissemination

The art trade is therefore not directly accessed through the economic stakes of what is traded there. If the purchase and sale of works is indeed the ultimate goal, including for Diderot and Grimm who, through the Salons, offer their services as brokers¹⁵, the first approach to commerce is this conversation that seals a community of connivance. Right at the start of the Salon de 1761, Diderot complacently evokes Abbé Galiani's comments in front of a Vanloo : "  Whatever the charming abbé says, the Magdeleine in the desert is only a very pleasant painting. " (Versini IV 202 ; DPV XIII 218). Galiani, on the other hand, convinces Diderot when, amidst Challe's scabs, he unearths a Socrates to rave about: " Of Challe's three paintings, the expiring Cleopatra, the Socrates about to drink the hemlock, and the Warrior recounting his adventures, none is noticed, and that's wrong. The condemned Socrates is worth as much as any other piece in the Salon. I am very grateful to our Neapolitan for having unearthed it from the obscure corner where it had been placed" (Versini IV 217, DPV XIII 243). Should we share Mme Geoffrin's infatuation, who bought a Lecture by Vanloo even before it was exhibited at the Salon ? " It's been a long time since our friend Made Geoffrin's painting, known as la Lecture, was judged for you. For me, I find that the two young girls, charming in truth, with a soft and fine physiognomy, resemble each other too much in action, figure and age. The young man reading looks a little benign  one would take him for a robin in a mask suit. " (Versini IV 203 ; DPV XIII 219). In front of Deshays's Sainte Anne faisant lire la Sainte Vierge , Diderot reports a fellow painter, Dumont le Romain ' Il faut que je vous avoue une bonne fantaisie. You'll laugh, but what does it matter? Our friend Le Romain¹⁶ can't suffer angels because of their /// ailes " (Versini IV 216 ; DPV XIII 24).

Integrating the work of art into a trade of sociabilities means surrendering its valuation to the sharing of contradictory individual judgments. Discussion and dissent force reasoning, sharpen the eye and structure taste. Even when a work arouses general infatuation and crowds, like Greuze's L'Accordée de village, it's to feed the variety of remarks that fuse :

" This elder sister, is she a sister or a servant? If she's a servant, she's wrong to be leaning on the back of her master's chair, and I don't know why she envies her mistress's lot so violently. If she's a child of the house, why this ignoble air, why this negligence? Happy or unhappy, she had to be dressed as she should be at her sister's engagement party. I can see that people are mistaken; that most of those who look at the picture take her for a servant, and that the others are perplexed. I don't know if this sister's head isn't also that of La Blanchisseuse.

A woman of much wit remarked¹⁷ that this painting was composed of two natures. She claims that the father, fiancé and tabellion are indeed peasants, country folk; but that the mother, fiancée and all the other figures are from the Paris market. The mother is a fat fruit or fish merchant; the daughter is a pretty bouquetière. This observation is, at least, fine; see, my friend, if it is right. " (Versini IV 235 ; DPV XIII 271-2)

Diderot, who had a hard time making his way through the crowd to get to the painting¹⁸, begins by wondering alone about the equivocal expression of the young girl leaning on the family man's chair : the reader will soon discover that the noble questioning of the meaning of the work overlaps with a much more trivial questioning of how it was executed. Are the girl's ignoble and neglected appearance internal signs of social identification (she's not a master's daughter, but a servant), technical defects (Greuze would have neglected, missed this figure), or external signs of fabrication (referring to the real, ignoble model used by Greuze, a bouquetière, a whore) ?

The shift from a question of representation to a question of evaluation corresponds to the shift from the glorious Salon to the commercial Salon : the hermeneutic opening (the " que signifie ? ", always ironic and scathing in Diderot) is just the beginning of the ideological and social dissemination. The remark by a witty woman in the crowd of spectators introduces a first dissemination of points of view, between internal and external readings of the signs  the difference she establishes between models from the countryside and models from the hall unravels the painted scene into two incommunicable orders of society (the people and the rabble, rustic virtue and merchant vice), produces meaning in dissimilarity, points up the artifice of the moral world whose scenography Greuze deploys. It's not just a manufacturing flaw  it's the symbolic flaw in the whole ideological edifice on which the Salon's social artifact is built : there's only one space of representation, but scattered in the commerce of dissimilar worlds and judgments.

This dissemination, this dissimilarity emerge simultaneously as voices in the hubbub of the Salon and as figures in the Halle trivializing Greuze's peasant idyll : " La mère est une grosse marchande de fruits ou de /// fish; the girl is a pretty bouquetière. " It was the dowry of an Accordée, a trade duly controlled therefore and recorded by the village tabellion  now it's another trade, of a madam madam supplementing her income as a petty trader by the trade of her daughter sold as a model to painters like Greuze : of this other romance, barely hinted at here, Diderot will romanticize throughout opposite Baudouin's Modèle honnête (Versini IV 855 ; DPV XVI 622).

Trade disseminates and blurs the social body :

" It is a strange thing the diversity of judgments of the multitude that gathers in a Salon. After wandering there to see, one should also take a few turns to hear¹⁹. People of the world cast a disdainful and distracted glance at great compositions, and are arrested only by portraits of which they have the originals present. The man of letters does just the opposite. Passing quickly over the portraits, the large compositions fix all his attention. The people look at everything, and listen to nothing²⁰. It's when they meet on the way out that they're pleasant to hear. One says: Have you seen the Marriage of the Virgin? It's a beautiful piece! ... No. But what about the Portrait of the Countess? That's what's so delicious... Me, I just don't know if your countess has had herself painted. I would have fun²¹ around a portrait, while I have neither too many eyes nor too much time for Deshays' Joseph or Greuze's Paralytic.... Ah, yes; it's that man next to the stairs, about to be given extreme unction... It is thus that nothing passes without praise and without blame: he who aims at general approval, is a fool. " (Versini IV 245, DPV XIII 353)

The conversation is first of all a dissonance : nobody looks at works in the same way ; we don't see the same things, we don't judge them in the same way²². There is no " general approval ", because this art business that is being set up escapes all ritual, all protocol, all ceremony  it's anarchy, cacophony, general incomprehension and a dialogue of the deaf.

In this disorder, however, something crystallizes, federates around Greuze. His paralytic does not fall into the genre polarization first sketched out: " the great compositions " on the one hand, " the portraits " on the other, the heroic world and the worldly world. The paralytic is " that man standing next to the staircase, about to be given extreme unction "  the staircase in the Louvre's Salon carré and the man in the Greuzian scene are on the same level, the same space. The public interest merges the reality of the Salon and the imagined representation produced by Greuze  the new order promoted by this art trade emerges from this fusion, which is above all sensitive. We share a common emotion. And Diderot exclaims, taking Greuze as witness : " Que n'étais-tu à côté de cette jeune fille qui regardant la tête de ton Paralytique, s'écriria avec une vivacité charmmante : Ah, my God, how he touches me ; but if I look at him again, I think I'm going to cry ; and wasn't that young girl mine²³ ! I would have recognized her by that movement. When I saw this eloquent and pathetic old man, I felt, like her, my soul soften and tears ready to fall from my eyes. " (Versini IV 275 ; /// DPV XIII 394)

Fusion, penetration

If the real space of the Salon is disseminated in the hubbub, the diversity of paths, the variety of judgments, individualizing the aesthetic experience, the new sociability of the art trade federates and merges at the same time the common space of representation and judgment, of what is described and the place from which it is described. Listening to the stranger chatting, questioning and remarking next to you, entering into conversation with him, is only a preliminary to the other, more decisive break-in, which consists in establishing a trade with the characters on the canvas. Faced with a landscape by Loutherbourg that has moved him more than the others, Diderot imagines himself entering the canvas and sitting down in Grimm's company:

" Ah, my friend, how beautiful nature is in this little canton! Let's stop here. The heat of the day is beginning to make itself felt, let's lie down alongside these animals. While we admire the Creator's handiwork, we'll be entertained by the conversation between this shepherd and this peasant woman. Our ears will not disdain the rustic sounds of this herdsman who charms the silence of this solitude, and deceives the troubles of his condition, by playing the flute. Let's rest. You'll be next to me. I'll be at your feet, quiet and safe, like the dog who is the constant companion of his master's life and the faithful guardian of his flock. And when the weight of day has fallen, we will continue on our way, and in a more distant time, we will still remember this enchanted place and the delightful hour we spent there. " (Versini IV 268, DPV XIII 384.)

Diderot doesn't write in the Salon, but in the evening in his study. Both the Salon and the canvas are thus recreated by his imagination  the fatigue of the country walk and that of the visit to the exhibition merge, the unreality of Loutherbourg's shepherds is identified with Grimm's absence  a unique space is created, where the intimate network of complicities, friendships, conversations  aesthetic pleasure sustains the proximity of Diderot and Grimm : it's the same closeness that lays the two friends " alongside these animals ", that melts them into themselves so that through them they become mute listeners to the conversation of the shepherd and the peasant  from the mute rumination to the gallant conversation, then from this to the music of the herdsman, space unfolds through sensitive communication, through contacts from near and far. The herdsman is no further away: " je serai à vos pieds... comme ce chien "  the herdsman is now Grimm, to whom Diderot sticks as he stuck to oxen. Finally, the entire landscape is absorbed into the sensitive network²⁴ by the call to stroll : " when the weight of day has fallen, we will continue our route ".

The sensitive network is the vector of fusion²⁵, it organizes penetration : penetration into the geometric depth of the painted scene, but also penetration of judgment, which guarantees the competence of evaluation. At the start of the Salon de 1765, Diderot writes :

" If I have some thoughtful notions of painting and sculpture, it is to you, my friend, that I owe them. I would have followed the crowd of idlers at the Salon, I would have given as they a superficial and distracted glance at the productions of our artists; in a word I would have thrown in the fire a precious piece, or carried up to the nudes a mediocre work, approving, scorning, without investigating the reasons for my infatuation or my disdain. /// It was the task you set me that fixed my eyes on the canvas and kept me circling the marble. I gave the impression time to arrive and enter. I opened my soul to the effects and let them penetrate me. I have collected the sentence of the old man and the thought of the child, the judgment of the man of letters, the word of the man of the world and the words of the people; and if I happen to wound the artist, it is often with the weapon he himself has sharpened. I questioned him, and I understood what it was to have the finesse of drawing and the truth of nature. I conceived the magic of light and shadow; I came to know color; I acquired a feeling for flesh. Alone, I meditated on what I saw and heard, and these terms of art, unity, variety, contrast, symmetry, order, composition, character, expression, so familiar in my mouth, so vague in my mind, became circumscribed and fixed. " (Versini IV 291, DPV XIV 21-2)

The penetration is reciprocal : just as Diderot crosses the border of frames, wanders through landscapes and calls out to characters, or takes artists to task, so " l'impression " arrives and enters him, penetrates him, from the work as well as from the audience. The variety of words captured in the hubbub of the Salon is not the object of a discursive synthesis  it feeds a system of tensions, of intensities. Conceiving, knowing, acquiring, meditating : Diderot capitalizes on these intensities.

As you can see, the art business is not just the articulation of a discourse, a market and a sentient community. Dialectically overtaking representation, it reorders its device, i.e. the very conditions of scenic play : to compose a scene, there was a system of cuts and effractions, the detachment of a seeing without being seen, the distribution of a vague and a restricted, of a place of the real and a place of meaning. This old system is overturned by the art trade: a community polarizes, a sensitive contagion spreads, a color diffuses. It's not just an art market that's taking shape on the outside; it's also, on canvas and in marble, a principle of indiciality that's spreading. Referring to Hersé's rendez-vous galant with Mercure, exhibited by Lagrenée at the Salon of 1767, Diderot exclaims :

 

" The flesh of art struggles against the flesh of nature. Bring your hand close to the canvas, and you'll see that imitation is as strong as reality, and wins out over it in beauty of form. You'll never tire of looking at Hersé's neck, arms, throat, feet, hands and head. I put my lips to it, and I cover all these charms with kisses. O Mercury, what are you doing ? what are you waiting ? " (Versini IV 563 ; DPV XVI 134.)

On the edge of intimacy and publicity, commerce galant is a secret propagation of the privacies of the touch, invoked nonetheless on the refrain of a nursery rhyme thrown in the cantonnade, whose apostrophized addressee is the god of... commerce...

Bibliography

• Walter Benjamin, " L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée ", 1936, in Écrits français, ed. J. M. Monnoyer, Gallimard, Nrf, 1991
• Jean Chatelus, Peindre à Paris au dix-huitième siècle, ed. Jacqueline Chambon, 1991
• Thomas Crow, La Peinture et son public à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, trans. André Jacquesson, ed. Macula, 2000
• René Démoris, "Oudry et les cruautés du rococo", Revue des sciences humaines, no. 296, Bestiaire /// des Lumières, oct.-dec. 2009
• Dictionnaire universel françois et latin, contenant la signification et la définition Tant des Mots de l'une et de l'autre langue, avec leurs différens usages, que des Termes propres de chaque Etat & de chaque Profession [...], nouvelle édition revûe, corrigée & augmentée, [...] Imprimé à Trévoux, & se vend à Paris [...], 1721, avec approbation et privilège du Prince [de Dombes]
• Dictionnaire universel françois et latin, vulgairement appelé dictionnaire de Trévoux, contenant la Signification & la Définition des mots de l'une & de l'autre Langue, avec leurs différens usages ; les termes propres de chaque Etat & de chaque Profession [...], nouvelle édition, corrigée et considérablement augmentée, Paris, Compagnie des Libraires associés, 1771
• Diderot, Œuvres complètes, chronological edition, introductions by Roger Lewinter, Le Club Français du Livre, 1969-1973 (abbreviated CFL)
• Diderot, Œuvres complètes, Hermann, 1975-... (abbreviated DPV after its initiators, Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust and Jean Varloot)
• Diderot, Œuvres, edition established by Laurent Versini, tome IV, " Esthétique-Théâtre ", Laffont, Bouquins, 1996 (abbreviated Versini IV)
• Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Christian Michel, Daniel Rabreau, Martin Schieder (dir.), L'Art et les normes sociales au XVIIIe siècle, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, coll. Passages, vol. 2, 2001
• E. Meyer, Diderot, collection des Classiques populaires, Paris, Boivin, 1923
• Patrick Michel, Le Commerce du tableau à Paris dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, Septentrion, 2008
• H. N. Opperman (ed.), J. B. Oudry 1686-1755, cat. expo., Paris, Grand Palais, RMN, 1982
• Procès verbaux de l'Académie royale de peinture 1648-1792, Paris, Baur, 1875

Notes

Richelet (1680 and 1706) : " Commerce. s. m. Traffic in merchandise. (Le commerce ne va plus. The commerce is no longer good. To hear the commerce. Know the commerce.)

Trévoux (1721) : " Commerce. s. m. Trading, traffic in money, or merchandise, which one makes for the purpose of profiting on the discounts, sale, or exchange one makes of it. Commercium. Such a Banker makes a great commerce of money. This Merchant makes the /// wholesale trade; this one does it only in retail. The commerce of the East is that which is done by the Mediterranean at Alexandria, Smirne, Aleppo. The commerce of the Indies... " (II, 24)

It is mainly Diderot's correspondence with Falconet from 1769 to 1771 that gives us information about his activity as a broker for Catherine II. References are given in the so-called Lewinter edition of Diderot's Œuvres complètes, Paris, Club français du livre, 1971, abbreviated CFL.

Billet to Falconet dated March 6, 1769, CFL VIII 835 : " J'ai acquis à la vente Gaignat, pour sa Majesté Impériale, cinq des plus beaux tableaux qu'il y ait en France ". Diderot asks that the paintings commissioned from Vien and Machy be paid for. Diderot to Falconet, March 30 1769, CFL VIII 840-841 : Diderot returns to the charge to have the painters paid, against Galitzine who finds them too expensive. Catherine II to Falconet, May 10/21 (two dates because two calendars), p.846: Catherine II pays her debts to Diderot for the Gaignat sale. Diderot to Falconet, May 26, p. 849-850 : orders from Catherine II sent to Russia (see also letter of July 11, 1769, p. 860). Post scriptum of letter to Falconet of August 6, p. 876 : first steps for the purchase of M. de la Live's cabinet. Falconet to Catherine II, August 6/17, p.883: reception of paintings in Saint-Petersburg. Diderot to Falconet, September 7, p.898: the paintings sent to Catherine II were missing from the Salon, as were those by Laborde. Falconet to Catherine II, September 13/24, p.914: criticism of paintings received. Diderot to Falconet, November 15, p.956: proposes to buy two Van der Meulen belonging to Louis Michel Vanloo, from Carle's estate. March 15, 1770, p. 981: estimated price. Diderot to Falconet, March 20, 1771, CFL IX 1007-8 : " I enjoy the most decided public hatred, and do you know why ? Because I send you paintings " A challenge: to send " the entire Thiers gallery " (also known as " cabinet Crozat "). Falconet copies part of the letter to Catherine II on May 29, p.1033. Jean Robert to François Tronchin, March 28, 1771, p.1009-1010: Diderot negotiates the purchase of the complete Crozat collection, without a public sale. Falconet to Betski, April 3-14, 1771, p.1022: Cochin must be won over to this acquisition. Diderot to Grimm, July 1771, p.1048: thank Tronchin for his help in the negotiations. Walpole to Conway, July 31, p. 1057 : despite having been double-crossed by Catherine II for Crozat's paintings. Diderot to Jean-Robert Tronchin, August 13-14, 1771, /// p. 1063-4 : asks Tronchin to go and appreciate the collection in Paris, as a matter of course  he will be paid for it. Diderot to Tronchin, Oct-Nov 1771, p.1118: "We have a phantom competitor. It's M. le Duc de La Vallière. " Tronchin to Galitzine, Oct. 18, 1771, p. 1122 : not to become impatient with Diderot's negotiations (Galitzine's reply Oct. 23, p. 1125  Nov. 18, p. 1132). Galitzine to Tronchin, Dec. 4, p.1149: the paintings from the Braamcamp gallery purchased by Catherine II were lost in a shipwreck. Diderot to Tronchin, Dec. 8, p.1150: the Crozat sale is concluded. Tronchin announces it to Betski, Dec. 27, p. 1153.

///