Jean-Honoré Fragonard was one of the best-known French painters of the 1700s, known for his slightly risqué representations of upper class life in Paris before the French Revolution. Why was one of his pictures showing men and women playing blind man’s buff printed and published in Hartford, Connecticut during the 1830s? Why was court painter Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Napoleon Crossing the Alps reproduced in no fewer than five different prints by Hartford’s Kellogg brothers?
Americans had had a fondness for France ever since the French King Louis XVI sent French troops to aid the cause of American independence during the Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette enjoyed enormous popularity in America, both as the young aide-de-camp to George Washington, and also when he revisited the United States in 1824, as an old man. The Kelloggs’ portrait of the elderly Lafayette, which shows him visiting the tomb of Washington, was based on a painting by the American artist and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse.
These and other French subjects in Kellogg prints were probably due to the presence of a French lithographer in the Kellogg’s Hartford print shop, from the 1830s well into the 1860s. Joseph Buat learned how to make lithographs in Paris before emigrating to Boston in the 1820s, possibly in response to the turbulent politics of that decade. Heroic depictions of Napoleon abound in Kellogg prints from the 1830s. These probably reflect Buat’s influence, and suggest that he was no friend to the restored Bourbon monarchy. Later Kellogg prints include scenes from the Revolution of 1848, when the monarchy was once more overthrown and republican government was restored to France, albeit briefly.
There is no evidence that Bastille Day—the French National holiday commemorating the fall of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789—was celebrated in Connecticut during the 1800s, but French art and politics were celebrated in dozens of lithographs printed and published in Hartford and distributed throughout the eastern United States. A selection of these prints may be viewed online at http://emuseum.chs.org:8080/emuseum/ or in person by visiting the research center at the Connecticut Historical Society at One Elizabeth Street in Hartford’s historic West End. The research center is open Thursday 12-5 and Friday and Saturday 9-5.
