Books, Prints, and Travel: Reading in the Gaps of the Orientalist

Transcription

BOOKS, PRINTS, AND TRAVEL: READING IN
THE GAPS OF THE ORIENTALIST ARCHIVE
ELISABETH A. FRASER
Writing to Madame de Récamier during an arduous voyage to the Levant in 1817
and 1818, the beleaguered Comte Auguste de Forbin pleaded passionately for
letters from her to alleviate the horrors of his journey: a difficult passage at sea,
the death of a hired travelling companion, heat and plague. ‘I need them, I have
been cruelly tested. . . . Never was a voyage more unfortunate,’ he wrote. Subsequent letters describe his ‘terrible fear’ of the plague in Constantinople (‘death is
everywhere’), and the ‘devouring heat’ of Egypt.1 And yet Forbin later made light
of the journey’s difficulties in his published account, the Voyage dans le Levant
(1819), a sentiment reinforced by François-René de Chateaubriand in his review:
‘The Comte de Forbin’s publication will finally prove that today one can do
quickly and easily what in the past demanded much time and effort.’2 Similarly,
the Comte Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul-Gouffier’s magnificent Voyage pittoresque de la
Grèce (1782–1822), one of Forbin’s primary models, gives no hint of the woes that
dogged its production: revolution, legal battles, work lost in transport, dishonest
printers, artists making off with commissioned drawings, and so on. To follow
Choiseul-Gouffier’s trail through the archives is to wade in rancour, regret and
litigiousness to a degree unsuspected by the reader of his serenely beautiful
Voyage pittoresque.3
In a departure from earlier writing on colonialism, scholars today expect to
find this kind of contradiction in the accounts of European travellers about in the
world. Travel was dangerous, difficult, expensive and politically fraught. Colonial
travellers were not always the self-confident vehicles of projections and ideas
passively absorbed by those they encountered as they are often assumed to be.
Travellers, even in colonial contexts, were involved in processes of negotiation
whose outcomes were not pre-ordained and in which the identity of all involved
was at stake and subject to pressure.4 Travel accounts correspondingly record
subterranean uncertainties, often inadvertently, as well as triumphant imperialist messages. European world travellers, Nigel Leask has recently maintained,
were more concerned with convincing their readers of their veracity than with
purveying imperial sentiments.5
Concerns about veracity were particularly at issue, I will argue in this article,
in a specific type of representation: the illustrated travel book, which came into
its own in the late eighteenth century. In that period, world travellers wrote about
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00610.x
342
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141–6790 . VOL 31 NO 3 . JUNE 2008 pp 342-367
& Association of Art Historians 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing,
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B O O K S , P R I N T S , A N D T R AV E L : R E A D I N G I N T H E G A P S O F T H E O R I E N T A L I S T A R C H I V E
places that most of their readers had themselves never seen, so that their
representations of the experience were not verifiable. Unsurprisingly, then, travel
accounts emphasize travellers’ authority and the authenticity of their representations. But authority and authenticity, I argue, are especially precarious
notions in the case of the illustrated travel book.
Taking a cue from new theories of reading generated by recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the history of the book, I will look at Forbin’s and
Choiseul-Gouffier’s volumes as paradigmatic examples of illustrated travel books,
seeing them less as ‘container[s] of meaning’ acting on the passive reader–viewer
than as ‘an occasion for operations both mental and physical’ in which the
reader–viewer can potentially be engaged.6 The plural nature of the illustrated
travel book – juggling word and image and coordinating the work of a large
number of writers, researchers, artists and printers – provides a radically alternative model for interpreting travel representation in the age of expansion. The
complexity of making and publishing illustrated travel books makes for inherently heterogeneous and multivocal productions that invite open-ended forms of
reading and viewing.
Spawned in part by European expansionism, by the late eighteenth century
there existed a thriving publishing industry for travel accounts, in which images
played an increasingly important role. Book historian Daniel Roche has shown
that there was a veritable explosion of books on travel beginning in the 1780s,
with 1,511 publications appearing in France alone from 1781 to 1800, compared
with a total of 703 in the preceding two decades. Yasmine Marcil reveals a
corresponding rise in attention to these publications in the periodical press of the
period.7 The many publications dealing with Mediterranean destinations sought
not only to disseminate knowledge about Mediterranean societies, but also to
define France’s sense of itself as heir to the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and an influential presence in the regions of the embattled Ottoman
Empire. From roughly 1780 to 1850, prints were a major feature of travel writings
of all kinds, from the archaeological to picturesque. Lavish engravings, and then
lithography from the early nineteenth century, became the norm. Of high artistic
quality and often folio-sized, these prints were produced at great expense and
disseminated in instalments to subscribers. However, most scholars who discuss
cross-cultural encounters in travel literature – anthropologists, literary critics,
and historians – ignore the substantial visual elements of these accounts.8
Despite the extensiveness, richness, and prominence of this compelling
visual material, art historians, too, have paid it scant attention, even in the vast
literature on Orientalism, which has mostly been focused on painting and
photography.9
Illustrated books have perhaps been overlooked because they are cumbersome
and inaccessible as visual objects: often large folio in format, multi-volume, with
each volume holding as many as 80–120 prints, it is difficult to experience them
in their entirety as objects, much less give them their due in close visual analysis.
The temporality built into their viewing, the physicality of the book object, the
juxtapositions of images and of images and text, the scale of images, along with
the visual density and texture of prints, are all part of the experience of reading
the illustrated book in the original, and are not easily conveyed by a few reproductions plucked out of context.
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2008
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1 J. P. Granger, Drovetti and his entourage measuring a fragment of a colossus in Upper Egypt.
Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 73 from Forbin, Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris:
Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
In my comparison of Forbin’s and Choiseul-Gouffier’s publications, I want to
consider the illustrated book as a particular type of object, distinct in the way
that it is viewed and consumed from an isolated image, such as a painting, and
therefore posing specific challenges to Orientalist verities.10 The interrelationship
of word and image, the complicated processes of print-making, the nature and type
of print-making process used, the multiplicity of authors involved in the making of
these books all need to be factored into the ways that we read travel literature. This
complexity bursts the containing frame of the books’ eastern inventory.
Near the end of Forbin’s Voyage appears a striking and somewhat surreal print
(plate 1): surrounded by his vividly portrayed entourage, the Italian savant and art
collector Bernardino Drovetti, sometime French consul to Egypt, measures a
colossal Sphinx’s eye.11 Although he intends the image as an homage to Drovetti,
‘a man who has brought so much honour to the name of France in Egypt’ [‘un
homme dont la conduite a fait tant d’honneur au nom français en Egypte’], the
figures’ haphazard poses around the massive head and their quirky expressions
give the image a humorous, mocking quality. The print, with its large-scale
figures and depiction of a European measuring a monument among indigenous
people, is unique in a volume otherwise dominated by panoramic views peopled
at most with unobtrusive native figures and almost never with Europeans. In
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contrast, Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce includes many engravings showing climbing, surveying Frenchmen of his entourage, without any
apparent irony (plate 2).
Forbin’s wry commentary on European travellers in Greece, which appears
earlier in his text, could almost serve as a gloss for his image of Drovetti. There he
encountered travellers, he says
drawing and measuring for many years, with the minute exactitude of the most scrupulous
commentators, these monuments that were the noble creation of genius. Unhappy slaves of
rules and of the slightest caprice of the ancients, they write volumes to reveal an error of three
lines committed in 1680 in the measure of an architrave; they become dull, fall asleep, and stay
eight years in Athens to draw three columns. [. . .] Only after many years do their sad watercolours acquire the highest degree of tedious perfection.12
Lacking Forbin’s jaundiced view of the Europeans’ propensity for measuring,
Choiseul-Gouffier juxtaposes his most picturesque views with plans, crosssections (plate 3) and measured statuary, all given with exact dimensions.
Forbin seems to comment again on the gap between view and measurement
in a passage describing a fastidious abbot who crisscrossed Palestine ‘measuring
all that presented itself, indiscriminately, whether of interest or not’. At the Pool
of Siloam in Jerusalem, shown in a sumptuous lithograph by Charles Bouton
2 J. B. Tilliard, engraving after J. B. Hilair, View of the interior of the Grotto of Antiparos. Plate 38 from
Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
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3 J. B. Tilliard, Plan and section of the Grotto of Antiparos. Engraving, plate 37 from ChoiseulGouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
(plate 4), the abbot nearly drowns as he walks through the freezing cold source in
order to measure it, Forbin’s text recounts, while Silwan Arabs, who use the pool
for the mundane act of washing, look on in amusement. Yet Bouton’s print shows
us neither amused Arabs nor an especially ridiculous abbot, focusing instead on
the picturesque qualities of the plunging view into the pool’s recesses, the
dramatic light of which is vividly captured by the velvet gradations of texture and
tone of lithography.
Forbin’s humorous comment on the mania for measuring appears to be selfirony – for who is the writer but a traveller obsessed with the antiquities and
natural wonders of the eastern Mediterranean lands? But his humour also tells us
something about his temporal relationship to what, by 1819, has become an
established genre: the illustrated travel account. Measurements could now be
seen as tiresome and the earnest collection of data pedantic. The differences
between Choiseul-Gouffier’s and Forbin’s approaches also introduce some of the
complexity of illustrated travel literature, where books can be markedly different
from each other even when they deal with the same geographic and cultural
terrain, and where images and texts within even a single publication often work
on different, sometimes competing registers.
By introducing these books with the theme of measurement, I mean to evoke
Edward Said’s notion of Orientalist knowledge as a form of containment. The
propensity for measuring stands for any number of other activities, such as
cataloguing, inventorying, collecting, displaying, all means by which the West,
Said argues, sought to discipline and dominate the East. Like many illustrated
travel books depicting the world beyond Western Europe, a primary epistemolo346
gical goal of both Forbin and Choiseul-Gouffier was to make visible and
Forbin’s
accessible an Other.13
account of his voyage in 1817 is a
nostalgic revisiting of the failed hopes
of the Napoleonic empire. In contrast,
Choiseul-Gouffier’s book is a protophilhellenic dissertation on the political advantages for the French nation
of commercial and political influence
in the Near East. While each is part of
an expansionist view of the Mediterranean, the specific character of
what they propose differs.
Both pioneers in the history of the
book, Choiseul-Gouffier and Forbin
saw their works’ visual component as
their main contribution to the literature on the eastern Mediterranean
and, as such, offer important case
studies of the relationship between
prints, books, travel and expansionist
politics. Both were quickly translated
(into English, Dutch, Italian and
German) and reissued in various
French and Belgian editions.14 Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque, with 4 C. Bouton, Interior of the Pool of Siloam in
its 126 pages of magnificent engrav- Jerusalem. Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 16
ings in a volume of only 204 pages, is a from Forbin, Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris:
richer, longer version of the illu- Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque
strated travel account than Forbin’s nationale de France.
Voyage dans le Levant, but it would be a
mistake to dismiss the latter as a merely derivative production by a frivolous
dabbler in the arts, as one author has characterized it.15 Forbin’s volume was one
of the first major books to use the new technique of lithography on a large scale,
containing 78 masterful large-format folio prints (plate 5), while Forbin, the
powerful Director of Royal Museums and a decorated artist in his own right, was
anything but a dabbler.16 Despite their differences, both Forbin’s and ChoiseulGouffier’s publications are structured so as to make the book itself a metaphor for
travel. As the imagined reader traverses the pages she also crosses lands and
moves through time; as the reader closes the book, so, too, does the voyage come
to an end, and reader and traveller return to France. It is through the positioning
of the viewer–reader as an armchair voyager that these books most serve the
epistemological function of rendering the East visible and accessible in the way
Said describes. This mode is particularly strong in Choiseul-Gouffier, who stresses
that the reader will follow his route in the act of reading, and provides a large
map of Greece and Turkey with a red line marking his path, asking the reader to
plot his place on this map.
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5 L. P. Baltard, Ramla, ancient Arimathea. Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 40 from
Forbin, Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque
nationale de France.
Choiseul-Gouffier wants ‘to make the reader travel with me, to have him see
all that I’ve seen, and to position him in the place where I myself was when I made
each drawing’.17 The sequence of images follows his trajectory – reinforced by an
added temporal component as the original subscribers received each successive
instalment over time – and his commentary links each image with a vessel, a
passage, a means of transportation. The sheer visual density of his book with its
many engravings gives the reader a palpable sense of the physical space of Greece,
a sense of travelling through it visually. The juxtaposition of interspliced text and
image representing so many places – at least twice as many as Forbin included –
also suggests the directed movement of a voracious traveller.
Moreover, Forbin’s images and many of Choiseul-Gouffier’s are structured
as ‘views’, as replications of the act of vision, invoking the voyager’s sight
(plate 6). Forbin’s text includes dramatic arrival scenes, pregnant with subjectivity, panoramas defined by his scanning eye. As his party approaches Athens,
Forbin describes his climb up a hill, through a forest, his heart beating violently:
‘I finally see it, this sacred city, this temple of liberty, of glory, and of the arts.’
Listing monument after monument as his eye scans the city, he compares
his exalted view of the Acropolis to a ‘tableau’.18 The day after arriving at
Milo, Forbin again climbs a mountain to a little monastery, from the gate
of which, he says, one can see the entire Greek Archipelago, with its ‘dazzlingly
blue sea’. There follows a long panoramic passage as he looks down from his
promontory:
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6 C. Thiénon, View of Bethlehem. Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 21 from Forbin,
Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
I perceived on the shore, near ancient burial sites, the ruins of Milo, a completely Venetian city,
whose steeples and domes seemed now only supported by palm trees. The trees pierce the
churches’ enclosures, their roots extend into the sepulchres, and their tops elegantly dominate
Corinthian capitals, a pale echo of them. These copses, so picturesquely placed among the
vestiges, have had the time to grow since the abandonment of this city, formerly so radiant,
now so insalubrious and almost entirely forgotten.19
This highly inflected view, suffused with melancholy, invokes the seeing I and the
feeling subject, anchoring the external world in the visual experience of the observer.
Both authors underline this eye-witness element of travel literature by referring to their presence, their thoughts, their experiences as they looked. Several
times Choiseul-Gouffier reassures the reader, ‘I myself saw all the places and all the
monuments whose drawings will be engraved; the only claim of this work is to
represent with the greatest exactitude the current state of the country.’20
Nonetheless, these repeated assurances about authenticity, linking the act of
seeing to the final representation, cannot overcome the absence of seamless
continuity in the actual production of images. Like most travel books, both
Forbin’s and Choiseul-Gouffier’s were complex productions, employing a host of
assistants.21 Choiseul-Gouffier’s staff included at least thirty artists, among them
print-makers and cartographers, as well as multiple authors and research experts.
Forbin, an artist himself, drew in situ as he travelled with his entourage of two
artists, Pierre Prevost and Mathieu Cochereau (who died early in the voyage) and
349
7 F. Dequevauviller, engraving after J. B. Hilair,
View of Island of Patmos. Plate 55 from
Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la
Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque
8 Berthault, engraving after Foucherot,
Cross-section of Tomb of Mylasa. Plate 87 from
Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce,
1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
350
an architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot (who
was severely injured shortly after
landing). Choiseul-Gouffier, a trained
amateur, relied frequently on his hired
travel companions, Jean-Baptiste Hilair
(a painter), François Kauffer (his private
secretary with training as an engineer)
and Jacques Foucherot (an architect), to
render what he saw. Another layer of
complexity is introduced when a cadre
of print-makers translated their sketches into prints. The resulting prints in
Choiseul-Gouffier’s publication are so
diverse in type, including costume
pieces, landscapes (plate 7), picturesque views, maps, technical plans,
elevations, cross-sections (plate 8) and
narrative scenes, as to override any
impression of a unified text with a
single author and voice.
With text and image often
working on different registers and
having different functions, this travel
literature is inherently complex and
heterogeneous. In one example, Choiseul-Gouffier writes of the sad and
disorderly appearance of the Island of
Argentière (Kimolos). Lacking vegetation, the rocky village is a heap of
miserable shacks in which women,
children, and beasts are crammed
together; the women’s dress is said to
be ridiculous, excessive, and dirty.
However, none of this barren chaos is
suggested by the illustration of this
passage (plate 9), a clearly organized
image with a crisply defined,
economical and orderly composition
full of verdant natural bounty.
With at least thirty-six artists
producing lithographs, Forbin’s book
had almost as many hands involved.
But lithography itself, which betrays
the hand of the maker, lends an even
greater visual heterogeneity to his
project: the lithographic process leads
to very strong differences in the rendering of images, visible, for instance,
9 J. B. Tilliard, engraving
after J. B. Hilair, Women
of the Island of Argentière.
Plate 3 from ChoiseulGouffier, Voyage pittoresque
de la Grèce, 1782. Paris:
s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque
in the tonal quality of Jean-Baptiste
Isabey’s Damascus Gate in Jerusalem
(plate 10) and Constant Bourgeois’s
more loosely and roughly drawn
Ephraim Gate in Jerusalem (plate 11).
Forbin and Choiseul-Gouffier
tacitly
relinquish
conventional
authorship in the sense of a unified
voice in another way as well. Each
emphasizes his belatedness in a
tradition of antiquarian travel and
his indebtedness to a host of earlier
publications. Each begins with an
invocation of prior authors and each
implicitly refers back to these predecessors in text and image. Among
other examples, the French botanist
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s travels
in the Levant and his publication of
1717 were important antecedents for
Choiseul-Gouffier, prompting in
more than one instance Choiseul- 10 J. B. Isabey, Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. LithoGouffier’s visits to and discussions of graph by G. Engelmann, plate 14 from Forbin,
specific sites: his exploration of the Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie
Grotto of Antiparos, for example. royale. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Tournefort’s volume includes an
engraving of the interior (plate 12). Choiseul-Gouffier goes one-up on him with
images of the entrance to the grotto, its interior – among the most visually
compelling images in the entire book – and a plan and section (plates 13, 2 and 3),
proffering additionally a correction to Tournefort’s ‘inaccurate description’ of the
grotto.22 The priority of the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte shaped the making
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11 C. Bourgeois, Ephraim Gate in Jerusalem. Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 15 from
Forbin, Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
of Forbin’s book and also the expectations of his audience. For instance, the print
of Drovetti (plate 1) – who had been aide-de-camp to General Joachim Murat
during Napolean’s Egyptian campaign – automatically evokes similar views from
the Description (plate 14). Forbin himself refers in several passages to the erstwhile
Napoleonic presence in the East and reviewers made explicit the connection
between the two publications. Forbin’s lithographs, with their moody, soft and
nostalgic beauty, refer by inversion to the Description’s rigid, linear and hyperrealistic copper engravings, their stiffness amplified by the use of the Conté
machine in many prints to engrave mechanically the sky, water, architectural
surfaces and backgrounds.23 Through visual distance from this prior referent, the
lithographs leave an impression of faded memories, of wistful ponderings of an
irretrievable past: that is, the shadow memory of the Description enriches readings
of Forbin. His voyage and resulting book also, inevitably, revisit Vivant Denon’s: as
Napoleon’s Director of Museums, Denon was Forbin’s administrative predecessor;
and he had toured Egypt with the Napleonic Commission of Egypt, producing his
own famous illustrated travel book.24 The references to all these earlier examples
– more intertextuality than simple quotation of sources – undermine the single
author’s voice (and authority) as well as the (self-) containment of the book,
adding another element of inherent heterogeneity. To read one author on Egypt,
or Greece or Turkey, was simultaneously to read a set of others; and cross-reading
by readers was commonplace.25
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12 Anon., engraving after C. Aubriet, Grotto of Antiparos. From Tournefort, Relation d’un voyage du
Levant, fait par ordre du roy, vol. 1, 1717, 190. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Photo r Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.
13 J. B. Tilliard, engraving after Choiseul-Gouffier, Entrance to Grotto of Antiparos. Plate 36 from
Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
353
14 Detail of L. P. Baltard, engraving after C. L. Balzac, Pyramids at Memphis, General view of the
pyramids and the sphinx, taken in the setting sun. Plate 8 from Description of Egypt, vol. 5: Antiquités,
1822. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Photor Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.
The sheer immensity of these kinds of projects prevents anything like the
possibility of a single mind and voice shaping them from beginning to end, no
matter how much the experiencing author is discursively central to the books’
narratives. Beyond drawing on the expertise of cartographers, specialized
researchers, or a team of artists, both Choiseul-Gouffier and Forbin financed
others to actually travel to, and undertake the recording of, some places that they
never saw themselves. Forbin engaged a member of his travelling entourage, the
architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot, to visit and sketch places that he never visited,
giving him detailed instructions about the travel journal he was to maintain and
the kinds of things to sketch. (Huyot’s catastrophe-punctuated travels provide
another vivid, almost parodic example of the complications of such endeavours.)
‘We will straighten it all out later,’ Forbin advised.26 Although the books do not
directly acknowledge collective authorship, it is known to have been the case in
other books as well, most notably in the notorious Voyage pittoresque, ou Description
des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (1781–86), initiated by Jean-Benjamin de Laborde
and ultimately overseen by the Abbé de Saint-Non. Based on a travel log
commissioned from Vivant Denon and various images by artists working and
travelling independently, this publication occasioned a prolonged and complicated public battle over authorship between Laborde, Saint-Non and Denon. The
quarrel shows how poorly suited conventional notions of authorship are to these
kinds of works and how easily attempts to impose them can run aground.27
Similarly, while preparing the second volume of his Voyage pittoresque, ChoiseulGouffier engaged in bitter legal battles over the possession of images produced for
354
the tome: did he, the main author, own images he commissioned for the text; did
the artist who made them; or did the printer–bookseller who produced the final
volumes?28
Reviews of Forbin’s and Choiseul-Gouffier’s books appear to compensate for
this authorial confusion by emphasizing a singular author, maker and traveller.29
Not only do reviews of Choiseul-Gouffier’s tome omit direct reference to the
collectivity behind its production, they also repetitively assert that ‘only what was
seen has been depicted,’ or that:
One sees all the places, all the monuments, as they exist, as the Author saw them, as he drew
them with his own hand or had them rendered under his gaze [fait dessiner sous ses yeux], and
it is the Reader himself who makes the voyage to Greece.
And again, ‘Let us follow the path of the Author’; ‘M. Le Comte de ChoiseulGouffier [. . .] only puts forward what he knows.’30 Chateaubriand, author of the
important travelogue Itineraire de Paris à Jerusalem (1811), likewise supplies
authentification in his review of Forbin. He bases his affirmation of Forbin’s
general ‘fidelity’ and the ‘perfect resemblance’ of, for instance, his description of
Constantinople, on his own well-publicized experience of the same places.
Yasmine Marcil asserts that, in general, journalists reviewing travel literature
focused particularly on the credibility of the authors, identifying a rhetoric of
authenticity in travel writing: simplicity and purity, correctness without
pretention and exaggeration become terms of praise, while partiality is the most
common criticism levelled against travel accounts.31
Attention to the conditions of production and the complex structures of
illustrated travel books reveals how tenuous are claims to authorial authenticity, making it clear why travel publications, corroborated by their sympathetic
reviewers, so insistently attempt to assert their experiential grounding. A
direct link between author and reader is discursively assumed, but everywhere
potentially undone. This gap yields the possibility of open-ended reading
and viewing, at odds with a notion of the book as a fixed, static container of
information.
We can find other gaps in the Orientalist archive, as embodied by the
comparison of these two books. The different themes and forms of attentiveness of Choiseul-Gouffier’s and Forbin’s works add specificity and nuance to
orientalizing ideas, arguing against the much criticized monolithic approach –
one size fits all – that writers in Said’s wake have sometimes employed.
It is telling, for instance, that Choiseul-Gouffier’s early visit to Melos is illustrated
by a view of its port, shown in a frontal view and in a map (plates 15 and 16).
Forbin’s book similarly opens with Melos (plate 17); his first image, however, is not
the commercial port but the ruins of an ancient theatre on the water’s edge,
weed-encrusted, abandoned, seen in an oblique view that emphasizes a vast
expanse of empty space rather than archaeological information about the theatre’s architecture. Choiseul-Gouffier’s text bemoans the ruined city of Melos, but
his view of the port highlights a more optimistic scene of civic possibilities.
Indeed, one of the most frequently repeated subjects throughout ChoiseulGouffier’s voyage is the working port, bustling with activity and filled with
vessels.32
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15 Anon., engraving after Choiseul-Gouffier, View of the Port of Melos. Plate 4 from ChoiseulGouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
When Forbin finally chooses
a port view (plate 18), it is a
dramatic and picturesque ruin:
the ancient Palestinian seaport
of Caesarea, with huge blocks of
stone and sections of columns
lying about, overtaken by an
untamed nature – signalled
by a deer and thriving weeds.
Although no human figure enlivens the view, nature itself is
animated: for instance, in the
wind in the breaking waves, with
a distant sailing boat practically
pressed flat along the horizon
16 J. Perrier, engraving after L.M. Montulay and Choiseul- line, and in the nervous moveGouffier, Plan of the Port of Melos. Plate 5 from Choiseul- ment of the lithographic pen.
Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n.
By contrast, Choiseul-GoufPhoto: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
fier’s placid ports are active
356
17 H. Lecomte, Ruins of the Theatre of Melos. Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 1 from Forbin,
Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
places, sites of civilization and commerce, surrounded by the modern constructions of a living culture. His civic emphasis underscores his economic vision
of French investment in commercial relations with Greece.
Whereas in Forbin’s work the
loosely drawn character of the
lithograph invests the images
with pathos and subjective
moodiness, Choiseul-Gouffier’s
engravings appear formal and
rational. There is little among
the latter that resembles the
emotion-laden depiction of
ruins in Forbin’s tome.33 Choiseul-Gouffier’s philhellenic text,
with its invocation of the loss of
ancient Greece’s glories, might
well have been translated 18 C. Thiénon, Ruins of the Port of Caesarea in Syria.
visually into images of lavish, Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 12 from Forbin,
picturesque ruins. But instead Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie royale.
his ‘antique fragments’ appear Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
357
19 Anon., engraving after Foucherot, Antique fragments. Plate 20 from Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage
pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
isolated on the page; submitted to measurement, they are artefacts shorn of
pathos (plate 19).34
Forbin’s images create what Johannes Fabian has called the ‘ethnographic
present’, in which the object of scrutiny is situated at a temporal remove from the
observer (and, secondarily, from the reader–viewer of his book), in a history-less
space without distinctions between past and present.35 This separateness is
underscored in the division of the written narrative of his journey from his
images, which appear in separate sections of the book. The prints themselves are
literally tableaux: the book is a very large folio, approximately 91 76 cm, and the
prints themselves are unusually large, varying in size, but in the range of 46 61
cm, making this less a book and more a cabinet d’art or a portfolio of art prints.
Because Forbin’s images are less tightly wrapped around his travel narrative than
Choiseul-Gouffier’s, they stand on their own; because of their distinct styles and
sizes, they read less as a sequential visual narrative of voyage than as separable
and distinct pieces.
Separateness is also at work in the subject of the images: while ChoiseulGouffier frequently intermingles French voyagers with natives – although
they never seem actually to interact – Forbin’s prints are nearly devoid
of European presence. Whereas Choiseul-Gouffier intermingles the ancient
and the contemporary – for instance, in his many images of Greece, where
the Turkish presence is not visually obliterated but signalled by mosques
358
20 J. Mathieu, engraving after J. B. Hilair, View of the Fountain of Chios. Plate 46 from ChoiseulGouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
and people (plate 20) – Forbin isolates natives from the non-indigenous
and associates them with the ancient, hence removing them from the contemporary presence of European travellers.36 Even where everyday rather than
monumental life is depicted, the dilapidated setting suggests the timeless
space of an eternal past, as in Carle Vernet’s Entrance to the Street of the Bazaar
at Saint John of Acre (plate 21). The cumulative effect of Forbin’s narrative is to
suggest that everything is accessible to him, despite occasional dangers. He writes
at a critical distance from the people he observes; the viewer is external to the
view.
Accordingly, a greater sense of the exotic clings to Forbin’s lithographs
than to Choiseul-Gouffier’s engravings, which make Ottoman Greece familiar,
not strange. Highly ordered, finely rendered, framed and centred, ChoiseulGouffier’s compositions are clearly structured into spatial sectors, with little
of the effect of spontaneity or haplessness of Forbin’s lithographs (plates 22 and
23). Indeed, place is literally domesticated in the many images of women in
Choiseul-Gouffier’s work, in which women carry fruit or flowers or draw water at
a source. (The few images of men are costume plates rather than scenes, showing
them bearing weapons.) Unusual among travel writers, Forbin tellingly included
only one such image (a barefoot woman from Santorini, plate 24), whereas
Choiseul-Gouffier includes scenes of women for most of his stopping points:
women (not men) for him become an index of social practice and contemporary
custom.
359
21 C. Vernet, Entrance to the Street of the Bazaar at Saint John of Acre. Lithograph
by G. Engelmann, plate 10 from Forbin, Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris:
Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
In identifying both internal contradictions within a single travel book and strong
differences between travel books, I wish to highlight the absence of a unified
approach to the representation of travel encounters in the Near East. Nonetheless,
I want to temper Nigel Leask’s recent claim that Europeans abroad in the period
360
from 1770 to 1820 were relatively
weak and that therefore imperialist
concerns of that era have been exaggerated. In asserting that eighteenthcentury naturalists ‘were often more
concerned with survival’ and with
the need to ‘convince sceptical
readers of the truth of their claims
than to feed a triumphalist discourse
of empire’, Leask rightly contests
the completeness and seamlessness
of European hegemony and the absolute dichotomy between all-mighty
conqueror and disempowered colonized that has dogged Orientalist
discourse.37 Like many other writers
on early modern culture, Leask is
22 J. L. Délignon, engraving after J.B. Hilair,
Women of the Island of Chios. Plate 48 from
Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce,
1782. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale
de France.
23 A. E. Fragonard, Dance of the Almeh at Benisouef. Lithograph by G. Engelmann, plate 71 from Forbin,
Voyage dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
361
concerned to rewrite the teleological
approach to travel in this period that
wants to see it as anticipating the fullblown formalized colonial relations of
the later nineteenth century. Yet if
travellers such as Choiseul-Gouffier
and Forbin were not agents of perfect
domination, neither were they powerless. Neither voyager ever leaves behind
his official ties, his quasi-official status
as representative of the interests of
France and French expansion; both
report on French outposts and competition with foreign powers, especially
Russia and England, over influence
within the Ottoman Empire and
Greece. In invoking official representatives of France (consuls and diplomats),
who host them throughout the Levant,
as well as the French battleships that
transport them to their destinations,
Choiseul-Gouffier and Forbin provide a
reassuring sense of the omnipresence
of the consular and naval network
even in perilous conditions. Both
place themselves in a position of
exteriority, as described by Said:
explaining societies, saving degraded
24 L. Bouteiller, Woman of Santorini. Lithograph cultures, despising much of the
by G. Engelmann, plate 7 from Forbin, Voyage
present, although they do not entirely
dans le Levant, 1819. Paris: Imprimerie royale.
obscure it in the manner of later
Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
nineteenth-century Orientalists.
Above all, their ability to travel and
to produce these books represents
tremendous personal power in the form of capital and connections: both
nobles, Forbin and Choiseul-Gouffier funded their travels in part with inherited
wealth, and both were connected to, and supported by, the French crown.
Choiseul-Gouffier’s subscription campaign alone, his singular devotion to his
project during years of research, the cadre of artists and writers he was able to
assemble, all suggest the substantial resources available to him. Furthermore, the
lavish beauty of Choiseul-Gouffier’s book, with its many medallions, vignettes,
fleurons and culs-de-lampes, makes it a prestigious object in its own right (plate
25).38 And this prestigious object brokered more power for him: his critically
acclaimed book brought him memberships: the Academy of Inscriptions in 1779,
the Academy of Fine Arts, as an honorary associate member, and the French
Academy, both in 1782. Shortly thereafter he was named French ambassador to
Constantinople.
The task of breaking open the Orientalist archive, the perfect containment of
362
25 J. B. Hu€et, Cul-de-lampe with medallions. Engraving, from Choiseul-Gouffier,
Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, 1782, 38. Paris: s.n. Photo: Bibliothèque
knowledge in a bound book, is limited and even irresponsible if separate from an
ongoing examination of its conditions of power. My desire is to identify both
internal contradictions, invitations to open-ended reading, and the overarching
framework of power within which these fissures occur. The illustrated travel book,
with its complex word-and-image relationships and authorial uncertainties,
shows us how this might be done.
363
Notes
I wish to thank Pat Mainardi, whose session on nineteenth-century prints at the
College Art Association in 2006 gave me the opportunity to develop the ideas in
this essay, and Natalie Scholz and Marieke Bloembergen, for inviting me to
present this material to an interdisciplinary faculty forum at the University of
Amsterdam. I am also grateful to Maryse Viviand of the Réserve department at the
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève for her gracious assistance in obtaining photographs.
1 ‘J’en ai besoin, j’ai été cruellement eprouvé. [. . .]
Jamais voyage eu fût plus malencontreux’, ‘la
mort est partout’, Forbin, Bibliothèque nationale
de France [BnF] Manuscripts Department, n.a.f.
15459, f. 48.
2 ‘L’ouvrage de M. le comte de Forbin achèvera de
prouver qu’on peut faire aujourd’hui promptement et facilement, ce qui demandoit autrefois
beaucoup de temps et de fatigues.’ Chateaubriand, Le Conservateur, 3:35, 1819, 395.
3 Forbin’s and Choiseul-Gouffier’s books, generally
recognized as pioneering publications, are
mentioned in many scholarly works, though
they have been little analysed as individual
objects. Among the few sustained discussions are
Patrick Jager, ‘‘‘Ecrire et peindre’’; le Voyage dans
le Levant en 1817 et 1818 du comte de Forbin’, in F.
Moureau, ed., L’Oeil aux aguets, ou l’artiste en
voyage, Paris, 1995; Frédéric Barbier, ‘Le Voyage
pittoresque de la Grèce par le comte de ChoiseulGouffier’, in R. Andreani, et al., eds, Hellénisme et
hippocratisme dans l’Europe Méditerranéenne; Autour
de D. Coray, Montpellier, 2000; Frédéric Barbier,
‘Le comte de Choiseul comme guide: Voyage
pittoresque en Grèce en compagnie d’un noble
français du XVIIIe siècle’, Gryphe, Revue de la
Bibliothèque de Lyon, 4, 2002, 3–12.; Chantal Gnell,
‘Les ambiguı̈tés du philhellénisme: l’ambassade
du Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier auprès de la
Sublime Porte 1784–1792’, Dix-huitième siècle, 27,
1995, 223–35.; and Olga Augustinos, French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from the
Renaissance to the Romantic Era, Baltimore, 1994,
157–73. An entire exhibition was recently
devoted to Choiseul-Gouffier’s publication: see
Odile Cavalier, ed., Le voyage en Grèce du comte de
Choiseul-Gouffier, Avignon, 2007. Both works are
discussed in Chateaubriand en Orient, exh.
cat.,Vallée aux Loups, 2006.
4 A good statement of current understandings of
colonial travel can be found in the introduction
to Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, eds, Tropical
Visions in an Age of Empire, Chicago, 2005, 3–20.
5 Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel
Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’, Oxford
and New York, 2002.
6 Leah Price, ‘Reading: The State of the Discipline’,
Book History, 7: 1, 2004, 318. See also Adrian
Johns’s idea in his The Nature of the Book: Print and
364
Knowledge in the Making, Chicago, 1998, that the
meaning of books shift, creating localized
reading communities rather than universal
consensus.
7 See Daniel Roche, ‘Les livres de voyage à l’époque
modern XVIe-XVIIIe siècle’, in ‘Dossier: Voyages’,
Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 22,
2006, 5–13, and Yasmine Marcil, ‘‘‘Voyage écrit,
voyage vécu?’’ La crédibilité du voyageur, du
Journal encyclopédique au Magasin encyclopédique’,
Sociétés et représentations, Special issue: Le Siècle du
voyage, 21, April 2006, 25–43. On the rise of the
illustrated book in late eighteenth-century
France, see Antony Griffiths, Prints for Books: Book
illustration in France, 1760–1800, London, 2004; for
the major survey publication on book history
from 1780 to 1830, see Henri-Jean Martin and
Roger Chartier, eds, Histoire de l’édition française,
vol. 2, Le livre triomphant: 1660–1830, Paris, 1990,
514ff.
8 As Antony Griffiths wrote recently, ‘Art historians usually ignore prints, print historians
usually ignore books, while book historians
rarely seem able to cope with the prints that
appear on their pages’, Prints for Books, x. An
exception is Beth Fowkes Tobin’s work, particularly her writing on William Hodges in her
Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and
Letters, 1760–1820, Philadelphia, 2005.
9 Barbara Stafford’s pioneering work, Voyage into
Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated
Travel Account, 1760–1840, Cambridge, MA, 1984, is
the major exception. Dian Kriz’s original essay,
‘Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted
Bodies in Hans Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica’,
William and Mary Quarterly, 57:1, 2000, 35–78,
offers a rare model of close and sustained
analysis of an illustrated book. Many writers on
Orientalism, beginning with Said, cite the
massive Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte, but it
has been little discussed as a visual object. One
account is David Prochaska’s Saidian ‘Art of
Colonialism, Colonialism of Art: the Description
de l’Egypte (1809–1828)’, in L’esprit créateur, 34,
1994, 69–91. Elizabeth Oliver’s ongoing close
study of the Description’s plates will rectify this
major lacuna; see her ‘Vision and Disease in the
Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte (1809–1828)’,
MA Thesis, University of South Florida, 2006.
10 For recent reassessments of the status of
Orientalism in modern visual culture, see Jill
Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds, Orientalism’s
Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography,
Durham, 2002; and Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and
Mary Roberts, eds, Edges of Empire: Orientalism and
Visual Culture, Oxford, 2005.
11 Bernardino Drovetti (1772–1852), a Piedmontese
with Bonapartist allegiances, was French consul
in Egypt off and on from 1807 to 1814 and again
from 1821 to 1826; typical of the diplomatic
corps in the ancient Mediterranean lands, he
dabbled in archaeology and amassed a collection
that ultimately ended up in various European
museums, most particularly the Egyptian
Museum of Turin.
12 Forbin, 13: ‘dessinant, mesurant, depuis
plusieurs années, avec l’exactitude minutieuse
des commentateurs les plus scrupuleux, ces
monumens, noble création du génie. Esclaves
malheureux des règles, des moindres caprices
des anciens, ils écrivent des volumes pour relever
une erreur de trois lignes commise en 1680, sur
la mesure d’une architrave; ils s’appesantissent,
s’endorment et demeurent huit ans à Athènes
pour dessiner trois colonnes. Ils font construire,
sur la place d’où ils prennent leur point de vue,
une petite maison, et leurs tristes aquarelles
n’atteignent qu’au bout de plusieurs années le
plus haut degré de leur ennuyeuse perfection.’
13 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978.
14 Choiseul-Gouffier’s book is an early example of
the voyage pittoresque genre and of an illustrated
travel book created by travel and production
teams. It appeared close in time to two other well
publicized books, the Abbé de Saint-Non’s Voyage
pittoresque, ou Description des royaumes de Naples et
.
de Sicile (1781–86) and Jean Pierre Houel’s
Voyage
pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari
(1782–87). Three separate tomes, comprising two
volumes, appeared in 1782, 1809 and 1822
(although these publication dates do not reflect
the period of the livraisons, which were spread
out over several years). Volume 1 appeared
simultaneously in German (1780–82); excerpts of
it were published in 1800, along with sections of
Tournefort’s and Richard Pococke’s publications
on Greece. A Belgian octavo edition in two
volumes appeared in 1823, with an accompanying large folio volume of lithographed
reproductions of the plates following in 1830. In
1842 a second French edition was issued with a
slightly altered title in four octavo volumes with
a separate in-folio volume of plates. Throughout
this essay I refer exclusively to volume 1, widely
considered to be the best and a masterpiece of
eighteenth-century book production. Forbin’s
Voyage dans le Levant appeared first in grand folio
and then in two subsequent octavo editions in
French, with plates being sold separately, all in
1819. Forbin’s book was published in English in
two parts in 1819 and 1820, in Dutch in 1821, in
German in 1823, and in Italian in 1830. It is
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
possible that some of these foreign editions are
counterfeit, or unauthorized, editions.
Olga Augustinos’s otherwise good book gives
short shrift to the visual material in the publications she discusses, sometimes skewing her
assessment of them.
On Forbin, see Elisabeth Fraser, ‘Uncivil Alliances: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the
Public’, Oxford Art Journal, 21: 1, 1998, 87–103.
Choiseul-Gouffier, 2: ‘tâcher de faire voyager le
lecteur avec moi, de lui faire voir tout ce que j’ai
vu, de le placer dans l’endroit ou j’étois moimême lorsque je faisois chaque dessin.’
Forbin, 6: ‘Je la vis enfin, cette ville sacrée, ce
temple de la liberté, de la gloire, des arts.’
Forbin, 3: ‘J’apercevais sur le rivage, auprès des
sépultures anciennes, les ruines de Milo, ville
toute venitienne, dont les clochers, les domes,
semblaient n’être plus soutenus que par des
palmiers. Ces arbres percent l’enceinte des
églises; leurs racines s’étendent dans les
sépulcres, et leurs têtes dominent élégamment
ces chapiteaux corinthiens, qui en sont une
faible image. Ces bosquets, si pittoresquement
placés parmi ces vestiges, ont eu le temps de
croı̂tre depuis l’époque de l’abandon de cette
ville jadis si riante, aujourd’hui si malsaine et
presque entièrement oubliée.’ Mary Louise Pratt
brilliantly develops the travel tropes of
‘promontory description’ and ‘seeing man’ in
her Imperial Eyes; Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York, 1992, especially 201–
227.
Choiseul-Gouffier, 1: ‘J’ai vu par moi-même tous
les lieux, j’ai vu tous les monumens dont les
dessins vont être gravés; la seule prétention de
cet Ouvrage est de représenter avec la plus
grande exactitude l’état actuel du Pays.’
For an understanding of the especially complex
production of illustrated travel books, see
Christian Michel’s analysis of a contemporary
example, for which a particularly rich documentation has survived: ‘Une entreprise de
gravure à la veille de la Révolution: Le tableau
général de l’empire othoman’, Nouvelles de l’estampe,
84, 1985, 6–25. See also Michael Albin, ‘Napoleon’s Description de l’Egypte: Problems of Corporate Authorship’, Publishing History, 8, 1980, 65–
85.; and Dominique Choffel-Berthou, ‘Les illustrations dans les livres de voyage au XIXe siècle et
leur véracité’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 111: 1430,
1988, 213–24.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un voyáge
du Levant, fait par ordre du Roy, 2 vols., Paris, 1717.
See Lisa Small, Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists,
and the Rediscovery of Egypt, New York, 2006, on the
making of the Description.
Vivant Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute
Egypte, pendant les campagnes de Bonaparte, en 1798
et 1799, Paris, 1802.
Prochaska deals with the notion of indebtedness
linking the Encyclopédie, the Description of Egypte,
365
and the Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie, 1844–
67. Similarly, Derek Gregory links photography
in the Middle East, beginning with Félix Teynard
and Maxime Du Camp, to the Description, in his
‘Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Practices
and Productions of Space in Egypt, 1839–1914’, in
J. Schwartz and J. Ryan, eds, Picturing Place:
Photography and the Geographical Imagination,
London, 2003, 195–225.
26 ‘Dessines des costumes des pays où tu passeras,
fais des figures comme si tu en avais une grande
habitude, d’abord elle viendra, et puis nous
régulariserons tout cela.’ (f. 144). This is revealed
in correspondence found in the BnF: Manuscripts Department, including four letters to
Huyot, N.A.Fr.14899, fols. 140–7. On Huyot’s
travels, particularly as they concern architectural history, see Pierre Pinon, ‘L’Orient de
Jean Nicolas Huyot : le voyage en Asie Mineure,
en Egypte et en Grèce (1817–1821)’, Revue des
mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 73–74,
special issue: Figures de l’orientalisme en architecture, 1994, 35–56. Another instance of Choiseul-Gouffier subcontracting actual travel to
someone else is the journey undertaken by Louis
François Sébastien Fauvel, eventually named
French vice consul in Athens, and Foucherot in
1780. See C.G. Lowe, ‘Fauvel’s first trip through
Greece, 1782–1784’, Hesperia, 5, 1936, 206–224.;
and Alessia Zambon, ‘Louis-François-Sébastien
Fauvel et la constitution de la collection Choiseul-Gouffier’, in Odile Cavalier, ed., Le voyage en
Grèce du comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, 63–83. Fauvel,
the artist Louis-François Cassas and several
others travelled and researched extensively, in
some cases for years, on Choiseul-Gouffier’s
behalf, gathering documents, collecting antiquities, and making drawings.
27 See Antony Griffiths, ‘The Contract between
Laborde and Saint-Non for the Voyage pittoresque
de Naples et de Sicile’, Print quarterly, 5: 4, 1988,
408–414.; and Hélène Tuzet, ‘Une querelle littéraire en 1785: l’abbé de Saint-Non et ses collaborateurs’, Revue de littérature comparée, 21, 1947,
428–36. Lawsuits were apparently common for
this kind of complex publication involving so
many collaborators; Antony Griffiths’s highly
informative Prints for Books is full of engrossing
stories of litigation involving the production of
illustrated books. Yet another example is found
in Michel, ‘Une entreprise de gravure à la veille
de la Révolution’.
28 Several nineteenth-century writers wondered
aloud about Choiseul-Gouffier’s omission of his
contributors’ names, but all did so either in
private or after his death (See Zambon, ‘LouisFrançois-Sébastien Fauvel et la constitution de la
collection Choiseul-Gouffier’, 68–70). The
archival trail left by Choiseul-Gouffier’s various
legal wrangles is long, and includes diplomatic
papers at the Archives du ministère des affaires
étrangères, his family papers in series T, ‘saisies
révolutionnaires’, at the Archives nationales,
366
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
and abundant correspondence in the BnF
Manuscripts Department. In addition to close
visual analysis, there remains much archival
work to do on illustrated travel books.
As Yasmine Marcil has shown, reviews of travel
publications often functioned more as publicity
than as critical assessment; this is suggested in
reviewers’ complicity in emphasizing the
authenticity of the travel experience in the
books under review.
‘On a peint ce qu’on a vu.’ Or, ‘On y voit tous les
lieux, tous les monumens, tels qu’ils existent tels
que l’Auteur les a vus, tels qu’il les a dessinés de
sa main ou fait dessiner sous ses yeux, et c’est le
Lecteur lui-meme qui fait le voyage de la Grece.’
‘Suivons la marche de l’Auteur.’ ‘M. Le Comte de
Choiseul-Gouffier [. . .] n’avance que ce qu’il sçait
[sic].’ Journal des Sçavans, 1778, 277; 1779, 132, 133,
811.
See Marcil, ‘‘‘Voyage écrit, voyage vécu?’’’, 41–3.
Claudio Greppi has written on the increased
importance placed on direct observation in illustrated travel literature beginning in the late
eighteenth century in his ‘‘‘On the Spot’’:
Travelling Artists and the Iconographic Inventory of the World, 1769–1859’, in Driver and
Martins, eds., Tropical Visions, 23–42.
Other port views include: View of the City of Nio, pl.
11; View of Bourg of San-Nicolo, pl. 29; View of the
City of Metelin, pl. 44; and View of the Island of
Pathmos, pl. 55. An exception is Choiseul-Gouffier’s image of the Port of Assemkalasi (now
Anaklia), pl. 102: a picturesque, weedy ruin
figures prominently, surrounded by sedentary
Turks and a clump of resting camels; the dark
figure of a standing Turk, silhouetted against the
sky, points to the right to the ruin, directing the
viewer’s attention as well to the two Frenchmen
in the distant middleground, who, instrument
in hand, survey the land. It is striking that these
orientalist tropes – decayed culture, lolling
Turks, measuring Frenchmen – appear in the
Turkish section of the travel book.
Pathos and nostalgia are emphasized in a
contemporary review of Forbin’s book (PierreAntoine Lebrun, ‘Voyages: Voyage dans Le Levant en
1817 et 1818 par M. le Comte de Forbin’, La
Renommée, 30, 14 July 1819, 119–20).
Nonetheless, as Frédéric Barbier neatly points
out, destruction and death are thematically
present in several images of tombs (Barbier, ‘Le
Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce par le comte de
Choiseul-Gouffier’, 2000, 238).
See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How
Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, 1983.
This is all the more striking because the Napoleonic Description, which Forbin implicitly
reprises, includes many images of French
soldiers and savants. See Prochaska, ‘Art of
Colonialism, Colonialism of Art’, 81–6. Scholarship on travel, tourism, and colonialism has
dealt extensively with the representation of
travellers and natives in travel imagery; the
absence of travellers frequently signals an
attempt to capture a ‘pure’ world unmediated by
contact with and reference to the viewer’s world.
For a good treatment of the issue, see Julia
Ballerini, ‘The In Visibility of Hadji-Ishmael:
Maxime Du Camp’s 1850 Photographs of Egypt’,
in K. Adler and M. Pointon, eds, The Body Imaged;
Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, Cambridge, 1993, 147–60; and Robert
Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and
Painting, 1867–1886, New Haven and London, 1994,
44f, 111f, and passim. Mary Louise Pratt’s notion
of anti-conquest is a particularly rich application
of this theme to travel tropes: the eighteenthcentury naturalist absents himself from the
visited landscape to distinguish himself from the
conquistadors who preceded him; see her
Imperial Eyes, 15–107. Omission of travellers in
travel imagery should also be related to James
Buzzard’s useful notion of ‘anti-tourism’; see his
The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and
the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918, Oxford, 1993.
37 Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 18.
38 Griffiths makes it clear why these elements of
illustrated books were costly (Prints, esp. 1–56.) As
Griffiths explains, vignettes (rectangular images
at the head of a chapter), culs-de-lampe (images at
the end of chapters, in the shape of a hanging
lamp), and fleurons (images appearing on the title
page) were printed on the same page as text. To
do this, sheets had to be put through two
different presses in a process that was difficult
and, according to Griffiths, is no longer understood. Furthermore, in particularly fine books
such as Choiseul-Gouffier’s, culs-de-lampe were
made to fit the exact space left over at the end of
a chapter and to relate to the content of that
final passage. They therefore had to be done at
the very end of the printing process; including
them added to the complication and above all
duration of the production process, increasing
costs. Tellingly, these expensive decorative
elements vanished from bibliophile book production by the end of the century.
367

Books, Prints, and Travel: Reading in the Gaps of the Orientalist

Transcription

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