Among the art and luxury books of the 18th century, there is one that stands as a marvel and a masterpiece, an unparalleled example of a book's potential richness. This work, the great monument and triumph of the vignette, dominates and crowns all the illustrations of its time. We have already named it for all connoisseurs: the Contes of La Fontaine, in the edition known as that of the "Fermiers généraux" (the Farmers-General). It is a book truly deserving of this baptism by its patrons, a royal volume from the last of the financier-Maecenases and one of the most beautiful expenditures of the intelligent and sensual wealth of Louis XV's reign.

In this book, for which no expense was spared, where images abound to announce each tale, where the best engravers vied for the plates, and where Choffard scattered his ingenious tailpieces on nearly every page, one finds the inimitable model of gallant engraving adorning a risqué story. On the first page of one of its two volumes, like a companion piece to the portrait of La Fontaine, appears the portrait of the illustrator: Charles Eisen.1

Flemish Roots and a Painter's Upbringing

This French illustrator descended from a Flemish lineage of painters. His father was François Eisen, who had come from Brussels to seek his fortune in Valenciennes, a province whose art was still deeply connected to that of Flanders. Married there in 1716, François Eisen painted religious scenes for the churches of the Beguinage, the Brigittines, the Ursulines, and the Abbey of Vicoigne. In 1745, difficulties with the Valenciennes administration and a rivalry with his colleague, the painter Gilis, prompted him to return to Brussels. However, the war in the Belgian provinces and the capture of Brussels by the Marshal de Saxe soon drove him out.

Returning to France, François settled in Paris. There, he began to paint small pictures that blended the preciousness of Mieris with the Spanish style that Van Loo was attempting to introduce into historical painting, a fantasy Fragonard would later embrace. His subjects were playful scenes of mischief and boyish pranks between girls and boys. The little boys wore tunics with slashed sleeves and hats in the style of Henri IV, while the little girls wore ruffs, pearl necklaces, and feathered headdresses. These compositions were filled with dogs, cats, and parrots—the domestic companions of childhood.

L'oiseleur
L'oiseleur

They were pleasant works, marked by a Germanism that would later flourish in the small paintings of Wille and Schenau. They were a great success and, according to Hécart, would have opened the doors of the Academy to him had he chosen to apply.

After many years, as the genre aged along with the painter whose hand grew less nimble, François Eisen was forced to cut his expenses and move into a poor little apartment on the Rue de la Huchette. Hécart, who met him there in 1770, tells us the painter was then eighty-five or eighty-six years old, and his wife was nearly as old. "He had subjected himself to the taste of the art dealers who gave him work," Hécart wrote. "He painted for them tabagies (tavern scenes), caricatures, and bambochades (boisterous genre scenes). The paintings were six to seven inches high; he made two or three a month and was paid three louis for each.