Comte de Caylus (1692-1765) - A Turkish Magician

A good impressions on Japan. Laid down on paper.

Anne Claude de Tubières-Grimoard de Pestels de Lévis, comte de Caylus, marquis d'Esternay, baron de Bransac (Anne Claude Philippe; 31 October 1692 – 5 September 1765),[1] was a French antiquarian, proto-archaeologist and man of letters.

Archaeologist, collector, amateur etcher (often signs 'C*') and writer about art; member of the Academy of Painting (1731), and of the Academy of Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres (1742). One of the first individuals to illustrate the shape rather than simply the design of ancient Near Eastern cylinder seals.

While a young man, Caylus distinguished himself in the campaigns of the French army, from 1709 to 1714. After the peace of Rastatt (1714) he spent some time in travelling in Italy, Greece, the Levant, England, and Germany, and devoted much attention to the study and collection of antiquities. He became an active member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and of the Académie des Inscriptions. Chief among his antiquarian works must be the profusely illustrated Recueil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises (6 vols., Paris, 1752–1755),[2][a] which was mined by the designers of Neoclassical arts for the rest of the century.[citation needed] His Numismata Aurea Imperatorum Romanorum, treats only the gold coinage of the Roman emperors, those worthy of collection by a grand seigneur. His concentration on the object itself marked a step towards modern connoisseurship, and in his Mémoire (1755) on the method of encaustic painting, the ancient technique of painting with wax as a medium mentioned by Pliny the Elder, he claimed to have rediscovered the method. Denis Diderot, who was no friend to Caylus, maintained that the proper method had been found by J.-B. Bachelier.


Caylus in Receuil d'Antiquités, Book 7, 1767
Caylus was an admirable and prolific etcher. He worked chiefly from drawings by Italian and French masters, including examples from the collection of Pierre Crozat and the Cabinet du Roi (the collection of the King); he also made many etchings from drawings by his friend Antoine Watteau and the sculptor Edmé Bouchardon.[4] He caused engravings to be made, at his own expense, of Bartoli's copies from ancient pictures. His publications Nouveaux sujets de peinture et de sculpture (1755) and Tableaux tirés de l'Iliade, de l'Odyssée, et de l'Enéide (1757)[2] consist of descriptions of subjects from classical literature for the inspiration of contemporary artists and their patrons.

His cultural interests were not confined to the arts of Classical Antiquity but extended to Gallic monuments, such as the megaliths of Aurille (Poitou), of which he commissioned drawings in 1762.[citation needed]

He encouraged artists whose reputations were still in the making, and befriended the connoisseur and collector of prints and drawings Pierre-Jean Mariette when Mariette was only twenty-two, but his patronage was somewhat capricious. Diderot expressed this fact in an epigram in his Salon of 1765: "Death has delivered us from the cruellest of connoisseurs."[b] Caylus had quite another side to his character. He had a thorough acquaintance with the gayest and most disreputable sides of Parisian life, and left a number of more or less witty stories dealing with it. These were collected (Amsterdam, 1787) as his Œuvres badines complètes. The best of them is the Histoire de M. Guillaume, cocher (c. 1730).[2] His Contes, hovering between French fairy tales and oriental fantasies, between conventional charm and moral satire, have been collected and were published in 2005;[5] they were originally published as les Féeries nouvelles (1741), les Contes orientaux (1743), Cinq contes de fées (1745), plus two posthumous stories published in 1775.

The Souvenirs du comte de Caylus, published in 1805, is of very doubtful authenticity. See also E. and J. de Goncourt, Portraits intimes du XVIIIième siècle; Charles Nisard's edition of the Correspondance du comte de Caylus avec le père Paciaudi (1877); and a notice by O. Uzanne prefixed to a volume of his Facties (1879).

Condtion is good. Wrinkled paper. Diffuse foxing.