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After thirty years’ sojourn in this country, Rouquet transferred himself to Paris. At what precise date he did this is not stated, but by a letter to Hogarth from the French capital, printed by John Ireland, the original of which is in the British Museum, he was there, and had been there several months, in March 1753. The letter gives a highly favourable account of its writer’s fortunes. Business is “coming in very smartly,” he says. He has been excellently received, and is “perpetualy imploy’d.” There is far more encouragement for modern enterprise in Paris than there is in London; and some of his utterances must have rejoiced the soul of his correspondent. As this, for instance–“The humbug virtu is much more out of fashon here than in England, free thinking upon that & other topicks is more common here than amongst you if possible, old pictures & old stories fare’s alike, a dark picture is become a damn’d picture.” On this account, he inquires anxiously as to the publication of his friend’s forthcoming Analysis; he has been raising expectations about it, and he wishes to be the first to introduce it into France. From other sources we learn that (perhaps owing to his relations with Belle-Isle, who had been released in 1745) he had been taken up by Marigny, and also by Cochin, then keeper of the King’s Drawings, and soon to be Secretary to the Academy, of which Rouquet himself, by express order of Lewis the Fifteenth, was made a member. Finally, as in the case of Cochin, apartments were assigned to him in the Louvre. Whether he ever returned to this country is doubtful; but, as we have seen, the Etat des Arts was printed at Paris in 1755. That it was suggested–or “commanded”–by Mme. de Pompadour’s connoisseur brother, to whom it was inscribed, is a not unreasonable supposition.

In any case, M. Rouquet’s definition of the “Arts” is a generous one, almost as wide as Marigny’s powers, already sufficiently set forth at the outset of this paper. For not only–as in duty bound–does he treat of Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and Engraving, but he also has chapters on Printing, Porcelain, Gold-and Silver-smiths’ Work, Jewelry, Music, Declamation, Auctions, Shop-fronts, Cooking, and even on Medicine and Surgery. Oddly enough, he says nothing of one notable art with which Marigny was especially identified, that “art of creating landscape”–as Walpole happily calls Gardening–which, in this not very “shining period,” entered upon a fresh development under Bridgeman and William Kent. Although primarily a Londoner, one would think that M. Rouquet must certainly have had some experience, if not of the efforts of the innovators, at least of the very Batavian performances of Messrs. London and Wise of Brompton; or that he should have found at Nonsuch or Theobalds–at Moor Park or Hampton Court–the pretext for some of his pages–if only to ridicule those “verdant sculptures” at which Pope, who played no small part in the new movement, had laughed in the Guardian; or those fantastic “coats of arms and mottoes in yew, box and holly” over which Walpole also made merry long after in the famous essay so neatly done into French by his friend the Duc de Nivernais. M. Rouquet’s curious reticence in this matter cannot have been owing to any consideration for Hogarth’s old enemy, William Kent, for Kent had been dead seven years when the Etat des Arts made its appearance.

If, for lack of space, we elect to pass by certain preliminary reflections which the Monthly Review rather unkindly dismisses as a “tedious jumble,” M. Rouquet’s first subject is History Painting, a branch of the art which, under George the Second, attained to no great excellence. For this M. Rouquet gives three main reasons, the first being that afterwards advanced by Hogarth and Reynolds, namely,–the practical exclusion, in Protestant countries, of pictures from churches. A second cause was the restriction of chamber decorations to portraits and engravings; and a third, the craze of the connoisseur for Hogarth’s hated “Black Masters,” the productions of defunct foreigners. And this naturally brings about the following digression, quite in Hogarth’s own way, against that contemporary charlatan, the picture-dealer:–“English painters have an obstacle to overcome, which equally impedes the progress of their talents and of their fortune. They have to contend with a class of men whose business it is to sell pictures; and as, for these persons, traffic in the works of living, and above all of native artists, would be impossible, they make a point of decrying them, and, as far as they can, of confirming amateurs with whom they have to deal in the ridiculous idea that the older a picture is the more valuable it becomes. See, say they (speaking of some modern effort), it still shines with that ignoble freshness which is to be found in nature; Time will have to indue it with his learned smoke–with that sacred cloud which must some day hide it from the profane eyes of the vulgar in order to reveal to the initiated alone the mysterious beauties of a venerable antiquity.”