Self-Portrait of an Artist: Translation and the Creative Process of Catherine Perrot

Abstract

Catherine Perrot (1620–169–) gave painting instruction to members of the French royal family, including Marie-Louise d’Orléans, niece of Louis XIV and Queen Consort of Spain from 1679 to 1689. At the age of 62, Perrot was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, one of only fifteen women to be admitted in the Academy’s 145-year existence. Four years later, she published Les Leçons Royales ou la manière de peindre en mignature les fleurs & les oyseaux, par l’explication des livres de fleurs & d’oyseaux de feu Nicolas Robert, fleuriste (1686). In 1693, at the age of 73, Perrot completed Traité de la mignature. This final work contains the same studies of flowers and birds as in the previous manual, but it includes some important additions. There is a different dedication and introduction, a comprehensive list of definitions of technical terms, and an index. More significantly, there are theoretical reflections, as well as instructions for the drawing and painting of landscapes, biblical figures, and saints. In her first publication, Perrot makes a tepid initial step into watercolor manuals, a genre dominated by male artists at the time. She based her instructions on engravings by Nicolas Robert, a male contemporary well established in the field and well positioned at the court of Louis XIV as the Peintre Ordinaire de Sa Majesté pour la miniature; he also acted as Perrot’s teacher and was revered by her. Perrot’s subjects in the 1686 edition—flowers and birds in miniature—are safely anchored in feminine artistic convention. But in her revised copy, Perrot has taken on landscapes and religious subjects, considered more serious themes, and has included the more academically grounded component of art theory. In this enhanced second edition, Perrot makes an explicit, direct connection between the visual arts and words. Beginning from the premise that “painting is the language of mutes,” Perrot writes that visual representations of figures “express feelings of the heart just as words do when they are joined together.” To represent an object well is akin to pronouncing a specific word “so that it is understood perfectly, without stuttering.” For Perrot, a painting is both seen and heard—and, in creating a work of art, the artist has something to both show and to tell. Messages are conveyed and a kind of intimacy exists—if only temporarily— between artist and viewer. The multi-faceted sensorial experience, then—involving speaking, hearing, seeing, and feeling—results in a rich hub of shared meaning between creator, creation, and viewer, and beyond. The creative process, then, is dynamic across varied mediums, and is achieved, and replicated, when an inspired idea assumes shareable forms. A rare first edition of the 1686 watercolor manual came to my attention when my colleague, art historian and scholar Dr. Diane Radycki, shared it with me in the hope that I might translate it into English from the original French. Student scholar Miranda Cooper produced a first draft translation, augmenting it with biographical and historical context for a senior-year capstone research project. Cooper became fascinated with Perrot during the six months she labored intensively to produce the translation. The process of reading the artist’s work and then of attempting to convey her content and original tone and style gave Cooper the sense of having had a protracted, in-depth conversation with Perrot, a kind of “long-term intimacy,” as Robert Weschler describes the relationship between a translator and the original author in Performing Without a Stage; the Art of Literary Translation. Grappling with a representation of the artist’s words in English was a challenge; meeting that challenge resulted in the sense of knowing Perrot better than others who have not studied her expression as closely. Cooper recalls, “The roughest draft was also my introduction into the mind of Catherine Perrot . . . her brilliance and organization as well as [. . .] her influence and connections.” The work I did to check Cooper’s TRANSLATION REVIEW 2022, VOL. 114, NO. 1, 38–46 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2140236