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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

Putting Oneself in the Light: Rousseau and the Frontispieces of His Works

Résumé

Putting Oneself in the Light: Rousseau and the Frontispieces of His Works Technically speaking, the engraving is a play with shadow and light. Diderot pays homage to it in just such terms in his Salon de 1765: "Regardez chaque point comme un rayon de lumière éteint. [...] Dans la taille-douce tout est éclairé, le travail introduit l'ombre et la nuit. Dans la gravure noire la nuit est profonde; le travail fait poindre le jour dans cette nuit" 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was so enamoured of the colourless world of the engraving and of its intense expressiveness that hardly a single work of his was given to the world unaccompanied by some engraving. He was, moreover, himself a collector of such prints. Nor was it just in those works of his that fall into the category of the "literary" that Rousseau called the printed image to his aid. He did the same in his philosophical publications, placing at the threshold of each published work vignettes and frontispieces whose conception was the fruit of original reflection on the relation between the text in question and the signifying force of the engraved print. He would himself take the decision as to just which scenes and topics were to be illustrated and would even actively supervise the work of the draughtsmen and engravers, often intervening to regulate, so to speak, the luminous intensity of the images. Such was the case, for example, of the tenth engraving in La Nouvelle Héloïse, which represents St. Preux's nightmare (Ill. 1) 2. Rousseau, we know, several times requested that this plate, already dark in its initial version, be made still darker so as to create an atmosphere of terror: "The proof I have seen of this plate with the ghosts will do very well, provided it is made still darker and that a slightly more alarmed expression is given to the face"; "the 'ghosts' print will be an admirable one, once its lighter areas have been filled in and darkened" 3. We find him making an analogous, even if photically inverse, intervention with regard to the first of the engravings which provide the illustrative plates for Emile,

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hal-03929253 , version 1 (08-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03929253 , version 1

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Nathalie Ferrand. Putting Oneself in the Light: Rousseau and the Frontispieces of His Works. Pictures of the Enlightenment/ Bilder der Aufklärung, Elisabeth Décultot and Daniel Fulda (eds.), In press. ⟨hal-03929253⟩
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