Important marble statue of a Monkey dressed as a Lady (or Frisotton), French, first quarter of the 18th century

Collection du financier Paul Poisson de Bourvallais (? - 1719), dans les jardins du château de Champs dessinés par Claude Desgots (1655 - 1732), jardinier du Roi (“Boulingrin de la Figure”), propriétaire du château jusqu’en 1718 ;

Collection de la princesse Marie-Anne de Bourbon, veuve du Prince de Conti (1666 - 1739), fille illégitime de Louis XIV et de Louise de la Vallière ;

Collection de Louis César de la Baume Le Blanc, duc de la Vallière (1708 -1780) ;

Collection de Madame de Pompadour, locataire du château de Champs entre 1757 et 1759 ; 

Collection du financier Gabriel Michel de Tharon (1702 - 1765) entre 1763 et 1765 ;

Puis par descendance à son épouse Anne Bernier (1738 - 1788), puis à sa fille Henriette-Françoise Michel (1738 - 1794), marquise de Marbeuf ;

Collection de la Marquise d’Aligre, dans le vestibule de son hôtel particulier, Paris ;

Par tradition, collection du Vicomte de Prou ;

Collection particulière française, dans le jardin de la propriété “les Douves” à Onzain (Loir-et-Cher) ; 

Galerie Kugel, Paris

R. Serrette, Le Château de Champs, Paris, 2017, p. 32 (ill.), 65 et 102 ;

N. Garnier-Pelle, Singeries & exotisme chez Christophe Huet, Saint-Rémy-en-L'Eau, 2010, p. 175 ;

S. Dannaud, G. Dordor, A la Cour des singes, Saint-Rémy-en-l'Eau, 2009, p.92 (ill.) ;

A. Fourny, "Dans l'esprit du XVIIIe siècle, Les Douves, deumeure ni rustique, ni citadine", Plaisir de France, Paris, janvier 1968, n°351, p.14-19 (ill.) ;

E. de Ganay, “Le Château et les jardins de Champs”, Gazette illustrée des Amateurs de jardins, Paris, 1933-1934, p.19, 24-25 (chez Madame la Marquise d’Aligre) ;

J. A. Dulaure, Les Environs de Paris, Paris, 1786, vol. I, p. 49-50 ;

A-N. Dezallier d'Argenville, Voyage pittoresque des environs de Paris, ou Description des maisons royales, châteaux & autres lieux de plaisance, situés à quinze lieues aux environs de cette ville, Paris, 1779, p. 314-317.

Références bibliographiques

C. Cahen d'Anvers, Le Château de Champs, 1928, Paris ;

J.-C. Menou, Le Château de Champs, Paris, 2001 ;

F. Boulerie, K. Bartha-Kovács (dir.), Le singe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Figure de l'art, personnage littéraire et curiosité scientifique, Paris, 2019.

Unique in French Baroque sculpture, Frisotton (or La Grenuche) is remarkable for the subject’s rarity in sculpture as well as for its exceptional provenance and its extremely lively treatment. Richly dressed in an ample open coat revealing a panier skirt, a laced bodice and a pleated chemise, the monkey is about to lift a quince to her lips, while various fruits and vegetables lie scattered on the ground (grapes, an apple, walnuts, cabbage and squash) – she appears to have been caught in the act. She wears a finely curled wig, decorated with a ribbon and topped with a tall feather (an aigrette).

Formerly ornamenting the gardens of the Château de Champs (Seine-et-Marne), this unusually large marble is a humorous caricature portrait, contrasting the marked realism of the anatomical representation and the monkey’s animal nature with the elegant costume and extravagant appearance. 

An ornament for the first garden at Champs

From the very early eighteenth century, Frisotton decorated the splendid plantations of trees known as bosquets at the Château de Champs, one of the most accomplished French architectural creations of its time. Reconstruction of the building started in 1702, commissioned by Paul Poisson de Bourvallais (?–1719), a wealthy financier active in the latter part of Louis XIV’s reign. Born into a modest family in Laval, the young Paul Poisson came to the attention of the powerful president of the Brittany parliament, Louis II Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, who took him under his wing and aided his rapid social ascent. After Pontchartrain was named Controller-General of Finances in 1689, the two men collaborated to turn Poisson into a very rich ‘traitant’, or agent for the Crown. In 1695, the financier obtained the position of secretary to the King and started to call himself Poisson de Bourvallais. This new position and the revenues it produced allowed him to acquire the seigneury of Champs in 1702 for 135,000 livres and he immediately embarked on significant refurbishment works. While the architect Jean-Baptiste Bullet de Chamblain (1665–1726) was entrusted with the rebuilding of the Château, it was Claude Desgots (1655–1732), the King’s gardener and great-nephew of André Le Nôtre, who was charged with the creation of a large orthonormal garden, in which Frisotton occupied a prime spot. In a specially created setting to the east of the Château, the bosquet was described in the 1727 map of the Château, garden and park as ‘Le Boulingrin de la Figure’ (Fig. 3).¹

Known for his boorish, brutal character and his insatiable appetite for profit, Bourvallais made many enemies as the years went by – notably with the royal family, when he refused to enter into a partnership with one of the Princesse de Conti’s protégés.² Accused of embezzlement and sentenced by the Chamber of Justice, Paul Poisson de Bourvallais was forced to cede the Château de Champs in September 1718 to his rival, Marie Anne de Bourbon (Princesse de Conti), for 20,000 livres – a sum regarded as derisory for such a residence at that time: the memoirist Saint-Simon described it as a ‘crust of bread’.³ In 1718, the princess gave the Château to her first cousin, Charles-François de La Baume Le Blanc, who moved into the residence the following year. In 1739, his son, Louis César de la Baume Le Blanc, Duc de la Vallière (1708–1780, Fig. 1), inherited the estate and embarked on lavish works, especially in the gardens, which were partially redesigned by Jean-Charles Garnier d’Isle (1697–1755), nephew of Claude Desgots. In the east, he created four new bosquets and made changes to Frisotton’s ‘boulingrin’. Far from being cast aside, the work was now placed at the end of a new geometrically designed bosquet embellished with two paths lined with rose bushes: the marble took centre stage in the middle of a large trellis with three niches (Fig. 4).⁴

Forced to rent out the estate because of increasing financial difficulties, in 1757 the Duc de la Vallière handed over the Château de Champs to his close friend the Marquise de Pompadour (1721–1764, Fig. 2), who bought all the furnishings. Very much more than a simple tenant, the marquise fitted out the Château to reflect her own distinctive taste with objects from her other residences as well as commissions designed specifically for Champs. After an aborted attempt to purchase the property, in the end Madame de Pompadour left the Château after only two years. Buckling under his debts, in August 1763 the Duc de La Vallière finally sold Champs to the financier and ship owner Gabriel Michel de Tharon (1702–1765), who had been co-director of the Compagnie Perpétuelle des Indes Orientales since 1748.

As its eminent owners succeeded each other, Frisotton seems to have remained in the same bosquet, since the ‘figure’ is noted in the centre of the trellis in 1779 by Dezallier d’Argenville in his Voyage pittoresque des environs de Paris.⁵ The park was then gradually abandoned in the last decades of the eighteenth century, as Dulaure describes in 1790: ‘[the gardens] have been very neglected for some time; the pleasure gardens have been sacrificed, the lawns in the parterres no longer exist and wheat is growing in their soil, the fountains have no water, and several statues have fallen into disrepair’.⁶ But the present marble escaped this sad fate. However, the work seems to have been given away or sold in about 1792, when the Marquise de Marbeuf (Tharon’s daughter) engaged Balthazar Legros to transform the gardens into the then fashionable style anglais. This entailed the destruction of the bosquets to the east of the Château. The provenance of Frisotton during the nineteenth century is unknown. She reappeared in the early 1930s, when Ernest de Ganay described the marble in the entrance hall of the private residence belonging to the Marquise d’Aligre in Paris.⁷

A rare singerie

For a long time, as a result of a persistent oral tradition, this work was wrongly thought to be a caricature of Madame de Pompadour, but in fact it is much earlier than Louis XV’s favourite, as is confirmed by its presence in the maps of the Desgots garden. The subject’s ambiguity, as well as its moral intent, was already puzzling commentators in the eighteenth century: on several occasions Frisotton was simply described as a ‘figure’ and even ‘enigmatic’, as Dulaure wrote in 1790. Far from being explicit, the marble is open to two interpretations: an allegory of the sin of greed from a moralizing perspective or a simple humorous and satirical image, which fits better with the iconography of singeries that were omnipresent in the painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

Because its physical characteristics are close to those of humans, as is its ability to imitate, the monkey became the preferred animal for anthropomorphic representations. While in the medieval period the primate’s image was very negative, associated with the Devil, vanity, indecency and avarice, its symbolism gradually began to change in the early seventeenth century, developing a more satirical aspect. While singeries originated in antiquity, it was above all in Antwerp in the early seventeenth century that the theme began to spread, disseminated in Peeter van der Borcht’s engravings and then taken up by many painters, including Jan Brueghel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Younger and especially David Teniers the Younger.⁸ In France, the subject was adopted by numerous artists in the following century, notably by Claude Audran III (1658–1734), a specialist in the genre who was responsible for many decorative schemes featuring singeries, including one made for Louis XIV at the Château de Marly (circa 1709, now destroyed). Several of his pupils perpetuated the genre, among them Watteau and in particular Christophe Huet (1700–1759). Huet created many simian decorative schemes, the most famous of which are the Petite Singerie and the Grande Singerie in the Château de Chantilly (painted between 1735 and 1737). In these schemes, singeries and exoticism are frequently combined, as was the case in Champs, where Huet oversaw the decoration of the Salon Chinois for the Duc de la Vallière. Present on all four doors but much fewer than at Chantilly, the monkeys in the Champs salon are chasing birds.⁹ In this respect, it is amusing to note the fact that the present marble, whose bosquet pre-dated these decorative schemes, was on a direct axis from the Salon Chinois (north-west wing) and could probably be seen by visitors to Champs from that viewpoint.

Although animal representations were common in sculpture during the reign of Louis XIV, as demonstrated by the lead sculptures that once decorated the Labyrinth at Versailles (destroyed during the reign of Louis XVI), the present marble must nevertheless be regarded as being in a class of its own. While the genre is prevalent in painting, in interior decoration and in the decorative arts, singerie sculptures are rare. In Environs de Paris, Jacques-Antoine Dulaure compares our Frisotton to the figures that populated the garden of the Villa Palagonia near Palermo, known as the Villa dei Mostri .¹⁰ The comparison with this group of ‘monsters’, which is later and of lower quality, seems inappropriate: the decoration featuring hybrid creatures is strictly speaking closer to the iconography of grotesques than to that of singeries.

The attribution of this exceptional work to a specific hand remains complex, partly because the unique character of its subject makes it difficult to associate with a particular artist, but also because of the lack of precision in old sources. In this context, for a long time a second oral tradition assigned Frisotton to a member of the Adam family. Whether this related to the sculptor Lambert-Sigisbert Adam (1700–1759) or to Nicolas-Sébastien Adam (1705–1778), this far-fetched attribution can be disregarded, given the dissimilarities of style and the obvious earlier date of our marble.

Nevertheless, several clues seem to underline that this work has an important parentage; firstly, the remarkable technical carving of the marble, which highlights the contrasts of texture and refinement in the materials, but also the imposing size of the sculpture, which suggests good access to a supply of Carrara marble, and above all its provenance, linked to several of the most influential individuals of the eighteenth century.

¹ Boulingrin: an open area in the form of a flat-bottomed basin bordered by a slope or a bank. […] The boulingrin composé can include a fountain, urns or statues (definition given in M.-H. Bénetière (ed.), Jardin, vocabulaire typologique et technique, Inventaire général du patrimoine, Paris, 2000, p. 88; our translation).

² See R. Serrette, op.cit., p. 28–29

³ Louis III de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Mémoires, Paris, 1917 (vol. 15, chapter III): ‘Bourvalais, one of the richest traitants and the most badly treated by the Chamber of Justice, was stripped […] of a country house at Champ, which he had refurbished charmingly, turning it through acquisitions from a pied-à-terre for entertaining to a large and beautiful country seat. Mme la Princesse de Conti acquired Champ for a crust of bread and gave it to La Vallière […]’ (our translation).

⁴ R. Serrette, op. cit., p. 65. The trellis now in the garden is a recreation dating to the late nineteenth century, when Achille Duchêne (1866–1947) restored the garden at the behest of Louis Cahen d’Anvers (1837–1922).

⁵ op. cit., p. 316.

⁶ J. A. Dulaure, Nouvelles descriptions des Environs de Paris, Paris, 1790, p. 61; description repeated in P. Villiers, Manuel du voyageur aux environs de Paris, Paris, 1802, p. 165.

⁷ E. de Ganay, op. cit., p. 24.

⁸ See B. Schepers, ‘La folie des singes à Anvers au XVIIe siècle’, in Le singe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Figure de l'art, personnage littéraire et curiosité scientifique, 2019, pp. 153–165.

⁹ N. Garnier-Pelle, Les Singeries de Chantilly, Paris, 2021, pp. 82–86.

¹⁰ op. cit., p. 50