Brandoin and Gibbon in Lausanne, c1787: a drawing rediscovered and a letter explained.

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Michel-Vincent Brandoin and Edward Gibbon

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Brandoin and Gibbon in Lausanne, c1787: a drawing rediscovered and a letter explained.

If the name Michel-Vincent Brandoin (2) is remembered by historians of art, particularly in Britain, it is as a result of a single work: a print made after his drawing, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting in the Year 1771 (3) (Pl 1). This was the first illustration known of these manifestations, only the third after its foundation when they were still held at the cramped Pall Mall house before the move to the grander setting of Somerset House. Swiss by birth, Brandoin followed initially in the family textile business in Amsterdam and Turin before settling in London in the late 1750s. His transition from family business interests to the pictorial arts was accomplished by late 1762 when he devoted himself to working as a watercolourist from his apartments in Chelsea. How he made his living at this time is not recorded, but there are notations in his surviving Account Book' that he taught English and Swiss amateurs, and possibly acted as a picture dealer. (4) However, by 1769 Brandoin was working in the Poland Street studio of Paul Sandby, conceivably as a student, evidence for which appears in an unpublished manuscript in which the first sentence reads: 'Monr Sandby m'appris en 1769 a bouillir le bistre ... & par la lui donner du brillant & de la transparence.' (5) The manuscript was no doubt intended to record modern watercolour techniques, quite possibly with the objective of writing a procedural manual. It is surely in this goal that Brandoin visited other studios of watercolour painters active in London, including in the manuscript heretofore unknown records on the working methods--and watercolour palettes--of not only Sandby, but also Charles-Louis Clerisseau, Francesco Zuccarelli, Antonio Zucchi, and others. In the following year, Brandoin entered the Royal Academy school, no doubt on the advice of Sandby; he was 37, the oldest student at the time and the first instance known in his biography of professional training. (6) While under the supervision of his teachers, Brandoin was already making a name for himself as an astringent caricaturist of British social customs through satiric drawings published regularly by Robert Sayer.

Despite success in the crowded field of pictorial caricature and social satire, Brandoin decided in late 1772 to return to his native city of Vevey where he continued teaching and undertaking a variety of projects and commissions, including topographical illustration, the decorative arts, and architectural ventures, only remnants of which still remain. Several of these commissions were for a variety of sepulchral monuments, as the neo-classic one for the wife of the Russian count Grigory Orloff in 1781, (7) another for the Necker family in Coppet in 1786, (8) and yet another as a memorial to the poet Salomon Gessner in 1789, about which Brandoin asked the opinion of no less a connoisseur than William Beckford. (9) By this time Brandoin had known Beckford for several years, after having accompanied him in 1786 on a tour of Switzerland subsequent to his wife's death; Brandoin provided some topographical studies for his patron, which he praised. (10) Even though many of Brandoin's commissions at this time were for landscapes, the mainstay for Swiss artists at the time, he also had an unusual client in the Swiss adventurer and scholar Antoine-Louis de Polier, who commissioned him to produce copies of the extensive collection of Indian artifacts he brought back to Lausanne from his three-decade long service in the British army in India, which he, too, described enthusiastically to Beckford. (11) Brandoin was, in other words, an extremely versatile artist who undertook artistic endeavors in diverse areas that gained him an enviable reputation as one of the most important artistic figures of the area. When touring Switzerland in 1784, Sophie von La Roche, the German femme de letters, friend of Goethe, and the most famous female writer in Germany at the time, sought Brandoin out in Vevey--as 'herren Brandwin' and then later 'Herr Bruntwein'--as a principal dignitary in the area to meet. (12)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Gibbon's portrait

With Brandoin's multiple connections to both Swiss and English society in the 1780s, it would seem peculiar that he did not encounter Edward Gibbon after the historian retired to Lausanne in late September, 1783. Indications of an indirect association between Brandoin and Gibbon have been recorded obliquely for decades but with few substantial details emerging. A hint on the Brandoin/Gibbon relationship came to light in 1976 when a letter from Brandoin to Jacques-Georges Deyverdun,...

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