The Public Promenade (La Promenade Publique)

Philibert-Louis Debucourt’s "The Public Promenade" is the last and greatest example of multiplate color printing in the eighteenth century. Here the artist portrayed members of Parisian society in the grounds of the Palais Royal. He accurately depicted fashions and social customs on the eve of the revolutionary terror of August and September 1792, when the royal family was imprisoned and the massacre of French aristocrats began. Identifiable portraits include the Duc d’Aumont, dressed in pink and sprawled across three chairs, the future Louis XVIII, and the Duc de Chartres, blowing kisses to a group of promenading women; this group includes Manola, wearing a yellow dress with a black bodice, who was Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s favorite model.

This etching is one of three impressions in the first state (a state is any stage in the development of a print at which an impression is made), before the addition of all inscriptions and the artist’s initials and date. The colors, dominated by patriotic blues, reds, and whites, are at their freshest and most brilliant. Debucourt used aquatint washes and hand tools to create the four large plates—a black “key” plate and red, yellow, and blue color plates—to imitate gouache and watercolor washes.

Debucourt, originally trained as a painter, had executed the first of his five hundred prints by the time he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1781. Although he reproduced other artists’ work, he was most successful with color prints designed after his own compositions. His work reflected the changing taste of an era, from portrayals of Parisian society to severe revolutionary allegories to subjects rendered in the manner of early Romantic artists.