Marketing race and racism in Revolutionary Paris. No U.S. copies.

Louis-Marie Sicardi / Jacques-Louis Copia. Come la trovate? Paris: “A Paris chez Sicardi Rue et Faubourg Poissonnière, au coin de la Rue Bergère, N.o 158. et 16. de la Section. Et chez Jaufret M.d d’Estampes au Palais de l’Egalité à côte du Café de Foy. N.o 61.,” [1793]. [ x cm], [1] f. stipple engraving, with contemporary hand-color. Toned, some wrinkling especially at left edge.
 
 
Rare—and openly racist—stipple engraving produced in Paris in 1793 by Jacques-Louis Copia (1764-1799) after the design of Louis-Marie Sicardi (1746-1825). Marika Takanishi Knowles discussed this print in her recent (and excellent) article on Sicardi’s development of racist-consumerist themes culminating his 1803 print “Mirate che bel visino” (“Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s ‘Mirate che bel visino’,” Journal18 [June 2023]). 
 
Knowles writes of the enigmatic Come la trovate?, “In 1793, Sicardi expanded his repertoire to show a Black man wearing a slave collar unveiling a dark-haired white woman who wears an Ottoman-inspired dress … an advertisement for the print in Le Moniteur universel makes the content explicit: the man reveals the woman in order to present her for sale, while asking the intended client ‘Come la trovate?’ or ‘How do you find her?’ This sequence of publications suggests that Sicardi had discovered a commercially successful format for the presentation of paired figures in which one figure theatrically reveals another, whether by drawing back a curtain or lifting a cloth. In ‘Come la trovate?,’ he both sexualizes and racializes the discovery. 
 
“The text in Le Moniteur universel, however, made it quite clear that miscegenation was not on the horizon, assuring the reader that ‘if le nègre admires her beauty, it is not for his own sake, and he does not want others to envy him for her, but to buy him from her.’ Perhaps the success of Sicardi’s new formula had to do with the way that the content of the print is run through with the site of its marketing, so that the window-shopper in the Palais Royal might conflate the purchase of the print with the purchase of a beautiful woman” (Knowles, “Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s ‘Mirate che bel visino’,” Journal18).
 
 
OCLC and KVK locate no U.S. copies of this work.
 
*Marika Takanishi Knowles, “Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s ‘Mirate che bel visino’,” Journal18 (June 2023); Jules Belleudy, “Louis Sicardi, Miniaturiste,” Bullétin de la Société de l’art français (1931), pp. 239-309; Michel Lauraine, Louis Marie Sicard, dit Sicardi (1743-1825), peintre miniaturiste.