Marketing race and racism in Napoleonic Paris. 1 U.S. copy.

Louis-Marie Sicardi / Joseph André Mécou. Mirate che bel visino. Paris: “Se Vend à Paris chez l’Auteur Rue S.t Sulpice, ci-devant Petit Bourbon, N.o 721, Faubourg S.t Germain et chez Jeaufret M.d d’Estampes Palais du Tribunat N.o 61.,” “Déposé à la Bibliothèque Nationale le 16. frimaire An 12.” [8 December 1803]. [35.5 x 27.2 cm], [1] f. stipple engraving. Edges trimmed unevenly, water staining, spotting and toning. 
 
 
Rare (1 U.S. copy: Yale)—and overtly racist—stipple engraving produced in Paris in 1803 by André Joseph Mécou (1771-1837) after the design of Louis-Marie Sicardi (1746-1825). 
 
In her recent (excellent) article on the work, Marika Takanishi Knowles remarks that, “There are surprisingly few accounts of this print.” I can do no better than her analysis, and so I quote it here at length (“Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s ‘Mirate che bel visino’,” Journal18 [June 2023].)
 
Knowles writes that, “the print stages itself as a meeting between the subject and the viewer by hailing the viewer with the instruction to look: ‘Mirate che bel visino,’ which can be loosely translated as ‘Look at this cute little face.’ The stipple etching, made by Joseph André Mécou after a drawing by Louis-Marie Sicardi and published in Paris in 1803, shows two figures, a white woman and a Black woman, behind a wooden table fitted with a folding mirror. 
 
“The intended content of the composition was made explicit in the sale advertisements printed in December of 1803 in Le Moniteur universel and Le Journal de Paris. In the former, the description reads: ‘This composition, full of grace and originality, presents a young woman showing to her mirror the head of her négresse, and smiling at the idea of this piquant opposition.’ This text makes the underlying racism of the print quite clear—unfortunately, there is nothing very unexpected in the contrast between a white woman who is idealized according to period standards of beauty and the caricatural representation of a Black woman who is further subjugated by the white woman’s controlling embrace […] The presentational gesture both theatricalizes Blackness in a comic mode and offers this comic performance of race for consumption in the marketplace. By situating this print in the context of Sicardi’s oeuvre as well as the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary marketplace for prints, its theatrical nature becomes clear […] 
 
“[Sicardi’s] prints were sold in fashionable locales like the Palais du Tribunat (once the Palais Royal), a centre of modish Parisian consumption where shoppers sought ribbons, gloves, trimmings, books and prints, as well as theatrical entertainment. Sex workers also solicited in the galleries of the Palais […] In the end, Sicardi created a horrific pastiche. From portraiture, he took the well-known pairing of a white woman and a Black servant, which he set within the genre of the toilette picture as a commentary on the theatrical staging of appearance. Driven by an obligation to appeal to the marketplace, he turned to the comic theater, from which he took the strategy of direct address, as well as the comic derision that was the servant’s eternal lot in this theatrical style. The result is an image that lies at the intersection between the making of race, the making of women, and the sideshow antics of the marketplace address. At the end of the eighteenth century, this blatant address to the marketplace hailed the triumphant union of racism and mass culture” (Marika Takanishi Knowles, “Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s ‘Mirate che bel visino’,” Journal18).
 
 
OCLC and KVK locate 1 U.S. copy of this print (Yale).
 
*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.