The Naked Philosophe and the Shameless Prussian: Diderot's Portrait Sitting

In one of the most intriguing passages of his Salon of 1767, Denis Diderot recounts at length his dealings with the Prussian-Polish painter Anna-Dorothea Lisiewska-Therbusch. Recently arrived in Paris, she had gained a solid reputation as a portrait and history painter at the court of Frederick II, at the elegant and libertine court of Duke Carl Eugen in Stuttgart, and at the court of the Elector Palatine in Mannheim. In January 1767, Therbusch was in Paris, eager to leave her mark on the most prestigious art academy of Europe. It was then that she tan into Diderot and into trouble. That trouble proved to be of the lasting kind. Diderot's portrayal of the artist and her work was such that it gave Therbusch an unsavory immortality. Indeed, a peculiar reincarnation of her has resurfaced in a recent play by the French-speaking German playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt entitled Le Libertin, which was turned into a homonymous film by Gabriel Aghion (2000). (1) Both works portray Therbusch, played by Fanny Ardant in the film, as an artistic sham, a seamy seductress, and a swindler. Under the pretext of painting his portrait, Therbusch seduces Diderot into posing nude for her and then engages with him in a game of sexual banter that extends over a sequence of sittings that are repeatedly disrupted by various incidents and repeatedly adjourned. The portrait turns out to be a rough sketch of his private parts. However, Therbusch's real intent is not so much to seduce the philosophe as to steal from him a collection of valuable paintings that he is about to ship to Catherine of Russia. Diderot uncovers the scheme and exposes the charming impostor. The play predictably ends with a romp in bed, with Therbusch finally allowing herself to be tempted by Diderot, who, of course, is nothing if not irresistible (a young and implausibly fit Vincent Perez plays him in the film). Both the play and the film are generous servings of that kind of fatuous fluff that contemporary audiences often associate with pre-revolutionary libertinage and with the ethos of the aristocratic lifestyle. It should not come as too much of a surprise that the actual story of the relationship between Diderot and Therbusch was infinitely more interesting and fraught. What I am hoping to show here is that Therbusch is the focal point around which revolve a great deal of unspoken and perhaps unspeakable concerns and fantasies on Diderot's part. In exploring the meandering, contradictory, and at times unbalanced response of Diderot toward Therbusch, I would like to highlight on the one hand his profound and very personal anxiety about the woman artist's gaze as a vehicle for desire and knowledge--on the other, his ambivalent feelings toward female sexual education, in particular his own daughter's. Mme Terbouche, as Diderot calls her, was an adventurous and ambitious artist. She had been trained, like her sister and brother, by her father, the portrait painter Georg Lisiewski (1674-1751), and later by Antoine Pesne in Potsdam. At the age of forty, with the consent of her husband, she left him and their three grown children in Berlin in order to further her career at the courts of Stuttgart, Mannheim, and Potsdam. Unlike French women painters, who were limited by enforced proprieties to working on still lifes and portraits, Anna-Dorothea Therbusch painted in a variety of genres that were forbidden to women, such as mythological scenes, mostly in a rococo style influenced by Coypel, Lancret, and Watteau. She also produced genre scenes in the manner of Gerard Dou, whose influence may be felt in some of her remarkable self-portraits that often show her framed by a stone window, surrounded by the emblems of her art, a palette and brushes, as well as books. As Patricia Crown has noted, Therbusch often fashions herself through masculine attributes, such as a scarlet velvet robe and a high-necked linen shirt typical of the learned professions. She often leans on a portfolio of drawings, thus claiming for herself the creative and cerebral activity of composition that was traditionally associated with masculinity (as opposed to color, which belonged to the realm of the sensual and the feminine, or to material craftsmanship). …