Signatures, Authorship and Autographie in Eighteenth-Century French Painting

Signatures became something of a convention in eighteenth-century French painting. At that time, the authorial value of the name was inscribed in a tradition that went back to the medieval and Renaissance era. But definitions of authorship shifted, as a stronger autographic conception of painting arose, and that would have a strong legacy in the Romantic age. In that context, this essay argues, the meaning of the signature changed. As the signature became conventional in an art imbued with the aura of names, it also gained a new status, that of an autographic trace, carrying a discourse on the performance of the artistic gesture. This essay analyses some emblematic signatures to sustain this argument. Fragonard's signatures in his Portraits de fantaisie embody the aura of artistic performance; women's signatures testify to enduring suspicion about the autographic status of their paintings and the necessity for these artists to perform their art in order to be considered as authors. Finally, Hubert Robert's autograph inscriptions, disseminated in his work and in the ruins that he painted, manifest the reinforcement of a discourse on presence and witnessing in the painting of the Enlightenment.