Scene in the Tuileries: The Chairs
Medium
Etching, second state
Dimensions
sheet: 4 7/16 x 7 7/8 in. (11.3 x 20 cm) image: 4 1/8 x 7 5/8 in. (10.5 x 19.4 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Rogers Fund, 1918
Accession Number
18.21.1
Tags
Art Historical Context
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s 1760 etching *Scene in the Tuileries: The Chairs* captures a lively moment in one of Paris’s most fashionable public spaces during the mid-eighteenth century. The Tuileries Gardens, laid out beside the Louvre, served as a popular gathering place for all classes, where visitors could stroll beneath orderly rows of trees, admire sculpture, and rent chairs for a small fee. Saint-Aubin records this everyday ritual with affectionate detail, showing men and women seated or conversing amid the garden’s formal greenery. Working in the delicate medium of etching, the artist em...
About the Artist
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin · 1724–1780
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780) was one of the most vivid and irrepressible graphic artists of eighteenth-century France, a tireless draughtsman whose sketchbooks and prints constitute an extraordinary visual chronicle of Parisian life during the Ancien Régime. Born into a family with strong connections to the decorative arts — his father was an embroiderer to the king — Saint-Aubin received fo...