Die Kenner

Decamps had submitted painting after painting to the French Academy, and the Academy kept turning him down. This was his reply. He filled a canvas with monkeys dressed as gentlemen, gathered around a landscape in the manner of the old master Poussin, peering and stroking their chins like a panel of connoisseurs. Painting monkeys aping human folly was an old joke, called singerie in French, but Decamps aimed it squarely at the experts who judged him. He painted it in 1837 and showed it at the Paris Salon two years later. The finest touch is the earnest concentration on the apes' faces, studying the picture with all the gravity of men quite sure they know best.