The Monkey Painter (Studio Interior)

Nobody is quite sure when this was painted. The Louvre's own record says it was shown at the Salon of 1833, yet gives its date as 1849, and other references place it in 1837. The subject is clearer, a monkey at work as an artist, an old joke that Decamps returned to more than once. Chardin had shown a monkey painter at the Salon of 1740, dressed in a red coat and plumed hat and standing at a proper easel to copy a plaster cast, and the Louvre owns what is probably that very canvas. Decamps's monkey has none of those manners. He squats on the floor of a cluttered studio, his canvas propped against a chest, and holds the brush at full stretch to dab at a landscape. On the wall hang a palette, a pistol and a framed picture, and a blue and white jar stands by the canvas. The painting came to the Louvre in 1902 in the bequest of Georges Thomy Thiéry, a collector born on Mauritius, along with a whole group of other works by Decamps.