Gabriel de Saint-Aubin

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin

Frick Collection

New York

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Through Jan. 27, 2008

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin isn’t as big a name in art history as he should be, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. Perhaps that’s because his finest works are small drawings “so subtly made and so full of minuscule details that they can be fully appreciated only with the help of magnifying glasses.” The Frick Collection’s current exhibition of 75 paintings and works on paper, the first show dedicated to the artist since the 1920s, provides a rare chance to study his “unclassifiably diverse” range. Some of the most impressive drawings render elaborate naval battles, contemporary public scenes, or episodes from Roman history. But most capture ordinary Parisian life. These endlessly inventive, always lively works here reveal him as “a genius draftsman, one of 18th-century France’s greatest.”

That may be taking things a bit far, said James Gardner in The New York Sun. Saint-Aubin’s drawings are undoubtedly charming but rarely provide much psychological insight. “What is most impressive about this art is its sheer volume.” The artist’s brother once estimated that he produced 100,000 drawings in his career. While this may be an exaggeration, he seems to have been a compulsive observer of his native city. “Saint-Aubin would wander Paris’ streets and haunt its theaters, dance halls, and brothels, recording everything he saw in his sketchbooks.” Sketchy scenes of everyday life were hardly what his wealthy patrons wanted. But they perfectly match our contemporary tastes. Taken together, his drawings capture the modern world at the very moments of its dawning, and his oeuvre “adds up to far more than the sum of its individual parts.”