VICTOR DUBREUIL ACTIVE 1886-c. 1900
The Eye of the Artist, c. 1898
Oil on canvas, 10 X 14" (25.40 x 55.56 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 967-0-148

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a number of American trompe l'oeil still-life painters began to focus on the subject of money. Led by William M. Harnett, such artists as John Haberle, John F Peto, and Nicholas A. Brooks created exact images of paper currency. They had several aims: to show off their replicative skills, to confound federal counterfeiting laws, and, perhaps most importantly, to join in the then - highly- emotional debates over American monetary policy. At the time there were significant differences between using "hard" gold- or silver-backed paper currency and "soft" Treasury Notes, or "Greenbacks," whose value was based solely on the government's promise to redeem them.
Among the most enigmatic of these painters was Victor Dubreuil, born in New York City to French émigré parents. While Dubreuil's training is unknown, his name appears in Manhattan directories in 1886, and the first of his money paintings dates to about 1890. Dubreuil had a satirical streak, frequently painting rows of money-stuffed barrels or safes full of cash, underscoring America's preoccupation with wealth in the age of the robber barons. Among his best-known works is The Cross of Gold (1896, private collection), which depicts bills arranged in the form of a cross tacked to wood planks with gold-headed pins, a literal embodiment of Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryar's words at the 1896 Democratic Convention: "You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold!", that is, create economic hardship for ordinary farmers and workers through the "hard" money policies of East Coast banks. In Dubreuil's version, however, "Greenbacks" form the cross, now nailed down by gold.
Another of Dubreuil's paintings is titled Don't Make a Move! (c. 1898, private collection), a view of two robbers, who have caricatured Jewish features, one armed with a pistol, holding up a bank cashier who is identical with the viewer. Such seemingly anti-Semitic sentiments would not have been unusual for a French artist working at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, a French army officer and a Jew, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted and imprisoned as a German spy. Although the evidence was subsequently found to be falsified, French conservative politicians still used the occasion to blame their country's financial woes on a conspiracy of Jewish bankers.
This background is necessary to explain Dubreuil complex work, The Eye of the Artist. The painting depicts a folded five-dollar Treasury Note glued thick wood plank. Below the bill is a letter addressed to the artist and, to our right, a hole cut into the plank, through which a human eye stares back According to the painting's title, this eye is the a looking at us through his creation. It has been n that ". . . this eye, or oeil, is the trompe l'oeil of piece ... the I of the artist who draws his mater from the visual realm (and) the eye from the pyramid (on the back of) the American dollar bill."' That above the pyramid is an Egyptian symbol of divine watchfulness, the eye of an all-knowing, omnipresent God-or of an especially vigilant artist.
The letter had been sent from the New York which had run several articles on January 23, V relating to the uproar in France's Chamber of Deputies over Emile Zola's letter, "J'accuse." Zol produced evidence that the real spy was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, who had been acquitted, through forged evidence, of the blame that had on Dreyfus. The Herald, a politically conservative( newspaper, ran Zolds text and the opinion of a French doctor that Zola suffered from a "pathological ( nervous condition"!
The discovery of these articles, when paired w five-dollar "Greenback" bearing the portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, whose Presidential administration was noted for its financial corruption, might indicate that The Eye of the Artist was another attack on Jewish robber-bankers and/or their unsound monetary policies. Dubreuil's motives, however, are never entirely decipherable. What, for instance, did he intend by painting the plank with the colors of the Hungarian national flag; the presence of the words "Havana" and "NimoreiS" on the letter; or "D Nellborgen' named as Secretary of the Treasury on the bill? While we may never be able to explain all of Dubreuil's puns and references, the evidence indicates that he was an artist with international interests, and more than just money on his mind.


BRUCE W. CHAMBERS