Review of Pictures of Life
author: Elizabeth Moody
source date: January 1791

Elizabeth Moody Art. 52. Monument du Costume Physique & Moral de la Fin du dix huitieme Siécle; ou, Tableaux de la Vie. Small 8vo. 2 Vols. pp: 360 in all. 6s. Boards. Dilly. 1790. Art. 53. Pictures of Life: or, a Record of Manners, Physical and Moral, on the Close of the Eighteenth Century. Translated from the French. Small 8vo. 2 Vols. pp: 440, in all. 6s. Boards. Dilly. 1790. [Monthly Review , second series, vol. 4, January 1791, pages 106-107. Benjamin Nangle identifies Elizabeth Moody as the author of this review from an editor's marked copy of The Monthly Review . See Nangle, The Montly Review, Second Series, 1790-1815: Indexes of Contributors and Articles , Clarendon Press, 1955. This edition of this review article was edited by Mary A. Waters with transcription, encoding, and editorial assistance by Dillon Cullinan. The book comprises 26 illustrations by the artists Sigmund Freudenberger (1745-1801) and Jean-Michel Moreau (1741-1814) with text by Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne (1734-1806), a writer of novels, short stories, legal and philosophical essays, historiography, autobiography, and even pornography.]

The author of these descriptions sets out with promising to exhibit pictures of the modes of thinking, and manners of acting, peculiar to the present age: this led us to expect some novelty in the subjects of these paintings; of course we were a little disappointed to meet with none but old pictures: the same dissipation, the same frivolité, and disposition to gallantry, and the same general profligacy among the great, are here represented as they have been so often described in past ages: nor can we perceive any peculiar excellence in this painter's performances: his colours are often coarse: he has not taken a good likeness of Nature, either in her moral or physical character; and she is mostly drawn in unbecoming dresses. In a picture of her in her physical capacity, we are presented with an accouchement [Birth of a baby.] . This is a favourite subject with the artist, and he paints it con amore [Tenderly; lovingly.] The companion to it is a mother surrounded with one-and-twenty children, a groupe that not a little enhances our admiration of French population: nor can we contemplate this Galtic Hecuba [Wife of King Priam of Troy. They had 19 children together.] without some degree of respect. Among the best of the pictures, is a gambling party, where the fatal consequences of that pernicious vice are affectingly pourtrayed. A melancholy story, displaying some of the cruel effects of the present commotions in France, concludes the exhibition.

The translator is a faithful copyist: but the colouring to which we object, in some of the original pictures, is still coarser in the copies—This is not the fault of the translator, but of the languages.