Victor Dubreuil and his illusory wealth

BN Goswamy

Trompe l’oeil: Visual illusion in art, especially as used to trick the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object. — Dictionary

He was obsessed with money, doubtless, because he never had any. — Alfred Frankenstein on Victor Dubreuil

THERE is no surprise in the fact that hardly anybody here knows the name: Victor Dubreuil. Not many did anywhere — whether in his native France, or in the US where he eventually settled down — even when he was still around. A recent article on him opens like this: “In October 1893, an unidentified reporter for the New York World visited Victor Dubreuil’s studio on West Forty-Fourth Street to ask him about his deceptively realistic paintings of United States currency.

Several of his pictures had drawn public interest when they were displayed over the bar in a Seventh Avenue saloon. What the journalist found, when the door opened, was a kindly, 51-year-old, virtually penniless Frenchman who spoke heavily-accented English and shared his accommodations with a young nephew.” This man, ‘portly of form with dark eyes, and a grizzled black beard’, appeared keen on not being recognised.

In some of his paintings of currency notes, there were hidden meanings, inserted clues and dates, and he signed each of his works to make sure that they were not meant to pass off as real notes

There was reason for this: he had had a shadowed past in his own country. Born in 1842 at Ayrton near Poitiers, this son of a landowner grew up to join the French army as a young soldier, some 20-odd years of age, and fought in two wars on behalf of his country. Then, having had a good education, he settled down in Paris, and worked for some time as the director of a bank. But, by 1881, he had become a ‘socialist agitator’; he co-partnered the founding of a newspaper called La politique d’action — ‘the Politics of Action’ — which did not succeed.

He then nursed the ambition to establish a Franco-African development company that would do for his country ‘what the East India Company had done for England and for India’, but with a difference. Any financial rewards that came from it would go ‘not to the capitalist but to the working man’. Nothing was working, however, except that by this time one knows in what direction his own mind was moving.

Having tried many things — from land-owning to soldiering, from banking to entrepreunership — one can guess that one day something was going to break. That day came early in 1881. On that day — apparently part of his ongoing efforts — he stole more than five hundred thousand francs from his bank and vanished. When the theft was discovered, the police thought he must have disappeared in neighbouring Holland. The machinery went into action: an extradition warrant was issued on the basis of his crime of forgery and misappropriation of funds. But, having made his plans carefully, Victor Dubreuil was by then moving to that distant land of opportunity: the United States. He arrived in New York in June 1882.

In all this, one must be wondering where does Dubreuil’s work on painted money come in. Oddly enough, in the midst of all these turbulent moves, he did pick up painting. After four months of work as a stable boy soon after he arrived, he began to teach himself to paint and found that he was very good at it. He began to paint still life, genre scenes, landscapes and even portraits. He even started to sell his works and succeeded: not on a grand scale but slowly. By the time he became a natural citizen of the United States, his certification of naturalisation described him simply as an ‘artist’.

In all this, his socialist leanings never left him. The writer of the article I referred to above emphasises that when he began to paint very realistic-looking — trompe l’oiel — images of US dollars and other currency notes, his intention was never to fake — there were enough fakers in the country around — but to engage people with money for a different end. There is little doubt that he came under surveillance by the US authorities repeatedly, for they were hunting for fakers, but nothing was proven against him. One of his most famous works, ‘Barrels of Money’, which shows casks overflowing with stuffed currency notes and spilling out, was even confiscated. But there was no real money in the painting, not even a suggestion of it. In some of his paintings of currency notes, there were hidden meanings, inserted clues and dates, and he signed each of his work to make sure that they were not meant to pass off as real notes. What he brought to his work was satire, a sense of humanising humour. The barrels of money that he painted in eight different versions were ‘imaginary creations that called attention to human greed’. As another writer has said that in them ‘the viewer is presented with the illusion of un-obtainable riches’. Dubreuil, in fact, toys at times with the viewers’ desire for a better life, tempting them with fortune. Or was it that he wanted to ‘touch upon the struggle between wealth and poverty in American society’?

It is not easy to comprehend all this: the turns and twists of the mind of a talented man in whose heart a battle was raging all the time, as it were. To make good in life, but in an honest manner using subtle means? Whatever the case, Dubreuil returned to France in 1900. Evaluation of his work had gone through a change. As Dorinda Evans says: “Like ‘The Eye of the Artist’, ‘Don’t Make a Move!’, ‘Safe Money’ and ‘The Cross of Gold’ (titles of some of his best known works), the works have to be chewed on to get out their marrow-like essence. They provide an intriguing, hint-based game of guessing. As is evident, they also tend to involve a moralising twist.”

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