A Friendly Discussion

Jehan Georges Vibert spent much of the 1870s perfecting a small genre he essentially invented: the satirical painting of Roman Catholic clergy enjoying the worldly comforts their vows formally renounced. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts under Félix-Joseph Barrias and nurtured inside the French Salon tradition, Vibert was technically one of the most accomplished painters of his generation, capable of competing with William-Adolphe Bouguereau on surface quality alone. Yet he chose to deploy that facility on comedy rather than on the idealised mythological nudes the Salon rewarded most. Works such as this one, depicting cardinals at coffee, at chess, over wine, or inspecting new delicacies, were enormously popular with collectors in France, Britain and the United States, and Vibert sold heavily into the American Gilded Age market. The humor is never savage: these are men of evident learning and good humor, their venality mild enough to be charming. The painting belongs to a body of work that made Vibert wealthy and critically respected during his lifetime, and that art historians now read as a sly, sustained commentary on institutional religion filtered through the visual language of the academic Salon.