Stories of Painters in Le Mousquetaire (1853-1857)

In Florence, where he stayed between 1840 and 1843, Alexandre Dumas received a very prestigious editorial commission, La Galerie de Florence, to illustrate the collection of the Grand Duke’s Gallery. Dumas produced a history of the Medici family, a history of painting from the Egyptians to the present, and Histoire des peintres. Several decades later he reprised some of these texts in Trois maîtres (1861) and Italiens et Flamands (1862), which profiled different painters. To understand Dumas’s selection of artists, we must consider an intermediate work of his that has so far been forgotten: his Histoire des peintres published in feuilleton format in the pages of Le Mousquetaire, a journal he founded and edited between 1853 and 1857. This study briefly sets out the history of this work, focuses on some elements of its commentary, and identifies it as an interesting case of pseudo-scientific popularization spread via new channels of mass communication.