Color aquatint, etching and engraving printed in carmine, dark pink, yellow, blue and black, 1792. 460x618 mm; 18 1/4x24 1/2 inches (sheet). Third state (of 3). Trimmed on or just inside the plate mark, with the entire composition, border line, text and registration mark in the lower center margin preserved. A superb, well-registered impression of this extremely scarce, important print, with strong colors, the very fugitive pinks and roses still distinct and the foliage in the upper portion of the plate particularly strong.
Debucourt's (1755-1832) La Promenade Publique was published in Paris in the first half of 1792. The second half of the same year saw riots, the August 10, 1792 massacre of Louis XVI's Swiss Guards, the descent into chaos of the Legislative Assembly, foreign invasion, the abolition of the monarchy and with that the abolition of the year itself: September 22, 1792 became day one of month one of year one of the new Republican Calendar. Debucourt's print shows the Parisian aristocrats at play before the French Revolution erupted: dancing, gambling and gossiping, carefree and seeminglingly oblivious to the forthcoming nightmare.
According to Ittmann, "The fops vie with the infamous beauties of the day, innocently unaware of the impending massacres of September 1792. Debucourt dared to include portraits of the little, pink-clad duc d'Aumount indolently sprawling across three chairs and the future Louis XVIII, then the duc de Chartres, simpering on tiptoe to blow a kiss to an admiring friend, little more than a year before the execution of his father, Philippe-Egalité. Probably for this reason, Debucourt chose to issue this print without the usual fanfare of a press announcement and inscribed it with the address of the printseller Depeuille instead of his own," (Regency to Empire, French Printmaking 1715-1814, Minneapolis, 1984, p. 290). As Salaman grisly noted of the characters represented in this scene, they "had yet to hear the thud of a head falling into a basket," (Masters of the Colour Print: P. L. Debucourt, London, 1929). Fenaille 33.
