Art Institute of Chicago

Le Déjeuner de Voltaire à Ferney ou Le Souper des Philosophes (The Lunch of Voltaire in Ferney or the Soup of Philsophers)

Unknown Artist

Date

c. 1773–75

Medium

Etching in black on bluish gray laid paper

Culture

Switzerland

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

The Swiss artist and caricaturist Jean Huber was Voltaire’s longtime neighbor and his most frequent portraitist. This anonymous print after a Huber painting imagines some of the leading statesmen, polymaths, writers, and clerics who often hobnobbed with Voltaire coming to supper at his Ferney estate. Voltaire, his hand raised, calls the group to order. Included in the cosmopolitan cast of characters are Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, authors of the famous Encyclopédie . Although the two writers were associated with Voltaire, there is no surviving record of them having dined at Ferney.

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