BLAIREAU, BLAIREUTÉ, BLAIREAUTAGE AND BLAIREAUTEUR

Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting Heads of the Rebel Beys at the Mosque El Assaneyn (fig. 1), shown at the Salon of 1866, prompted the art critic Edmond About to exclaim in awe:

The quotation contains a pun on the word exécution. The painting shows the heads of executed rebels, exhibited as a deterring example at the door of a mosque. For About, the brutality of these killings contrasted most effectively with the manner in which the artist had executed his painting, described as polie et blaireautée, here translated as “polished and licked.” Both adjectives suggest an immaculately smooth pictorial surface. The latter, blaireauté, is a technical term referring to the brush employed by the artist to achieve a perfect smoothness of the picture plane, the blaireau (English: badger-brush or blender) — a special tool made out of the long, supple hair of the badger. Resembling a powder puff, such a brush was employed dry, that is, with neither pigment nor binder, and used to efface all traces of brushwork by circling it across the paint surface. The technical vocabulary of the time coined a verb to describe the action of handling this brush: blairotter. The action itself was called blaireautage.

Blaireautage resulted in fini or “finish” — another technical term, used to describe the perfect smoothness of the picture plane. For many critics, fini was the hallmark of academic painting. Most commentators strongly disapproved of the use of the badger. Artists who employed it (or were believed to have made use of it) were tauntingly given the moniker blaireauteurs. It was an allegation often made against Gérôme, whom many believed to foster an excessive love for this utensil. Gérôme's strong affection for the badger brush was notorious: the entry on the word blairotter in the Larousse of 1866 quotes the dictum of the critique Paul de Saint Victor: “Gérôme blairotte trop ses tableaux.”

Indeed, painting manuals of the nineteenth century warn not to overdo blaireautage, as an excessive use of the badger deprives the painting of vigor and energy.