Le Déjeuner de Voltaire à Ferney or Le Souper des Philosophes

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

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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