Another mystery de Beaumont solved has to do with the artist’s habit of illustrating pictures at exhibitions. He regularly sketched at the Salons, and his unfinished drawing "The ‘Salon du Louvre’ in 1765" demonstrates the care he devoted to the placement of paintings. The artist was also a regular at the Paris auctions, filling sales catalogues with sketches that have proved so accurate that for years connoisseurs have been using them to track the provenance of pictures.

When the particularly rich collection of paintings and drawings amassed by the art dealer and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette came up for sale in the winter of 1775, Saint-Aubin was there sketching. As a document, his sales catalogue has proved so useful that one of the organizers of the present exhibition, Pierre Rosenberg, is currently preparing it for publication. Certainly, this reportage was a happy pastime for Saint-Aubin, who seems to have had the character of a pedant scholar (he liked to correct mistakes in the catalogues with little annotations), yet it appears that the sketches were also produced to meet the requests of clients. The same is also true of his apparently spontaneous pictures of the city—many were commissioned.

Another source of employment for the artist came with the revival of temporary architectural structures, which were commissioned for notable festivals, parades and fireworks displays. Saint-Aubin found work designing these structures as well as producing commemorative prints and drawings of them. Some of his sketches at the theatre also had a commemorative function that would have recommended them to clients. "Voltaire’s ‘Coronation’ at the Théâtre Français on March 30, 1778" commemorates a particularly famous tribute paid to the philosopher just two months before he died. Indeed, the more one sees Saint-Aubin celebrating events central to the patriotic French life of his day, the more one doubts that he was nearly as marginal as once thought. While he never matured into an artist who could do battle with the likes of Fragonard and Watteau, he remained entirely steeped in the values of the Academy of his day; he merely found his livelihood outside it.

Indeed, sometimes one might almost imagine that he was trying to carry the Academy into the streets. He was noted for his technique of imparting almost the same substance to his allegorical figures as he did to his human types. Maybe it was a matter of style, but recently some experts took one of his drawings out of its frame to examine it, and on its verso, almost as if Saint-Aubin had wanted his secrets hidden, they discovered a self-portrait, "Gabriel de Saint-Aubin Painting an Allegory of Justice." Probably executed around 1768, it shows the artist sitting behind his easel, just across from an ordinary-looking, dainty maiden, who sits holding up a sword and scales. Saint-Aubin didn’t need to triumph in the Salon itself; for him its themes and heroes were walking about Paris every day.

Morgan Falconer is a journalist and critic based in New York. His writing appears regularly in publications such as The Times, London.