Le chanteur, la baguette et la peinture historiée (une iconographie européenne)

Almost everywhere in Europe, from the 17th century to the Second World War, drawings, paintings, engravings or photographs have represented the singer of « complaints », perched on a scaffold, pointing with his stick towards a great painting on which would be represented the main episodes of the story being told. This character, often taken to be any old huckster, is clearly badly known. He is the cousin of other wanderers: of the peddlers (because he would sell his complaints, printed and illustrated), of the circus hucksters hawking their trade at village fairs or markets –quacks, magic lantern or optical vision operators. This paper tries to paint an iconographic panorama from a pragmatic point of view and limits itself to Western Europe; its corpus consists in some hundred representations of complaint singers in action