In 1787, a painting at the Paris Salon gave offence. Not through nudity, but through roughly an inch of visible enamel.
蒷isabeth Vig閑 Le Brun had painted herself the previous year with her six-year-old daughter Julie gathered into her lap. Both look directly out at the viewer. The mother's lips are parted, and her teeth are showing. The gossip sheet M閙oires secrets relayed the verdict of the tastemakers with some relish: artists, connoisseurs and people of taste were united in condemning the affectation, for which antiquity offered no precedent. The complaint, stripped of its curlicues, was that in smiling she showed her teeth.
The old regime of teeth
Rules of conduct inherited from antiquity and hardened in Renaissance courtesy books discouraged opening the mouth to display feeling. A face at rest signalled self-command. Louis XIV, who lost most of his upper teeth to a catastrophic extraction in his forties, set the standard for a court that took its cues from him, and the standard was gravity.
There was a practical dimension too. Sitters held poses for hours across multiple sessions, and no one can hold a smile. But painters invented drapery, backgrounds and entire landscapes without difficulty, so the technical excuse only goes so far. The mouth stayed shut because it was deemed vulgar.
Where the teeth went instead
Lucas van Leyden engraved
The Dentist in 1523. An operator has his fingers and an instrument inside a seated man's mouth. The patient's face has collapsed into a grimace. Behind him, unhurried and unnoticed, a young woman is lifting his purse. The print circulated across western Europe in French, German and Italian versions, and its joke is entirely legible five centuries later: pain makes you stupid, and somebody is always watching for the moment.
A century afterwards, Theodoor Rombouts painted
The Tooth-puller, now in the Prado, on a canvas more than two metres wide. A crowd presses in around the operator, faces registering fascination and alarm in about equal measure, while the patient endures with a stoicism that reads as either courage or shock. Certificates lie on the table attesting to the man's training, and the Prado notes drily that they may well be fake. When the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent mounted its Rombouts retrospective in 2023, new research suggested that the amateur dentist is the painter himself.
How the rule broke
Something shifted in eighteenth-century Paris, and dentistry was part of it. Pierre Fauchard published Le Chirurgien-dentiste in 1728, coining the word that named the profession and arguing for conservation rather than extraction. His successors built a genuine specialism out of it. At the same time the cult of sensibility, running through Richardson and Rousseau, recast the smile as evidence of a responsive soul rather than a coarse one. Feeling became fashionable, and a face that showed feeling became admirable.
Vig閑 Le Brun was standing exactly on that fault line, which is why the reaction to her self-portrait was so sharp. She painted a second version in 1789, more classically draped, and it hangs in the Louvre alongside the first. Within months the Revolution had scattered her clientele and she was on the road to Rome.
The maintained face
More recently, smiley people are everywhere on social media. The general conception is they are considered sympathetic, approachable, happy, healthy and wealthy. A social expectation that every adult should display a full set of teeth on demand requires an industry to sustain it, and much of that industry now operates across borders.
Dental implants in Turkey have become a global phenomenon and a true social media trend, while we art enthusiasts are still waiting for a modern Rombouts to turn the craze into satire.
Rombouts painted his tooth-puller amid a crowd, and his painting circulated all over Europe. Four hundred years on, the transaction has moved online. Vig閑 Le Brun's face is still smiling in the Louvre. Whether some future viewer will find our own teeth as strange as we find those closed Renaissance mouths cannot be answered from inside the convention.
