The guy was a pretty good draftsman/painter.
And his personal evolution, from entrepreneurial banker to rabble-rouser, is similar to that of Thomas William Lawson who went from Rockefeller-connected financier, copper speculator and stock tout to muckraker at approximately the same time. Lawson's 1905 book Frenzied Finance begins with an author's note:
"TO MY AUDIENCE. SAINTS, SINNERS, AND IN−BETWEENS."
If interested see links in our post "Oil Tankers and Interest Rates and Scallywags and Time".
And the headline story from Public Domain Review:
After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks are evaluated anew by Dorinda Evans, who considers Dubreuil’s unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time.In October 1893, an unidentified reporter for the New York World visited Victor Dubreuil’s studio on West Forty-Fourth Street to ask him about his deceptively realistic paintings of United States currency. Several of his pictures had drawn public interest when they were displayed over the bar in a Seventh Avenue saloon. What the journalist found, when the door opened, was a kindly, fifty-one-year-old, virtually penniless Frenchman who spoke heavily accented English and shared his accommodations with a young nephew. As the writer described Dubreuil, the artist had a bent, portly form, dark eyes, and a grizzled black beard. When he went out, he wore a wide-brimmed black hat. This recently recovered journalist’s interview reveals an educated man of strong opinions and many talents. And it helps fill a longtime gap in basic knowledge about Dubreuil and his cryptic, socially-critical images.1
Born to middle-class parents on November 8, 1842, he was baptized Marie Victor Théodore Dubreuil in the town of Ayron, near Poitiers. On the record, his father is listed as a landowner. From what is known, Dubreuil joined the French army as a soldier in his twenties and fought in the Second Franco-Mexican War as well as the Franco-Prussian War. Then he settled in Paris, working as the director of an exchange bank. On May 29, 1878, at age thirty-five, he married Virginie Lenoir, a widow fifteen years his senior. By the spring of 1881, he had become a socialist agitator and co-founder of a short-lived newspaper called La politique d’action. He also tried to found a norm-breaking African development company. According to his interviewer, the company would “do for France and Africa what the East India company did for England and India”, with the difference that “the workingman, not the capitalist” would reap the financial rewards. Apparently as part of this effort, Dubreuil stole more than five hundred thousand francs from his bank — in an action he justified as borrowing — leaving it bankrupt. On October 29, 1881, the Parisian newspaper La revue économique et financière carried a short notice of Dubreuil’s disappearance and speculated that he had gone to Holland. According to the paper, an extradition warrant had been issued against him for forgery and misappropriation of funds.2
....MUCH MORE
Victor Dubreuil, Don’t Make a Move!, oil on canvas, 1893 — Source.
Now called Don’t Make a Move!, the canvas, painted during a time of economic depression, is identified in the article as A Prediction For 1900; or, a Warning to Capitalists. This first title and visual evidence within the painting imply that the subject is an allegorical indictment of international banking. The artist himself, shown wearing his signature broad-brimmed hat and pointing a pistol at the viewer, and his “ex-washerwoman” pose as two bank robbers who, in their coarse clothing, are ostensibly victims of financial reverses.5
