Gabriel de Saint-Aubin failed three times to win the Prix de Rome. On one occasion he was defeated by Fragonard, on another, by the son of Chardin. Winning the accolade would have sent Saint-Aubin (1724–80) to Rome on a scholarship and elevated him to a career at the pinnacle of the art world in 18th-century France. Instead he spent his life as a wandering street draftsman, apparently never getting more than 10 miles from Paris. He sketched the parade that welcomed Marie Antoinette to the city in 1773; he pictured the dwarf at the ancient St. Germain fair; he even described a crackpot paper-organizing system intended to handle the bureaucracy of the nascent Paris police force. He portrayed fashionable café life, theatre and opera; he sketched new buildings going up—among them the church that would later become the Panthéon—and appears to have captured most public celebrations held by the French royal family for three decades. He experimented with drawing in liquid gold and produced illustrations for guidebooks and lascivious novels.

In short, he was a bohemian: He remained a bachelor, an insomniac, a hypochondriac (he complained of toothaches, headaches and leg aches), and when he died at the age of 56, on Valentine’s Day, 1780, the notary charged with inventorying his belongings walked into his apartments near the Louvre and found them so filthy and disarrayed that he refused to proceed until they were cleaned.

This is the Gabriel de Saint-Aubin that the 19th-century writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt celebrated in one of their novelistic essays, and, in essence, it is the artist as he has come down to us today: avant-garde, avant la lettre. It’s a seductive picture, the tragic Parisian gazetteer, and his eccentricity is a tempting explanation for his marginal place in histories of 18th-century French art. But it’s also wholly anachronistic. Saint-Aubin was born half a century before the advent of Romanticism, and he would have had little notion of what the Goncourts understood by bohemian life. This month, however, the first significant retrospective of the artist in 80 years opens at the Frick Collection in New York, and it should, finally, both rehabilitate the artist’s reputation and return him to his proper context. (The exhibition runs from October 30 through January 27, after which it will travel to the Louvre.)

Although he is remembered as an oddball artist, it would surely have been odd if Gabriel de Saint-Aubin had not been an artist, since nearly all of his family were craftsmen of one kind or another. His grandfather was an embroiderer, and his father followed suit. Of his six siblings, five were artists, and, intriguingly, of the three to achieve fame—Gabriel, Charles-Germain and Augustin—all did so in the media of etching and draftsmanship. Gabriel particularly excelled: He had the talents of a brilliant miniaturist, a compresser of detail and ornament. "The Triumph of Pompey, 61 B.C.," produced in 1763, right at the outset of his mature period, is a sturdy rendition of his talents; even the sloping landscape in the background is put to work in heightening the pageant.

Unfortunately, like his brothers, Gabriel lacked the talent to produce the large-scale history paintings that the Academy encouraged. His preparatory studies and sketches fizzed with spontaneity, but somehow, when he translated them into final compositions, the life bled out. His family long believed that one of his canvases, "The Triumph of Love Over All the Gods," 1752, a dizzying confection of cherubs, proved his talents. Others clearly disagreed—when it was offered for sale in 1807, it made five francs.

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s undisputed talent lay in recording the street life that passed before his eyes. "Society Promenade," from 1760, is a typically highly worked drawing in ink, watercolor and gouache, and a typical subject: a scene of high-society street theatre with its figures grouped into a myriad of conversations. This lively choreography may have masked one of the artist’s weaknesses, for one senses that he was uncomfortable with articulating scenes at close quarters; rather than speak his figures’ emotion through expressions on their faces, he preferred to speak them through a ballet of movement. Nevertheless, the pleasure Saint-Aubin derived from producing such sketches is readily apparent and, according to his brother Charles-Germain, he produced between 4,000 and 5,000 in his lifetime. Indeed, toward the end of his life he seems to have produced little else.

This prolific production has only encouraged the acceptance of the Goncourts’ picture of the street draftsman, yet it has led more cautious scholars to wonder how he made a living. Kim de Beaumont, one of the organizers of the new exhibition, has re-examined the evidence and concluded that the artist was not the footloose sketcher once imagined. At the age of 23 he was made professor of drawing at the École des Arts, a school established in the 1740s by the architect Jacques-François Blondel to teach all the branches of learning necessary to architects. Indeed, during his time there, Saint-Aubin may well have taught figure drawing to Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.