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Four Allegories of Love:
Catalogue entry

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Entry details

Full title
Four Allegories of Love
Artist
Paolo Veronese
Author
Sir Nicholas Penny

Catalogue entry

, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

© The National Gallery, London

[page 411][page 412]

NG 1318 
Unfaithfulness

© The National Gallery, London

Oil on canvas

189.9 × 189.9 cm

[page 413]

NG 1324 
Scorn

© The National Gallery, London

Oil on canvas

186.6 × 188.5 cm

[page 414]

NG 1325 
Respect

© The National Gallery, London

Oil on canvas

186.1 × 194.3 cm

[page 415]

NG 1326 
Happy Union

© The National Gallery, London

Oil on canvas

187.4 × 186.7 cm

[page 416]

Support

The dimensions given above are those of the stretchers. The canvas is identical in all four paintings: a plain (tabby) weave of medium weight with 13 by 13 threads to the square centimetre.1 In each painting the canvas consists of two strips joined with a horizontal seam extending across approximately the centre of the composition (thus, under the chins of both men in Unfaithfulness, through the eyes of the more prominent woman in Scorn, just below the elbow of the man in Respect, through the jewel of the kneeling woman in Happy Union). Each of the canvas strips is close in size to the loom width of about one metre that seems to have been standard in Venice.

The edges of the painting have been slightly damaged and in some cases turned over. The sides of Respect appear to have been trimmed more severely than those of the other three paintings. It seems likely that the full extent of the man’s right hand and more of the woman’s head on the pillow were originally apparent.2 The artist may have been aware that not all of the painted area would be visible within the original frames because thin discontinuous borders, about two centimetres wide, are painted around all the canvases in red‐brown and orange‐brown paint, perhaps to indicate the area of the canvas that would be visible. The pigment employed for these borders appears to be contemporary with Veronese’s painting, although it has been reinforced.3

Materials and Technique

The canvas is prepared with a thin gesso ground (calcium sulphate), probably gypsum (calcium sulphate dihydrate),4 which is coated with a thin imprimitura of light greyish‐brown colour composed of lead white with some finely ground black and an earth pigment.

The speed and assurance with which the paintings were executed are essential to the effect – to what Holmes described as the ‘princely ease and magnificence’ of the works.5 A bold preparatory underdrawing can be discerned, both drawn in black chalk or charcoal and painted in a liquid medium, also in black and, here and there, very finely, in an orange‐brown. The black underdrawing can be seen most clearly in the drapery below the right breast of the sleeping woman in Respect and outlining the left arm of the man in the same painting. A thin line of brown in the neck of the principal woman in Scorn may have served as a guide for the necklace.6 Some sort of elementary geometrical scaffolding may have been used to help calculate the perspective of the architecture in this painting, as is suggested by the diagonal brushed in black which is just visible in the top right corner.

The sky was completed late in the painting process and it is often thicker around the figures, redefining the position of a head (as in the man’s head in Respect) or of an arm (as in the man’s arm in Happy Union). The very last passages were, however, often painted on top of the sky – some of the leaves and also the yellow shoulder‐buttons in Respect, and some of the foliage above Cupid’s bow in Scorn). There are many minor revisions – the girdle of the enthroned woman was moved higher in Happy Union, as was the head of the hound. More significant pentimenti are seen in Respect, where the red curtain was greatly extended to conceal more of the damask hanging behind it, and in Scorn, where Cupid’s right arm was originally lower and his left arm higher. It also seems probable that the green drapery over the thigh and buttocks of the woman in Unfaithfulness was added, perhaps for the sake of decency, weakening the composition.

Many samples have been taken from these paintings, and the pigments employed have been fully described in the National Gallery Technical Bulletin for 1996. No ultramarine was used. Smalt was used for the sky, which has turned grey in all four paintings. The effect is not displeasing, and one scholar has even argued that it was meant to diminish the perspectival depth of the ceiling paintings,7 but it is not something Veronese can have intended. Smalt was used under azurite for Cupid’s wings both in Respect and in Scorn, where it has completely lost its colour.8 Very rich, deeply saturated greens composed of copper glazes over verdigris and lead white have survived well (as in the man’s cloak in Respect), although some of the greens have also darkened. Vermilion and red lake (in some cases analysed as cochineal) were used in combination in some areas, notably the curtain in Respect, where there has been some fading of the lake at the top right. Orpiment and realgar were employed for the russet colour of the jacket and boots in Unfaithfulness and have degraded. Both linseed oil and walnut oil were used as a medium, the latter less than the former.9

Conservation and Condition

As explained elsewhere (p. 462), the paintings served as overdoors when they were in the Orléans Collection and for this reason they are not likely to have been subjected to radical cleaning. They must have been cleaned when they entered the Darnley collection, or shortly before. They were cleaned again in 1947 and then cleaned and restored between 1980 and 1983 (NG 1324 and NG 1325 between 1980 and 1981, NG 1318 between 1981 and 1982, and NG 1326 between 1982 and 1983). NG 1326 was relined on this occasion.

Losses have been retouched at the edges of all four paintings and also along parts of the seam (especially in Happy Union). The condition in some places affects our understanding of the volumes depicted (notably in the stone sphere and in the breast and belly of the enthroned woman in Happy Union, and in the belly of the sleeping woman in Respect). The russet‐coloured jacket and boots of the bearded lover in Unfaithfulness have lost much of the original modelling on account of the degraded pigments.

As noted above, the colour of the sky has changed from blue to grey, the colour of Cupid’s wings has changed, some of the greens have darkened (in the pattern of the damask in Respect, and in the leaves in Happy Union), and both the subtle rose pink and the pale green in the cloak of the principal woman in Scorn have faded. Pentimenti have become apparent (as noted above) and some white patches in the clouds in Unfaithfulness and Scorn now seem more abrupt than must have been intended.

[page 417]

Inscription

The paper held by the woman in Unfaithfulness is inscribed with red letters which appeared to Gould in 1975 to spell ‘che / uno possede’, meaning ’which one person possesses’. But he put question marks after the first and second word, and wrote that ‘there is some doubt about some of these letters’. In 1959, when he first published the inscription, he transcribed it as ‘ch … / mi.p(ossede)’, again with question marks.10 Braham proposed, reasonably, in 1970 that ‘che uno possede’ might mean ‘someone who has one man’ and might have continued ‘should be satisfied’, in which case, of course, it is not intended as the contents of the (presumably illicit) note but as a message to the beholder. However, the words could equally be the first part of a cynical adage such as ‘she who has had one lover always wants another’. Braham noted that there is a further mark in red after ‘che’, which is partly concealed. ‘This seems unintelligible as part of the inscription and was perhaps added by the artist to ensure that the recession in the area of the picture was not disturbed by letters entirely isolated on the white paper.’11

Attribution and Dating

The paintings seem always to have been acknowledged as by Veronese but many scholars have argued that there must have been some studio assistance. Thus Frederick Stephens in a lecture of 1876 expressed the view that the ‘broadly drawn outlines’ in Respect were ‘laid on with less refinement and less reserve than elsewhere’ and that the forms in this painting ‘were originally somewhat carelessly defined, and afterwards rudely corrected with broad, bold touches of dark pigment, the additions being probably due to the master’. He also found the colours in Respect to lack the ‘silveriness’ of the other paintings, and the face of the nymph to be in need of ‘the purity of the carnations’.12 The flesh colours (carnations) of the back of the woman in Unfaithfulness, on the other hand, are ‘exquisite in the rendering of the white and rose; the greys, so delicious to artistic eyes, have been introduced with amazing skill’ – a skill later praised by Holmes as worthy of Velázquez.13

Some doubts that the paintings were entirely by Veronese had clearly been entertained in the National Gallery, since Collins Baker’s catalogue of 1929 distinguishes ‘nos 1318 and 1326’ (Unfaithfulness and Happy Union) as ‘wholly by the master’s hand’.14 In the catalogue of the Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures in 1947, Respect and Happy Union were relegated to ‘studio of Veronese’, only the dog in the latter being considered worthy of Veronese’s hand.15 Gould in his catalogue of 1959 regarded ‘the whole series as homogenous to the extent of seeing both autograph and studio execution in all four, only the ratio varying’. Veronese’s overall control was such that ‘glaring disparities in quality’ – such as the ‘coarse modelling’ of the putto on the extreme left of Unfaithfulness – were rare.16 Marini in his catalogue of Veronese’s work in 1968 followed Gould in his conclusion that there was some studio participation in subordinate areas, but this view was dismissed by Pignatti and Pedrocco, who claim that the autograph status has been unanimously acknowledged.17 To Gould’s observations it is perhaps only worth adding that there are some passages of broad and summary handling in the setting – especially the foliage – which could easily have been delegated, but also some rapidly brushed lights on the figures which seem likely to have arisen from a final judgement of how the pictures would look when viewed from a distance and from below, and that final judgement must surely have been Veronese’s own.

Fig. 1

Detail of Unfaithfulness (NG 1318). © The National Gallery, London

The dating of the paintings has varied greatly. Many scholars have suggested the 1560s but without giving any reasons. Gould’s observations in 1959, based on the notes of Stella Mary Pearce (Newton), that ‘the costumes and hairstyles shown would accord best with Veronese’s practice in the mid‐1570s’ is surely just.18 The way the hair curls back from the brow of the principal woman in Scorn is especially significant. Rearick felt that the close resemblance to Veronese’s very damaged fresco Venice distributing Honours in the Anticollegio of the Doge’s Palace, Venice, which was begun shortly after February 1576, was such that the National Gallery’s paintings could be dated ‘to the end of 1575 and the first three months of 1576’.19 Although there are similarities between the fresco and the canvases, especially Respect, they are not sufficient to justify so precise a date.

Original Setting and Preparatory Drawing

The hypothesis that these four paintings were intended either for a ceiling or for a series of ceilings is confirmed by two features. First, the architectural elements within them are tilted. Secondly, the lower parts of the compositions seem to have been cut, and in several cases the feet of some of the figures are not visible. Both of these features become disconcerting when the paintings are hung on a wall. To writers on art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the conventions for ceiling paintings invented in the early sixteenth century still prevailed, it was obvious that these [page 418][page 419]were ceiling paintings,20 but in the twentieth century this was sometimes doubted. For Gould it was merely ‘plausible enough’ and for Pignatti ‘probable’.21

Fig. 2

Paolo Veronese, studies for the Allegories of Love. Pen and brown ink with bister wash on ivory paper, 32.4 × 22.2 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Harry G. Sperling Fund, 1975. Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The composition of each painting forms a strong diagonal, which on a ceiling would help relate the paintings to one another but on a wall could serve no such purpose. This device is obvious enough in all four pictures, but it is most ingenious and most subtly dramatic in Scorn, where there is a double diagonal – the line of the bank and the outstretched arm of the statue are paralleled by the thigh and forearm of the principal woman, Cupid’s wings and the broken statue of a faun – with which the woman’s head, Cupid’s head and body, the raised arm of the man and the tree trunk are contrasted. Veronese’s love of diagonals is evident in very many of his paintings, but what is distinctive in all these canvases is the studied avoidance of verticals.

A sheet of preliminary figure studies in pen and ink with wash includes designs for figures and figure groups in all four of the paintings (fig. 2), demonstrating that the compositions were developed simultaneously22 and also that they are essentially figure groups. The trees and the architecture, which might act as scaffolding for a composition, are here merely accessories. The drawing also suggests one other practice of great interest. The wedded couple in Happy Union were originally conceived as advancing from the left – the more usual direction of action in a picture – but were then reversed in the painting, presumably to balance the diagonal movement in the other pictures. In addition, Cocke suggests that the five different positions in which the naked man in Scorn is drawn shows the attention Veronese gave to problems of foreshortening, perhaps employing a wax model.23 Xavier Salomon has recently noted that the drawing includes just above the studies for Respect five faint capital letters in black chalk. There is a G on the left and on the right A, C and F in a vertical line. Each of these is contained in a square. The letter B, unsquared, is placed in the middle. He has proposed that these letters may provide a clue as to the original arrangement of the canvases.24

The first published attempt to reconstruct the original arrangement of the paintings was made by Martin Royalton‐Kisch in 1978.25 He proposed, plausibly, that they were placed on the vault of a square room, with the skies converging in the centre of the ceiling. However, his arrangement of the paintings in the order of Scorn, Unfaithfulness, Happy Union and Respect (clockwise, in a circle) reflects ideas which are not entirely convincing. He argues that there are two ‘interior’ and two ‘exterior’ scenes, but surely only one of them is truly ‘interior’. And he proposes that the men who look out would have been understood as looking at figures in the other paintings: a tempting idea, but not compelling. It seems unlikely that they could easily have been understood to do this, nor are there any other paintings by Veronese in which this sort of interconnection is contrived. On balance it would seem more likely that they were intended for the ceilings of a suite of four rooms. In each painting the light falls from the same direction, which supports this idea. In addition, it should be noted that in Venice no private residence had a ceiling large enough for all these paintings and no ceiling with four square compartments is recorded.26 Since many European palaces had parallel suites of rooms for husband and wife, it is possible that two of the paintings were made for a reception room and bedchamber of a man and two for the equivalent rooms of his consort.

Original Patrons

As is discussed below, the paintings are first recorded in a posthumous inventory made in the late 1630s of the collection formed by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. They were not included in an earlier inventory of Rudolf’s collection. If they had been incorporated into a ceiling in Prague Castle, or some other imperial residence (or set aside with the intention of being incorporated), they might not have been listed.

If Rudolf did commission these allegories, he is likely to have done so soon after becoming emperor in 1576. It is tempting to suppose that they were made to decorate a marriage bedchamber. The subjects, although they have never been completely and convincingly explained, are certainly connected with the trials and rewards of love, and are as obscure and elaborate as those usually favoured by Rudolf, though rather more edifying, with lust sternly subdued in one scene, restraint apparently exercised in another, and fidelity certainly celebrated in a third. If the paintings did play a part in such a setting, then the space in the centre of the ceiling would have been intended for the couple’s united arms. And it has been ingeniously proposed that the men in each picture are gazing at such a heraldic centrepiece.27 The only problem with this argument – a very considerable one – is that the emperor never married.

The possibility should therefore be entertained that the paintings were made for another patron north of the Alps and entered the imperial collection indirectly. The chief agent for the importation of high‐quality Venetian art into the Empire in the period immediately before Rudolf’s accession was Jacopo Strada (1515–1588), whose clients included the Emperors Ferdinand I and Maximilian II, the Elector of Bavaria, Albert V, and the rich banker Hans Jakob Fugger. Strada was not only an art dealer but also an architect, and since he had trained under Giulio Romano in Mantua and took a special interest in the interiors of the Palazzo del Tè, which was so celebrated for its ceiling paintings, it is tempting to suppose that Veronese’s canvases travelled across the Alps through his agency. If so, it is possible that Strada diverted them to Rudolf on the latter’s accession in 1576, although Strada was not much favoured by Rudolf, who employed Strada’s son Ottavio in preference, and later took Ottavio’s daughter, Anna Maria, as his mistress.28

Against the idea that the canvases were made for export is the fact that two of the compositions (Unfaithfulness and Respect) are recorded in Van Dyck’s Italian sketchbook in [page 420][page 421]the 1620s (figs 4 and 5).29 This is not conclusive, however, since it is known that Van Dyck made drawings from copies and engravings as well as originals.30 His drawings of the two allegories are neither fluent in line nor confident in composition, and they introduce much awkwardness that is not present in Veronese’s paintings. This could be explained by the fact that Van Dyck was working from a copy by a less competent hand, but an equally convincing explanation is that he made the drawings from paintings which were on a ceiling.31 If this is so, then the paintings can only have been sent to Prague shortly before they are first recorded there in the late 1630s.

Fig. 3

Detail of Scorn (NG 1324). © The National Gallery, London

Fig. 4

Anthony van Dyck, drawing after Veronese, Allegory of Love III (Respect) – from Van Dyck sketchbook. Pen and brown ink and brown wash over black chalk, 15.5 × 20.2 cm. London, The British Museum. © Copyright The Trustees of The British Museum.

Fig. 5

Anthony van Dyck, drawing after Veronese, Allegory of Love I (Unfaithfulness) – from Van Dyck sketchbook. Pen and brown ink and brown wash over black chalk, 15.5 × 20.2 cm. London, The British Museum. © Copyright The Trustees of The British Museum

Meaning

Descriptions of the paintings in late seventeenth‐ and early eighteenth‐century inventories are vague and inconsistent. The women tend to be identified as Venus and the male warriors as Mars. Happy Union was recognised as an allegory, with the enthroned woman as ‘perhaps Peace’ in 1689 but as Venus in 1721.32 The earliest recorded titles, and thus the first known interpretation of their meaning, are to be found in the catalogue compiled by Du Bois de Saint‐Gelais of the collection of paintings in the Palais‐Royal belonging to the Duc d’Orléans, which was published in 1727.33 L’Infidélité, Le Dégoût, Le Respect and L’Amour Heureux illustrate, he believed, the dynamic elements of which marriage consists (‘différentes révolutions auxquelles sont sujets bien des mariages’). Although the titles are reminiscent of those given to prints after Watteau and his followers during this very period, they were retained throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and much of the twentieth, and were translated as Unfaithfulness, Scorn, Respect and Happy Union by the authors of the National Gallery publications after 1890. They were rejected by Cecil Gould in his catalogue of 1959, and declared ‘absurd’ by Edgar Wind, yet they continue to be used, especially in the English and Italian versions. Scorn was entitled Disinganno by Italian scholars, which means ‘Disillusionment’, and this was the title proposed by Rearick, but this variation, which seems far less appropriate, has not been adopted.34

Mariette, in the text he supplied for the second volume of the Recueil Crozat, in 1742, declared his uncertainty as to the meaning of the paintings but his certainty that the titles were not adequate, except in the case of Infidélité. He thought that Le Respect illustrated the power of beauty and Le Dégoût Love chastising Lust. Louis‐Abel Bonafons, Abbé de Fontenai (1736–1806), in the text he supplied for the complete illustrations of the paintings in the Palais‐Royal – a text probably completed in the mid‐1780s, although this part of it appeared in the volume published in 1808, two years after his death – also felt that the titles were inadequate. He was not uninterested in the meaning of details and noted that Cupid in Happy Union has been divested of his wings to indicate the constancy of married love, but he found it impossible to be sure whether the enthroned woman in that same composition is Venus (as her jewelled girdle might suggest) or Fortune (for whom the globe is a common attribute). He did not mind the uncertainty, which allowed the imagination to wander, and his own speculations were especially stimulated by Scorn. The woman with her bare breasts and jewels cannot be a true opponent of pleasure, he wrote, and the punishment administered by Cupid might be intended to show that love is kindled to greater warmth when its advances are rejected. In the case of Respect, he argued that it did not matter very much whether the action represented a specific historical deed (‘fait particulier’) such as the continence of a barbarian warrior or an allegory of the noble struggle (‘efforts généreux’) of a warrior resisting the appeal of a voluptuous indulgence (‘attraits de la volupté’), for only the ‘self‐esteem of those who believe it possible to know and explain everything’ is offended by such obscurity (‘le voile peu transparent’).35 Fontenai, having taken [page 422]the trouble to consult Ridolfi’s life of Veronese, also entertained the misleading idea that the paintings may have come from the ceilings of the Villa Barbaro at Maser.

There seems to have been little interest in the meaning of the paintings in the nineteenth century, though Waagen wrote that he considered Respect to be ‘very erroneously denominated’ since he was sure that it exemplified the ‘triumph of passion over reason’.36

Writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were so averse to allegory – ‘decorative homilies … a new idiom in decorative art, and one in which failure would seem to be almost inevitable’37 – that they had little to say about the meaning of the paintings, but Osmond was surely correct to consider them as two pairs, with Happy Union opposed to Unfaithfulness, and Scorn complementing Respect.38

By the mid‐1950s, when Cecil Gould began to write his catalogue of the Venetian school, it was acknowledged that expertise on the sort of meaning that might be present in Renaissance allegorical painting would best be found in the Warburg Institute. Consequently, Gould wrote to Ernst Gombrich, seeking his advice.39 It is not recorded how Gombrich replied, and the views of a rival scholar, Edgar Wind, were incorporated into Gould’s catalogue. Wind, like Osmond, also saw two pairs, but he did not consider that the woman in Scorn is expressing anything like scorn, or that the subject of 1318 is unfaithfulness, preferring to see it as ‘symbolising the strife of love’.40 The authority enjoyed by Wind is indicated by the fact that Gould credited him with identifying the relief on the vault in Respect as the Continence of Scipio, even though Gould knew that Pigler had already done so and also knew that there was some doubt as to whether this was the subject of the relief.41 The enthroned figure seems to be female, none of the figures can easily be identified as the fiancé, and no tribute can be discerned, either in the vault in the painting today or in the rather clearer depiction of it in an eighteenth‐century print (fig. 8).

Wind expanded on the meanings in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance in 1967. The man in Respect is, he claimed, not turning away from the sleeping woman but approaching her ‘with awe’, for this represents the ‘consummation of love’. He concedes that some ‘restraint’ is being exercised, but that word seems inadequate to describe the man’s refusal to look and the way he twists his body. Wind was most exercised by Unfaithfulness, which, he proposed, represented the ‘tripartite life’ defined by Marsilio Ficino – ‘a well‐regulated strife between the contemplative, the active and the pleasurable parts of the soul, in which the dominant part is given to pleasure’.42 Wind was as ingenious in detecting the tripartite life in Renaissance art as theologians had once been in finding emblems of the Trinity in the natural world. The ‘dominant’ pleasure in this case is ‘Voluptas Urania’, who turns her back to the world. She ‘fills the musical poet with divine meditations’ – a reference to the younger man who avoids looking at her, although he receives her note – while ‘the man of heroic actions, dressed in a cuirass, returns to her and grasps her hand’. Anticipating the question of how we know this woman to be a celestial being, he refers to her ‘exalted station’ (as if she had a throne), her ‘noble attendants’ (as if the men were her servants) and ‘the incontrovertible fact that she turns her back’ (as if only celestial beings adopted this attitude) – ‘not to mention the winged Cupid playing the spinet’ (as if music were exclusively elevating).43

Three years later, Allan Braham, then a junior curator at the National Gallery, tentatively pointed out some of the problems with Wind’s interpretations in an article in The Burlington Magazine. He also drew attention to the difficulties of interpretation, observing of the sphere, cornucopia, girdle, crown of leaves and veil in Happy Union that ‘the possible readings of these various attributes, taken singly or in various permutations, are almost limitless’, and noted in conclusion that the meaning of the series will not be settled, ‘failing the discovery of a written text’.44

Braham was probably the first scholar to draw special attention to the ‘glass beaker’ beside the bed in Respect, but his suggestion that it shows that the sleeping woman has been drinking wine and so ‘would be in no state of mind for resistance’ seems unconvincing.45 No Renaissance wine glass was of this shape. Another scholar has since suggested that the vessel is for urine.46 (What looks like a thin‐necked flask perched on the cornice may be an inverted fan – it certainly resembles one in the print, fig. 8.) In conclusion Braham argued that the ‘programme seems designed to pay homage to women on the one hand, and on the other to the state of marriage’. This conclusion is difficult to challenge but it is surprising that he finds the Happy Union to be ‘clearly Christian in sentiment’, as if monogamous felicity were a Christian ideal, or the symbol of the olive branch (for peace), the golden chain (for conjugal attachment) and the hound (for fidelity) dated from the Christian era. More recently Goodman Soellner has observed how closely Veronese’s paintings illustrate the progress of love in Petrarchan poetry of a kind that was very familiar to Veronese’s patrons. The view of the sleeping beloved is an example of this. She concedes, however, that she knows of ‘no close poetic analogue’ to the scene in which the woman slips a note into the young man’s hand.47

A point worth making in conclusion is that the relationship between the scenes is not necessarily sequential. The term cycle is also best avoided if it is taken to suggest narrative development, which seems most unlikely – not least because the same man does not certainly appear in any two scenes (and in particular the man in Happy Union certainly does not appear in any of the other scenes48), even though the women are always of the same type.

In addition it should be noted that, with the exception of Cupid, the enthroned woman in Happy Union and the veiled woman carrying an ermine in Scorn, the figures are not likely to be either personifications or divine beings; thus they do not represent love or lust or jealousy or chastity but are men and women who act out scenes illustrating virtues or vices. The nature of the action is perhaps most puzzling in Unfaithfulness,[page 423][page 424]for even if it represents indecision in courtship rather than marital deceit, there is nothing within the picture to express disapproval of the action represented.

Fig. 6

Detail of Happy Union (NG 1326). © The National Gallery, London

Fig. 7

Detail of Happy Union (NG 1326) showing the jewel worn by the kneeling woman. © The National Gallery, London

Acquisition by the National Gallery

The 6th Earl of Darnley, who had inherited the great collection formed by the 4th Earl (see pp. 448–52), wrote to the highly respected artist and art dealer Charles Fairfax Murray on 7 January and 25 January 1888, declaring his resolve to send the ‘four pictures’ by Veronese to Christie’s with a reserve of ‘not less than £12,000’, but also seeking Murray’s advice.49 Murray, evidently having dissuaded the earl from going to auction, undertook to offer the pictures to private collectors. Learning on 3 March that there was ‘no hope in Rothschild quarter’ Lord Darnley felt he should ‘now speak to Christie’s’,50 but again Murray must have dissuaded him.

There is no evidence that Murray persuaded any collector to take an interest in the pictures, except for a reference on 21 May 1889 of a ‘certain person’ going to see them – ‘I do not know whether for foreign or home quarters’.51 Presumably the paintings were available for inspection in London, and the mystery visitor may have been connected with the [page 425]National Gallery. Murray had evidently tried to interest Frederic Burton, in vain, but Murray made sure that others came to hear of their availability. In early June, Thomas Armstrong, director for art at the South Kensington Museum, wrote to his friend George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, a Trustee of the Gallery: ‘I am afraid Burton is inclined to poo‐hoo them … they would be a famous acquisition for the Gallery and I hope Berlin or some French jew will not lay hands on them.’52 Howard then raised the matter with Murray, asking whether Lord Darnley might also be selling the fine Tintoretto.53 This may be the first germ of the idea that Tintoretto’s great painting of the Origin of the Milky Way be offered together with the Allegories. In a letter dated 21 June Murray asked Bode, director of the museum in Berlin, if he would be interested in negotiating for the Veroneses. This seems to have been in 1890, and was probably a second approach.54 The reply cannot have been very positive because in the following month William Agnew had taken over negotiations (possibly at Murray’s suggestion, since Murray was informally attached to Agnew’s, and perhaps because Murray himself was travelling) and was keen to approach the National Gallery again. Lord Carlisle and another artist Trustee, Frederic Leighton, seem to have taken it upon themselves to ensure that Burton respond more positively. Agnew wrote to offer him the Veroneses together with the Tintoretto for £5,000, to be paid over two years. Burton replied on 25 July 1890, rather cautiously: ‘I have no doubt that the majority of them [meaning the Trustees], if not all, will sanction the arrangements.’ Gregory and Layard apparently had ‘qualms’.55

One of the Veroneses, however, was held back and kept at Cobham, as Lord Darnley explained, ‘by Agnew’s advice, – no doubt sound advice, – as it appears more likely to spoil than to help the sale of the others’.56 From this we can only conclude that Darnley had been informed by William Agnew that the lack of interest in the paintings might be partly explained by the supposedly improper subject matter of NG 1325, in which Cupid appears to encourage a man to take advantage of a sleeping woman.

On 26 July Darnley told Agnew that he wanted to present this painting to the National Gallery. He also wanted the price paid for the others to be kept quiet because it was so low and he had only agreed to it ‘after years of vain endeavour to dispose of the pictures both in Europe and America’.57 What seems to have lain behind this apparent benevolence was Lord Darnley’s reluctance to sell five paintings for £5,000 – that is, at £1,000 apiece. Instead, £5,000 would be, or would appear to be, the price for four. This mattered to him because he clearly foresaw the need to sell others of his Italian paintings.

Agnew explained the new situation to Burton and the ‘hard tussle’ he had had with ‘his Lordship’.58 The cantankerous Lord Darnley was, however, offended that Agnew should have revealed his intentions at this stage. It was, he wrote on 10 September, ‘directly contrary to my intentions … I am innocent of the perverted form which the transaction has taken.’ But, he added, ‘to tell the truth, I am only too glad to have “le Respect”, as it is so curiously designated, off my hands.’59 The Board, meanwhile, had met on 5 August and approved a plan to buy some of the pictures for £3,000 and to insure the others for £2,000 until funds were available to purchase them.60

Burton now proposed to take Unfaithfulness (NG 1318) and the Tintoretto (NG 1313) for £2,500. Lord Darnley agreed on 13 September,61 as did the Trustees on 15 September.62 The three Veroneses were already in the Gallery and the fourth must have arrived soon after. Burton seems to have had them hung high, believing that they had been painted for a ceiling, and one Trustee, Lord Hardinge, objected to this.63 This is a reminder of the difficulty of displaying the paintings, which must have been a major factor in the lack of interest Murray had encountered when trying to sell them. Lord Darnley received a cheque for the remaining £2,500 in June 1891.64 He had declared the price ‘absurd’ and grumbled that ‘everything Italian appears to be now out of favour’,65 but several years later, when Titian’s Rape of Europa was offered for sale, it soon emerged that this was not the case. Surprise has been expressed by the far greater sum of £20,000 that the Titian fetched, yet a great difference in value had been clear in 1833, when the Titian was valued at £1,500, twelve times more than each of the Allegories, which together were valued at £500.66

Provenance

The paintings correspond to nos 449 (Happy Union), 451 (Scorn), 453 (Unfaithfulness) and 455 (Respect) in the inventory of the imperial collection in Prague, made after 15 February 1637.67 They were among the pictures looted from Prague for the Swedish Crown in 1648 and were numbers 96 to 99 in the inventory of Queen Christina of Sweden’s collection that was made in 1652.68 Presumably they correspond to the ‘plafon’ by Veronese in the inventory of her collection made in Antwerp in 1656, when she was on her way to Rome,69 and they are listed as 1–4 in the posthumous inventory of her possessions made in Rome in 1689.70 They passed together with the rest of her picture collection in 1721 to the Duc d’Orléans (for this transaction and the paintings in the Palais‐Royal, Paris, see pp. 461–70). They were sold with the Italian portion of the Orléans Collection in 1792 to Walckiers and then to Laborde‐Méréville, by whom they were mortgaged to Jeremiah Harman. These paintings were acquired in 1797 by a syndicate consisting of the Duke of Bridgewater, the Earl of Carlisle and Earl Gower, by whom they were consigned to sale through Michael Bryan in December 1798 as lots 169, 181, 243 and 245. These four pictures were not then sold but were re‐offered at auction on 14 February 1800, as lots 26, 34, 42 and 57, and then bought by the 4th Earl of Darnley (see pp. 448–52) probably soon afterwards. They are recorded in the picture gallery at Cobham Hall in June 1831, when the probate inventory was compiled,71 and remained at Cobham until sold by the 6th Earl to the National Gallery in 1890 (NG 1318) and 1891 (NG 1324 and NG 1326). The circumstances of this sale are described in the previous section, where it is also explained why Lord Darnley made a gift of NG 1325 (also in 1891).

[page 426]
Fig. 8

Louis Desplaces, Respect by Veronese (NG 1325), etching and engraving, 30.6 × 31.5 cm (image), published 1742. © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Engravings

Prints were included in the second volume of the Recueil Crozat published in 1742, a large portion of which was devoted to Veronese. The plates, which are by Simon Vallée (NG 1318), Benoist Audran (NG 1324) and Louis Desplaces (NG 1325 and 1326), were all in reverse and are combinations of etching and engraving (fig. 8). Prints were also included in the second volume of the Galerie du Palais Royal in 1808, but as part of a section (consisting entirely of the works of Veronese) which had been published before 1808, and after drawings made before the sale of the paintings in 1792. Some of these were also engraved in reverse. The engravers were Jacques Couché (engraver to the Duc d’Orléans, who was born in 1759 and was the chief instigator of the publication), who signed NG 1324 (no. XV) and co‐signed NG 1325 (no. XIII); Louis‐Jacques Cathelin (1739–1804), who co‐signed NG 1325 and NG 1326 (no. XIV); Jean Antoine Pierron (active 1780–1812), who signed NG 1318 (no. XVI); and Pierre Alexandre Beljambe (1759– c. 1820), who co‐signed NG 1326 (no. XIV).

[page 427]

The Odescalchi Copies

An inventory of Palazzo Riario in Rome where the collections of the Queen of Sweden were housed was made in December 1713 following the death of the nephew of Pope Innocent XI, Prince Livio Odescalchi, first Duke of Bracciano (b. 1652), who had purchased the palace and the collections in 1699. It reveals that the works of art were arranged in the state rooms exactly as they were described in guidebooks ten years before, but also that something unusual was taking place behind the scenes.72

In one room on the ground floor 250 copies, of all sizes, made after famous paintings in the collection were packed, unframed, in cases.73 Upstairs there were other rooms full of copies, some noted as only ‘di primo sbozzo’ or ‘sbozzata’ – ‘sketched in’ or ‘blocked out’ – and others as ‘quasi finita’ – lacking only the final touches. Most of the notable paintings from the Queen of Sweden’s collection are listed among these copies, including all of Veronese’s Allegories: we find mention, for example, of three copies of NG 1318 (a ‘Woman’, or a ‘Venus’, ‘with two men’), one of them only just begun,74 and three of NG 1324 (the ‘nude man sprawled upon an entablature’).75 The agents of the Duc d’Orléans, who was engaged in protracted negotiations to buy the collection, knew that copies had been made but assumed that this was to ensure that the palace walls would not be denuded after the sale. The duplication makes it clear that something more akin to commercial editions of engravings or plaster casts was being undertaken, although whether at the initiative of Odescalchi or merely with his consent is not clear. A few copies which I have seen seem likely to have been made on this occasion, and they are too accurate to have been made without careful measurements.76 These copies would have been hard to make without removing the Allegories from the ‘cielo’ of the most important room in the ‘appartamento nobile’ on the first floor – indeed, given the proximity of the luxurious furnishings in this room, including a baldacchino with flowered brocade of crimson velvet and seats upholstered with the same material,77 the copies must obviously have been made elsewhere in the palace.

Exhibitions and Loans

London 1818, British Institution (23, 75, 99 and 145); Manchester 1857, Art Treasures exhibition (274, 273, 271 and 272 in the provisional catalogue; 287, 288, 285 and 286 in the definitive catalogue); London 1877, Royal Academy (107, 115, 126 and 95); London 1947, National Gallery, Cleaned Pictures Exhibition (42, 43, 45 and 44); Stockholm 1966, Nationalmuseum, Christina, Queen of Sweden, a Personality of European Civilisation ; Washington 1988, National Gallery of Art (NG 1318 and NG 1324) (63 and 64).

Fig. 9

Unfaithfulness (NG 1318) in its current frame. © The National Gallery, London

[page 428]

The original frames for the Allegories are not recorded, nor are any that were given to them in Sweden, but in Rome they had ‘cornici liscie compagne’, or ‘matching plain [that is, un‐carved] mouldings’, in 1689. That these mouldings were gilded is clear from an inventory of 1721.78 As noted elsewhere, in the Palais‐Royal they were incorporated into the architecture as overdoors and thus, when removed, would probably have been framed by a narrow moulding at most. Simple frames may also have been supplied before the sale of 1798 by Michael Bryan. There seems to be no record of how the pictures were framed at Cobham, but they were reframed on acquisition by the National Gallery,79 presumably by Dolman, who was then the Gallery’s official framer, with the gilded composition frames that they retain to this day (figs 9 and 10). These are likely to have been designed by Dolman or someone in his employ but were just possibly designed by Burton, or at least developed from his sketches or adjusted to his taste, for he is known to have supplied ideas for the Gallery’s frames.80

In 1932 the ‘fronts’ of two of the frames – those on NG 1318 and NG 1326 – were ‘cut out’ by ‘Draper’. In fact, all four frames were treated in this way and the section of each (including the dentils) nearest the painting which had been ‘cut out’ could then be reattached by means of small brass pegs. The glass and the painting itself can thus be removed without taking the frame off the wall. Minor repairs were also made at different dates.81

In the Director’s Report of January 1965 to December 1966 the four paintings are listed among those to be reframed.82 They were not, but by 1990 a large corner of an immensely heavy and deep carved structure reproducing the massive and ornamental framework of a Venetian palace ceiling of the late sixteenth century had long been under curatorial consideration. There may have been some knowledge of the attempts to reconstruct sixteenth‐century ceiling settings in North American museums83 – attempts requiring complex lighting solutions that were alien to the sixteenth century. But by the 1990s it was possible to appreciate that Dolman’s frames – inspired by the Sansovino frames of late sixteenth‐century Venice, which were well known and much imitated in the later nineteenth century84 – were among the best that had ever been made for the National Gallery. The Sansovino design has been modified so that the frames can hang more easily in the company of other types of frame, as may be seen, for instance, in the Venetian room created by Holmes in 1922.85 The design is also determined by the convenience of manufacture, using multiple components press‐moulded in composition. The frames are completely symmetrical so that the moulds used for one side would be good for all the others. Thus the fourteen bunches of fruit and leaves used for each length of frieze (224 bunches for the four frames) were made from two moulds.

Fig. 10

Corner of the current frame of NG 1318. © The National Gallery, London

Notes

2. This conjecture is supported by the engravings of the painting made when it was in the Palais‐Royal (see fig. 8, p. 426). (Back to text.)

3. Penny and Spring 1996, p. 52, note 13. (Back to text.)

4. Ibid. , p 41, note 1. (Back to text.)

5. Holmes 1923, pp. 204–5. (Back to text.)

7. Rearick 1988, p. 128. (Back to text.)

8. Ibid. , p. 37 and note 17 on p. 52. (Back to text.)

9. Penny and Spring 1996, p. 41 in the extended captions for plates 4 and 5. (Back to text.)

10. Gould 1975, p. 326 (but first published in Braham 1970, p. 209); Gould 1959, p. 151. (Back to text.)

11. Braham 1970, p. 209, note 10. (Back to text.)

12. Stephens 1877, p. 11. (Back to text.)

13. Ibid. , p. 13; Holmes 1923, p. 205. Holmes would of course have been thinking of the Rokeby Venus. (Back to text.)

15. Hendy 1947, pp. 43–4, nos 44 and 45. (Back to text.)

16. Gould 1959, p. 151 and note 6 on p. 152, repeated in Gould 1975, p. 328. (Back to text.)

17. Marini 1968, no. 109; Pignatti and Pedrocco 1995, II, pp. 362–3. (Back to text.)

18. Gould 1959, p. 151 and note 5 on p. 152. For earlier date see Osmond 1927, p. 36, and Fiocco 1934, p. 121. (Back to text.)

19. Rearick 1988, pp. 128–9. For the Anticollegio fresco see Pignatti and Pedrocco 1995, II, pp. 349–50, no. 234. (Back to text.)

20. Notably Mariette 1742, II, p. 67; Stephens 1877, pp. 11, 13. (Back to text.)

21. Gould 1959, p. 151; Pignatti and Pedrocco 1995, II, p. 361. Gould later entertained the idea that the paintings had been made for the centres of the ceilings of four separate rooms (typescript letter to Jean‐Luc Bordeaux of 10 March 1975). (Back to text.)

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23. Cocke 1984, p. 184. (Back to text.)

24. I am grateful to Dr Salomon for showing me the paper he wrote on this subject in 2005 and for letting me cite it here. (Back to text.)

26. Schulz 1968 for a survey of Venetian ceilings generally. (Back to text.)

27. Rearick 1988, p. 128. (Back to text.)

28. For a succinct account of Jacopo Strada’s career see the entry in the Macmillan/Grove Dictionary of Art 1996, vol. XXIX, pp. 737–40, entry by Dirk J. Jansen. (Back to text.)

29. On both sides of fol. 36 (Cust’s pagination), which is fol. 35 in the Vienna facsimile. (Back to text.)

30. See Jaffé 2001 for a full discussion of the sketchbook. He notes that some pictures recorded by Van Dyck seem to have been in Spain, not Italy (p. 615), and in some cases it can be proved that Van Dyck used prints (pp. 620–2) and drawings (but see p. 622, note 57). He speculates that Van Dyck may have seen Veronese’s cartoons. (Back to text.)

31. Royalton‐Kisch 1978, p. 161, first made this point. (Back to text.)

32. For Venus and Mars see Granberg 1897, Appendix I, p. xv, Appendix III, p. liii, etc. For the interpretation of Happy Union see ibid. , Appendix III, p. liii, and Appendix IV, p. xcviii. (Back to text.)

34. Rearick 1988, p. 126 (no. 64). Rearick also proposed Conjugal Concord in place of Happy Union. (Back to text.)

35. Fontenai 1808, II, text on pl. XIII. (Back to text.)

36. Waagen 1854, III, p. 20. (Back to text.)

37. Osmond 1927, p. 36; see Holmes 1923, p. 204, who found allegory ‘disastrous’ as an artistic mode. (Back to text.)

38. Osmond 1927, p. 36. (Back to text.)

39. Copy of letter dated 14 November 1956 in National Gallery dossier. (Back to text.)

40. Gould 1959, pp. 150–1. (Back to text.)

41. Gould 1959, p. 150, note 1, citing Pigler 1956, pp. 404–9. (Back to text.)

42. Wind 1967, p. 274. (Back to text.)

43. Ibid. , p. 274–5. (Back to text.)

44. Braham 1970, pp. 209–10. (Back to text.)

45. Ibid. , p. 210. (Back to text.)

46. Thornton 1991, p. 249, discusses the ‘orinale’, or ‘vaso del corpo’, in the Renaissance and notes that such could be made of glass. Unfortunately I have forgotten where I read or heard the idea that the glass flask in Veronese’s painting might be such a vessel. (Back to text.)

48. Royalton‐Kisch 1978, p. 161, dwells on the physical similarity between the man in Happy Union and the man in Respect, but they are not identical. (Back to text.)

49. John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, English MSS 1281. Paul Tucker kindly drew this to my attention. Murray was evidently abroad when the first letter was sent. (Back to text.)

50. Ibid. (Back to text.)

51. Ibid. (Back to text.)

52. Elliot 2000, pp. 169–70. (Back to text.)

53. Castle Howard muniments. From Carlisle to Murray 6 June. (Back to text.)

54. This letter is in Berlin. I am grateful to Paul Tucker for the transcription. It may date from 1889. (Back to text.)

55. NG 7/132/1890. For Gregory and Layard see the former’s letter to Carlisle of 6 August 1890 in Castle Howard Muniments, J22/78. Hardinge was also keen on the acquisition. (Back to text.)

56. NG 7/132/1890, Darnley’s letter to Burton of 10 September 1890. (Back to text.)

60. Minutes of the Board of Trustees, VI, pp. 154–5. (Back to text.)

63. Ibid. , VI, p. 168. (Back to text.)

64. Ibid. , VI, p. 191. (Back to text.)

66. See Douglas Guest’s 1833 valuation, Medway Archive Office U565‐F.27, nos 5, 16, 19, 26 (for Allegories) and no. 24 for Titian’s Rape of Europa. (Back to text.)

67. Granberg 1902, p. 105. (Back to text.)

68. Granberg 1897, Appendix I, p. xv (1648), and Appendix II, p. xxx (1652). (Back to text.)

69. Granberg 1902, p. xxv (1656). (Back to text.)

70. Granberg 1897, Appendix III, p. liii (1689). (Back to text.)

71. Victoria and Albert Museum (National Art Library), 86.00.9, fol. 137v. (Back to text.)

72. The inventory is Archivio di Stato, Rome (Not. A.C.–Vol. 5134). I studied it on microfilm in the Getty Provenance Index. For the collections c. 1703 see Rossini 1704, I, pp. 30–4. (Back to text.)

73. MS inventory, fols 33r–46v. The drying seems to have taken place in a palace of the Gritti family. (Back to text.)

74. Ibid. , fol. 79r (no. 222), fol. 112r (no. 324) and fol. 123r (no. 422). (Back to text.)

75. Ibid. , fol. 111v (nos 319, 321), fol. 112r (no. 323). (Back to text.)

76. Christie’s, South Kensington, London, 18 December 1998 (lot 145). A copy at Eastnor Castle in Ledbury, Herefordshire, after one version of Titian’s Venus and Adonis looks as if it was made at the same date. At least seven copies of this composition are recorded in the inventory. (Back to text.)

77. MS Inventory cited above, fols 74r–74v (nos 200–3); for the baldacchino etc. see fols 74v–76r. (Back to text.)

78. Granberg 1897, Appendix III, p. liii and IV, p. xcviii. (Back to text.)

79. Report of Director, V, 1895, p. 175. (Back to text.)

80. See, for example, Wornum’s MS diary (NG 32/67) for 6 June 1874, where new frames for the paintings by Pintoricchio are mentioned ‘according to Mr. Burton’s pattern’. Such an intervention would be less likely in the 1890s. (Back to text.)

81. Draper’s estimate for repairs to the cartouche of Scorn is dated 9 March 1933. (Back to text.)

82. Report for 1965–6, p. 78. (Back to text.)

83. The most notable example was the installation of Tintoretto’s Allegory of Sleep from Casa Barbi in the Detroit Institute of Art, and the reconstruction of Titian’s Vision of Saint John the Evangelist (1957.14.6) as a ceiling, together with associated panels from the Albergo of the Scuola Grande of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, during the 1990 Titian exhibition in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Back to text.)

84. See Penny 2004, pp. 179–80. (Back to text.)

85. This is recorded in a Gallery photograph dated January 1923. It was completed by 1 April 1922, as we know from Roger Fry’s review in the New Statesman of that date. (Back to text.)

Appendix of Collectors’ Biographies

The 4th Earl of Darnley (1767–1831)

John Bligh succeeded his father as 4th Earl of Darnley in 1781. He travelled in northern Europe before coming of age in 1788 and, shortly thereafter, went on to Italy. In Rome in 1789–90 he bought highly restored antique busts and statues, copies of famous antiquities, and some slabs and columns of antique marble.1 On his return to England he married and was soon engaged in making extravagant modifications to Cobham Hall, his great Elizabethan house in Kent. The 3rd Earl (1719–1781) had already much embellished and modernised Cobham, employing as his architect James Wyatt. Over the course of the next thirty years the Gilt Hall was clad with marble, the Long Gallery was transformed into a picture gallery, and a new library was created.2 In 1818 the earl returned to Italy, where he bought more ancient marbles and also commissioned from Canova a version of the Naiad in the Royal Collection.3

The 4th Earl was said to be very proud, with ‘the high notions of the old nobility, in manner uniform, cold and reserved’. His annual income was estimated by his contemporaries at £20,000,4 but one is not surprised to learn that he left the family fortune considerably impaired. A posthumous inventory compiled for fire insurance listed more than 160 pictures at Cobham Hall, with a total value of more than £30,000.5 This collection included The Rape of Europa, one of the half‐dozen greatest mythological paintings by Titian (now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), as well as the four Allegories by Veronese, Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way and Titian’s Portrait of a Man with a Quilted Sleeve, all of which are today in the National Gallery and all but the last mentioned of which are included in this catalogue. With the exception of the Titian portrait, the source of which is obscure, these paintings all came from the sale in 1798–9 of the Italian portion of the Orléans Collection, although it is noteworthy that none of them was purchased there directly – the Rape of Europa was bought soon after the sale from Lord Berwick, and the other paintings were also acquired after the sale or from Bryan.6

At the earlier Orléans sale (of 1793) Lord Darnley bought Rubens’s Head of Cyrus brought to Queen Tomyris for 1,200 guineas.7 No one who had spent a fortune on such a picture (fig. 4) is likely to have had an aversion to gruesome subject matter, and Darnley also acquired for the colossal price of £6,000 from Angelo Bonelli the Death of Regulus formerly in Palazzo Colonna – Salvator Rosa’s masterpiece as a historical painter (now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond).8 Rosa was clearly a favourite painter of Lord Darnley. He also owned Rosa’s Birth of Orion (also from the Colonna collection), a version of Jason with the Dragon and Pythagoras and the Fishermen (now in Belgium).9 This last was an early purchase, probably made in about 1791 from his friend Thomas Moore Slade, who lived in Rochester and was thus a close neighbour.10

Darnley’s judgement was not always secure and this is especially evident if we consider his purchases from the Vitturi collection (for which see also the entry for Pedro Campaña’s Conversion of Mary Magdalene (NG 1241)). The collection was acquired en bloc by Slade in Venice in the mid‐1770s, displayed in the gallery of his home in Rochester, and sold by him in 1791 after the failure of his speculation in a new method for making broadcloth (and before he secured the Dutch, Flemish and French portion of the Orléans Collection, as described on p. 466).11 It would not be fair to suggest that Slade regarded his noble and prodigal young friend as a convenient means of disposing of the less promising items in his collection, for he sold him Rosa’s Pythagoras and offered him Claude’s great Embarkation of Saint Ursula, which he turned down (soon afterwards the Claude found its way into Angerstein’s collection and so into the National Gallery). However, of the five ‘Titians’ that Darnley acquired from the Vitturi collection – ‘Christ giving the [page 449]blessing’, ‘His own portrait and Don Francesco del Mosaico’, ‘Venus and Cupid, in a Landscape’, ‘the Tribute Money’ and ‘Charles Fifth (whole‐length)’ – only the first was accepted as by Titian by Waagen in the mid‐nineteenth century and none was accepted by the end of the century.12 If we are inclined to ridicule we should consider the case of Sir Abraham Hume, an undoubted connoisseur, who was advised by acknowledged experts and acquired even more false Titians at the same date. Other Vitturi paintings acquired by Darnley include works attributed to Regnier, Barocci, Pietro della Vecchia and Guido Reni, which have not been traced.13 That Darnley himself had doubts about some of his early purchases is suggested by the fact that he consigned twenty‐five paintings to auction anonymously at Christie’s on 6 and 7 May 1796 (most of them, however, were bought in).14

Fig. 4

Rubens and Workshop, The Head of Cyrus brought to Queen Tomyris, c. 1622–3. Oil on canvas, 205.1 × 361 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. © 2006 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Whatever errors Darnley may have made in his selection of pictures from the Vitturi collection, they clearly reveal that he was early attracted by the work of Titian. To the Europa and the National Gallery’s portrait and the five Vitturi ‘Titians’ just listed must be added several works attributed to Titian in Darnley’s sale of 1796;15 also Titian’s Venus and Adonis from the Mariscotti collection bought from Buchanan after 1804 (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York),16 which is certainly a good replica; versions of the Naples Danaë17 and the Venus adoring herself in a Mirror,18 which are also likely to have been works of equivalent quality; and the Scourging of Christ, which was auctioned as a Schiavone in 1819 and attributed to this artist again later in the century by Waagen, but was believed by Darnley to be a Titian.19 The Danaë was valued in the insurance inventory mentioned above at £4,000 (more than the Queen Tomyris by Rubens and the Europa by Titian, valued at £3,000 and £1,000 respectively). It was described in the inventory as ‘very highly esteemed by the late Earl’ and this is confirmed by the fact that he commissioned an enamel copy of it from Nathaniel Bone.20

Darnley continued to collect paintings throughout his life, although probably less actively in the 1820s. He was evidently a keen follower of the auctions, where he often bought at low prices;21 but, as his bank account reveals, he also paid high sums to leading dealers, notably William Buchanan and Angelo Bonelli.22 In the former’s coarse, eager, shrewd letters written between 1805 and 1808 harrying his salesman in London, David Stewart, Darnley is characterised as a special admirer of Rubens and Van Dyck as well as of Titian and the Venetians.23 The insurance inventory attributed ten paintings to Rubens, of which, after the Queen Tomyris, the most important was probably the sketch for The Triumph of Henri IV now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.24 There were also major works by Snyders and Jordaens and, among half a dozen Van Dycks, what was simply stated to be his ‘finest picture’, the double portrait of the Stuart brothers now in the National Gallery (NG 6518), which then hung in its ‘massive richly carved frame’25 above the great marble chimneypiece carved by Richard Westmacott the Elder for the Gilt Hall (or Music Saloon, as it was then known). The double portrait, however, had been inherited, the 1st Countess of Darnley having been a Stuart. Portraits seem to have been the only pictures that Darnley inherited – or rather retained, for he sold the old masters acquired by his father at Christie’s in 1802. Among these there were no fewer than four Claudes, which all fetched respectable prices26 – revealing evidence of how little appeal tranquil imagery held for the 4th Earl (it will be recalled that he had turned down the offer of Claude’s Embarkation of Saint Ursula).

Beauty, however, did appeal to him and, together with Titian, Rosa and Rubens, his greatest enthusiasm was probably for Guido Reni. Among the fifteen works attributed to Guido in his possession was the Daughter of Herodias[page 450]from the Colonna collection, the magnificent painting now in the Art Institute, Chicago;27 a still more highly valued version of the Liberality and Modesty;28 and a Massacre of the Innocents, which was doubtless a copy although catalogued as an autograph work.29 Darnley did own copies after Guido which he knew to be such. Indeed, not only was there a painted copy of the Aurora at Cobham,30 but Richard Westmacott the Elder had copied it as a relief on the great chimneypiece in the Gilt Hall.31 A copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration also had a place of honour in Darnley’s collection and he purchased small copies of Raphael’s cartoons in 1801.32

Changes in attribution have created obstacles to an assessment of Darnley’s collection. It is uncertain under what name we might now find the Judas betraying Christ that was attributed to Guido, a highly valued painting which was also copied by Bone.33 No less mysterious is Guido’s Saint Teresa, bought by Wiggins in 1957, probably for its frame.34 The seventeenth‐century paintings had sunk in value by the time they were sold in the twentieth century. Annibale Carracci’s Toilet of Venus which Darnley bought at the Orléans sale, valued in 1833 at £400, fetched 21 guineas (£22 1s.) in 1925 (today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna).35 The Finding of Moses now in the National Gallery (NG 3142, as perhaps by Gargiulo) was lotted unframed and without any attribution together with an anonymous family portrait in the 1957 auction, where it was bought by Contini‐Bonacossi, who believed it to be by Cavallino.36

Lord Darnley was an occasional patron of modern artists. He bought a version of Reynolds’s Infant Samuel from the artist in 179137 and purchased from Gainsborough’s widow the copy Gainsborough had made in 1785 of Van Dyck’s Stuart Brothers.38 From Benjamin West he bought the small original sketch for that artist’s celebrated composition of Christ Rejected, dated 1811, presumably after its exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1815, when it was very highly praised.39 Just over ten years later he commissioned William Etty to paint the Judgement of Paris, which was exhibited to much applause at the Royal Academy in 1826, but it did not please him and he was dilatory in paying for it.40 Finding the money to pay for modern art in these years seems to have been a frequent problem. He quarrelled with Canova’s heirs over the cost of his Naiad, mentioned above, which was completed for him after Canova’s death. He probably commissioned or purchased Harlowe’s Dominican Friar on his second Italian trip, and perhaps also Jacob and Rachel at the Well by a mysterious ‘Wallace of Florence’.41 From Douglas Guest, ‘historical painter formerly lecturer on the Fine Arts in the Royal Institution’, he commissioned a painting of his second son in the guise of Hercules strangling serpents.42 In 1807 Guest sold to Darnley Correggio’s Zingarella, presumably a copy of the painting in Capodimonte, and this was puffed by Guest when he compiled the insurance inventory.43 Perhaps Guest was retained as an adviser, even as a curator, by Lord Darnley.

In 1806 the Queen Tomyris seems to have been on display at Cobham, but the other paintings in Darnley’s collection were kept in his London house in Berkeley Square. By 1819 the picture gallery at Cobham with its crimson hangings was full of paintings and open to ‘strangers’ every afternoon and to all ‘travellers’ by appointment.44 From Guest’s catalogue of 1833 we can deduce that the old masters were concentrated in the gallery and its two skylit vestibules, although others were to be seen on the great staircase, and full‐length ancestral portraits hung in the dining room in uniform frames that were part of its panelling. Only the Regulus and a painting of Neapolitan history were recorded in Berkeley Square45 and these presumably came to Cobham when Darnley’s town house was sold in 1836. Guest mentions that the gallery included Etruscan vases and had shelves under the windows filled with folios ‘of prints and on every subject connected with art history’, including, for example (as we discover from the probate inventory of 1831), volumes of engravings of the Orléans Collection.46 The gallery must have been quite as cluttered as a drawing room of around 1860. In addition to its eighteen carved and gilt armchairs and the ottoman, all upholstered in crimson damask (matching the walls), there were five ‘turkey carpets’, library tables, a full‐size billiard table, a harpsichord, large china jars, models of the Swiss mountains and cases full of Sèvres and Dresden porcelain.

Edward, 5th Earl of Darnley (1795–1833), died soon after his father, and his son, John Stuart (1827–1896), did not come of age until the late 1840s. Cobham, in the care of his mother, was, like so many other great houses in that period, less liberally shown than had previously been the case, and in 1843 it was reported as open only on Fridays to those with tickets, which could be secured for a shilling at the local school and libraries.47 An anonymous guidebook in the following year complained that there were ‘few really fine and genuine specimens’ among the paintings and these were not seen by ‘ordinary visitors’.48 The visitors’ books from 1819 to 1891 survive and from these it is clear that local tradesmen, craftsmen and clerks – printers, booksellers, dockyard assistants – and their families had always been among the visitors.49 With the popularity of day trips down the Thames to Gravesend by steamer, the number of visitors from London greatly increased50 and on 26 July 1851 C.L. Eastlake wrote his name and that of ‘Gustav Waagen from Berlin’ in the book.51 Waagen knew of plans for improving the display and recorded that the 6th Earl had recently bought a large Carlo Dolci (of Saints Catherine of Siena and Mary Magdalene presenting a portrait of Saint Dominic to two friars).52

The diary kept by the young earl on his continental tour in 1850 ‘with my little wife’ (Lady Harriet Mary Pelham) reveals him to have been a diligent visitor of galleries, with genuine, if largely predictable, enthusiasms. In Florence in November William Spence acted as cicerone and guided the couple to ‘picture shops’, in one of which they had bought a portrait of Girolamo Benivieni believed to be by Lorenzo di Credi (a version of NG 2491).53 Darnley made other purchases and it may have been to make space that he allowed Christie’s to sell ‘thirty gallery works from the collection of a nobleman; and 3 antique marble statues’ on 12 July 1862.54 Most of the paintings were minor and all of them fetched low prices but Orléans paintings were included, among them the so‐called Giorgione of Milo of Croton55 and a pair of pictures by ‘Spagnoletto’, also given to Rosa, of Democritus and Heraclitus.56 In addition, the colossal marble Antinous57 from the Great Hall was sold for 21 guineas, certainly a fraction of what it must have cost.

Comparison of plans of the picture gallery made in the first decades of the nineteenth century with the structure that survives today makes it clear that major changes were made by the 6th Earl, probably during the 1850s. The two top‐lit vestibules at either end of the gallery were opened up so that they formed parts of the same space, and a niche was opened opposite the central gallery window, in which Canova’s Naiad was placed. The arrangement [page 451]undoubtedly diminished the space for hanging pictures and helps to explain the sale of 1862.

That the collection remained a matter of pride seems clear from the lecture on it delivered by F.G. Stephens in 1876. By then the Titian portrait had established itself as one of the most famous works in the collection – lent to the Royal Academy in the previous winter and before that to the Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester. Stephens records the four Veroneses and the Tintoretto in a room to the south of the picture gallery, known as Queen Elizabeth’s Chamber.58 They had previously been in one of these vestibules together with the majority of the more admired pictures.59

The earliest evidence known to me of the 6th Earl’s intention to sell comes in letters of early 1888 to Charles Fairfax Murray concerning the sale of the Veroneses. The paintings were eventually sold together with the Tintoretto to the National Gallery through Agnew’s in complicated circumstances described in the entry here for the Allegories. This did not solve Lord Darnley’s financial problems, however, and on 28 April 1894 Lionel Cust (director of the National Portrait Gallery) wrote to Lord Carlisle that ‘my uncle, Lord Darnley, has asked me to tell you privately, as representing the Trustees of the National Gallery, that he is anxious to sell them his famous picture of “Europa” by Titian now at Cobham Hall. He is very unwilling to part with it.… he cannot ask for less than £5,000 for the picture though he would be quite ready to accept the money in three successive annual instalments.’60 The Trustees at their meeting on 1 May ‘after a brief discussion’ declared themselves ‘unable to entertain the offer’.61 Having thus discharged his patriotic duty, the aged earl presumably invited foreign offers, but it was his son Edward, the 7th Earl (1851–1900), who accepted from Bernard Berenson, acting for Mrs Gardner of Boston, the sum of £20,000 for the painting in June 1896.62 The death duties that this settled fell due again in November 1900 when the 7th Earl was succeeded by his brother Ivo.

When the Veroneses were available the director of the National Gallery, Frederic Burton, had been lukewarm and dilatory, to the distress of many informed art lovers and of the more active of the Gallery’s trustees. This and other incidents made it possible to diminish the authority and independence of his successor, but there was no guarantee that the Board of Trustees would act decisively or wisely, and by the time Titian’s portrait became available their chairman, Lord Lansdowne, was resolutely opposed to bothering the Treasury with requests for special grants even ‘for first rate works’. Both Lord Carlisle, the most responsible and one of the most senior trustees, and Burton’s successor as director, Sir Edward Poynter, were informed, immediately after the Earl’s death in 1900, by Cust (the 7th Earl’s cousin) that the Titian was likely to be sold. But the Board did nothing. Three years later Cust wrote again to Poynter indicating that the 8th Earl was proposing to sell the Titian, together with a Reynolds and the Van Dyck, and offering to intervene on the Gallery’s behalf. Early in 1904 Poynter was able to enquire as to the price of the Titian and the Van Dyck but it took him four months to get the trustees to make an offer – one that was way below what was asked and was immediately rejected. The paintings were sold instead to the dealer Sir George Donaldson. Poynter then persuaded Donaldson to offer the Gallery the Titian for the price he had paid for it. The trustees then took another couple of months to decide to buy it (by a majority of six to three). Poynter had to raise most of the £30,000 by appealing to wealthy art lovers (Lord Iveagh, Waldorf Astor, Pierpont Morgan, Alfred Beit). The whole deplorable episode made it clear to all owners that it would be difficult to sell anything, however pre‐eminent, to the National Gallery and it left Poynter keen to retire.63

Other important paintings were sold privately from Cobham in the following years. By 1909 the Rubens sketch was with Colnaghi and by 1919 Lord Lascelles (later 6th Earl of Harewood, see pp. 455–8) owned the Queen Tomyris.64 A public sale of paintings took place at Christie’s on 1 May 1925, two years before the 8th Earl’s death. Large sales were conducted on the premises by Sotheby’s on 22 and 23 July 1957 and the house was sold to the Ministry of Work four years later. It is currently occupied by a school for girls (the Westwood Educational Trust). Some family portraits remain there, many of them copies, and a single survivor from the great collection formed by the 4th Earl, the half‐size copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration in its original Carlo Maratta frame. But superb fittings elsewhere remind us of the former splendour of the house.

Notes

2. Colvin 1978, pp. 948–9, 952. (Back to text.)

3. Sold at Sotheby’s, London, on 23 July 1957 as lot 409, ‘Pauline Borghese’. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A cupid attributed to Canova that was sold by the earl’s grandson at Christie’s on 12 July 1882 (lot 131) for 180 guineas is likely to be the ‘small figure in marble’ mentioned immediately after Canova’s Nymph on a Couch in the probate inventory of 1831 (fol. 142v). (Back to text.)

4. Farington 1978–98, VI, 1979, p. 2263, 10 March 1804, citing Sir Richard Westmacott. (Back to text.)

6. Buchanan 1824, I, p. 112, reports Lord Berwick’s purchase of the Europa for 700 guineas. (Back to text.)

7. Ibid. , I, p. 168. (Back to text.)

8. Kitson 1973, p. 28. For the price see Guest 1833. (Back to text.)

9. Guest 1833, nos 57, 28 and 38. The Jason has not been traced. The Orion was in a private collection in 1963. (Back to text.)

10. Buchanan 1824, I, pp. 328–30. (Back to text.)

11. Ibid. , I, pp. 320–4 (but the dates have to be deduced). (Back to text.)

12. Ibid. , I, pp. 328–30. For the Christ see Wethey 1979, plate 216; for the double portrait see Wethey 1971, II, p. 183. This last picture was bought for £5 at Sotheby’s, 23 July 1857 (lot 320). (Back to text.)

13. The Regnier is no. 52 in Guest 1833, highly valued at £300, but the Barocci, the Guido and the Pietro della Vecchia are not to be found there. (Back to text.)

14. The marked copy in Christie’s archive clearly shows Darnley as both consigner and purchaser. (Back to text.)

15. Christie’s, London, 6 May 1796, lot 54 (portrait of a friar), and 7 May, lots 45 and 94 (Saint Margaret and a self portrait). There was also a copy of Venus and Adonis. (Back to text.)

16. 49.7.16. Sold at Christie’s on 1 May 1925 as lot 79. (Back to text.)

17. Wethey 1975, p. 133. Sold at Christie’s on 1 March 1925 as lot 83 for 160 guineas. (Back to text.)

18. Wethey 1975, p. 202. Said by Waagen to be much damaged. Bought by Darnley from the Orléans collections for 300 guineas. Sold Christie’s, 1 May 1925, no. 81. Darnley also owned a copy of this picture kept in Lady Darnley’s room according to the probate inventory of 1831, lot 140. This was then sold for £4 on 12 July 1862 (lot 112). (Back to text.)

19. Consigned by Philippe Panné, Christie’s, 29 March 1819, lot 90 (sold for 66 guineas). Considered as a Titian in Guest 1883. The painting is not in Richardson 1980. (Back to text.)

20. Guest 1883, no. 72. The copy by Bone is no. 130, valued at £250. (Back to text.)

21. An example would be the 12 guineas he paid for a Snyders consigned by the Duke of Bridgewater at Coxe, 13 May 1802, lot 34. (Back to text.)

22. Notes made in the records of Coutts Bank kindly communicated by Roger Bowdler. There are records of payments of £400, £415 and £735 between January 1806 and May 1809 to Buchanan, and of £500, £525, £550, £400 and £1,000 between August 1811 and September 1815 to Bonelli. (Back to text.)

23. Brigstocke 1982, pp. 123, 173, 231–2, 254, 283, 295, 365, 391, 411. (Back to text.)

24. Liedtke 1984, pp. 151–63. (Back to text.)

25. Guest 1833, no. 96, there valued at £1,000. The frame survives around the copy now in the Gilt Hall. (Back to text.)

[page 452]

26. Christie’s, 8 May 1802. There were 61 lots. The Claudes fetched £220 10s., £115 10s., £210 and £273. (Back to text.)

27. Guest 1833, no. 29, valued at £1,200. (Back to text.)

28. Ibid. , no. 59, valued at £1,500. Sotheby’s, 23 July 1957, lot 316, listed by Pepper 1984, p. 280, as a copy, but he admitted that he had not seen it. (Back to text.)

29. Guest 1833, no. 35, valued at £600. The painting had belonged to Reynolds. (Back to text.)

30. Guest 1833, p. 107. (Back to text.)

31. Gunnis 1951, p. 423. This was apparently commissioned in 1778 and thus for the previous earl. Related chimneypieces are at Powderham Castle and Goodwood. (Back to text.)

32. Guest 1833, nos 39 and 61. Bought at auction 17 February 1801, lot 84. (Back to text.)

33. Ibid. , no. 62, valued at £400, and, for Bone, ibid. , no. 132. (Back to text.)

34. Ibid. , no. 59, valued at £200. Sotheby’s, 23 July 1857, lot 299. (Back to text.)

35. Ibid. , no. 9. Christie’s, 1 May 1925, lot 11. (Back to text.)

36. Sotheby’s, London, 23 July 1957, lot 377, £32 6s. Presented to the National Gallery by Count Contini‐Bonacossi. It is not possible to match with any painting in the 1833 list and it is possible that the Darnley provenance was invented. (Back to text.)

37. Guest 1833, no. 49, valued at £350. Reynolds’s ledger notes that it cost 75 guineas. It was sold at Christie’s on 1 May 1925 as lot 66, where bought by Agnew, who sold it to Major J.S. Courtauld, at whose sale on 27 October 1938 it was lot 249 (bought in). (Back to text.)

38. Christie’s, 1 May 1925, lot 20. Now St Louis Art Museum, inv. 1928.168. Waterhouse 1958, p. 124, no. 1017. (Back to text.)

39. Guest 1833, no. 63, valued at £400. Christie’s, 1 May 1925, lot 90. Now in the University of Rochester Art Gallery, New York. Von Effra and Staley 1986, p. 360, no. 354. (Back to text.)

40. Farr 1958, pp. 49–50, 122. The bank account cited in note 22 records payment to Etty between 1826 and 1829. (Back to text.)

41. Guest 1833, nos 31 and 110. George Harlow enjoyed great fashionable success in Rome in 1818 but died in the following year. Aidan Weston‐Lewis notes that Wallace is likely to be George Augustus Wallis (1770–1847), resident in Florence from about 1817. (Back to text.)

42. Guest 1833, no. 166. (Back to text.)

43. Ibid. , no. 23 (Correggio). The Correggio, valued at £2,000 in 1833, sold for 22 guineas (£23 2s.) at Christie’s on 1 May 1925 as lot 13. (Back to text.)

44. Britton 1801–15, VII, 1806, p. 603; Neale 1818–23, II, 1819, unpaginated. (Back to text.)

45. Guest 1833, last pages. (Back to text.)

46. Probate inventory, items 111r–117v. (Back to text.)

47. Summerly 1843, pp. 65–6. (Back to text.)

48. Anon 1845, kindly shown me by Roger Bowdler. (Back to text.)

49. Medway Archives Office, U565‐F13 (1–3). (Back to text.)

50. Mandler 1997, pp. 73 and 427. (Back to text.)

51. Medway Archives Office, U565‐F13 (2), unpaginated. (Back to text.)

52. Waagen 1854, pp. 17–26; Baldassari 1995, pp. 130–2. Sold at Sotheby’s on 23 July 1957 as lot 310, and then cut into pieces by the art trade. (See McCorquodale 1993, pp. 344–6.) (Back to text.)

53. Medway Archives Office, U565‐F31. The painting had been offered to the National Gallery in 1847–50 (see Gould 1975, p. 101). It was sold at Christie’s on 1 May 1925 as lot 25 for 180 guineas. For further dealings with Spence see Fleming 1979, p. 500, note 53. (Back to text.)

54. Christie’s, lots 89–131. (Back to text.)

55. Lot 93, sold for 10 guineas. Guest 1833, no. 85, valued at £50. Darnley had paid 40 guineas for it at the Orléans sale. Waagen realised that this had nothing to do with Giorgione. Another painting in the collection, Caesar presented with the Head of Pompey (for which see Rylands 1992, p. 214, A54), was believed to be by Giorgione. (Back to text.)

56. Sold for £2 and £1 15s. (Back to text.)

57. Lot 130, sold for 21 guineas. (See probate inventory, lot 142r.) (Back to text.)

58. Stephen 1876, p. 14. (Back to text.)

59. Deductions concerning the hang can be made from the probate inventory and from Guest 1833. There is also a plan of the picture gallery in Medway Archives Office, U565‐P27. (Back to text.)

60. NG7/171/1894. (Back to text.)

61. Minutes, VI, pp. 270–1. (Back to text.)

62. Sprigge 1960, p. 128. See also Hendy 1974, p. 259. (Back to text.)

63. Letters to Poynter from Cust of 14 November 1900 and 11 November 1903 are in the dossier for the Titian together with Lansdowne’s letter to Poynter and a sympathetic letter of 20 April 1904 from J.P. Heseltine. (Back to text.)

64. Liedtke 1984, pp. 156–63. For the Queen Tomyris see McGrath 1997, II, pp. 14–25, no. 2. (Back to text.)

The Orléans Gallery

Some of the greatest paintings included in this catalogue – chief among them Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way, Veronese’s four Allegories and Titian’s Death of Actaeon – belonged for much of the eighteenth century to the Orléans Collection, the most magnificent and important collection of paintings in France, surpassing in the judgement of some connoisseurs even that of the Crown.1 It was formed by Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (b. 1674), regent from September 1715 until his death on 2 December 1723, and was a major attraction for visitors to Paris for nearly seventy years.

A total of twenty‐five paintings now in the National Gallery once hung in the palace of the Orléans family, the Palais‐Royal, among them Sebastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus (NG 1), Annibale Carracci’s The Dead Christ Mourned (NG 2923), Rubens’s Judgement of Paris (NG 194), Netscher’s Lady teaching a Child to Read (NG 884), Le Valentin’s Four Ages of Man (NG 4919), Ludovico Carracci’s Susanna and the Elders (NG 28), the Circumcision from Giovanni Bellini’s workshop (NG 1455), and Raphael’s Mackintosh Madonna (NG 2069). These are still esteemed, although the last mentioned is a mere ghost of its former self, but some of the paintings in the National Gallery which came from this source have lost the reputations which they enjoyed there, and which they retained in the last century perhaps partly because of this provenance. Notable among these casualties of taste are the ‘Études du Corrège’, groups of heads copied from Correggio’s fresco in the apse of S. Giovanni Evangelista (NG 7 and 37), the Birth of Jupiter from the workshop of Giulio Romano (NG 624), and the four long furniture paintings with subjects from Roman history long attributed to the same artist (NG 643.1 and 2, and NG 644.1 and 2), also paintings now demoted to Style of Reni (NG 177, Saint Mary Magdalene) and Circle of Annibale Carracci (NG 25, Saint John the Baptist seated in the Wilderness). The Death of Saint Peter Martyr (NG 41), now considered as by Bernardino da Asola and little regarded, was then highly esteemed as a Giorgione. A few years ago one might have placed Veronese’s Rape of Europa in this same category, but now that it has been cleaned it is hard to deny that it is worthy of the artist to whom it was attributed. Another major work from the Orléans Collection, Eustache Le Sueur’s Alexander and his Doctor (NG 6576), was discovered in 1991 by Alastair Laing hanging as an overdoor in the dining room of a London club in St James’s Square; it was acquired for the Gallery in September 1999.2

The Duc d’Orléans was notorious for his private pursuits – his dabbling in chemistry and alchemy, his supper parties with an inner circle of disreputable cronies, his blatant indifference to religious orthodoxy and conventional morality. But in forming a great picture collection he was acting in accordance with accepted notions of princely magnificence. Dynastic status and indeed public benefit were motives as important as personal delight. Although he possessed some artistic talent himself,3 he seems to have taken rather little interest in the work of living French artists, with the exception of Antoine Coypel (1661–1722), who decorated the new gallery of the Palais‐Royal. In the guides to his collection we find a Watteau, Les Singes Peintres, but this seems to have been made as a pendant for an older painting, ‘La Musique des Chats de P. Breugle’, and thus had probably been prompted at least partly by the requirements of symmetry.4 Nor is he especially noted for his interest in modern Italian painting, although he [page 462]did commission major works by leading artists in Florence, Rome, Genoa and Bologna.5

Furnishing the Palais‐Royal

The palace which came to be known as the Palais‐Royal was built for Cardinal Richelieu in the 1620s and was bequeathed by him to the Crown. Louis XIV gave it to his brother, ‘Monsieur’, in 1692, when the latter’s son, the future regent (then Duc de Chartres), married his legitimised daughter, Mademoiselle de Blois. When Monsieur died in 1701 the palace was granted to his son, now the Duc d’Orléans. Thereafter, some rebuilding and much redecoration was undertaken, chiefly under the direction of Gilles‐Marie Oppenord (1676–1742), who was appointed Premier Architecte du Duc d’Orléans in 1715. A great new gallery had been built by Jules Hardouin‐Mansart for Monsieur along the Rue de Richelieu at right angles to the library wing to the west of the palace. It was completed in the year of Monsieur’s death and we know it to have been decorated with lacquer cabinets, loaded with oriental porcelain, as were the chimneypieces and side tables. A prelude to its magnificence and a climax to the suite of rooms in the library wing was provided by a Grand Cabinet or Cabinet des Glaces (with paintings hung on the mirrors6).

In 1702, soon after his succession, the Duc d’Orléans commissioned Coypel to paint the vault of the gallery with scenes from the Aeneid, which he completed in 1705.7 By then the palace already contained many paintings of the kind which had inspired these splendid compositions. Further canvases, not originally envisaged, were completed by Coypel for the gallery walls in 1715, and the architectural decoration, now in Oppenord’s hands, had been revised by 1717. Its climax was a semicircular end wall, where a chimneypiece was crowned with a marble bust, to either side of which bronze putti carried lights. Above the putti, stucco drapery was parted to reveal a great mirror, and winged youths supporting armorials broke into the cornice. The chimney was flanked by a pair of Corinthian pilasters framing obelisks hung with trophies and surmounted with eagles. More mirrors multiplied these splendid ornaments on either side.8 This was the most notable incorporation of Roman theatrical baroque architecture into France, created by an architect who was well aware that the palace was intended to house a collection which came from a great Roman palace. Half a century later it was still ‘impossible to imagine anything more richly furnished or decorated with more art and taste’.9

Under Monsieur the principal state rooms had been decorated with porcelain, tapestries and paintings, but as his son’s collection grew these rooms were increasingly dominated by paintings. Architectural sculpture tended to replace porcelain – as in the chimneypiece of the gallery just described. By 1717 the duke (now established as regent) was already anticipating a huge increase in his collection with the purchase of the Queen of Sweden’s picture collection. Oppenord redesigned the Grand Cabinet, hereafter generally known as the Salon à l’Italienne. Antoine Crozat wrote to the sculptor Pierre Legros, who had settled in Rome, to obtain the dimensions of the four allegories by Paul Veronese which ‘His Royal Highness’ wishes to have placed in a room which ‘Monsieur Hoppenor [Oppenord] is decorating [‘fait orner’], on the ceiling of which these paintings must be put’.10 The intention was probably to place these paintings not on a ceiling but above the doors of the salon; in any case, that is where they would eventually be displayed.

Unfortunately no visual record of this room as completed has been traced, although some of Oppenord’s designs for it survive. He planned carved panelling and sculptural ornament for the walls. This was executed around the high clerestory windows above the gallery with its wrought‐iron balustrade. The walls below were treated more simply because they were densely hung with paintings on crimson damask.11 The plan to incorporate the Veroneses as overdoors probably conflicted with Oppenord’s personal preferences because he generally proposed irregular shapes for paintings in this position – in accordance with his tendency to give movement to all the divisions of wall and vault. The birth of the rococo paradoxically coincided with a more respectful attitude to old master paintings, and it was out of the question to cut or otherwise adapt canvases by an artist like Veronese – indeed in the catalogue of the regent’s collection the Queen of Sweden was rebuked for having altered some paintings to fit the ceiling compartments of her ‘chambre’ and ‘salle d’audience’.12

Italian old masters were displayed in this room in carved and gilded frames above the ebony cabinets encrusted with rare stones and a pair of elaborate bronze groups supported by marble‐topped tables – an effect inevitably reminiscent of the Tribuna in the Uffizi in Florence. One of the cabinets incorporated miniature copies made by Pierre Mignard of the frescoes in the gallery of Palazzo Farnese in Rome, one of the chief models for Coypel’s paintings in the adjacent gallery.13 From the above account it will be clear that if paintings were originally acquired partly as ornaments for the palace, it was probably also the case that the design of interiors was modified to accommodate more paintings, and, most interestingly, that there was a relationship between the style of painted, sculptural and architectural decoration in the palace and the character of the collection which it housed. Before examining how the paintings were distributed through the palace something must be said of the sources of the collection.

The Acquisition of the Queen of Sweden’s Paintings

The Orléans Collection, formed over a period of some twenty years, amounted at the regent’s death to more than five hundred works (495 items in the published catalogue). It consisted chiefly of paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Venetian artists were especially well represented. Bolognese, Roman, Dutch and Flemish artists were also present in force. Florentine paintings were conspicuously absent (if the works attributed to Raphael and Michelangelo are excluded), as were Spanish (the Discovery of Moses, thought to be by Velázquez, was in fact by Orazio Gentileschi14). There were very few paintings of the early Renaissance (Bellini’s workshop Circumcision was exceptional).

Only fifteen of the paintings in the official catalogue had belonged to Monsieur, the regent’s father, although many more than this had been inherited.15 Many works had been presented to the regent in the hope of, or as the price for, favours and offices. Some came from other major French collections (Raphael’s Saint John the Baptist from the Président de Harlay; Annibale Carracci’s The Dead Christ Mourned, Titian’s Noli me tangere (NG 270) and Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way (NG 1313) – also Raphael’s Bridgewater Madonna and Domenichino’s Christ carrying the Cross now in the Getty Museum – from the Marquis de Seignelay). Sebastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus was extracted from the cathedral of Narbonne in return for a [page 463]large repair grant and a copy. The Abbé Dubois obtained Poussin’s Seven Sacraments (now National Gallery of Scotland) in Holland in 1716.16

To some respectable people of the clerical and professional classes the regent’s infatuation with paintings may have been considered almost as deplorable as his private life. Mathieu Marais noted in his diary in June 1723 that pressure had been applied on the Chapter of Reims Cathedral to yield its paintings which were attributed to Titian and Correggio to the regent. He was said to have left his new mistress at St‐Cloud to view these acquisitions: ‘It isn’t clear which of his two obsessions is the stronger’ (‘on ne sait pas quelle est la plus forte de deux passions’). Connoisseurs, Marais claimed, found it surprising that he should have no taste for the arrangement of pictures, ‘mettant un tableau de dévotion auprès d’une nudité, un tableau de grande architecture auprès d’un paysage, et ainsi du reste’ (‘putting a religious picture beside a nude, a picture with monumental building in it next to a landscape and so forth’).17 In fact, of course, the mingling of sacred and profane was usual in princely galleries at this date and the comment is chiefly of interest as evidence that the regent was personally involved in the hanging of his pictures.

By far the greatest single source for the Orléans Collection was the group of 123 paintings from the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden. The exiled queen died on 19 April 1689, leaving her art collections to Cardinal Azzolino, who died shortly afterwards on 8 June. A decade later in 1699 the cardinal’s nephew and heir, Marchese Pompeo Azzolino, sold them to Don Livio Odescalchi, Duke of Bracciano, nephew of Pope Innocent XI, a great art collector and patron, and it was his heirs and nephews – Cardinal Odescalchi, Archbishop of Milan, and the young Prince Baldassare Odescalchi, Duke of Bracciano – who in 1713, shortly after Don Livio’s death, let it be known that the old master paintings and the antique sculptures might be for sale. They had inherited Don Livio’s debts as well as his collection.

The Duc d’Orléans employed the wealthy connoisseur and collector Pierre Crozat (1665–1740) – ‘Crozat le Pauvre’ – to negotiate on his behalf during the winter of 1714–15. Crozat managed to view the collection with M. Amelot on 25 January 1715 in the Palazzo Odescalchi – Charles‐François Poërson, the director of the French Academy in Rome, noted that there were a good many ‘nuditez’, some of which (presumably Correggio’s Leda and Io among them) were covered with curtains. There were so many pictures (more than four hundred) and the Correggios and Veroneses were of such special importance that Amelot returned to inspect them on 6 February.18

In March Crozat began serious negotiations. He perceived that the prince, who was proposing to marry, wanted to retain a magnificently appointed palace, and so made an offer which excluded some of the tapestries and its richly upholstered furniture. He also made it clear that the paintings were his first priority. And the sculptures were in fact eventually sold separately to the King of Spain.19 For the paintings alone he offered 60,000 Roman scudi, which he considered to be higher than their market value. The Odescalchi wanted 100,000. Crozat increased his offer to 75,000 and then left Rome with the matter unsettled. The emperor had been mentioned as a possible rival purchaser, but Crozat thought that he would be happy with copies (these were being made for the Odescalchi anyway).20 In September 1715 Louis XIV died and the Duc d’Orléans became regent – virtual ruler of France. His greatly increased purchasing power cannot have made the sellers more inclined to compromise, and the new Duchess of Bracciano may not have wished to see her new residence stripped. Perhaps for this reason Crozat proposed purchasing only a group of the paintings, even proposing at one point a handful of the famous erotic paintings by Correggio and Titian.21 Some moves were again made in 1717 and by 16 March Poërson understood that his regent had ‘conclu le marché du cabinet’ – including ‘figures de marbres’ and ‘plusieurs colonnes’ as well as paintings. There must have been grounds for optimism given the plans made for the Veroneses already mentioned. By the end of April, there was also talk of a rival buyer, Prince Eugène of Savoy.22 But the wealth of the Duchess of Bracciano seems to have made selling a less urgent matter.

In May 1720 Filippo‐Antonio Gualtiero (1660–1728), an Italian cardinal closely attached to the French Crown, noted for his interest in both art and learning, was approached by the Abbate Calcaprina on behalf of the Duke of Bracciano, now recently widowed and probably pressed by his uncle’s debtors. Gualtiero wrote to Crozat seeking clarification as to what had been offered for what, and assurances that Crozat was acting as sole agent for the regent. By then the regent had, it seems, raised his offer for the paintings to 90,000 scudi, and this was increased by an extra 3,000 or so scudi ‘pour pot‐de‐vin’.23

In the negotiations which took place in the following months Gualtiero was apprehensive on several counts. First, he was worried about the condition and authenticity of the paintings. He forwarded a remarkable report from a certain M. Guilbert on the perplexing duplicates among the Titians, the holes in the Raphaels, the repaint on the Correggios, and so on. The report was not found too worrying. And as for the substitution of modern copies, alleged to be a common Italian trick, it was agreed that experts at the French Academy in Rome would carefully vet each picture.24

Gualtiero’s second worry concerned the frames, some carved and gilded, others of ebony, all old and outdated, awkward and heavy to transport, but of some use and value. The Duke of Bracciano, keen to keep these for the copies he was having made for his palace, offered in their place the tiny panels by Raphael of Saints Francis and Anthony (now in the Dulwich Art Gallery), but this was rejected as trifling and eventually the frames (and the Raphaels) were ceded to the French.25

The cardinal’s third and greatest worry was the obtaining of a licence from the pope (Clement XI, Albani) to export the paintings from Rome, and indeed it required numerous audiences with the Bishop of Sisteron, a personal letter from the regent, the intervention of Cardinal Albani, much discussion of whether or not the exports should be taxed and more than six months to secure this. The contract was finally signed on 14 January 1721. Crozat hurried to Holland with diamonds to help raise the required funds. But the pope died on 19 March without making any agreement and the new pope, Innocent XIII, elected on 13 May, did not agree until June. The paintings were then restored under the eye of Poërson by ‘Signor Domenico’, packed with extreme care (the canvases rolled on cylinders, and not laid flat with the panels as Guilbert had recommended) and sent on the first stage of their journey to France by sea. They were landed in the south of France and then travelled overland, for Cardinal Gualtiero had lost a great library in a shipwreck and did not trust the Atlantic. They took a long time to reach Paris and were not inspected by the new owner until shortly before 13 December.26

[page 464]

It had been suggested that the regent might like to hang the pictures in their old frames while new ones were made and also as a historical exercise, in order to see what they looked like when they had belonged to the Queen of Sweden – ‘cette grande Princesse’, the fame of whose collection was ‘si répandue dans toute l’Europe’.27 It is not known whether this was done, but new frames were certainly made (one or two probably survive on smaller paintings from the collection).28 The regent can have enjoyed his new possessions for little more than a year before his death, but arranging pictures was something in which he took special pleasure. The censorious Marais quoted earlier is not the only evidence for this. Les Curiositez de Paris in 1719 noted that he changed the paintings in the cabinet in which he normally worked ‘pour considérer l’harmonie dans différentes situations’.29

Access and Arrangement

On the death of the regent on 2 December 1723, the Palais‐Royal with its collections passed to his only son, Louis d’Orléans, known as ‘Louis le Pieux’. When this Duc d’Orléans retired from public life in 1742 the palace became the chief residence of his son Louis‐Philippe d’Orléans, who inherited it in 1752. He in turn entrusted the palace to his son, Louis‐Philippe‐Joseph d’Orléans, Duc de Chartres, at the end of 1780. During this period, although there were many changes to the order in which the pictures were hung, to the route taken by visitors, to the way the rooms were named and to the number of rooms open, the collection was easily visited by amateurs and artists alike.30 After a sale of Dutch and Flemish paintings in 1727,31 the collection was clearly regarded as in some sense complete and the Description des Tableaux du Palais Royal published in the same year and reissued ten years later was an official account of what was intended to be a permanent collection.32 This catalogue was clearly designed to be of use not only to connoisseurs but also to visitors with modest artistic education: the biographies of the artists and the descriptions of the paintings established a model that was to be followed over a century later by the ‘descriptive and historical catalogue’ published by the National Gallery.33

La Font de Saint Yenne in his polemical Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’état présent de la peinture en France…, published in The Hague in 1747, contrasted the liberal arrangements in the Palais‐Royal with the relative confinement of the pictures belonging to the Crown.34 Such criticism probably helped to bring into being the new royal gallery in the Palais du Luxembourg which opened to the public in 1750.35 New attractions were also to be found in the Palais‐Royal: notably in the 1750s the new Salon de Psiche with sculpture by Coustou, paintings by Jean‐Baptiste‐Marie Pierre, and white boiseries designed by Pierre Constant d’Ivry.36

Two of Correggio’s erotic paintings, of Io embraced by a cloud and Leda coupling with the swan, were damaged by Louis le Pieux in a demented mood and these were sold in 1753 after they had been repaired.37 The outrage which this episode aroused testified to general familiarity with the collection and a strong sense that it was not merely the property of the family. When, during the 1770s, the paintings were systematically restored (and many of the paintings on panel transferred by a novel method to canvas), the widespread concern at their condition and alarm at their treatment again reflected this.38

It is impossible to trace here in any detail the way in which the old master paintings were hung, but some general points can be made as well as some more particular observations about the paintings catalogued here. Most of the smaller Dutch and Flemish paintings were at first segregated in a suite of rooms, sometimes known as the Cabinets des Roués, where the regent had retired for his chemical experiments and his private suppers. Two of these cabinets flamands were named after the fabric on the walls: the Cabinet Jaune and the Cabinet Bleu (by contrast, the larger French and Italian paintings were hung on red fabric).

There were two suites of larger rooms which ran side by side down the west or library wing of the palace (parallel with the Rue St‐Honoré). These were the Grands Appartements to the north of the wing and the Petits Appartements to the south. Sacred and profane paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were consistently intermingled in these rooms, thus in the cabinet of the Duc d’Orléans Veronese’s Rape of Europa was listed in the company of the Communion of the Magdalen and the Martyrdom of Saint Stephen.39 It is hard to detect much order in the rooms, although the name of one of them, the Chambre des Poussins, reflects the fact that this artist’s work was originally concentrated there with Le Sueur’s tondo of Alexander and his Doctor, a homage to Poussin, above the chimney.40

The arrangement of paintings in Oppenord’s great Italian salon seems not to have changed between the regent’s posthumous inventory of 1724 and the dismantling of the gallery in the mid‐1780s.41 Veronese’s Allegories of Love, as has been mentioned, served as overdoors, and below these hung his four great mythological allegories now divided between the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Titian’s Rape of Europa (now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) and its companion, Perseus and Andromeda (now in the Wallace Collection), were displayed on either side of the chimneypiece, each in a cluster of five paintings which included, presumably at some height, the head studies then attributed to Correggio. Titian’s Death of Actaeon hung on one side of the door entering the Galerie d’Énée; its pendant was Cambiaso’s Death of Adonis, a smaller painting but with figures of comparable size and a similarly tragic theme, and apparently a similar preference for smoky greys over strong local colour (see fig. 8).42

Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way also served as an overdoor, hung in the Seconde Pièce d’Enfilade of the Grands Appartements. To either side of it were two large canvases by Luca Giordano of the Pool at Bethesda and the Cleansing of the Temple (sent by the king of Spain to Paris in exchange for some Mignards). Opposite was a ‘Salviati’ (Giuseppe della Porta), supposedly of the Rape of the Sabines (now in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle), which possesses figures with similarly outflung limbs (fig. 9).43

Somewhat surprisingly, Titian’s Noli me tangere was hung as an overdoor in the Galerie à la Lanterne in the Petits Appartements.44 There were fifty‐two other paintings in this room, which, at least in 1749 and 1765, included many that were related in style: the National Gallery’s Death of Saint Peter Martyr, the Amour Piqué (Wallace Collection) and Gaston de Foix (Castle Howard), all then believed to be by Giorgione, and Titian’s early Three Ages of Man (National Gallery of Scotland). But the room also contained the Bellini workshop Circumcision, an early Lotto (now in the National Gallery of Scotland) and works by Raphael, Poussin and others which were certainly less congruous.45

The Collection Commemorated and Threatened

When, on 30 December 1780, the Duc d’Orléans entrusted the Palais‐Royal to his son, the Duc de Chartres, the art [page 465]collections were explicitly excluded. This was confirmed in another legal document early in the following year.46 It seems likely that the duke feared that his son might sell the collection in order to settle debts or to finance extravagant new ventures. Soon after he had gained control of the palace, the Duc de Chartres commissioned his architect, Victor Louis, to reorder and partly rebuild it, developing the perimeter of the gardens as commercial property, and altering the interiors.47 The new plans, according to a guidebook of 1787, included a public museum on the first floor above the public gardens in which all the ‘beautiful artistic productions, scattered throughout the palace, would be reunited’ and this seems to be confirmed by surviving drawings.48 It was an ambition typical of the period, in which the collections of the Crown were also being reorganised and the Palais du Louvre was taking the first steps towards being the museum that we know today. Among the few ventures that were realised in the Palais‐Royal was a museum for children which opened in 1785.49

Fig. 8

Gérard‐René le Vilain, after a drawing by Duvivier of Luca Cambiaso’s Death of Adonis. London, British Museum, 1855,0609.476. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Fig. 9

Antoine Louis Romanet, after a drawing by Antoine Borel of Giuseppe Salviati’s The Rape of the Sabines. Both engraved and etched together with the text by Abbé de Fontenai. Published in the 1780s and then again in 1808. London, British Museum, 1855,0609.304. © The Trustees of the British Museum

On 13 December 1785 – less than a month after the death of his father (on 18 November) – the new duke had obtained a royal privilege for one of the most ambitious publications of its kind: La Galerie du Palais Royal gravée d’après les tableaux des différentes écoles, edited and published by the ‘graveur de son cabinet’, Jacques Couché (b. 1759). Advertisements for the first livraison were published early in 1786.50 By August of that year the paintings from the walls of the great rooms were displayed on large easels ‘in the middle of each room … obliquely to the light, resting partly upon each other’.51 This was for the convenience of the twenty draughtsmen employed to copy the 396 paintings, which were eventually engraved and etched in 352 plates.52 A ‘description historique’ – a critical appreciation with a brief biographical note on the artist – by the Abbé de Fontenai was engraved together with each plate. The Galerie was issued to subscribers quarterly in livraisons (each of six plates) and thirty of these appeared regularly from 1 February 1786 until the Terror halted the enterprise. By then the paintings had been sold, but because preparatory drawings of most of them had been made Couché was later able to revive the publication.53

There were precedents for this great undertaking: the Recueil Crozat published between 1729 and 1742 in three volumes was devoted to notable works of art in the great collections of Paris, including over thirty paintings in the Orléans Collection, and the great series of engravings of the gallery in Dresden appeared in 1753;54 but the most obvious and recent precedent was an ominous one. The anglophile Duc de Chartres as well as any French engraver would have been aware of the London print‐seller John Boydell’s scheme to reproduce the whole collection of old [page 466]masters formed by the English prime minister Sir Robert Walpole (Lord Orford) at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, employing forty‐five printmakers to do so. Work had commenced on this undertaking by 1773, and publication, in parts, to subscribers began in the following year. Then, in 1779, the collection was sold en bloc to Catherine the Great and, when completed in 1788, the two huge volumes commemorated rather than celebrated a British collection – one now subsumed in that of ‘Her Most Imperial Majesty the Empress of Russia’.55

Intimations of the probable fate of the Orléans paintings may indeed have stimulated the creation of an equivalent record of it. An earlier publication of a similar character was that of the finest gems of the Orléans Collection, the Principales pierres gravées, the engravings of which appeared between 1780 and 1784.56 In 1787 the Duc d’Orléans sold his entire collection of gems to Catherine.

In March 1788 negotiations were under way for the sale of 478 of the Orléans pictures to a syndicate organised by the London auctioneer James Christie, who had also helped to sell the Walpole collection.57 Serious investigations as to the value of the collection were renewed on Christie’s behalf by the Flemish‐born painter Philip J. Tassaert in June 1790.58 This was not the first time since the acquisition of the collection that an attempt had been made to assign a value to the paintings. Each of the inventories made shortly after the death of the regent, his son and his grandson in March 1724, February 1752 and August 1785 did so. The estimates fluctuated: Veronese’s four Allegories of Love were valued at 32,000 livres in 1724 and 1752 but at 24,000 in 1785; the versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis never fell below 5,000 or rose above 6,000 livres; Titian’s Noli me tangere was valued at 8,000, then fell to 2,000 and then jumped to 3,600; Tintoretto’s Milky Way was put at 2,400 in the first two inventories, as was Veronese’s Rape of Europa, but in 1785 the former was considered to be worth a mere 800 and the latter a mere 150.59

Obviously the paintings were not easy to value, and when the duke was said to be about to accept Christie’s estimate of 50,000 guineas the Duchesse de Bourbon (to whom he would, under the terms of his father’s will, be obliged to share the proceeds of any such sale) had the collection valued by Le Brun at twice as much. The English newspapers were full of rumours. But 100,000 guineas was too much for Christie. One scheme was for twenty ‘persons of the first fashion’ to raise a large part of the sum, opening a subscription for the remainder, reselling the pictures to those who had subscribed and then offering what was left over at a public auction. An objection frequently made against the speculation was that too many of the pictures were too large for ‘our London houses’.60 The Prince of Wales, a former crony of the duke, was said to have promised to advance 70,000 of the 100,000 guineas requested – scepticism regarding his ability to do so may have been combined with doubt as to the desirability of being junior partner to him in such a deal. In any case the plan foundered.61 And so too did a plan to purchase between twenty and thirty of the finest paintings for the French Crown.62

The Collection Divided and Exported

In all early accounts it is said that the duke needed to fund his political campaign to have himself made regent – a campaign that soon resulted in the abandonment of his titles and his adoption of the name Philippe‐Égalité. But his motives are likely to have been as confused as his own finances. In any case during the summer of 1792, when his political prospects were especially intoxicating – and precarious – and his debts no less pressing, he agreed to sell his French and Italian paintings to the banker Édouard Walckiers63 of Brussels for 750,000 livres. Soon afterwards the German, Flemish and Dutch paintings (147 items) were sold for 350,000 livres to Thomas Moore Slade, who had very nearly succeeded in purchasing the entire collection in the previous year.64

Slade was acting for a consortium consisting of the 7th Lord Kinnaird together with Mr Morland and Mr Hammersley, partners in Kinnaird’s father‐in‐law’s bank. He removed the paintings from Paris with difficulty. The duke’s creditors tried to obstruct the transporters and the indignation of protesting artists threatened to create further problems. During April 1793 the pictures – amplified by other works (259 pictures were offered) – were exhibited at 125 Pall Mall, the former premises of the Royal Academy, where the sale was handled by Mr Wilson.65

Meanwhile Walckiers had sold on the Italian and French paintings (unpacked) for 900,000 livres to his cousin, another banker, François‐Louis‐Joseph de Laborde‐Méréville (1761–1802), to whose family, perhaps significantly, the Duc d’Orléans was indebted. The new owner began to build a gallery on to his new hôtel in the Rue d’Artois (today Rue Lafitte) to accommodate them. Like Walckiers and the duke, he was active in reformist politics. But as the Revolution advanced he disowned it and prepared to emigrate.66 Early in 1793 he was in London together with his paintings. In April of that year Philippe‐Égalité was arrested and on 6 November he was guillotined.

Laborde mortgaged the collection for £40,000 to Jeremiah Harman (1764–1844), an eminent banker (a director of the Bank of England between 1794 and 1827) who was himself to be an important collector of paintings (several of which were acquired after his death for the National Gallery) and also the first and most important patron of the young Charles Eastlake.67 Some at least of the paintings were possible to view but the majority were presumably kept in store.68 It is sometimes claimed that the paintings were sold outright to Harman, but Laborde retained the right to reclaim them within five years. Had these terms been slightly different he might have been able to save the paintings for France, where he returned briefly in September 1797.69 However, under the terms agreed, ownership was transferred to Harman, who sold the paintings, in the early summer of 1798, for £43,500 to the art dealer Michael Bryan (1757–1821), who was acting for a syndicate of three noblemen.70 Benjamin West and Charles Long, aware that a sale was imminent, had a plan to which both the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, and King George III had given their support, to acquire the finest 150 pictures for £44,000 as a national collection. But either they made the offer too late or it was clear to the vendors that the offer was uncertain and would have entailed a considerable wait.71

The leading partner in this syndicate was Francis, the 3rd and last Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), a man with little taste for art and even less knowledge of it, who was a keen speculator (now chiefly remembered for his massive investment in canal building). His associates were his heir and nephew George Granville Leveson‐Gower (1758–1833), then Lord Gower, later 2nd Marquess of Stafford and eventually 1st Duke of Sutherland, and Frederick, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825), who had married Lord Gower’s sister, Lady Margaret Leveson‐Gower. Lord Carlisle contributed a quarter of the purchase price and Lord Gower an eighth.72 Although Lord Gower [page 467]had the smallest share he may have been the principal mover. He had been British ambassador in Paris between 1790 and 1792 and would therefore probably have been au fait with every move made to save or sell the collection.73 It is likely to have been Carlisle who approached Michael Bryan, or was approached by him; we know that he had been buying pictures from Bryan (and selling pictures to him) since at least 1796.74

Between 26 December 1798 and 31 July 1799, 138 paintings were placed on exhibition at Bryan’s gallery (88 Pall Mall) and 158 – the larger ones – at the Lyceum, a large exhibition space in the Strand. We know how they were displayed from drawings made by the diarist Joseph Farington. In Bryan’s gallery Titian’s Noli me tangere hung in the small room in the centre opposite the door, and Veronese’s Rape of Europa on one of the short walls of the long gallery, the lowest of a tier of four pictures. In the Lyceum Sebastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus occupied the centre of a wall, flanked by Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and his Diana and Callisto. This must certainly have been impressive but the height of the room was such that it was possible to hang two large paintings, by Tintoretto and Le Brun, above the Sebastiano. Two of Veronese’s Allegories of Love were among the highest pictures on the same wall; the two others occupied the same position on the wall opposite.75

For English art lovers who could afford the admission fee of half a crown (the usual sum to prevent the attendance of the common public was a shilling) the event was, at least in recollection, a revelation. ‘A new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new earth stood before me,’ Hazlitt recalled in his essay ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, published in The London Magazine for 2 December 1820.76 But the display was without glamour, many pictures were apparently unframed, and the catalogue was free of description, let alone the usual auctioneers’ hyperbole. This had also been true of Slade’s sale in 1793. Mary Berry reported that the Lyceum was in any case too far from the fashionable haberdashers to attract society.77 Lady Amabel Lucas visited Bryan’s gallery a dozen times but made fewer visits to the Lyceum, which was colder and where she noted that the paintings ‘look more dirty, or more sunk in their colours than those at Bryan’s as they are mostly very large, fill an immense room so as to touch one another, and are without frames, the collection does not look so pleasing. The Venus detaining Adonis; the Actaeon and the Callisto of Titian whose colouring looked so fine at the Palais Royal, did not appear so beautiful here.’ She bought paintings from both places, however.78 About sixty per cent of the works exhibited were sold. Sixty‐six of them were re‐offered at Bryan’s gallery on 14 February 1800, with reduced reserves, and most were disposed of.

The sale as a whole was not managed in a straightforward way and even the exact number of the paintings for sale is not quite clear.79 All three syndicate members made changes to the selection made for themselves as the sale progressed. Thus, at one stage Lord Gower agreed to take the Lot and his Daughters attributed to Velázquez (now recognised as by Orazio Gentileschi) which Henry Hope had previously agreed to buy for 500 guineas. Carlisle hoped for a while to claim Raphael’s Madonna del Passeggio (the public price for which was 3,000 guineas) but this was later taken by the Duke of Bridgewater. He also considered buying Titian’s Rape of Europa, which Lord Berwick eventually purchased for 900 guineas.80

It is clear that there was no cash profit for the syndicate. On top of the purchase price of £43,500 they had to pay more than £1,800 for framing, carpenters, catalogues, advertising, doorkeepers and insurance and a little over £3,360 to Bryan as his commission. Sales, together with door money, brought in nearly £10,000 less than this outlay. There is, however, no evidence that they expected to do better, and the value of the paintings assigned to them was nearly £35,000.81 One episode in particular does need further explanation and that is the auction sale by Coxe, Burrell and Foster on 13 May 1802 at which all members of the syndicate consigned some of the pictures they had reserved. The sale was badly timed and little noticed and the results must have been very disappointing: Titian’s Noli me tangere, for example, consigned by Lord Gower, fetched 250 guineas (£262 10s.) whereas its price to the public had been calculated as 400 guineas.82

It is worth listing those paintings which fetched – or were valued at – more than a thousand guineas: of these the most notable was Sebastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus, for which Angerstein paid 3,500 guineas on the first day (26 December 1798). At the earlier sale in April 1793 Richard Payne Knight had paid 1,000 guineas for The Cradle, then attributed to Rembrandt (now in the Rijksmuseum). The Judgement of Paris by Rubens, also in that sale, was retained by Lord Kinnaird at a valuation of 2,000 guineas.83 The other most prized paintings were retained by the Duke of Bridgewater’s syndicate. Lord Carlisle kept Annibale Carracci’s Dead Christ Mourned (valued at 4,000 guineas), the Duke of Bridgewater kept Raphael’s Madonna del Passeggio (valued at 3,000 guineas), Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (at 2,500 guineas each), Poussin’s Sacraments (this series at 4,900 guineas) and his Moses striking the Rock (at 1,000 guineas), Annibale Carracci’s Diana and Callisto (at 1,000 guineas) and Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket (at 1,200 guineas – in fact an early copy of the painting now in the National Gallery).84

Posthumous Influence

In 1806 Couché returned to the business of engraving the Orléans Collection, and two years later the three volumes of the Galerie du Palais Royal were finally published. French art lovers were reminded of what they had lost. Of the Bridgewater syndicate Croze‐Magnan observed, in the Notice Historique which prefaced the first volume, that English art lovers, ‘true to their national character, make public interest a matter of commercial speculation’ (‘les amateurs anglais, conservant le caractère national, spéculèrent sur la curiosité publique’).85 It is hard to deny the justice of this verdict. What had been acquired by a prince partly for the benefit of the public had fallen into the hands of a ‘nation of shopkeepers’. Equally, however, it was hard to feel that the French were the victims of foreign rapacity when the Musée Napoléon was bulging with plunder.

The art dealer William Buchanan in his Memoirs of Painting with a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures by the Great Masters into England Since the French Revolution, published in two volumes in 1824, interpreted the commercial acumen and private greed of the British nobility as patriotic zeal, and concluded his account of what was, after all, the dispersal into private hands of a great public collection, with the optimistic assertion that public institutions were about to develop in Britain which would match those on the Continent – ‘the present epoch will ever be memorable in the history of this country, by his Majesty having declared his pleasure that England shall possess a Public and National Gallery of the works of the great painters, and thus given a pledge to his people, that the period of [page 468]GEORGE THE FOURTH will be to ENGLAND, what that of FRANÇOIS PREMIER was to FRANCE.’86

These sonorous words must strike the reader of Buchanan’s coarse and mercenary business letters87 as somewhat comic. But it is not entirely ridiculous to claim that the presence in Britain of so many great paintings, and above all of so many great paintings which had once formed a public collection, did something to inspire more liberal attitudes in private owners.

In 1803 Earl Gower succeeded as Marquess of Stafford and also inherited from his uncle, the Duke of Bridgewater, the latter’s collection of paintings. Until his death in 1833 (by when he had been created Duke of Sutherland) both his own and the Duke of Bridgewater’s portions of the Orléans Collection hung together in Cleveland House in London, forming the ‘Stafford Gallery’. A top‐lit picture gallery already existed on the first floor. To this Charles Heathcote Tatham built another gallery, also top‐lit but with grand coffered apses. He added a dining room and drawing room, both with bay windows overlooking St James’s Park, and an ante‐room between them which was hung with the Poussins. Tatham’s new rooms were for French and Italian paintings. The old gallery was filled with Dutch and Flemish masters. These were far more austere interiors than any these paintings had adorned in former centuries. The only furniture in Tatham’s new gallery seems to have consisted of a pair of massive side‐tables with dolphin supports, and chairs lining the walls – both doubtless served to keep people from getting too close to the pictures, which were hung in symmetrical patterns (but without uniform frames).88

That public visitors to the Stafford Gallery were anticipated is clear from the catalogue raisonné by John Britton published for their use in 1808 (the same year as that in which the motives of the English were denigrated by Croze‐Magnan), and the small numbered ivory tag on each frame facilitated consultation of this catalogue. Lord Stafford’s grandson, the dilettante sculptor Lord Ronald Gower, recalled that ‘long before the National Gallery had been formed, the gallery … at Cleveland House … was to the English art student, in a limited degree indeed, what that of the Louvre is to the French.’89 Visits were restricted to Wednesday afternoons over four summer months in 1806 and 1807, and thereafter for three summer months, to those who had tickets. These were only issued to acquaintances of the marquess or of a member of his family or to those recommended by such acquaintances. Season tickets were granted to artists on the recommendation of a member of the Royal Academy. ‘It is expected, that if the weather be wet, or dirty, that all visitors will go in carriages.’90 Britton in his preface defended these arrangements as necessary, given the ‘ignorance, vulgarity or something worse’ of the ‘lower orders’ and the ‘frivolity, affectation, and impudence’ of that class of ‘lounging persons’ so abundant in modern London, but what is more significant than the reasons provided is his defensive tone, surely adopted in response to the ‘reproach of foreigners’ that great collections in France and Italy had been open to ‘the emulous artist, and to every person of laudable curiosity’.91

The foundation of the British Institution in 1805, with Lord Stafford as its first president, was made in the same cultural climate: at its loan exhibitions of old master paintings held in the summer months, masterpieces from the Orléans Collection were for a while reassembled. In 1816 some of these masterpieces – including Titian’s Venus and a Lute Player, Veronese’s Hermes, Herse and Aglauros, Palma Vecchio’s Venus and Cupid in a Landscape and Guido Reni’s Risen Christ appearing to the Virgin – were among the paintings bequeathed by Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (b. 1745) to the University of Cambridge, together with funds to erect the museum that now bears his name. This was the first public collection of major old master paintings in Britain. The National Gallery was founded in 1824 with the acquisition of Angerstein’s collection, which also included a significant portion of the Orléans Collection.

Meanwhile groups of Orléans paintings were sometimes displayed as such in the houses where they were to be found. In Castle Howard, the seat of the Earls of Carlisle, the Orléans pictures were hung in uniform frames upon dark green silk. Visitors were anticipated and here too the numbered ivory disks attached to the lower edge of each frame helped visitors to consult the catalogue for the ‘Orléans Room’.92

The share of the Duke of Bridgewater passed on the death of his nephew (the Lord Gower who had belonged to the syndicate, who became Marquess of Stafford and briefly Duke of Sutherland) to his second son, Francis (1800–1857), who took the name Egerton in 1833 and was made 1st Earl of Ellesmere in 1846. Charles Barry rebuilt Cleveland House for him between 1840 and 1854; the great new picture gallery of what was soon called Bridgewater House was completed in 1851 and most of those who visited it then and in the following decades were aware that the great Titians and Raphaels (now on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland from the current Duke of Sutherland) had once adorned the Palais‐Royal, just as when these paintings hung in the Palais‐Royal they were known to have once belonged to the Queen of Sweden.

Notes

1. Piganiol de la Force 1765, I, p. 329; Yorke MS, V, p. 234. (Back to text.)

2. Wine 2001, p. 226 (for provenance) and pp. 235–9 for a full account of the picture’s fortune. (Back to text.)

3. Folliot 1988, p. 69, no. 36, for the paintings by him of Daphnis and Chloe, now only recorded in Audran’s engraved illustrations for a limited edition of Amyot’s translation of this romance printed in 1718. (Back to text.)

4. [Du Bois de Saint‐Gelais] 1727, pp. 76–7. Another Watteau, a Bal Champêtre, was later recorded in the collection. (Back to text.)

6. Folliot 1988, pp. 54, 55, and 59, no. 33. (Back to text.)

7. Already admired by Brice 1706, I, pp. 141–2. For Coypel’s painting in the palace see Mardrus 1988, pp. 79–94. (Back to text.)

8. Brice 1717, I, p. 204; Folliot 1988, pp. 62–5 and, for the great chimneypiece wall, pp. 70–1, no. 40. (Back to text.)

10. Montaiglon V, 1895, pp. 66–7. (Back to text.)

11. Folliot 1988, pp. 63, 72–3, nos 46–8. (Back to text.)

13. For Mignard see [Le Rouge] 1733, I, p. 160. (Back to text.)

14. Christiansen and Mann 2001, pp. 238–40, no. 48 (entry by Christiansen). (Back to text.)

15. Mardrus 1990, p. 294. (Back to text.)

16. Stryienski 1913, pp. 9–16; Mardrus 1988, pp. 95–116. (Back to text.)

17. Marais 1863–8, II, 1864, p. 465. (Back to text.)

18. Montaiglon IV, 1893, pp. 344, 350–1, 356–7, 360, 366–7; Stryienski 1913, pp. 19–20 (Back to text.)

19. Crozat was still anxious in August 1720 to have the antiquities included in any sale to the Duc (Montaiglon V, 1895, p. 363). For the sale to Spain see ibid. , VII, 1896, p. 59. For the context see Haskell and Penny 1981, p. 62. (Back to text.)

20. Montaiglon V, 1895, pp. 371, 373–7, 379, 410–11. (Back to text.)

21. Stryienski 1913, pp. 20–1, citing the correspondence between Gualtiero and Crozat in the British Museum. (Back to text.)

22. Ibid. , p. 25. (Back to text.)

23. Montaiglon V, 1985, pp. 326–31, 337–8, 356–60; Stryienski 1913, pp. 23–4. (Back to text.)

24. Montaiglon V, 1895, pp. 339–45, 365, 412. For Guilbert see also p. 276. (Back to text.)

25. Ibid. , pp. 344, 365, 373, 376–7, 381; VI, 1896, pp. 5, 7. (Back to text.)

[page 469]

26. Ibid. , V, 1895, pp. 344, 375–7, 382–7; VI, 1896, pp. 5–11, 109; Stryienski 1913, pp. 26–31. (Back to text.)

27. The expression is used by Poërson in a letter to d’Antin of 14 January 1721 (Montaiglon VI, 1896, p. 5). (Back to text.)

28. An example is around Domenichino’s Vision of Saint Jerome in the collection of Sir Denis Mahon and currently on loan to the Ashmolean Museum. (Back to text.)

29. [Le Rouge] 1719, p. 103 – repeated after the regent’s death in the editions of 1723 (I, p. 147) and 1733 (I, p. 167). (Back to text.)

30. Bauche 1749, p. 293, notes that the numbering of the paintings no longer makes sense; Hébert 1766, p. 341, explains that the recent fire in the palace opera house had involved rearrangements. Later guides frequently warn the reader that changes are in train. (Back to text.)

31. Croze‐Magnan in Fontenai 1808, p. 3. (Back to text.)

32. [Du Bois de Saint‐Gelais] 1727; the volume was no longer anonymous in the second, posthumous edition of 1737. (Back to text.)

33. Wornum 1847 was edited by Eastlake and initiated by him as Keeper of the National Gallery, although published after his resignation. (Back to text.)

35. McClellan 1994, pp. 25–48. (Back to text.)

36. See [Dézallier d’Argenville] 1765, pp. 78–80 (Salon de Psiche). (Back to text.)

37. Stryienski 1913, pp. 70–1. For Louis le Pieux in general see Mardrus 1988, pp. 117–22. (Back to text.)

38. The transfers from panel were recorded on the backs of the paintings. See, for instance, the note by Hacquin on the back of NG 643 and 644. Payne Knight’s recollection of the transfer of the Sebastiano makes alarming reading ([Knight] 1814, pp. 283–4). This was published long afterwards, but Knight was in Paris as a young man in 1773, which is the date at which he claimed elsewhere that ‘the French cleaners’ were ‘first employed to repair, or rather destroy’ the Venetian paintings which he regarded as the worst victims ([Knight] 1810, p. 315). See also, for contemporary comments on the brash new varnish, Yorke MS, V, pp. 232, 234, and more generally on the methods being employed, Walpole 1973, p. 344 (letter of 25 August 1771). (Back to text.)

39. Archives Nationales, Posthumous Inventory of March 1724, photocopy in the Getty Provenance Index, fol. 139, item 1697 and adjacent entries. (Back to text.)

40. Mardrus 1996; Wine 2001, pp. 235–6. (Back to text.)

41. The last published list of the pictures is Thiéry 1887 (I, pp. 257–8) but the paintings may by then already have been removed to easels. (Back to text.)

42. Manning and Suida 1958, fig. 121 (tav. LXXV). In the Stafford Gallery the painting was described as ‘faint and pale’ in the flesh (Britton 1808, p. 26). For this room see [Dézallier d’Argenville] 1749, pp. 75–7; Bauche 1749, pp. 311–13; Hébert 1766, pp. 354–5; Thiéry 1787, I, p. 287. (Back to text.)

43. For this room see Bauche 1749, p. 308, and Hébert 1766, pp. 349–50. The Giordano is untraced – see Ferrari and Scavizzi 1992, I, p. 401; II, figs 1084 and 1085, pp. 925–6. For the Salviati see [Du Bois de Saint‐Gelais] 1727, p. 267, and Fontenai 1808, Vol. I. (Back to text.)

44. Bauche 1749, p. 300. (Back to text.)

45. Ibid. , pp. 300–2. (Back to text.)

46. Forray 1988, p. 149. (Back to text.)

47. Ibid. , pp. 149–54. (Back to text.)

48. Thiéry 1787, I, p. 270; Forray 1988, p. 153. (Back to text.)

49. Thiéry 1787, I, p. 272. (Back to text.)

50. Mardrus 1990, pp. 79ff. (Back to text.)

51. Trumbull 1953, p. 103. (Back to text.)

52. These drawings, surviving in six volumes in the Bibliothèque d’Art et d’Archéologie (Fondation Doucet), are described by Joubin 1924. (Back to text.)

53. The plates are variously entitled ‘De la Galerie de S.A.S. Monseigneur le Duc d’Orléans’, ‘De la Galerie du Palais Égalité’, ‘De la Galerie du Palais d’Orléans’, ‘De la Galerie du Palais Royal’. The title‐page for the first volume was issued to subscribers in 1786 and so dated – hence all three volumes are sometimes thought to have been published at that date. See Croze‐Magnan in Fontenai 1808, I, p. 4. (Back to text.)

54. Mardrus 1990, p. 81. (Back to text.)

55. Rubinstein 1996, pp. 65–73. (Back to text.)

56. Arnauld and Coquille 1780–4, with engravings by Augustin de Saint‐Aubin (1736–1807), draughtsman and engraver to the Duc d’Orléans. (Back to text.)

57. The figure of 418 is given in error in Mardrus 1988, p. 98. The contract is in the Bibliothèque Nationale. See also Sutton 1984, p. 358. (Back to text.)

58. Four letters from Tassaert to Christie were sold at Sotheby’s, London, 7 July 1958; their content is described in Russell 1990. (Back to text.)

59. The valuations are given by Stryienski 1913. I have checked them against the photocopies made from the inventories in the Archives Nationales by Colin Bailey for the Provenance Index of the J. Paul Getty Museum. (Back to text.)

60. Victoria and Albert Museum Albums of Press Cuttings, PP 17.4, II, pp. 546, 548, 578, 581, 598. (Back to text.)

61. Sutton 1984, pp. 357–72 (especially pp. 358–9). (Back to text.)

62. See McClellan 1994, p. 67, for Alexandre‐Joseph Paillet’s plan, submitted to the Comte d’Angiviller, for a group of pictures to be acquired by the king. (Back to text.)

63. The name is spelled differently by all the major sources. I have followed Suzanne Tassier’s entry in the Biographic Nationale de Belgique. Édouard‐Dominique‐Sébastien‐Joseph Walckiers (1758–1837), known as ‘Édouard le Magnifique’, had many important Parisian contacts – his sister and niece were married to close members of the Orléans circle. He himself had similar political ambitions in Brussels to those of the Duc d’Orléans in Paris, and he was ruined by the revolution which he helped to unleash. (Back to text.)

64. Buchanan 1824, I, pp. 59–60, quotes from a memorandum by Slade which gives the date of his first visit as 1792, and this date is often repeated (e.g. by Sutton 1984, p. 359). But since Slade also recalled first arriving in Paris on the day that the king fled, this must have been on 21 June 1791. The year in which he returned to Paris and made the purchase must have been 1792. It seems that the paintings could be viewed in Slade’s house at Chatham before the sale ( ibid. , pp. 161–4). (Back to text.)

65. Lady Kinnaird was a daughter of Mr Ransom in whose bank Morland and Hammersley were partners. Mr Assinder of Barclays Bank presented photocopies of manuscript lists of paintings acquired by Morland, Hammersley and Kinnaird to the National Gallery on 18 January 1961 and noted that large advances were made to the duke by Ransom and Company (NG archive, Box AIV.17.1). The paintings were shown ‘without the embellishment of a new varnish, without repairing the few accidents of time, and without the decoration of magnificent gilded frames’. Unsold pictures were exhibited at 16 Old Bond Street in May 1795 (88 items). The sale actually opened in April, as Pomeroy (1997, p. 30) notes. (Back to text.)

66. For Laborde see Boyer 1967. Slade (see Buchanan 1824, I, p. 161) reported the rumour that the duke had lost a vast sum at billiards to M. Laborde the Elder, and Sutton (1984, p. 362) makes an interesting conjecture on this business. (Back to text.)

67. Robertson 1978, p. 249, for Harman generally, and for paintings (Rembrandt, NG 190; Reni, NG 191; Dou, NG 192) bought from his collection by the National Gallery, ibid. , pp. 82 and 295. (Back to text.)

68. Farington 1978–98, II, 1978, p. 590; III, 1979, pp. 793 and 850, reports on visits made by Sir George and Lady Beaumont and by Benjamin West. (Back to text.)

69. The rapid visit to France (not mentioned in Boyer 1967) is mentioned by Farington (1978–98, IV, 1979, p. 1132). Laborde also returned for a while to France in 1800. Buchanan claimed that he was guillotined and although he corrected this error (1824, II, p. 379) it has been repeated (e.g. Sutton 1984, p. 361). He formed another collection which was sold at Christie’s on 6 and 7 January 1801 (not mentioned in Boyer 1967). He died in London on 2 October 1802 and was buried at Holme Pierpont near Nottingham, his country residence. A letter from Lucy Elizabeth, Lady Bradford, to her father, Lord Torrington, of 23 November 1802, describing how she had dined with ‘Madame de la Borde’ (evidently Laborde’s mother) in Paris during the peace, sheds light on one source of the family’s fortune. She was no longer wealthy (‘I am not sure she has a carriage’) and Lady Bradford noted that the ‘State of St Domingo is a most serious loss to them… their possessions there were immense’ (Staffordshire County Record Office, D1287/18/9 (P/1062)). The French evacuated Haiti in November 1803, but the colony was in several respects ‘lost’ considerably earlier. (Back to text.)

70. Castle Howard Muniments J14/27/1 for the agreement signed by all members of the syndicate in Bryan’s presence on 13 June 1798. Buchanan (1824, I, p. 18) and Soullié (1843, p. 14) give £43,000 as the sum and this has been repeated in many, perhaps most, later accounts. (Back to text.)

71. Our only source for this episode is a conversation with West recorded by Farington in January 1799. Farington 1978–98, IV, 1979, p. 1132. (Back to text.)

73. Sutton 1984, p. 363. (Back to text.)

74. He bought the Gossaert Adoration (NG 2790) from Bryan in March 1796, disposing of a Poussin in part payment. For this and other transactions with Bryan see Castle Howard Muniments J14/27/2 and 3 and J14/28/5, 6, and 13. (Back to text.)

75. The drawings are illustrated and discussed by Haskell 2000, pp. 25–6. The Tintoretto was a sketch for the Paradise, perhaps the painting in the Thyssen‐Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. The Le Brun was the Hercule terrassant Diomède (Hercules vanquishing Diomedes) now in the Nottingham Castle Museum. Because the numbers in Bryan’s catalogue follow the hang [page 470]of the paintings in tiers going up and down the walls, this might lead one to suppose that the Allegories were separated at random, but the symmetry of the arrangement in fact made their relationship obvious. (Back to text.)

76. Hazlitt 1902–6, VI, 1903, p. 14. (Back to text.)

77. Berry 1866, II, p. 86 (5 March 1799). (Back to text.)

78. The passage quoted was written on 4 January 1799. Yorke MS, XVII, p. 280. Her visits were made between 29 December 1798 and 29 April 1799. Ibid. XVII, pp. 275, 277–80, and XVIII, pp. 4, 5, 19, 26, 42, 57. Humphrey Wine pointed these entries out to me. (Back to text.)

79. Castle Howard Muniments J14/27/4 includes a memorandum to the effect that two pictures had accidentally been given the same number and J14/27/1 includes a note referring to ‘seven or eight pictures more [than the 298 listed]… now in possession of the Duke of Bridgewater’. (Back to text.)

80. Ibid. J14/27/14 for Lot and his Daughters reserved for Gower, but annotated as purchased by Hope; J14/27/6 for Raphael reserved for Carlisle; J14/27/7 for The Rape of Europa reserved for Carlisle and J14/127/9 for the same picture sold to Lord Berwick. The whereabouts of the Lot and his Daughters is not clear (see Christiansen and Mann 2001, pp. 183–4, no. 37, especially notes 3, 7 and 8 (entry by Christiansen)). (Back to text.)

81. For the original outlay of £43,500 see Castle Howard Muniments J14/27/1; for the door money of £1,574 0s. 6d., framing charges etc. of £1,826 1s. 8d. and Bryan’s commission of £3,361 5s. Od. see J14/27/11 and 13, where the sales are also recorded. Pomeroy (1997, pp. 29–30) Correctly correctly noted that the syndicate did not make a cash profit as has often been claimed. However, she reckons the sales at £34,617 10s. 6d., which omits the £3,71116s. owed by the purchasers at the date of the statement in J14/27/13. Her calculation ( ibid. , p. 31, note 14) of the attendance figures must also be questioned since it fails to take into account the fact that season tickets were obtainable and purchasers (with their parties) could make numerous visits. (Back to text.)

82. For an analysis of the sale see Fredericksen 1988, p. 20, no. 110. (Back to text.)

83. Or so Buchanan reported. There is also evidence that it was retained by Slade (see Sutton 1984, p. 362). (Back to text.)

84. The valuations given here for the syndicate’s pictures are the ‘public prices’ assigned to them. Castle Howard Muniments J14/27/14 reveals that the cost to the members of the syndicate, the so‐called ‘proprietor’s price’, was calculated as a midpoint between the ‘cost price’ (an agreed division of the original total purchase price) and the ‘public price’ presumably recommended by Bryan: this ‘proprietor’s price’ was £3,000 for the Carracci; £2,250 for the Raphael; £3,750 for the pair of Titians; £3,750 for the Sacraments; £750 for the Moses; £900 for Carracci’s Diana and the same for the supposed Correggio. (Back to text.)

85. Buchanan 1824, I, p. 4. (Back to text.)

86. Ibid. , I, p. 216. (Back to text.)

89. Gower 1883, I, p. 82. (Back to text.)

90. Britton 1808, preliminary note. (Back to text.)

91. Ibid. , p. vi. (Back to text.)

92. The arrangement is shown in a watercolour by Mary Ellen Best made in July 1832. Four Orléans pictures remain today at Castle Howard: two portraits, the delightful little poetic pastiche probably by Pietro della Vecchia (once regarded as a portrait of Gaston de Foix by Giorgione) and the portrait group of figures at prayer by Bedoli which was thought to represent the Dukes of Ferrara by Tintoretto. (Back to text.)


List of archive references cited

  • Berlin: Charles Fairfax Murray, letter to Bode, 21 June 1890
  • Castle Howard, Muniments: Carlisle, letter to Murray, 6 June 1889
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/1
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/2: Michael Bryan, receipt for a painting by Poussin, received from the Earl of Carlisle in part payment for NG2790, 16 March 1796
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/3: Michael Bryan, receipt for 300 guineas, received from the Earl of Carlisle in part payment for NG2790, 28 June 1796
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/4
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/6
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/7
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/11
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/13
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/27/14
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/28/5
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/28/6
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/28/13
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J14/127/9
  • Castle Howard, Muniments, J22/78: Sir William Henry Gregory, letter to the Earl of Carlisle, 6 August 1890
  • Leeds, West York Archive Service, Leeds District Archives: Lady Amabel Lucasnée Yorke (1751–1833), Baroness Lucas and Dowager Viscountess Polwarth, later created Countess de Grey in her own right, Diaries, 1769–1827
  • London, Christie’s, Archive: marked-up copy of sale catalogue, 6 May 1796
  • London, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, 86.00.9: probate inventory of the 4th Earl of Darnley, June 1831
  • London, Victoria and Albert Museum, PP 17.4: Albums of Press Cuttings
  • Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Getty Provenance Index: copy of posthumous inventory of Philippe, duc d‘Orléans, March 1724
  • Manchester, University of Manchester, John Rylands Library, English MSS 1281
  • Paris, Archives Nationales: posthumous inventory of Philippe, duc d’Orléans, March 1724
  • Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale: contract relating to a syndicate, organised by James Christie, negotiating for the purchase of part of the Orléans collection in 1788
  • Rome, Archivio di Stato, Not. A–C. – vol. 5134: Odescalchi inventory, 1713
  • Stafford, Staffordshire County Record Office, Bradford Papers, D1287/18/9 (P/1062): Lucy Elizabeth, Lady Bradford, letter to her father, Lord Bradford, 23 November 1802
  • Strood, Medway Archives Office, U565.F27: Douglas Guest, MS catalogue of the pictures at Cobham Hall … compiled by Douglas Guest, 1833, unpaginated

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HolmesCharlesSirOld Masters and Modern Art. The National Gallery Italian SchoolsLondon 1923
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La Font de Saint Yenne 1747
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List of exhibitions cited

London 1818
London, British Institution, 1818
London 1877
London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Works by the Old Masters and Deceased Masters of the British School, 1877
London, National Gallery, An Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures (1936–1947), 1947–8
Manchester 1857
Manchester, Old Trafford, Exhibition Hall, Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Collected at Manchester in 1857, 5 May–17 October 1857
Stockholm 1966
Stockholm, National Museum, Queen Christina of Sweden, a Personality of European Civilisation, 1 July–30 October 1966; (11th Council of Europe Exhibition)
Washington 1988
Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1988

The Organisation of the Catalogue

Artists are listed alphabetically and separate works by the same artists are ordered chronologically (rather than by date of accession). The division of an artist’s work between catalogues has been avoided in the past, but Titian presents a special problem. His work from before 1540 has been left for another volume and his later productions are presented here together with works by rivals, followers, pupils and imitators.

I have included one painting which seems to be a pastiche made soon after Titian’s death (A Concert, NG 3) and another which is a copy of one of his compositions, probably made later than 1600 (The Trinity, NG 4222), but not A Boy with a Bird (NG 933), which has often been taken for a seventeenth‐century imitation of Titian. The light cloud of drapery around the upper arm and the outlining of the fingers recall Titian’s Noli me tangere (NG 270) of c. 1515. It may be an excerpt from a painting of Venus and Adonis, a composition discussed in this catalogue (pp. 274–91), but if so must, as Paul Joannides has proposed, be an early version. Arguments in favour of the autograph status of this curious morsel are presented by Joannides and Jill Dunkerton in volume 28 of the National Gallery Technical Bulletin.

A good case could easily be made for including works by Rottenhammer, Elsheimer and El Greco, all of whom painted in Venice and were formed, or at least reformed, as artists by that experience. But readers will expect to find their work in other catalogues and it is unlikely that my colleagues would have consented to their appropriation. It may therefore seem inconsistent to have included The Conversion of Mary Magdalene (NG 1241) which is probably by Pedro Campaña, who was Netherlandish by birth and worked for many years in Spain. He was probably only briefly resident in Venice, but this painting was commissioned by a Venetian patrician both as a record of his family and as a record of a fresco in a Venetian church, so it seemed wrong to omit it.

As in the first volume of the sixteenth‐century Italian paintings, the entries, which are more discursive than was formerly the case in the Gallery’s catalogues, have been divided into sections with titles intended to help readers select the topic that interests them. Much material concerning previous owners is supplied and much on the circumstances of the work’s acquisition, but a succinct, factual summary of provenance is also supplied separately for ease of consultation.

The information on picture frames provided in the first volume attracted more comment in print than any other feature of that book. Here I have also drawn attention both to old frames of distinction and to frames made for the National Gallery. The reader should note that Jacob Simon at the National Portrait Gallery has created an online directory of framemakers which includes all the craftsmen mentioned here as employed by, or as suppliers to, the National Gallery.

An account of the conservators employed by the Gallery to varnish, line, clean, repair and retouch before the establishment of the Gallery’s own Conservation Department is incorporated in the introduction to the first volume (Penny 2004, pp. xiv–xv). A great deal of information about the conservation of the National Gallery’s paintings is provided and I have tried to relate the conservation history to the provenance, identifying not only nineteenth‐century restorers but also, sometimes, those from earlier centuries.

A question‐mark is used to indicate a doubt as to the authorship of a painting in preference to the formula of ‘Attributed to’ or ‘Ascribed to’. Comprehensive listing of references made in recent art‐historical literature has not been attempted. References in the notes are abbreviations of entries in the bibliography. I have tried to identify the actual authors of exhibition catalogues and of anonymous guides.

A Note on Manuscript Material Cited

References are made in the notes to manuscript material (chiefly letters) studied in British family papers – for example, those of the Earls of Carlisle and of the Dukes of Hamilton – and also to material studied in public and church archives in Venice – for example, confraternity manuscripts in the care of the parish of S. Trovaso, the parish records kept in S. Silvestro, and wills, inventories and financial records in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (here abbreviated to ASV). Most frequent reference, however, is made to the Archive of the National Gallery itself: the minutes of the meetings of the Board of Trustees, with the associated papers, the Gallery accounts, the diary and other papers of Ralph Nicholson Wornum, and above all the notebooks or travel diaries kept by Sir Charles Eastlake on his continental tours between 1852 and 1864 (there is also one for 1830). Since there is more than one notebook for each annual tour, the number of the notebook cited is given in parentheses – thus ‘MS notebook 1864 (2)’ for the second in 1864. I have published an account of Eastlake’s methods and motives for compiling these notebooks in ‘Un’introduzione ai taccuini di Sir Charles Eastlake’ in Anna Chiara Tommasi, ed., Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle: Conoscitore e conservatore (papers from the Convegno held in 1997 at Legnago, Verona), Venice 1998, pp. 277–89. They are currently being transcribed and edited by Susanna Avery‐Quash for publication by the Walpole Society.

About this version

Version 1, generated from files NP_2008__16.xml dated 06/03/2025 and database__16.xml dated 09/03/2025 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 03/01/2025. Structural mark-up applied to skeleton document in full; entry for NG294 reintegrated into main document; entries for NG16, NG26, NG224, NG277, NG674, NG1318 & NG1324-NG1326, NG1883-NG1884, NG3948, NG4452, NG6376, NG6420 and NG6490 prepared for publication; entries for NG16, NG26, NG224, NG277, NG294, NG674, NG1318 & NG1324-NG1326, NG1883-NG1884, NG3948, NG4452, NG6376, NG6420 and NG6490 proofread and corrected.

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Chicago style
Penny, Nicholas. “Four Allegories of Love, traditionally entitled (top to bottom from left):, NG 1318, Unfaithfulness, NG 1324, Scorn, NG 1325, Respect, NG 1326, Happy Union”. 2008, online version 1, March 9, 2025. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EA0-000B-0000-0000.
Harvard style
Penny, Nicholas (2008) Four Allegories of Love, traditionally entitled (top to bottom from left):, NG 1318, Unfaithfulness, NG 1324, Scorn, NG 1325, Respect, NG 1326, Happy Union. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2025. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EA0-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
MHRA style
Penny, Nicholas, Four Allegories of Love, traditionally entitled (top to bottom from left):, NG 1318, Unfaithfulness, NG 1324, Scorn, NG 1325, Respect, NG 1326, Happy Union (National Gallery, 2008; online version 1, 2025) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EA0-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 19 March 2025]