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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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