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The Death of Actaeon:
Catalogue entry

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Entry details

Full title
The Death of Actaeon
Artist
Titian
Inventory number
NG6420
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

Oil on canvas, 178.8 × 197.8 cm

Support

The measurements given above are those of the stretcher. The original canvas is a medium‐weight twill weave 2/1 (that is, with the threads that are vertical to the painting running over two horizontal threads and under another), with 13 vertical and 18 horizontal threads per centimetre. This canvas has been paste‐lined on to a similar type of canvas. The original canvas extends to the edges, except at the centre of the left side, where it is 1 cm short; at the top right corner, where it is 2 cm short; and at the upper edge, where it is slightly turned over (but nowhere by more than 1.5 cm). Cusping is apparent at all four edges, although it is much more pronounced at the left and right. The painting must, therefore, always have been of approximately the size that we see now.

Approximately in the centre of the canvas there is a vertical seam which can easily be discerned. It crosses Diana’s left hand and the hind leg of the hound furthest to the left. A triangle of canvas, twill but apparently of a somewhat heavier weave, has been added in the top right corner of the left‐hand portion of canvas.

There is an irregular loss in the canvas at the lower right‐hand corner, the maximum width of which is 30 cm and the maximum height 24 cm.

The stained deal stretcher with crossbars carries a label for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1893 on its upper member; there is also, at the top left, a circular label with serrated edges inscribed HHB/F200. Beside this ‘No. 166’ is written in blue pencil, and a numeral (either ‘16’ or ‘10’) is written in black paint. On the lower right‐hand corner of the stretcher there is a small rectangular paper label inscribed ‘no. 3…’ – the second digit has been largely eradicated.

Materials and Technique

The canvas was given a thin gesso ground and then a dark imprimitura. Much preliminary drawing was made with a brush and lead white (in some cases perhaps mixed with other pigments), and this reveals numerous changes of plan. At one time Diana had both flying hair and a flying scarf. Her left arm was raised higher, several positions were tried for her bow and, most notably of all, her right arm was originally not raised but hung by her side, only a little bent. The landscape elements appear to have been greatly modified. A major tree planned for the distance on the right was moved into the foreground. The area of most action has also been most repeatedly worked over. It seems likely that Actaeon’s body was not at first so far to the right. Parts of the painting are more finished than others, and some parts more credible as deliberately unfinished than others.

In a recent article the late Roger Rearick claimed that Diana ‘clearly did not at first shoot an arrow’. However, the X‐radiographs (fig. 2) show that her outstretched arm was holding a bow in each of the several positions proposed for it. The original idea may have been that she should simply hold the bow aloft, but it seems more likely that we were to suppose that she had released the string and the arrow has been discharged. It is not clear. Rearick also supposed that the two sides of the composition were developed independently: when the Diana was laid in, ‘the episode of Actaeon devoured by his hounds had not even been sketched in’. There is no technical evidence to support this – nor any to contradict it.1

Conservation

The painting was said to be very obscured by darkened varnish in 1914 (see below) and it is likely that it was cleaned shortly after its sale in 1919–20 to Lord Lascelles, probably in Italy.2 The painting was surface‐cleaned and revarnished on acquisition by the Gallery.

Condition

There are numerous flake losses along all of the edges but the worst of these are on the right‐hand side of the lower edge and along the seam. The losses form lines which are slightly suggestive of creases caused by folding or rolling. There is a pronounced craquelure, especially in the dark areas. Diana’s flesh is generally flattened and abraded. Her face has been retouched, giving her cheek a smooth plumpness and perhaps modifying her lips and nose. The lake has almost entirely faded from her dress. One notable effect which may not have survived is the reflection of Actaeon’s legs. The edge of the water is no longer apparent, and other shapes in the water either have re‐emerged with the increased translucence of the paint or perhaps were never cancelled. It is generally hard to distinguish between forms which seem vague because they are unfinished and those which are pentimenti or are abraded.

Attribution, Dating and Status

The painting has generally been accepted as by Titian. The first indication of any doubt comes in Roger Fry’s review published late in 1911 of the exhibition of Old Masters at the Grafton Galleries. He was ‘inclined to think’ that the picture was by Titian but with significant additions by assistants. The figure of Diana was ‘splendidly constructed and the design here shows all of Titian’s power of counterchanging silhouettes of light on dark and dark on light’, but the drawing of Actaeon and the dogs was ‘heavy and dull’ and the colour ‘too hot and brown’.3 He seems never to have considered the possibility that the painting was not finished. I know of no significant opposition to the attribution since then, although Harald Keller in 1969 and Roger Rearick in 1997, among others, have suggested that another hand finished the figure of Diana.4 Gould, who believed the entire painting to be substantially complete, dismissed this as a ‘quaint idea’.5 If, as seems likely, the painting was in Titian’s studio at the time of his death, his heirs may well have wished to give it a more marketable appearance without altering its status as a late work by the master himself. If this were the case they would [page 249][page 250]have given the goddess, and especially her face, a more resolved appearance but left the remainder of the painting as it was at Titian’s death. The retouching of the goddess’s face makes it hard to assess the character of the original painting in this area, but the impassive profile is certainly not typical of Titian. Although there is some resemblance to the head of the angel in the Annunciation in S. Salvatore – a painting that had evidently been completed by 1566, when Vasari saw it – the angel’s features are more mobile.

Titian died in 1576, but it is likely that many of the paintings on which he was still working, or rather on which he sporadically worked, had been begun long before. In a letter to King Philip II of Spain dated 19 June 1559 Titian wrote of ‘due poesie già incominciate, l’una di Europa sopra il Tauro, l’altra di Atheone lacerato da i cani suoi’ (‘two poetic pieces which are already begun, one of Europa upon the Bull, the other of Actaeon torn apart by his own hounds’). He worked on the painting of Europa together with an Agony in the Garden, reporting on his progress in a series of letters and announcing their completion in a letter of 26 April 1562.6 It therefore seems reasonable to suppose that he was not working much on the Death of Actaeon in these years. It also seems reasonable to suggest that much of the painting that we do see belongs to the late 1560s but that some changes and additions, notably the explosive bush in the foreground, may date from the 1570s.7

Fig. 1

Titian, Religion succoured by Spain, 1572–5. Oil on canvas, 168 × 168 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

[page 251]
Fig. 2

X‐radiograph of NG 6420. © The National Gallery, London.

Cecil Gould, writing in Apollo in June 1972 when the National Gallery was appealing to the public to help acquire the painting, argued that it represented the artist’s late style, in which he had abandoned the ‘crimson draperies and ultramarine skies’ of his earlier work. The Rape of Europa (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), he claimed, was one of the ‘last examples of the polychrome style of painting that Titian had followed … throughout his long career until that moment’.8 However, we find intense greens and blues and reds (vermilion as well as crimson) in both the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Rape of Lucretia, sent to Spain in 1571 and engraved that same year, and the Flaying of Marsyas in Kromeriz, which Gould lists among the artist’s last works. It is true that after 1560 Titian began to apply these colours in scumbles, often with his fingers, so that they only half belong to any of the forms and seem to float on the surface of the painting: evidently he painted them last. In the case of the Flaying of Marsyas, which, like the Death of Actaeon, is likely to have been in the artist’s workshop when he died, one can still see passages of smoky preliminary painting (notably the ghostly body of Apollo) but the blood, the dogs’ tongues and the ribbons in the trees are brilliant red. But perhaps the most valuable comparison is with Religion succoured by Spain, which Titian sent to Philip II in September 1575 (fig. 1). Here there is clearly no reluctance to employ deep rose and blue.9

The absence of such colours in NG 6420 is, however, only one of the reasons for supposing that Titian did not consider it complete. In other late paintings with a comparably [page 252]asymmetrical composition (Perseus and Andromeda in the Wallace Collection is the best example; see p. 200) he contrived to give the entire surface a coherence which NG 6420 does not possess, and the impact of blurred areas of painting (turbulent water, the smoke of torches, indecipherable distances, light piercing foliage) is enhanced by contrast with forms that were more fully modelled, if still often roughly painted, and, indeed, with some that were more detailed (Midas’s diadem in the Flaying of Marsyas and Lucretia’s ear jewel).

To claim that the painting was never finished is not to deny its appeal to Titian, who may well have relished the gradual evolution of his own work, and even come to dread separating himself from his inventions. Nor is it to deny its appeal to younger artists, who seem to have been inspired by the absence of local colour as well as the rough handling in his late paintings. Nor would such works have been unappealing to collectors. As we shall see, this painting was described as incomplete in what seems to be the earliest reference to it after Titian’s death, as it also was by Sir Abraham Hume, a later owner, who described it as ‘a great painting never finished but quite beautiful’ (‘un gran quadro non terminato … ma bello assai’).10

Subject and Literary Source

As noted above, Titian mentioned a painting of the Death of Actaeon in a letter to King Philip II, describing it as one of two ‘poesie’ which he had already begun (‘già incominciate’). The other paintings of this poetic type that he made for Philip II take their subjects from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is certainly true of Diana surprised by Actaeon (now in the collection of the Duke of Sutherland, on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland), which shows the moment of speechless shock – the silence emphasised by barking dogs – when Actaeon disturbs Diana and her nymphs at their bath. Ovid relates how the goddess, not having her arrows to hand (Titian is careful to paint her quiver hanging on a tree), splashes water on his face and dares him to tell the world what he has seen – ‘if tell he can’. NG 6420 illustrates the sequel: Actaeon flees; surprised at how fast he is moving, he senses a change in himself; he stops to drink at a stream; he discovers from his reflection that he has become a stag; finds that he cannot speak and is then torn to pieces by his own hounds.11

The subject was not entirely new in Renaissance art. A tondo attributed to Matteo Balducci in a private collection shows Diana splashing Actaeon, who is already transformed and is being attacked by his hounds, and there are cassoni panels by Sellaio illustrating the story in Yale University Art Gallery.12 But it is rare and it may be that Titian had never seen another painting or other representation of the subject.

It has been generally assumed that the woman in Titian’s painting is Diana – certainly by Michele Silos in his poem on the painting published in 1673 – ‘Hic sylvipotens Diana curvu / Arcu seposito, sinumque nuda’.13 But, as Gould observed, ‘in Ovid’s account Diana was not present at the scene of Actaeon’s death … Actaeon had left her naked and without her weapons only just before.’ And, moreover, ‘the female in the present picture does not wear Diana’s crescent in her hair (as the goddess does in both of Titian’s previous depictions of her in the series).’14 The second of these three points is not entirely just, for the fact that Ovid’s narrative speeds forward as Actaeon rushes to his death need not suggest that his end was instantaneous.

As Gould noted, the problem of the absent crescent had earlier exercised the Abbé Fontenay, the author of the text for an engraving of the painting made in the 1790s for the Galerie du Palais Royal. Fontenay altered the title from Diane poursuivant Actéon to Mort d’Actéon: ‘Rien cependant ne caractérise cette Déesse. Il faut plutôt croire que le Titien n’a voulu qu’une des Nimphes de Diane, poursuivant ce jeune Prince.’ (‘Nothing identifies her as the goddess. So we must believe that Titian only intended her as one of Diana’s nymphs, in pursuit of the young prince.’)15 This explanation seems inadequate, not so much because the nymphs too were last seen naked, as Gould pointed out, but rather because it is strange to give a mere nymph such prominence in the narrative.

Gould proposed that the figure may not be intended ‘as a literal presence but rather as a personification of Diana’s vengeance’ and in favour of this he observed that ‘there was no need for anyone to shoot at Actaeon (as he is shown already half a stag, and already being attacked by his hounds), that (at least now) the female figure’s bow has no arrow and no bow string, and that in an earlier state, as shown in the X‐rays, the female figure may not have been shooting but merely holding her bow aloft.’16 This may be true, but it is also possible that here Titian used another literary source, for such a combination of sources is precisely what is found in the Bacchus and Ariadne.17 There were, it seems, late antique accounts of the myth in which Diana played an active part in Actaeon’s death.18

Richard Cocke has observed that in the early second‐century romance The Golden Ass by Apuleius there is a description of a spectacular Parian marble statue which represents Diana, her tunic blown back in the breeze, with a brace of bounding hounds on a leash. Behind her there is a cavern with moss and creepers and fruit and, half concealed by these, the alarmed face of Actaeon, already half‐transformed into a stag. Actaeon was also reflected in the water which ran by the goddess’s feet.19 The source would not have been obscure – as Cocke observes, Firenzuola’s translation of Apuleius was published in Venice in 155020 – and Titian is likely to have been attracted to it by the fact that, like the texts he had illustrated for the Duke of Ferrara, it described (or purported to describe) a masterpiece of ancient art – in this case a sculpture, but a sculpture of exceptionally pictorial character (to represent water in marble is difficult enough, but to represent a reflection in the water still more so). Although this passage is not closely followed – for example, only one hound is by the goddess’s side in Titian’s painting and it is not on a leash – it does license the idea that the vengeful goddess pursued Actaeon. Titian would surely also have wanted the reflection to play a more important part in his painting than is apparent in the form in which he left it: [page 253]the pool in the right foreground must have been conceived with this in mind, matching the one upon which the hunter stumbled in the earlier episode.

Visual Sources

Cecil Gould noted that the Diana ‘derives visually from an Antique source. An engraving of a cameo, inscribed “Diana Cacciatrice”, is included in Lachausse’s Le Gemme Antiche Figurate (1700) and gives the essentials of the pose, including the leaping hound. Other similarities may be found in the so‐called Diana of Versailles (Louvre).’21 However, there is no evidence that the gem in question would have been known to Titian, and although we may detect some similarity in the light Amazonian apparel and the hound, the ‘essentials of the pose’ are not in fact close. Ancient reliefs of Actaeon attacked by hounds are also known.22 Any resemblance to the Diana of Versailles (known also as the Diane Chasseresse) is superficial; Titian is unlikely to have had the opportunity to study this piece or any variant of it.23

A Workshop Version of the Painting?

In a letter of 28 November 1568, the imperial ambassador to Venice, Veit von Dornberg, mentioned to the Emperor Maximilian II that Titian could provide paintings of Diana and Endymion, Actaeon at the Fountain, the Death of Actaeon, the Pregnancy of Callisto, Adonis killed by a Boar, Andromeda freed by Perseus, and Europa on the Bull. He was passing on information received from Titian himself and the list of subjects was in the hand of Orazio Vecellio (an identical list was sent to Albrecht V of Bavaria). The emperor replied that in his view Titian was too old to paint well.24

In the second, fourth, sixth and seventh of these subjects Titian must have been offering replicas of paintings which had already been dispatched to the Spanish court; that is probably also true of the Adonis subject (although Titian’s paintings of Adonis show the young hero parting for the hunt rather than killed by the boar). In the case of The Death of Actaeon he may have been offering the original painting, although that had originally been destined for the King of Spain. But this need not mean that the painting was finished, simply that it was in Titian’s mind as something that he could easily finish.

There is in any case no good evidence that a second version of the Death of Actaeon was made by Titian or by his workshop, or indeed by anyone. The idea that one might have been made was entertained as a serious possibility by Cecil Gould,25 chiefly because, believing the painting to be a finished work of art, he supposed that it might actually have been sent to Spain. It is not included in the list of paintings by Titian which had been sent to Philip in December 1574.26 Gould regarded this evidence as inconclusive because, he wrote, ‘Titian himself says in that list that there had been many others which he could no longer remember’27 – but the large narrative paintings are not items that could easily be forgotten, least of all those which had been sent most recently. No mention of the Death of Actaeon had been found in any inventory of the Spanish royal collection. All the same, Gould’s hypothesis has been accepted as a fact by at least one eminent scholar.28

Previous Owners

The Marquess of Hamilton and the Archduke Leopold William

Had the painting been in Titian’s workshop when he died, it is likely that it would have turned up for sale in Venice, and it seems that this was indeed the case. Sometime in the years 1636–8 the British ambassador to Venice, Lord Fielding, submitted a list of paintings to his brother‐in‐law the Marquess of Hamilton.29 The pictures in it seem to correspond with those which had been in the celebrated collection of Bartolomeo della Nave, the export of which to England is repeatedly referred to by Ridolfi in his Maraviglie.30 The ninth item in this list was ‘A Diana shooting Adonis in forme of a Hart not quite finished Pal 12 & 10 Titian’. The Marquess (later Duke) of Hamilton (1606–1649) was one of the half‐dozen great collectors at the court of King Charles I. He led the Scottish forces that were defeated by Cromwell’s army at Preston in 1648 and was beheaded early in the following year, four weeks after the king. The best record of his collection is the list drawn up after his death, by when the paintings were available for sale, and there we find ‘Une Diane tirant avec un arc contre Adonis aussi grand que le naturel elle dans un paisage avec des chiens h.12, la.14 pa’.31

The bulk of Hamilton’s Venetian paintings were purchased for the Archduke Leopold William, and this painting is clearly represented in the view of the archduke’s gallery at Brussels by David Teniers the Younger, now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux‐Arts (fig. 3).32 In addition, a small copy of Titian’s painting on panel by Teniers is known.33 These copies differ no more from Titian’s original than is usual with other little copies by Teniers. A print of the painting is included in the Theatrum Pictorium, the anthology of prints of the archduke’s paintings published in Antwerp in 1660, by which time they had been transferred to Vienna.34 Cecil Gould made much of the fact that the format was here elongated, showing landscape to the left of Diana, although, as he conceded in a note, such deviations were common in engravings.35 He made still more of the fact that the painting is reproduced in the Prodromus of 1735, which comprises prints of pictures in the imperial collection in Vienna, into which the archduke’s paintings had passed by gift and bequest.36 But the engravings in the Prodromus were based on those of the Theatrum Pictorium, so this is hardly surprising. Moreover, there is very good reason to suppose that its inclusion in the Prodromus was a mistake because there is no mention of a painting by Titian of the Death of Actaeon in the inventory of the archduke’s paintings that was made when that collection reached Vienna, or in later imperial inventories.

Queen Christina of Sweden, the Duc d'Orléans, Sir Abraham Hume and the Earls of Brownlow

Titian’s painting was in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1662 or 1663, when an inventory was made of the contents of Palazzo Riario in Rome, which she had by [page 254]then adopted as her official residence. It was there described as ‘Una Diana in piedi in atto di havere saettato Atteone, che lontano si vede presso da cani in un bellissimo paese. Figure al Naturale, con cornice liscia indorata, alto palmi otto, e mezzo, e Larga palmi nove, e mezzo – di Titiano.’37 The painting does not appear in the inventory of her collection made in Antwerp in 165638 but we must assume that it passed from the archduke’s collection to hers at around that time – the moment when his collection was moved from Brussels to Vienna. Queen Christina, having just converted to Catholicism, could expect such gifts from Catholic princes at this date.

Queen Christina’s collection remained in Rome until 1721, when it was acquired for the Duc d’Orléans in circumstances described on p. 463. That section also describes the display of the painting (pendant with a Cambiaso) in the Palais‐Royal and the sale of that collection. NG 6420 was purchased by Sir Abraham Hume Bt (1749–1838) in 1798 for 200 guineas – a relatively low price which reflects its status as an unfinished picture. Lord Berwick paid 700 guineas for the Rape of Europa (Bryan paid the same amount for the Perseus and Andromeda when it failed to find other purchasers in 1800) and Diana surprised by Actaeon and Diana and Callisto were retained by the Duke of Bridgewater at a valuation of 2,500 guineas each.39

Hume was the author of a book on Titian and also especially appreciative of preliminary sketches by Venetian artists (or what he believed to be such). An account of his collection is included as an appendix, which also explains how this painting was inherited by the Earls Brownlow. Hume’s great‐grandson, the 3rd Earl Brownlow (1844–1921), was made a Trustee of the National Gallery in 1897. Twenty years before that it would certainly not have been supposed that a nobleman of such wealth would ever need to part with his old master paintings, but the situation was now very different. In a letter of 29 November 1914 addressed to Holroyd, the Gallery’s director, Lord Brownlow offered to sell Van Dyck’s Portrait of a Woman and Child (NG 3011) for £10,000 and the Death of Actaeon for £5,000. ‘I only ask from the Gallery what I consider to be a very low price because I am anxious to see them in the gallery.’40 He went on to explain that they [page 255]would be sold for a much higher price on the open market if the Trustees were not interested.

Fig. 3

David Teniers the Younger, Gallery of the Archduke Leopold William, 1651. Oil on canvas, 96 × 129 cm. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux‐Arts de Belgique. © Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België. Photo: Cussac.

The Trustees discussed the offer at a meeting held on 8 December. There was some feeling that it was improper to employ public money for such a purpose during wartime, and Alfred de Rothschild, who could not attend the meeting, sent a letter to the chairman to say that he had spoken on the previous day (7 December) with the Prime Minister (Asquith) and he had agreed that it was not the ‘right moment’ – an opinion Mr de Rothschild had already expressed emphatically in a letter to Holroyd of 3 December.41 However, the chairman, having spoken with Lord Lansdowne (the 5th Marquess, then leader of the Opposition), concluded that there would be no objection to purchasing pictures if they could be obtained on genuinely advantageous terms. Holroyd reported Lockett Agnew’s opinion of the valuations. The Board accepted the offer of the Van Dyck but declined the Titian, the merits of which they felt it was ‘impossible’ to consider in its ‘present condition’, although they would be happy to reconsider it if Lord Brownlow were to have it cleaned.42

It seems likely that some members of the Board were keen to acquire the Titian but that there was anxiety as to the effect this might have on Alfred de Rothschild, who was not only a friend of the king but the owner of a collection of old master paintings, some of which, it was hoped, he would bequeath to the Gallery. He would be indignant enough at the ‘unpatriotic’ decision to buy the Van Dyck, which he regarded as an ‘indifferent specimen’, but he thought that the Titian ‘would not fetch £5 at Christies’43 and its acquisition could well have precipitated his resignation. (A profile of this difficult character is provided in an appendix, pp. 472–5.)

The measure of Rothschild’s expertise and of Brownlow’s generosity was provided when the war ended. The picture was sold for £60,000 to Viscount Lascelles (later the 6th Earl of Harewood) on 15 July 1919 by Colnaghi’s, with payment to be made in two parts, the second a year later. The invoices do not make it clear whether Colnaghi’s were selling the painting for Lord Brownlow or as the owner.44 It seems likely that they had purchased it from him not long before. Tancred Borenius, who advised Lascelles, was rumoured to have received commissions from two parties in the affair but I have seen no evidence for this, and many anecdotes of this kind were circulated later when Borenius’s conduct had become flagrantly mercenary. An account of Harewood’s collection is given in an appendix, pp. 455–8.

Acquisition by the National Gallery: The Public Appeal

After ten years on loan to the National Gallery, the Death of Actaeon was sold by the trustees of the 7th Earl of Harewood at Christie’s, London, on 25 June 1971 (lot 27), where it was bought for 1,600,000 guineas (£1,680,000) by Julius Weitzner, who sold it a few days later for £1,763,000 through Martin Zimet to the J. Paul Getty Museum. On 28 July the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art recommended delaying the export for a year and not granting a licence if a sum of £1,763,000 was made available by that date. The Gallery could not act until it had ascertained how the government would respond to the announcement which the chairman of the Trustees, Sir John Witt, made on 1 July that the Gallery wished to commit £1,000,000 (of which £600,000 would be an advance against future purchase grants). On 21 October the Department of Education and Science announced that it would permit the Gallery to draw in advance on future grants, provided that no special grants were requested in the period when the purchase grant was docked, and provided that the case was not regarded as a precedent. In addition, they guaranteed £1 for every £1 submitted independently. This doubled the value of the generous contributions promised by the National Art Collections Fund (of £100,000) and the Pilgrim Trust (of £50,000), leaving half of the remaining sum of £463,000 to be found.45

The Trustees then took the extraordinary step of launching a public appeal. This was opened on 1 December. All parties to the sale behaved well: Mr Getty and the J. Paul Getty Museum permitted public exhibition in the Board Room (below a ‘plastic sheath’), where the painting was seen by 355,869 visitors; Christie’s and Weitzner were among the most notable contributors to the appeal.

One motive for the appeal was public dismay at the failure to stop the export of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja in the previous year, but many felt that they would rather have contributed to an appeal for that picture than to a picture which the Gallery’s director, Martin Davies, evidently found it hard to describe as other than ‘difficult’ (he considered that, by contrast, the Velázquez was ‘replete with undemanding attraction’). Titian’s picture, Davies gloomily continued, ‘forms a comment on the conditions under which we live’ – Titian ‘had become pessimistic, perhaps rightly’ – and then he added, almost as an afterthought, it was important because of ‘the artist’s use of his means of expression’.46

A further disincentive to public generosity was provided by the government’s announcement of its intention to introduce admission charges to the National Gallery – ‘why pay to help acquire a picture, and pay again to see it if acquired’.47 A more optimistic attitude was adopted outside the Gallery, and when Duncan Grant’s paraphrase of the painting (fig. 6) was projected on to the safety curtain of the Royal Opera House it was vigorously applauded.48 The appeal succeeded and a cheque was handed over on 6 July 1972. Lists of the 169 donors who contributed £100 or more were printed in The Times49 and the first of these to be published probably stimulated the final donations that secured the painting.

Provenance

See above. Probably in the artist’s possession at his death. Apparently with Bartolomeo della Nave by the mid‐1630s, when purchased for the Marquess of Hamilton. Purchased from Hamilton’s collection after his execution in 1649 for the Archduke Leopold William; presumably presented to Queen Christina of Sweden when she was resident in Antwerp in about 1656; certainly in her collection by 1662/3 in Palazzo Riario, Rome, where it remained until 1721, when it was acquired from her heirs (or, more precisely, the heirs of her heirs) by the Duc d’Orléans, Regent of France; by descent to [page 256][page 257]the Regent’s great‐grandson, Philippe Égalité, by whom sold in 1792 to Édouard de Walckiers; acquired from him in the same year by Laborde‐Méréville; imported to London by the latter in 1793 and mortgaged to Jeremiah Harman, by whom sold in 1798 to the Duke of Bridgewater, the Earl of Carlisle and Earl Gower; bought early in 1799 by Sir Abraham Hume Bt, from Michael Bryan, agent for the three owners; by descent to the 3rd Earl Brownlow (Hume’s great‐grandson); sold by Colnaghi to Viscount Lascelles 1919–20; by descent to the latter’s son, the 7th Earl of Harewood, by whom sold at Christie’s, London, on 25 June 1971 (lot 27); purchased by Julius Weitzner and sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum; export by the latter institution deferred in accordance with the ruling of the Reviewing Committee, and the picture was acquired in July 1972 with a special government grant and contributions from the National Art Collections Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, and a public appeal.

Fig. 4

Detail of NG 6420. © The National Gallery, London.

Fig. 5

Jacques Couché after ter Borch, The Death of Actaeon, engraving from the Galerie du Palais Royal, published in the 1780s and again in 1808. © The National Gallery, London

Exhibitions

London 1819, British Institution (118); London 1845, British Institution (53); London 1872, Royal Academy (73); London 1893, Royal Academy (121); London 1894–5, New Gallery (166); London 1910–11, Grafton Galleries (154); London 1930, Royal Academy (169); London 1950–1, Royal Academy (210); London 1960, Royal Academy (84); London 2003, National Gallery (37); Madrid 2003, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Prints

The engraving by P. Lisebetius for the Theatrum Pictorium (no. 73) of 1660 was made after the younger Teniers’s painted copy, as mentioned above. That by Jacques Couché (fig. 5) after a drawing by Gerard ter Borch made for the Galerie du Palais Royal was evidently one of those completed before the Revolution, since the legend includes the title of the duke and [page 258]is centred on his arms. Couché’s engraving is quite exceptional among the plates of this great publication in its disregard for the original painting, as if the difficulty of rendering the artist’s broken touch in a line engraving licensed the draughtsman and engraver to invent their own version. The pool in the foreground on the right is replaced with a tributary stream corresponding to the lit area of water. On the right a more substantial tree is anchored to the base with a rock, the foliage behind the victim has been darkened so that he appears as a silhouette against it, the trees and sky have been tidied up. On the left the composition has been extended to include Diana’s foot, her bow has been given a string, and, while her brow has been left dark, her eye is lit up and her expression strengthened. To some extent the engraving amounts to a criticism of the painting but it also guesses intelligently at how the forms might have eventually been given more clarity by Titian himself. This is especially evident in the painting of the goddess’s dress and the interpretation of the fluttering belt and of what was believed (surely correctly) to be a shadow below it.

Fig. 6

Duncan Grant, Diana and Actaeon, after Titian, 1971. Watercolour and pastel on paper, 34.8 × 39.3 cm. Private collection. © Estate of Duncan Grant/ licensed by DACS 2008 1970. Watercolour, purple chalk, green chalk, red chalk and graphite on paper, 35.2 × 40.6 cm (sheet). New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of John Russell (B2001.13.1). © Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2023 .

Copy

A drawing by Duncan Grant in watercolour and pastel, presumably preparatory for a painting in oil, a slide of which was projected on to the curtain at Covent Garden (as described above), was recently in New York (fig. 6). Grant’s copy was made at the instigation of Richard Buckle, who invited other British painters to do the same.50 It is fascinating evidence of how Titian’s way of painting could be interpreted as anticipating Cézanne, with whom, of course, Titian was frequently compared. When Titian’s painting is converted into an unstable compositional mosaic the awkward relationship between the foreground goddess and the victim in the middle distance seems as deliberate as the interlocking of a pine branch with the distant profile of a Provençal mountain. It is tempting to speculate that Duncan Grant deliberately executed his version in the colours which Cecil Gould had considered to be significantly absent from Titian’s painting.

To judge from the view of the archduke’s gallery at Brussels (fig. 3), Titian’s Death of Actaeon was then framed in a dark‐stained wooden moulding with a gilt sight edge. Since Titian’s is the only painting shown in a frame of this kind (the other paintings have uniform gilt cassetta frames), that makes it likely that it had come in this frame from a previous collection, perhaps indeed from that of Bartolomeo della Nave (it is in any case a type of frame favoured by Italian collectors around 1630). In Palazzo Riario in the 1660s the painting was in a plain gilt moulding, which it probably kept until it passed into the Orléans Collection in 1721, when it would have been given a frame much like the one it has today. The present frame, however, was not made for the painting, since it has been extended to fit, and it may not be a genuine frame of this period but an accomplished reproduction made in Paris in about 1900 (fig. 7). It is of carved oak. The low‐relief strapwork, foliate scrolls and flowers, set off by cross‐hatching cut in the gesso, cover the principal ogee moulding and flow on to the sanded flat. There are projections at the centres and corners adorned with foliate palms against a background pattern of diapers cut in the gesso. The original water gilding is obscured by later oil gilding, toning and dirt. According to Cecil Gould’s typescript notes,51 the painting came to the Gallery in this frame, which is therefore probably the frame that the painting had when it was in the Harewood collection.

Notes

2. Claude Phillips’s observation, made in 1919, on the changes that would occur were the painting to be cleaned was quoted by Borenius in his catalogue of the Harewood collection in 1936 (p. 37). Phillips wrote that ‘only to Signor Cavenaghi of Milan could such a precious task be confided’ and, had the job been given to someone else, it would have been odd to include this. (Back to text.)

3. Fry 1911, pp. 162 and 167. (Back to text.)

4. Keller 1969, p. 163; Rearick 1997 1996 , p. 55. The only scholar who seems to have doubted it was Herzer in his entry for Titian in Thieme‐Becker. (Back to text.)

5. Gould 1972; Gould 1975, p. 296, note 4. (Back to text.)

6. Mancini 1998, pp. 246–7, for the letter of 19 June, and, for subsequent ones of 22 April 1560, 2 April 1561, 17 August 1561 and 26 April 1562, pp. 263–4, 269–70, 271–2, 289. English translations of these letters are given by Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877, II, pp. 242–3, 275–6, 305–6, 307–8, 310–11 and 319–20. (Back to text.)

7. The passage is very close to one in the upper right corner of the Escorial Saint Jerome in Penitence (for which see Wethey 1969, p. 136, cat. 108, plate 195). (Back to text.)

[page 259]
Fig. 7

Lower left corner of the current frame of NG 6420. © The National Gallery, London.

8. Gould 1972, pp. 464–9. (Back to text.)

9. Wethey 1969, p. 124, cat. 88, plate 196 (Religion succoured by Spain); Wethey 1975, pp. 153–4, cat. 16, plate 170 (Marsyas), and pp. 180–1, cat. 34, plate 164 (Rape of Lucretia). (Back to text.)

10. Borean 2004, p. 285, letter to same of 5 April 1800 in the National Gallery archive. See also Borean 2004, pp. 33–4. In his monograph on Titian Hume wrote only that ‘in parts, it appears not to have received the finishing touches’ (Hume 1829, p. 96). (Back to text.)

11. Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, lines 131–265. (Back to text.)

12. Private collection, Scotland, formerly at Haigh Hall. For the cassoni see Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, pp. 187 and 469. The first half of the story is illustrated in a fifteenth‐century Sienese cassone panel that was lot 58 at Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 1998. Fredericksen also lists a birthplate at Williams College. See also Schubring 1923, pl. 14. (Back to text.)

13. Silos 1673, quoted by Canestro Chiovenda 1971. See the description in the Odescalchi inventory of 1713, Archivio di Stato, Rome, Not. A–C. – vol. 5134, fol. 60v., no. 103: ‘altro quadro… rappresenta una cacciaggione di diana.’ (Back to text.)

14. Gould 1975, p. 293. (Back to text.)

15. For a full discussion of the engraving and its date see below, in text. (Back to text.)

16. Gould 1975, p. 293. (Back to text.)

17. Thompson 1956. I am aware that Holberton 1986 argues that everything in the painting is derived from Catullus. (Back to text.)

19. Cocke 1999; Apuleius 1935, pp. 52–5. (Back to text.)

20. Firenzuola 1550, fols 17 recto and verso. (Back to text.)

21. Gould 1975, p. 293. (Back to text.)

22. Clarke and Penny 1982, p. 126, no. 4 (for cameo and related reliefs). (Back to text.)

23. For this statue see Haskell and Penny 1981, pp. 196–8, no. 30. I cannot see any close connection with the Cesi Diana mentioned by Cocke 1999, pp. 308–9. (Back to text.)

24. Panofsky 1969, pp. 161–3, quotes this letter and discusses it. (Back to text.)

25. Gould 1975, p. 294. (Back to text.)

26. Mancini 1998, p. 402. An English translation is provided by Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877, II, pp. 403–5. Charles Hope informs me that the list is in the hand of Orazio. (Back to text.)

27. Gould 1975, p. pp. 294–5. (Back to text.)

28. Rearick 1997 1996 , p. 48. He asserts that the original version ‘has not survived’. (Back to text.)

30. Ridolfi 1914, pp. 83, 140, 168, 169, 201, 222, 253, 336, 395; 1924, p. 203. For Bartolomeo della Nave in general see Lauber and Furtlehner forthcoming 2008 . (Back to text.)

32. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux‐Arts, no. 458. (Back to text.)

33. Ellis Waterhouse informed Cecil Gould on 15 February 1973 that the painting was in a private collection in Oxfordshire (letter in NG dossier) but he had seen it there a ‘good many years ago’. (Back to text.)

34.Theatrum Pictorium, no. 73, by P. Lisebetius after Teniers. (Back to text.)

35. Gould 1975, pp. 294–5, and note 11 on pp. 296–7. (Back to text.)

36. Stampart and Prenner 1735, plate 18 (centre of second row of pictures). (Back to text.)

37. Granberg 1897, p. liii. (Back to text.)

38. Granberg 1902, p. xxv. (Back to text.)

39. NG 6420 was no. 269 in the Lyceum sale, the Rape of Europa was no. 205 in that sale, the Perseus and Andromeda was lot 65 in the sale of 14 February 1800, the Diana surprised by Actaeon and Diana and Callisto were nos 240 and 249 in the Lyceum sale. (Back to text.)

40. N7/460/917. (Back to text.)

41. Ibid. (Back to text.)

42. NG 1/8, pp. 231–2. The chairman on this occasion was J.P. Heseltine. Lord Brownlow himself had chaired the previous meeting on 17 November. Lansdowne was of course also on the Board. (Back to text.)

44. Photocopies of the two invoices dated 15 July 1919 and 20 July 1920 were kindly sent to me by May Redfern of the Harewood House Trust. (Back to text.)

45. All details of the business are given in the Annual Report for 1971–2. (Back to text.)

46. Ibid. , p. 26. (Back to text.)

47. Ibid. , p. 26. (Back to text.)

48. Watney 1990, pp. 74–5; Spalding 1997, p. 476. Spalding also notes that the artist contributed £80 to the appeal. (Back to text.)

50. Watney 1990, pp. 74–5. David Hockney, Keith Vaughan, Robert Medley and Patrick Procktor were also invited. Watney’s fig. 63 reproduces another, less free, copy by Grant. (Back to text.)

51. National Gallery archive. (Back to text.)

Appendix of Collectors’ Biographies

Sir Abraham Hume Bt (1748/9–1838)

Abraham Hume married in 1771, succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in the following year, served as high sheriff of Hertfordshire, where he owned the estate of Wormleybury, in 1774, and sat as Member of Parliament for Petersfield 1774–80 and Hastings 1807–18. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1777 and served as vice president of the Geological Society (of which he was a founder) from 1809 to 1813.1 He formed a collection of minerals and a very fine collection of paintings. He was one of the most discerning connoisseurs of painting in Britain.

The first evidence of Hume’s picture collecting appears in 1779, the date he recorded for the acquisition of Bassano’s Journey of Abraham from the painter, connoisseur, dealer and noblemen’s guide in Italy, William Patoun (d. 1783).2 Patoun sold him other paintings as well, including the Venus and Cupid by Cambiaso which is now in the Art Institute in Chicago,3 and gave him three sketches by Barocci.4 Hume’s friendship with Sir Joshua Reynolds must also have quickened his taste for old master paintings. An interest in technique is suggested by the fact that Reynolds, at Hume’s suggestion, painted his wife on wood rather than canvas.5 Reynolds bequeathed to Hume the choice of his pictures by Claude; he took the Sunrise View of the Roman Campagna (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).6 Hume also bought at Reynolds’s sale at least one of the artist’s sketches and an old copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.7

Hume’s collecting must have been stimulated by the Grand Tour that he made in 1786–7 with his wife and their eldest daughter.8 They made purchases in Florence, Rome and Venice. In particular, in Venice he acquired two portraits believed to be by Titian.9 He also made contact with the scholarly Venetian dealer Giovanni Maria Sasso (1742–1803), who had previously acted as a supplier for other English collectors,10 and thereafter he employed Sasso as an agent. Their correspondence in Italian survives in the National Gallery’s archive and the archive of the Seminario Patriarcale of Venice and has recently been published by Linda Borean together with a full scholarly commentary.11

A fascinating aspect of this correspondence is the very keen interest that Hume had in the condition of the paintings he was offered and his knowledge of not only artists’ techniques but also those of picture restorers. Hume was a declared enemy of picture cleaning, which he believed had had an especially ruinous effect on Venetian paintings. An attractive feature of the Descriptive catalogue of a collection of pictures, comprehending specimens of all the various schools of painting, which Hume had privately printed in 1824,12 is the acknowledgement of ‘Mr Sasso’ in his preface: ‘no one deserved more the confidence that was placed in him, possessed more knowledge or acted with greater integrity.’13

Of the 154 paintings in this catalogue, 45 are Venetian, and this was the school in which Hume (and Sasso, of course) took most interest. The only examples of what he regarded as the early phases of European art in the collection were Venetian. Notable among these were Giovanni Bellini’s Portrait of a Condottiere (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington14) and the Adoration of the Shepherds by Catena (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York), [page 459]which Sasso had obtained for him from the Giustiniani collection in 1791 as a late work by Giovanni Bellini, and which ‘might to inexpert eyes seem to be the work of Titian when still under Bellini’s tutelage’.15 In 1819 he purchased from Féréol Bonnemaison in Paris the exquisite Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saints by Cima da Conegliano (now in the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon), which Waagen considered the ‘most beautiful little picture of domestic devotion that I have ever seen by this master’.16

However, it was Titian and Titian’s followers that Hume valued above all. He wrote the first book on Titian to be published in England (Notices of the Life and Works of Titian) and believed that he owned twenty‐one of his works. Among these, several of the portraits are fine examples of paintings influenced by Titian, but perhaps the only painting that Hume believed to be by Titian which is highly regarded today is the Death of Actaeon.17 Here, then, is the weakness in his connoisseurship.

Hume believed that the ‘real genius of a master is more peculiarly displayed in his first thoughts’ and that the finished work was often equivalent to a copy, albeit made by the artist’s own hand, an idea that he perhaps owed to Reynolds or to Patoun. It was the priority given to sketches that partly explains why Waagen considered the collection to be one that might have been formed by a painter.18 And indeed Hume was an amateur painter.19 He was pleased to acquire the Death of Actaeon precisely because it had ‘not received the finishing touches’ and one could admire, in the trees and water especially, the ‘spirit and vigour with which Titian exercised his pencil, in laying in his pictures’.20

One of the Titians in Hume’s collection (today at Belton House in Lincolnshire) was a small version of the Penitent Magdalen which Sasso had acquired in 1791 from the Muselli collection. It is doubtless a copy, but is of superb quality and was accepted as a Titian by Ridolfi in the seventeenth century and by Waagen in the nineteenth21 – as well as by Sasso in the eighteenth. However, this is not a characteristic example because it is a highly finished picture. The problem with many of Hume’s Titians is that they were small works which he – and Sasso – believed to have been made as preparatory sketches for larger works, but which now seem more likely to have been free studies by later artists.22 On the other hand, he certainly owned exquisite preliminary sketches on panel by Rubens (such as The Meeting of King Ferdinand of Hungary and Cardinal‐Infante Ferdinand of Spain at Nördlingen, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum23) and by Van Dyck (such as Saint Sebastian tended by an Angel (fig. 7), now in the same museum and previously in the collection of Kenneth Clark24), and it is easy to understand how he would have assumed that the practice of seventeenth‐century Flemish artists followed that of the great Venetians of the sixteenth.

The above account has not done justice to the wide range of Hume’s taste. He owned very good Bolognese paintings, many of which he also acquired by correspondence, using as his agent Sasso’s friend Giovanni Antonio Armano.25 He also owned a few very choice Dutch ones, including Rembrandt’s Aristotle contemplating the Bust of Homer, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York,26 and Aelbert Cuyp’s The Maas at Dordrecht, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.27 Most of the pictures in his collection were small – the Death of Actaeon must have been the largest – which is unsurprising since he kept them in his London house, 29 Hill Street, Berkeley Square.28 One larger painting that Hume acquired from Sasso, The Last Supper, recently recognised as an important early work by Jacopo Bassano (he believed it to be by Palma Vecchio), was presented by him in 1797 to the parish church of Wormley in Hertfordshire.29 His will reveals that four Renaissance portraits (one of them [page 460]attributed to Tintoretto) were ‘fitted into the walls of the drawing room’ at Wormleybury surrounded by ‘Gibbins carving’ (presumably frames in the style of Grinling Gibbons).

Fig. 7

Anthony van Dyck, Oil sketch for Saint Sebastian tended by an Angel, c. 1630–2. Oil on wood, 40.6 × 30.5 cm. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum (85.PB.31) .

Although the printing of his catalogue in 1824 suggests that Hume regarded his collection as complete, some copies include an appendix listing twenty‐two additional acquisitions, the latest of which is dated to 1829, when he was nearly eighty.30 By then he must have been much exercised as to the future of his collection. He gave his Claude Sunrise to his eldest daughter, Amelia (a talented painter of landscapes), and her husband, Sir Charles Long (created Baron Farnborough in 1826), but they had no children and Lady Farnborough died in 1837, a year before her husband and her father. On the other hand, Hume’s younger daughter Sophia, who had married John Cust, 2nd Baron and 1st Earl Brownlow (1779–1853), in 1810 and died in 1814, had left two sons, John Hume Cust, Viscount Alford, and Charles Hume Cust, and a daughter, Lady Sophia Cust, the eldest child. The majority of the paintings were assigned as heirlooms in 1834 to Viscount Alford,31 but a number of others were separately bequeathed to him and to Charles and Lady Sophia (who had married Christopher Tower in 1836).32

Alford died young, in 1851, before his father, and the paintings passed to his son John (1842–1867), who became 2nd Earl Brownlow in 1853, when still a minor. He also inherited the massive Bridgewater estates and took the surname and arms of Egerton with the earldom. By 1851 the paintings were mostly divided between Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire, and Belton House, Lincolnshire.33 On the 2nd Earl’s premature death his heir was his younger brother Adelbert, the 3rd and last Earl of Brownlow (1844–1921). It was he who sold a Van Dyck portrait of a mother and child to the National Gallery in 191434 and also tried to sell the Death of Actaeon to the Gallery at the same time. After his death most of the paintings kept in Ashridge and at Carlton House Terrace in London were dispersed in sales in 1923 and those kept at Belton were sold in 1929.35 There was a further sale in 1984,36 in which year Belton House, together with a few items in Hume’s collection, was acquired by the National Trust.

Hume is important not only as a collector but as a founding director of the British Institution, which did much to foster the atmosphere in which the creation of the National Gallery became possible. He was related by marriage to the Duke of Bridgewater, who acquired a sizeable portion of the Orléans Collection (Hume’s wife, Lady Amelia Egerton, the daughter of John Egerton, Bishop of Durham, was the sister of the last two Earls of Bridgewater, and niece of the last two dukes). His eldest daughter’s husband, Charles Long, Lord Farnborough – known as the ‘king’s spectacles’ because he was chief adviser to King George IV on his collection, and on much that the king planned for the embellishment of London – was perhaps the single most influential figure in the London art world in the early nineteenth century. Hume seems to have been on very close terms with him and they were depicted together in Pieter Wonder’s painting of Patrons and Lovers of Art.37 But Hume seems to have had little interest in British art after the death of Reynolds, indeed little interest in modern art of any kind except, typically, for a few very choice Venetian paintings, notably several Canalettos, including the celebrated view of the Pra della Valle which Tiepolo was said to have kept in his bedroom,38 and an erotic pastoral which, together with a delightful portrait of his daughter Sophia, Domenico Pellegrini seems to have painted for him in London.39 However, at the very end of his life he seems to have been taken by the talents of William Collins (1788–1847), whose Landscape with Children examining Fish on the Sea Shore was among the last works added to the revised edition of his catalogue.40

Notes

1. Burrell 2003, pp. 86–8. provides a succinct biography. See also Russell 1984 and Lloyd 2004. (Back to text.)

2. For Patoun see Ingamells 1997, pp. 746–7. For the Bassano see Hume 1824, no. 41. (Back to text.)

3. Lloyd 1993, pp. 58–9, no. 88. (Back to text.)

4. For the Baroccis see Hume 1824, nos 49, 50 and 51. One of these (49) is in the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, S 35, now regarded as an unfinished copy (Tomory 1976, p. 168, no. 177). (Back to text.)

5. Hume 1824, no. 138; Mannings 2000, I, no. 965 (as on canvas laid down on panel), II, fig. 1455. The painting is at Belton House. (Back to text.)

6. Hume 1824, no. 136; Metropolitan Museum 47.12. See also Rothlisberger Roethlisberger 1968, I, p. 235, no. 591, for a notable drawing by Claude in Hume’s collection. (Back to text.)

8. Ingamells 1997, pp. 533–4; Borean 2005 2004b , pp. 19–24. It is possible that he had previously made this tour as a bachelor. (Back to text.)

9. Hume 1824, nos 12 and 13. See Wethey 1971, p. 175, no.X78. (Back to text.)

10. For a general survey of Sasso see Orso 1985–6. (Back to text.)

13. Hume 1824, unpaginated preface. (Back to text.)

14. Hume 1824, no. 2; NGA 1939.1.224 (Kress). Now recognised as a portrait of Giovanni Emo but cautiously catalogued as ‘attributed to Giovanni Bellini’ by Brown (in Boskovits and Brown 2003, pp. 75–81), but surely a superb example of Bellini’s early portraiture severely damaged when on the art market in the early twentieth century. It was perhaps one of the paintings acquired by Hume from Dr Pellegrini in Venice in 1786. See Borean 2005 2004b , p. 81. (Back to text.)

15. Hume 1824, no. 1; Metropolitan Museum 69.123; identified as by Catena by Berenson; Robertson 1954, pp. 60–1, no. 36 (when with Contini Bonacossi); Zeri and Gardner 1973, pp. 18–19; Borean 2005 2004b , p. 82. (Back to text.)

16. Hume 1824, no. 3; Humfrey 1983, pp. 108–9, no. 61; Waagen 1854, II, p. 314. The attribution to Cima was acknowledged by Hume in a note on page 50 of the revised edition of his 1824 catalogue. (Back to text.)

17. Hume 1824, no. 22. (Back to text.)

18. Waagen 1838, II, p. 201. (Back to text.)

19. A landscape by him was the last item on the list of paintings given by Hume as heirlooms to the Brownlow family. (Back to text.)

20. Hume 1824, no. 22. (Back to text.)

21. Waagen 1838, II, p. 202; Borean 2004 2004a ; Borean 2005 2004b , pp. 71–2, 188–91, and fig. 32. (Back to text.)

22. Examples include Hume 1824, no. 14, the ‘original study’ for Titian’s Presentation, bought 1790, sold 1923 for 16 guineas (lot 59), bought for the family and now at Belton House, see Borean 2005 2004b , p. 69 and fig. 28; no. 16, the ‘original study’ for Titian’s Venus and Adonis, bought 1792, sold 1923 for 21 guineas (lot 18), now untraced; no. 21, the ‘original study’ for La Fede by Titian, sold 1923 for 20 guineas (lot 64), also untraced. The very good copy after Tintoretto’s Removal of the Body of Saint Mark (Borean 2005 2004b , p. 160, note 99 and fig. 49) is another example. For the whole question of sketches before and after see Borean 2005 2004b , pp. 65–72. (Back to text.)

23. Hume 1824, no. 96. J. Paul Getty Museum, 87.PB.15. (Back to text.)

24. J. Paul Getty Museum, 85.PB.31. (Back to text.)

25. Armano deserves more study. For what has been published concerning him see Borean 2005 2004b , pp. 1–4, note 3. Ludovico Carracci’s Flagellation (Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai) merits special notice (Hume 1824, no. 65; Broggi 2001, I, pp. 119–22, no. 14; II, figs 46–8; Borean 2005 2004b , fig. 5). (Back to text.)

26. Hume 1824, no. 116; Bredius 1971, p. 594, no. 478, fig. on p. 386. It is typical of Hume that he declined to purchase the companion painting Homer Dictating, which was imported with the Aristotle from Naples in 1814 but was in less good condition. In addition, Hume formed a large collection of Rembrandt’s etchings, which were sold at Christie’s on 1 June 1878. (Back to text.)

27. Hume 1824, no. 111; National Gallery of Art 1940.2.1. For Waagen this was the ‘capital picture of the whole collection’ (1838, II, p. 206). NG 2532, a landscape by Wijnants, also comes from Hume’s collection. (Back to text.)

28. Waagen 1838, II, pp. 206–7, describes the paintings as hung throughout the house. Hume may also have kept a few of his paintings at Wormleybury, his house in Hertfordshire. (Back to text.)

[page 461]

30. Hume 1824 (revised), no. 162, Rubens’s sketch for the Death of Hippolytus, bought from Alexander Day, who acquired it in Rome. I am grateful to Michael Burrell for information about the revision of the 1824 catalogue. (Back to text.)

31. 118 paintings were given in entail in a deed of settlement dated 27 February 1834 (119 are listed but no. 23 is given two numbers in error). A transcript of this document, together with transcripts of later lists of 1851 and of the early twentieth century, made by Ellis Waterhouse, are in Box A1.6.31 in the library of the National Gallery. (Back to text.)

32. For Lady Sophia’s pictures see Burrell 2003, p. 68 (and entries for P28–32, M2–3, M8–10 and M13). An annotated copy of the revised 1824 catalogue records her ownership of two small pictures by Schiavone and a Pietro della Vecchia (nos 158–9 and 165 in Hume 1824, revised). These are mentioned by Hume in his will, as is a Hare by Weenix. Her brother Charles was bequeathed a landscape by Castiglione, a Wouwermans and a Veronese of Rebecca at the Well among other pictures. I am grateful to Alastair Laing for showing me a transcription of Hume’s will made by Peter Hoare in December 2006. (Back to text.)

33. Waagen 1854, II, pp. 313–14. According to a list of June 1851 (for which see the former note), the Death of Actaeon was kept at Belton. (Back to text.)

34. NG 3011. (Back to text.)

35. Christie’s, London, 4 and 7 May 1923, and 3 May 1929. (Back to text.)

36. Christie’s, Belton House, 30 April – 2 May 1984 (the Property of Lord Brownlow and the Trustees of the Brownlow Chattels settlement). Lots 582–6 offered on 1 May were paintings from Hume’s collection. (Back to text.)

37. The painting, in a private collection, was exhibited at the British Institution in 1831 . Sketches for the figure groups are in the National Portrait Gallery (Borean 2005 2004b , p. 92, fig. 42, and p. 95, fig. 44). (Back to text.)

38. Borean 2005 2004b , pp. 88, 124, 128, 207, 209, 213, 215, 217, 225. The Pra della Valle is in a private collection (Constable and Links 1989, I, pp. 383–4, no. 376). At 40 zecchini it was costly, but Sasso explained that this was the price paid by Tiepolo ‘che lo teneva nella sua stanza come cosa preziosa’, and Canaletto’s works were in such demand with foreign visitors that hardly any remained in Venice. Sasso’s description of the picture’s subtle spatial effects, the grading of the colour of the earth from sandy yellow to green, the repose that this gave to the eye, the harmony between air, buildings and ground, is masterly; and he concludes with an appeal to the artist in Hume: ‘insomma è un quadro che pare poca cosa ma è tutto artificio e so che piace molto alli professori’ (‘all in all it is a picture which seems slight enough but which is a work of the highest artistry and a delight, I know, to experienced painters’). (Back to text.)

39. Borean 2005 2004b , pp. 88–9, fig. 39. She also reproduces a print of a remarkably Titianesque Bacchante (fig. 40), justly observing that Hume may well have encouraged this aspect of Pellegrini’s work. This latter painting was lot 69, Sotheby’s, London, 23 November 2006. For the portrait of Sophia, dated 1797, see Burrell 2003 (a, b), pp. 84–5, P28. (Back to text.)

40. Hume 1824, p. 49, no. 167. It was bequeathed to his grandson Charles Hume Cust together with ‘Two Pictures of Dogs by Stubbs Another picture of a Terrier called Flow by Ward’ (which corresponds with ibid. , nos 146, 147 and 148). (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

  • 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
  • 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, 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
  • 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

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GranbergJohan OlofLa galerie de tableaux de la Reine Christine de Suède ayant appartenu à l’empereur Rodolphe IIStockholm 1897
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List of exhibitions cited

London 1819
London, British Institution, Catalogue of pictures of the Italian, Spanish, Flemish and Dutch Schools, 1819
London 1831
London, British Institution, 1831
London 1845
London, British Institution, 1845
London 1872
London, Royal Academy, 1872
London 1893
London, Royal Academy, 1893
London 1894–5
London, New Gallery, 1894–5
London 1910–11
London, Grafton Galleries, 1910–11
London 1930
London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Italian Art, 1930
London 1950–1
London, Royal Academy, Loan Exhibition, 1950–1
London 1960
London, Royal Academy, Italian Art and Britain, 1960
London 2003
London, National Gallery, 2003
Madrid 2003
Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2003

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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Permalink (this version)
https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E98-000B-0000-0000
Permalink (latest version)
https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E8L-000B-0000-0000
Chicago style
Penny, Nicholas. “NG 6420, The Death of Actaeon”. 2008, online version 1, March 9, 2025. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E98-000B-0000-0000.
Harvard style
Penny, Nicholas (2008) NG 6420, The Death of Actaeon. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2025. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E98-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
MHRA style
Penny, Nicholas, NG 6420, The Death of Actaeon (National Gallery, 2008; online version 1, 2025) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E98-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 19 March 2025]