Former Owners of the Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings in the National Gallery
Appendix to 'The National Gallery Catalogues: The Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings'

Ernest William Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe (1856–1917)

• Louis‐Léopold Boilly, A Girl at a Window (NG 5583)

Ernest William Beckett, MP (Unionist) for Whitby, 1885–1905, was the eldest son of William Beckett (1826–1890), banker and sometime MP for East Retford and then for Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, and of the Hon. Helen Duncombe (1831–1896), third daughter of William, 2nd Baron Feversham.¹ He was also the nephew, and became the titular heir, of Edmund Beckett (1816–1905), created 1st Baron Grimthorpe in 1886. Ernest William married Lucy Tracy Lee (known as ‘Luie’; 1865–1891), of the state of New York, in 1883. She, it is said, brought $500,000 on her marriage² and was a near relative of Mrs J. Pierpont Morgan, wife of the noted New York banker and art collector.³ His social circle included Lady Natica Lister‐Kaye,⁴ whose younger sister was Emilie Yznaga, later herself to own NG 5583. Luie died at the family home at 138 Piccadilly in 1891, a few days after giving birth to a son, Ralph William Ernest Beckett (1891–1963). It was Ralph who became the 3rd Baron Grimthorpe on the death of his father.

The 2nd Lord Grimthorpe has been dismissed as a dilettante who lived much of his life in France and Italy.⁵ A more generous assessment was that of his exact contemporary, the writer and editor Frank Harris who called him ‘a lover of all superiorities, who has known the ablest men of the times’.⁶ The family seat until 1908 was Kirkstall Grange, Yorkshire,⁷ but certainly around the turn of the century, and until 1906, Grimthorpe also had a house, Wood Lee, at Egham, Surrey, where he used to entertain.⁸ His West End residence, which during his marriage to Luie was at 17 Stratton Street, off Piccadilly, changed from 11 Connaught Place to Hanover Court, Hanover Square, probably early in 1906,⁹ and at least once again to 27 Welbeck Street towards the end of his life.¹⁰ In 1904 Beckett, as he then was, bought Villa Cimbrone, near Ravello, Italy, and set about the restoration of the house and garden. (It is now a hotel.) At one time his mistress was Alice Keppel, before she started her liaison with the Prince of Wales,¹¹ and he is believed to have fathered by her Violet Trefusis (1894–1972), the writer and, more notoriously, the sometime lover of Vita Sackville‐West.¹² A friend of Oscar Wilde, as an amusing experiment, Beckett once invited the playwright to lunch at Kirkstall Grange in the company of a group of country squires. He later recalled that Wilde won over his improbable lunch companions with a ‘play of genial humour over every topic that came up, like sunshine dancing on waves’.¹³

Beckett, however, also had a serious side. Besides being a partner in the Leeds banking firm Beckett & Co., which he joined in 1878,¹⁴ he was active in politics. Among his interventions in the political arena were his criticisms of the cruel conduct of German colonisers in Africa,¹⁵ his support of Winston Churchill’s opposition to army reform proposed by the Government in 1901–3,¹⁶ and his joining with Churchill to address a Free Trade Demonstration in Halifax in 1903.¹⁷ Following his elevation to the House of Lords, he spoke supporting the ‘undenominationalism’ proposed in the 1906 Education Bill declaring that ‘as long as religious controversy was mixed up with the education question there could be no peace’.¹⁸

Beckett was also active as a patron and supporter of the arts. He was treasurer of the founding committee of the National Art Collections Fund in 1903,¹⁹ a member of the Memorial Committee for James McNeill Whistler formed immediately after the artist’s death in 1903,²⁰ and one of a syndicate which in 1914 leased the Théâtre des Champs‐Elysées, Paris, for the Boston Opera Company and the Royal Opera Company of London to perform for ten weeks, ‘to show the Parisians what real grand opera was’.²¹ Early in the following year he was appointed treasurer of the International Academy of Opera based at the same theatre, the object of which was to find work for French, Polish and Belgian musicians engaged in grand opera who had been made unemployed as a result of the First World War.²² A friend and patron of Rodin, in 1901 Beckett commissioned from the sculptor a bust of Eve Fairfax (1871–1978), to whom he was newly engaged (they never married), and the following year was instrumental in arranging a subscription and banquet for him in London.²³

In the absence of any known lifetime or posthumous list of his pictures,²⁴ Beckett’s collecting activities remain obscure, but may have been prompted by his trip to America with Luie in 1884. There he was greatly impressed by the picture gallery of William Henry Vanderbilt, which he described as having ‘the best collection of modern pictures in the world, a perfect enchantment. One small picture cost £1200. Mr. Vanderbilt has excellent taste in pictures and he has always the pick of the market.’²⁵ In 1906 Christie, Manson & Woods held significant sales on behalf of Beckett (by now Lord Grimthorpe). Sculpture, ceramics and (mainly) objets d’art and furniture were sold on 8–9 May. Lot 166 was a Clodion terracotta which had been sold anonymously in Paris in 1891. It is now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. More objets d’art, and bronzes, marbles, faience, and furniture, French, Japanese and Chinese objets d’art, followed on 10–11 May. The sale comprised 317 lots realising a total of £10,542 3s. 6d. The most expensive item (£1,150) was a life‐size stone statue of the Virgin and Child once in the church of Saint‐Evroult. Among the French eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century objects were a Louis XVI clock, a Louis XV walnut‐wood sofa covered in Beauvais tapestry, a Louis XVI mahogany writing table in the manner of Jacob, and an Empire mahogany bedroom suite.²⁶

The following day Grimthorpe sold 54 pictures (realising £16,229 17s.), of which the most important by value (£5,250 to Agnew’s) was a version, apparently once in a collection at Arezzo, of a painting in the National Gallery:²⁷ namely, the Workshop of Botticelli tondo of the Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist (NG 2497). According to The Times report of the sale, most of the pictures ‘appear to have been purchased in Italy or elsewhere abroad … and very little is apparently known regarding the provenance of any one of them’.²⁸ A portrait by Romney, Mrs Blair, which Beckett had sold in 1903, had been inherited from his father William Beckett,²⁹ and it is possible that some or all of the other six English School portraits then sold had been similarly acquired by him. Certainly he is unlikely to have inherited the Impressionist pictures which were included in the 1906 sale, including a pastel by Manet with a suggested date of 1880,³⁰ a portrait of Isabelle Lemonnier by the same artist, dated 1879,³¹ and a Sisley dated 1876.³² Monet’s La Phare de l’Hospice he had bought from Bernheim‐Jeune in 1901 or later.³³ NG 5583, lot 14 of the 1906 sale, had been acquired by Beckett no earlier than 1898,³⁴ and a pair of paintings, Séparation douleureuse and Entrevue consolante, catalogued as by Boilly and forming the following lot, were described in 1898 as having been bought recently in St Petersburg.³⁵ All three paintings by Boilly in the Grimthorpe sale were bought by Jacques Seligmann.

When and where Grimthorpe had acquired the older masters in the 1906 sale is more difficult to discern. A copy of Frans van Mieris’s The Oyster Meal in the Mauritshuis, called in the Christie’s catalogue The Declaration (lot 46), had been part of the Van Loon collection which was sold en bloc to the Rothschild family in 1877.³⁶ A Portrait of a Cardinal catalogued as by Holbein (lot 39) was described as ‘From the Collection of Count Castellane’. In 1906 this could only have been understood as Paul Ernest Boniface de Castellane (1867–1932), who had famously married Anna, daughter of the so‐called ‘robber baron’ Jay Gould, spent most of her fortune and divorced her that year. Although married in New York, they lived in Paris, and so it was probably there that Beckett acquired the picture. Other lots in the 1906 sale, stated in the sale catalogue to be from named collections, are likely for similar reasons to have been bought, rather than inherited.³⁷

Possibly the reason for Beckett’s extensive sales in 1906, and even for his change of address, was connected to his having invested heavily in San Francisco before the earthquake and fire of April that year.³⁸ It was more likely, however, that the timing was fortuitous, since the sales were advertised only 13 days after the disaster occurred and then carried out less than a fortnight later,³⁹ and in any event Beckett was apparently in financial difficulties quite apart from events in San Francisco.⁴⁰

NOTES

Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester (1853?–1909) and Emilie Yznaga (1859?–1944)

• Louis‐Léopold Boilly, A Girl at a Window (NG 5583)
• Jean‐Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of a Lady (Madame de Gléon? (NG 5584)
• Nicolas de Largillierre, Portrait of a Man (Jean‐Baptiste Rousseau?) (NG 5585)
• Jean‐Marc Nattier, Manon Balletti (NG 5586)
• Jean‐Marc Nattier, Portrait of a Man in Armour (NG 5587)
• After Alexander Roslin, The Dauphin, Louis de France, as Colonel of the Dauphin‐Dragons (NG 5588)
• Louis Tocqué, Portrait of a Young Woman (NG 5590)

The Gallery’s acquisition of the paintings

In both his 1946 and 1957 catalogues of the National Gallery’s French paintings, Martin Davies gave the most recent provenance of these seven paintings as ‘Yznaga Bequest, 1945’.¹ The Yznaga referred to was Miss Emilie Yznaga, and in every case, save one, Davies expressed the immediately prior provenance as ‘Probably one of the pictures that passed from the Duchess of Manchester (died 1909) [Consuelo Yznaga] to her sister, Emilie Yznaga’. The exception was the Nattier portrait of Manon Balletti where Davies was more positive, stating that it was acquired by the Duchess of Manchester in 1907 and passed to her sister, Emilie. In addition to the French pictures was one Italian School painting, namely Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s The Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross (NG 5589). This was first catalogued by Michael Levey in 1956. Levey stated that it was in the collection of Miss Emilie Yznaga by 1936, and added in a cautious endnote, ‘Just possibly it was among the pictures passed to [Emilie Yznaga] from her sister the Duchess of Manchester’, a formula he repeated in his 1971 catalogue.² In fact there was no effective bequest and even if there had been one it would not have occurred in 1945. This was because the paintings had already been given to the Gallery. Its then Director, Kenneth Clark, saw the Yznaga paintings in Paris in the spring of 1936,³ and on 9 March 1937 he reported to the Trustees that Emilie Yznaga had ‘signed and deposited in the Gallery a formal Deed of Gift of her collection which … included several works of a type the Gallery lacked and were, in their kind, of the finest quality. Miss Yznaga would keep the pictures during her lifetime’.⁴ In fact she was not giving her collection, but only a part of it – namely, the Tiepolo and the seven pictures referred to in the headnote to this account.⁵ Although the deed of gift, which was dated 22 February 1937, cannot now be found, there are other references to it in the Gallery’s files,⁶ and it is clear that Yznaga made an immediate gift of paintings, albeit subject to her life interest. In October 1938, concerned by the possibility of war, she deposited the pictures with the National Gallery on loan,⁷ and the following month they were on display.⁸ Her life interest, which was the only outstanding interest in the paintings capable of being disposed of, expired on Emilie’s death on 1 November 1944.⁹ Consequently, on Emilie’s death, unless the deed of gift was expressed to be revocable and was in fact revoked, her estate had no property in the paintings capable of being bequeathed. Nevertheless, from a concern to make absolutely sure that the paintings became the Gallery’s property, Emilie made a will in English form in 1943 confirming the gift. Although the will became operative on Emilie’s death in 1944, it was only in March 1945 that her death, and presumably the will, was reported to the Gallery.¹⁰ Probably this was why Emilie Yznaga’s gift has ever since been called – wrongly – ‘Yznaga Bequest, 1945’ rather than, as it should have been, ‘Yznaga Gift, 1937’.

Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester

Consuelo Yznaga’s parents were Antonio Yznaga del Valle, originally from Cuba, and Ellen Little Clement of Natchez, Mississippi.¹¹ Antonio Yznaga owned a plantation at Ravenswood Place, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where he lived with his family and 145 slaves.¹² Most likely he had also already established a residence in New York before the end of the American Civil War.¹³ The Yznagas’ eldest child and only son, Fernando, was born in about 1850. Maria Consuelo, more often called Consuelo, was born in about 1853. The middle sister, Natica, was born in about 1856,¹⁴ and Emilie probably in 1859 in New York.¹⁵ In 1876 Consuelo married Viscount Mandeville, the son of the 7th Duke of Manchester.¹⁶

Consuelo had not reached adulthood when she and her sisters were taken to Paris by their mother. They stayed there several years until the outbreak of the Franco‐Prussian War in 1870, when they returned to Louisiana. In the meantime, Consuelo had befriended the Empress Eugénie, as well as Jennie Jerome (later Lady Randolph Churchill) and Alva Smith (later Mrs William Vanderbilt).¹⁷ As a young woman in New York, where she went in 1875,¹⁸ Consuelo was apparently one of a group of six ‘fragrant specimens of American girlhood’ who were nicknamed ‘The Bouncers’ and without whom, according to the New York Times, ‘No dance was complete … No country house frolic was a “go” …’.¹⁹ Following her marriage in New York to Lord Mandeville in 1876, which initially horrified Mandeville’s father, the 7th Duke of Manchester, who is said to have called her ‘a little American savage’,²⁰ she went with him to England and, in the words of the Duke of Portland, ‘took Society by storm by her beauty, wit and vivacity, and it was soon at her very pretty feet’.²¹ Thereafter she resided mainly in England and Ireland, where her new family had residences at Kimbolton Castle, St Neots; Portman Square in London; and Tandragee Castle, County Armagh. In 1877 Consuelo gave birth to a son who would become the 9th Duke of Manchester and to twin daughters two years later. Mandeville went bankrupt in 1889,²² a year before he became the 8th Duke on the death of his father. By then the couple were living apart. According to one account Mandeville ‘formed a scandalous public liaison with Bessie Bellwood, a coarse, hoarse‐voiced, male impersonator of the music halls’.²³ If Consuelo was able to console herself with Joseph Chamberlain, a member of Gladstone’s cabinet, whom she is said to have taken as a lover,²⁴ and then with the novelist, Robert Hichens,²⁵ the deaths of her daughters at the ages of 16 and 21 were doubtless bitter blows. Materially and socially, however, Consuelo led a charmed existence. In 1880 she and Emilie helped at a charity event led by the Princess of Wales at Kensington House.²⁶ In 1884 she was in New York staying at the Vanderbilts’ and helping plan the huge costume ball given in honour of her and Lord Mandeville.²⁷ In 1897 she was one of the guests at the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire’s costume ball at Devonshire House, Piccadilly (since demolished), where she is described as dressing as Anne of Austria in a gown of white, silver and gold satin and wearing a diamond crown and a single pearl on her forehead.²⁸ Consuelo’s life revolved around both the London social scene and the out‐of‐town activities of its participants: racing at Ascot,²⁹ yachting at Cowes,³⁰ renting Old Mar Castle in Scotland for shooting,³¹ hiring White Lodge, Richmond Park, for entertaining ‘in the most lavish manner’,³² interspersed with trips to Biarritz, St Moritz³³ and New York.³⁴ Consuelo’s social prominence was such that she would make posthumous appearances in Proust’s La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, as Mme de Guermantes’s London shopping companion. Among the visitors at Mar were her sister Emilie and Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.

It was following her return to London from New York in 1884 that Consuelo became a friend of Edward, the Prince of Wales.³⁵ They were to remain close friends for the rest of her life.³⁶ An account of that friendship is contained in the New York Times in 1908, after Edward had become king: Advancing years, a grandmother several times over, portly, and with few traces of the beauty and elegance for which she was formerly celebrated, she still retains her merry wit and her musical gifts which are always at the service of the King to dispel his boredom. Moreover, there are few persons who possess so intimate an acquaintance with his likes and dislikes, his prejudices and his tastes, and by catering to these the Duchess always manages to render herself agreeable in the extreme to his majesty.³⁷ If there were some parallels between this friendship and that of Mme de Pompadour with Louis XV, it was not the music of Rameau which entertained Edward VII. According to the New York Times, when things were getting dull at Tandragee Castle during a royal visit, Consuelo and Natica delighted their majesties when they ‘got their banjos and began playing and singing the old time darky songs’.³⁸

Never on, or anywhere near, the breadline, Consuelo became a wealthy woman in 1901 when her brother Fernando left his entire estate to her, worth between $3 million and $4 million,³⁹ the equivalent purchasing power of which today would be $87 million to $117 million.⁴⁰ As the New York Times reported it, this inheritance enabled her to ‘resume her state as a Duchess in London and to entertain a great deal’.⁴¹ In June 1909 each of the three sisters, Consuelo, Natica and Emilie, inherited some $120,000 from the estate of their father.⁴² When Consuelo herself died in November 1909, at her London residence at 5 Grosvenor Square, her American estate was worth nearly $2.5 million⁴³ and her English estate had a gross value of over £300,000.⁴⁴

Evidently Consuelo was a wealthy woman at the centre of the English social scene, well able to afford to buy old master paintings. If, however, the French pictures in the Yznaga Gift were acquired in France, she would have had relatively few opportunities to see her purchases in advance. Although she made trips to France from time to time both during her marriage and her widowhood – for example, at the end of 1901,⁴⁵ during the winter of 1907–8⁴⁶ and in the late summer of 1909, the last year of her life⁴⁷ – her domicile was in England.⁴⁸ If she collected as such, it was jewellery rather than paintings which she bought avidly, including, among items recently auctioned,⁴⁹ an antique diamond corsage brooch.⁵⁰ There is, however, no mention in contemporary journals of her having any interest in paintings. No French painting, eighteenth‐century or otherwise, nor for that matter any picture by Tiepolo, appears in any lists of pictures at Kimbolton Castle.⁵¹ Some evidence that Consuelo was interested in paintings, and French eighteenth‐century ones specifically, is contained in a letter written to her by her sister Natica in 1903 describing a visit to Potsdam and Sanssouci: ‘The Emperor’s chamberlain took us to the private apartments to see a particularly lovely Watteau which has never been exhibited.’⁵²

It is tempting to suggest that it was Emilie (who later declared herself to have been resident in France since 1901),⁵³ not Consuelo, who was buying the pictures in the Yznaga Gift. However, in the first place, according to an old label once on the stretcher of Nattier’s Manon Balletti and noted by Martin Davies in his 1957 catalogue, the painting was sold in 1907 by the baronne de Marbot, a direct descendant of the sitter, to the Duchess of Manchester.⁵⁴ That makes it likely that the Manon Balletti is ‘the portrait by Nattier’ which Consuelo bequeathed to Emilie by a codicil to her will dated 28 October 1909, rather than Nattier’s Portrait of a Man in Armour (NG 5587) which was also in the Yznaga Gift.⁵⁵ The reference to ‘the’ portrait by Nattier suggests that Consuelo had only one portrait by Nattier, and it follows that it was probably Emilie who later acquired the Man in Armour.

Secondly, in the case of Tocqué’s Portrait of a Young Woman, which was sold at the sale of Thirion deceased in Paris on 10 June 1907, a copy of the sale catalogue in The Hague is annotated with the buyer’s name, ‘Duchesse de Manchester’.⁵⁶ This too, therefore, was bought not by Emilie, but by Consuelo. In the evening two days before that sale Consuelo had been at Buckingham Palace at a state banquet in honour of the King and Queen of Denmark.⁵⁷ It seems unlikely therefore that Consuelo was in Paris when the auction took place and more probable that she instructed an agent to buy the picture. She may have seen both it and the Manon Balletti during a trip to Paris which she made in April 1907.⁵⁸

The Nattier was the only painting mentioned in the codicil. As to Consuelo’s will itself, which was dated 7 January 1909, with the exception of family portraits, a portrait of General Boyd by Gilbert Stewart (sic) and a pen‐and‐ink sketch by the Prince Imperial, all of which were left on trusts for Consuelo’s son or daughter‐in‐law, there was only one other specific bequest of paintings. This was to Emilie of ‘my four landscape paintings by Pilment [sic]’. They were not subsequently part of the Yznaga Gift, but were instead bequeathed by Emilie to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, where they now are.⁵⁹ All other specific bequests were of lace, furs and, above all, of jewellery. The residuary estate, including other moveables, was given to Consuelo’s descendants, subject, however, to certain annuities including one of £1,000 for Emilie. Presumably, therefore, the Tocqué was the subject of a lifetime gift by Consuelo to Emilie. This might be an exceptional case. At all events, Consuelo did not give or bequeath to Emilie all her French paintings. A sale at Christie, Manson & Woods, London, on 5 July 1918, on behalf of the trustees of Consuelo’s will, included the following:

• Drouais – Portrait of a Lady
• French School – Portrait of a Lady
• J.F. Dagoty Gauthier – Portrait of a Child
• Largillierre – Portrait of a Maréchal of France
• Vigée Le Brun – Portrait of Jeanne Charlotte St. Aubin
• De Troy – Portrait of a Lady⁶⁰

The position therefore at Consuelo’s death was that she certainly owned a number of French eighteenth‐century paintings, mainly portraits; she bequeathed five paintings to Emilie: a Nattier portrait and four landscapes by Pillement; the Nattier she bequeathed was probably the portrait of Manon Balletti; and she must have made a lifetime gift to Emilie of the Tocqué described as ‘a portrait of Mlle. De Coislin’.

Emilie Yznaga

Emilie came to England by 1879. She was then 20, and was reportedly a favourite in London society.⁶¹ Over the next 35 years Emilie, who never married but who had a reputation for being very good company,⁶² was to make a number of appearances in the society pages, and was often reported to be in the company of one or other of her sisters. A recognised member of the ‘smart set’,⁶³ she was among the invitees at a ball given at Marlborough House in 1886 by the Prince and Princess of Wales,⁶⁴ and she too went to the 1897 Devonshire Ball. In 1900 she was in London for the second marriage of Lady Randolph Churchill, whom Consuelo had befriended as ‘Jennie Jerome’ some thirty years earlier.⁶⁵ In 1903 she was at a dinner at Windsor Castle given by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra for the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia;⁶⁶ in 1905 she was a dinner guest of the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace who were entertaining the Prince of Bulgaria.⁶⁷ Another guest at that dinner was Sir John Murray Scott, Lady Wallace’s residuary legatee. In 1907 she was chatting to the Duchess of Westminster at Cowes,⁶⁸ and in July 1914 she was among the invitees at a state ball at Buckingham Palace.⁶⁹ Notwithstanding these fairly frequent trips to England, by the mid‐1890s Emilie was living mainly in Paris. Here she was a frequent companion of the immensely wealthy Baroness Clara de Hirsch, who until her death in 1899 had homes in the rue de l’Elysée and at the château de Beauregard near Marly.⁷⁰ By 1902 Emilie was described as living at 70 avenue Marceau, Paris, although, as is clear, she continued to make intermittent visits abroad.⁷¹ After the end of the Great War, Emilie’s social whirl continued. For example, in 1928 she went to a dinner at the Ritz, Paris, hosted by Mortimer Schiff, the maiolica collector. Among the guests was Joseph E. Widener, whose paintings collection later became one of the cornerstones of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.⁷² Two years later Emilie attended a dinner given by her good friend Anthony J. Drexel at his Paris home. Among the other guests was the duc Hélie de Talleyrand‐Périgord, who filled his various houses with seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century works of art.⁷³ Mixing in the same circles as noted art collectors, Emilie was herself one of their number, and owned objets d’art as well as paintings.⁷⁴ In 1932 she lent a monochrome Boucher sketch, which she was to give to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, to the major Exposition François Boucher mounted by the Fondation Foch at the Hôtel de M. Jean Charpentier (Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, inv. 36231), and in 1935 she lent three pictures to an exhibition of French eighteenth‐century art at the Charlottenborg Palace, Copenhagen. Among these was one of the Pillements inherited from Consuelo. Another was the portrait by Greuze possibly of Mme de Gléon now in the National Gallery (NG 5584), and the third was a self portrait by Ducreux.⁷⁵ Although an American citizen, Emilie remained a resident of Paris until she left France for New York sometime after 9 September 1939.⁷⁶ When she died in 1944 the New York Times referred to her as ‘known as an art connoisseur and a collector of paints [sic]’.⁷⁷

Emilie was also a significant patron of Jean Béraud (1849–1935), the painter of belle‐époque street and salon life. Emilie gave one picture by Béraud to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, three to the Musée Carnavalet in 1934,⁷⁸ and one, After the Misdeed, to the Tate Gallery. This is among the Tate pictures now on long‐term loan to the National Gallery (L 688). According to Patrick Offenstadt’s catalogue raisonné of Béraud’s work, Emilie was one of the executors of Béraud’s will.⁷⁹ Offenstadt published five paintings by Béraud which show the interior of Emilie’s apartment at 142 bis rue de Grenelle, where she lived on the fifth floor.⁸⁰

One of these five paintings, The Blue Sofa (private collection), is signed and dated 1912 (illustrated in Humphrey Wine, The Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings, London 2018, p. 224, fig. 4). The rest are undated. The 1912 painting was bought at the end of that year for stock by Bernheim‐Jeune direct from the artist and was recently on the art market.⁸¹ It shows the National Gallery’s portrait possibly of Mme de Gléon by Greuze (NG 5584). Two other paintings in this group by Béraud show pictures now in the National Gallery’s collection. At the centre of one is Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Lamentation (NG 5589). That picture by Béraud is now in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, to which Emilie bequeathed it, as is another interior by Béraud which shows in the centre Largillierre’s Portrait of a Man (NG 5585), and to the left of it Nattier’s Manon Balletti (NG 5586). To the right of the Largillierre is a pastel painting by Perronneau.⁸² The Perronneau appears again, possibly in a different frame, and certainly in a different location within Emilie’s collection, in another painting by Béraud which is also in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Interior View of Emilie Yznaga’s Paris Apartment with a Pastel by Perronneau, inv. 36228). All three paintings by Béraud in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs were deposited there by Emilie Yznaga by 1939 and subsequently formed part of her bequest to it.⁸³ Finally, there is a painting by Béraud in the Musée Baron Martin, Gray, which seems never to have been in Emilie’s collection (Interior of Emilie Yznaga’s Paris Apartment with a Lacquered Chest of Drawers, Gray, Musée Baron Martin, inv. 386 GR 82). It shows in the centre a mirror which was in the 1989 sale of the succession of Emilie’s legatee, Petronilla, vicomtesse de L’Hermite, who became comtesse Alain Costa de Beauregard by her second marriage. She was Emilie’s cousin, or, according to Offenstadt, her great‐niece. The Perronneau pastel shown in the painting by Béraud was also in the same sale (lot 31).⁸⁴

The Blue Sofa establishes that the so‐called Mme De Gléon was in Emilie’s collection by 1912, but, since none of the other paintings by Béraud is dated, in the absence here of photographs of them it is not proposed to speculate on when they might have been made and hence the date by when Emilie must have acquired the pictures shown in them.

It may have been Emilie’s pre‐existing interest in art which prompted Consuelo specifically to bequeath to her, and her alone, old master paintings in her collection, and she might even have relied on Emilie’s advice and contacts when acquiring pictures on the Paris art market. Finally, one might further hypothesise that Emilie vigorously developed her own collection once fortified by the inheritance from her father in June 1909, worth some $3.3 million in today’s terms, and only months later by the annuity bequeathed by Consuelo, which in today’s terms was worth some £96,000 per annum.⁸⁵ Emilie then had both the means and the enthusiasm to acquire all the pictures shown in Béraud’s paintings. The consequence is that – with the exception of those National Gallery pictures known to have belonged to Consuelo, namely Nattier’s Manon Balletti and Tocqué’s Portrait of a Young Woman – the remainder were possibly bought by Emilie on the art market. As a result, and pending more information emerging, it seems more appropriate to adopt for the other French eighteenth‐century paintings in the Yznaga Gift the words which Sir Michael Levey formulated for the Tiepolo: ‘Just possibly it was one of the pictures which passed to her from her sister, the Duchess of Manchester’ (my italics).

By way of a postscript, on 9 June 1909, the same day that the New York Times reported Emilie’s inheritance from her father, a self‐portrait painting by Ducreux, later recorded in Emilie’s collection, was knocked down to the expert Sortais at an anonymous sale for 20,000 francs, equivalent to some 80,000 euros today.⁸⁶ If Sortais was bidding on Emilie’s behalf, it may have been because at this moment in her life, her mood was best mirrored in Ducreux’s triumphant grin.

NOTES

I am grateful to Elena Greer, former Curatorial Assistant at the National Gallery, for helping to gather some of the information on which this biographical note is based. In addition, I am grateful to Stuart Band, Alexa Cox, Richard Edgcumbe, Peter J. St B. Green, Andy Haswell, Christianne Henry, Diane Naylor, Sofia Peers, Andrew Peppitt, Maxime Préaud, Cyrille Sciama, Marianne de Voogd, David Warren and the Centre de documentation, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, all of whom were kind enough to reply to the various enquiries I made.