Jacques‐Louis David 1748–1825
NG 6495 
Jacobus Blauw

Humphrey Wine, 2018

Extracted from:

Humphrey Wine, The Eighteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2018).
Humphrey Wine and Virginia Napoleone, Former Owners of the Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings in the National Gallery: Appendix to ‘The National Gallery Catalogues: The Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings’ (London: National Gallery Company, 2018).

1795

Oil on canvas, 91.8 × 72.9 cm

Signed bottom left: L DAVID. 4

Inscribed on the letter held by the sitter: J. Blauw ministre / Plenipotentiaire aux Etats / generaux des provinces / unies¹

Provenance

With the sitter until his death in 1829; bequeathed to his only daughter, Cornelia‐Marguerite‐Jeanne de Blancheville (née Blauw) (1787–1847), and thereafter by descent in the family to Cornélie‐Pulcherie‐Augustine Clavière (1833–1891), Blauw’s last direct descendant, wife of the painter and collector Jean‐Jules Chevrier (1816–1883), whose daughter, Cornélie‐Joséphine‐Louise Chevrier (1855–1930), married Honoré Luce (1847–1932); recorded in 1913 with M. Luce‐Chevrier;² ‘given’ by Henriette Luce‐Chevrier (Mme Georges Gruère) in 1968 to the Musée des Beaux‐Arts de Dijon, the ‘gift’ being rescinded following her title being challenged by members of the Chevrier family; sold in 1970 to the Wildenstein Gallery (the sale being unsuccessfully challenged by other members of the family); with Wildenstein & Cie, Paris, in 1978, when first offered to the Gallery for $1,200,000;³ acquired in 1984 (following a protracted negotiation for a French export licence) for $3,200,000, paid at the direction of Guy Wildenstein to Dr Adrian Hinderling, Zurich.⁴

Exhibitions

Paris 1913 (34);⁵ Toulouse and Montauban 1955 (60), as belonging to ‘un ami du Musée de Dijon’; Dijon 1958 (24), as belonging to Mme Gruère, Beaune; London 1986–7 (26); London 1987b (19); Paris and Versailles 1989–90 (143).

Related Works⁶

Drawing

Whereabouts unknown, pencil on paper, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 7 May 1980, lot 279(ii), as ‘Comte Calix, Portrait of a seated gentleman. Provenance Bruno Meissner, Zurich’. Compte‐Calix’s dates were 1813–1880. The sitter’s expression here is slightly different from that in NG 6495 and the drawing is probably after Tardieu’s print (see below). Possibly the same drawing as that sold at Frederik Muller & Cie, Amsterdam, 11–14 June 1912, lot 387, the description of which is recorded in note 7 below.

Prints

• (1) Facing in the same direction as NG 6495, Alexandre [page 144]Tardieu, engraving, inscribed lower left: ‘L. David Pinx.^t’, dated lower right: ‘Alex.^dre Tardieu Sculp.^t 1796’ and further inscribed below: ‘J.BLAUW. / Ministre Plénipotentiaire des Provinces‐Unies / Auprès de la Rép. Française’.⁷
• (2) In the same direction as NG 6495 but showing the head and shoulders only, Reinier Vinkeles, engraving, 1798, inscribed lower left: ‘L. David, pinx.’ and lower right: ‘Rein.^r Vinkeles, sculp. 1798’. The date of this print has been read as 1793, which is impossible.⁸
• (3) In reverse, head and shoulders only, lithograph by Ducarme after a drawing by Legrand.⁹
• (4) Jules David, about 1880.¹⁰

Technical Notes

The condition is good. There is a T‐shaped tear some 10 cm in length at the sitter’s proper right elbow and a smaller damage in the arm above. There are other smaller losses at the edges, in the hands and in the tablecloth. There are visible retouchings in the hands.

The canvas is a fine plain weave, lined shortly before 1978 over two old fine lining canvases. The back of the stretcher bears two labels, one for an exhibition David et ses élèves at the Palais des Beaux‐Arts, Paris, April to June 1913, bearing the owner’s name, ‘M. Luce‐Chevrier, rue Thiers, Beaune’, and the other, an older, small circular label inscribed ‘1816’. Pentimenti are visible to the contour of the proper left arm and hand and to the chair, which was slightly higher, and there are minor alterations to the cravat. Inspection indicates also that the portrait was painted first, then the background, and finally the wisps of white hair and quill pen.

Infrared reflectography (fig. 1) confirms the changes mentioned above and reveals alterations to the bottom of the back of the jacket, the proper right shoulder, and that part of the letter to the right of the sitter’s proper left index finger and the inkwell was made wider over the paint of the table top to take account of the refraction of the inkwell glass. Infrared reflectography also reveals underdrawing, most easily seen in the sitter’s face, for the proper left eye, the nose, mouth and cheek, as well as areas where a dark underpaint has been used to create the bluish tones in the flesh by exploiting the optical effect of light over dark, sometimes known as the turbid medium effect; this has become more pronounced with time. The blue of the coat has been identified by analysis as Prussian blue.¹¹

There are two labels on the back of the frame, neither dated. One relates to the transport of the picture by André Chenue & fils to the Gallery, presumably following the painting’s acquisition. The other, older label is of Arthur Lénars & Cie, 10, rue Leibnitz, Paris XVIII^e and is inscribed ‘j a o – L4’.

Frame

The carved Louis XVI frame has a lamb’s tongue sight edge, plain frieze, repeat acanthus to the hollow and ribbon‐twist back edge.

The Sitter’s Early Life

Jacobus Blauw was baptised in the Dutch Reform church of St Janskerk, Gouda, on 28 March 1759.¹² He was the only son among the five children of Pieter Blauw, who had become the minister at St Janskerk in 1755,¹³ and of Johanna Veerin.¹⁴ In 1775 Jacobus enrolled at the University of Leyden to study law. His doctoral thesis, ‘Selecta quaedam juris civilis contoversi capita’, was accepted the following year.¹⁵ In 1777 his father died,¹⁶ but Blauw had already set sail from Rotterdam for Batavia (present day Jakarta) on 8 December 1776 on De Jonge Lieve, a Dutch East India Company ship. He arrived at his destination on 18 June 1777.¹⁷ There he became a lawyer in 1778 and in 1779 was appointed as a barrister at the Court of Justice of Batavia. The same year Blauw married Hendrica Cornelia Van der Polder,¹⁸ the daughter of Jan Van der Polder, a merchant involved in the opium trade. The couple later had one child, Cornelia, born in 1787. On their return jouney to Holland in 1781 their ship was intercepted by the English.¹⁹ Obliged to disembark at Cadiz, the couple reached their destination overland.²⁰

Blauw returned to Gouda in 1784 and two years later became a member of the city’s council, a colonel of the local militia and a deputy for the city to the Estates of Holland. He belonged to the francophile Patriotic Party, which, in opposition to the stadtholder Willem V and the Orangists, sought to abolish State and Church privileges and to establish the ‘sovereignty of the people’. Uprisings led to the Patriots taking control of most of Holland by April 1787, and it is likely that as colonel of the Gouda militia Blauw was involved in the arrest nearby of the stadtholder’s wife, Wilhelmina of Prussia, in July. A few months later Prussian intervention restored Willem V and many of the Patriots fled, including Blauw, who, dismissed from his civic and military posts, travelled to Amsterdam and then to Brussels.²¹ He was back in Holland by January 1789, when he re‐enrolled at Leyden University and there continued to sign the attendance list for the following years up to and including 1795.²²

Blauw, Diplomat and Politician

The events of the French Revolution saw Blauw emerge onto the international stage. In February 1793 France declared war on Great Britain and Holland simultaneously, and after French successes the following year, Dutch Patriot factions, which had always looked to France for support, secretly prepared for an uprising with a view to overthrowing Willem V. It was at the end of 1794 that Blauw, by now a member of the National Revolutionary Committee of Holland, travelled with his Patriot colleague Van Dam to Brabant. They went on to Paris, arriving, presumably by the year end,²³ to frustrate the negotiations of Willem V’s representatives there.²⁴ In January 1795 the withdrawal of British troops from Holland led to Willem V and his family’s emigration to England. Amsterdam fell to French troops, who were welcomed as liberators by much of the population, and a bloodless change of government took place in Holland within weeks.

However, Blauw and Van Dam (who was to be replaced no later than 12 germinal, an III [1 April 1795] by Caspar [page 145][page 146][page 147] Meijer, the Dutch consul in Bordeaux, also portrayed by David, fig. 2)²⁵ were not initially recognised by the Committee for Public Safety in Paris, nor were they allowed to address the Convention. Indeed, they were briefly arrested by the Committee of General Security.²⁶ Blauw soon became aware that they were dealing with a government whose army controlled Holland and whose fraternal feelings towards the Dutch (of whatever shade of opinion) were less evident than its desire to exploit Dutch financial and geographical assets. France refused to recognise the independence of the recently proclaimed Batavian Republic, or to accredit Blauw and Van Dam (or subsequently Meijer) with ambassadorial status unless it made financial and territorial concessions to France.²⁷ In the event, Blauw and Meijer’s dogged negotiating stance on behalf of the Batavian Republic was effectively ignored when the French sent representatives to The Hague to deal direct with the new republic’s States‐General. To the chagrin of Blauw, who considered that better terms could have been obtained had the Dutch been firmer,²⁸ the rapidly signed Treaty of The Hague of 16 May 1795 conceded most of the demands that the two ambassadors had resisted.²⁹ When the new treaty was announced at the French National Convention on 21 May the ambassadorial status of Blauw and Meijer was de facto acknowledged.³⁰ However, their status was only formally recognised as ‘Ministres plénipotentiaires de la République des Provinces‐Unies, près la République française’ on 22 June 1795, when, after arriving ‘to the sound of reiterated applause’, one of them addressed the Convention and presented it with a Batavian flag. To further applause and cries of ‘Vivent les deux Républiques’, Blauw and Meijer received the Convention President’s fraternal kiss (fig. 3).³¹

During his ambassadorship Blauw did not cease to defend Dutch interests, particularly in relation to the autonomy of [page 148] Dutch ports, while at the same time remaining true to the ideals of the Revolution.³² His outspokenness, together with his perceived Jacobin leanings,³³ led to his being replaced as ambassador in June 1796 at the instigation of the French.³⁴ He was given a new posting as ambassador for the Batavian Republic in Italy, and spent the period October 1796 to September 1797 variously in Turin, Venice and Genoa.³⁵ On his return to The Hague in November 1797 he took up his seat for Gouda at the National Assembly. When briefly President of the National Assembly in December, which it was said he was unable to control,³⁶ his attempts at mediation between the Unitarian party, with whom he sympathised, and the more conservative Federalists failed. In December 1797 he signed the ‘Manifesto of the 43’, which expressed sentiments close to the radical French constitution of 1793, but only with reluctance because he thought that the more the Batavian Republic ‘attempted to “ape” the French Revolution, the nearer it approached to its ruin and lost sight of its real object: its title to an independent nation’.³⁷ Blauw was therefore opposed to the coup d’état of January 1798 which adopted a unitary, democratic constitution because he thought that the Unitarians should have adopted more conventional means.³⁸ Once more in Paris as a member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, in March 1798 he was appointed ambassador to the court at Vienna to represent Dutch interests at the forthcoming Rastatt Conference, but was blocked at the frontier by the French government, alarmed by his radical leanings.³⁹ Blauw was replaced in June when a counter‐coup in Amsterdam ousted the Dutch radicals.

Blauw, Citizen of France

This marked the end of Blauw’s political and diplomatic career. Threatened with arrest if he did not leave France,⁴⁰ after failing in his appeal Blauw returned to Holland in October 1798, before being allowed to return to France in March 1799.⁴¹ There he lived in a mansion at Voulx (Seine‐et‐Marne), which had been bought the previous year in the name of his mistress, the divorcée Angéline Fontana. By now himself divorced from Hendrica Cornelia Van der Polder,⁴² he married the 23‐year‐old Angéline on 17 June 1799, and acquired French nationality.⁴³ Shortly thereafter, however, Blauw found himself in financial difficulties; he sold his Dutch house in 1799 and the chateau at Voulx the following year.⁴⁴ Worse was to come. At some point he entrusted his fortune to the father of his future son‐in‐law, Guillot de Blancheville, who was controller of posts in Paris and whom Blauw’s daughter Cornelia was to marry in 1810. Later that year Guillot’s father went bankrupt and committed suicide, and Blauw wrote that he had lost nearly everything.⁴⁵ Now bereft of income, he wrote to Napoleon, whom he had twice met in Italy, seeking office.⁴⁶ He was successful, and in 1811 was appointed ‘Receveur des droits réunis’ at Dordrecht, where he remained until December 1813, when French troops retreated from Holland before the Allied advance. Blauw reached Paris early in 1814, having had to walk the final 100 km from Soissons, since there was no available transport. By now he was worse off than when he took up the Dordrecht post.⁴⁷ Thereafter he lived in Paris, first at 14 rue Taitbout and then at 69 (now 67) rue Sainte‐Anne. From 1819 until his death on 12 October 1829, Blauw was correspondent for the important Dutch newspaper De Oprechte Haarlemsche Courant.⁴⁸ He was survived by his wife Angéline. She had herself been ill and cared for by his daughter Cornelia, who had come from Macon to be by his side. In one of the last of his many letters to her, Blauw wrote: ‘Je pense que la France ne sera vraiment tranquille et heureuse [que] quand la fiole du bon sens tombera de la lune dans les têtes françaises et qu’on adoptera le système d’opinions dans les affaires civiles, et surtout religieuses’ (‘I think that France will not be truly peaceful and content until a little bottle of good sense drops from the sky onto French heads and one accepts that there are different points of view in civil and above all religious matters’).⁴⁹

Assessments of Blauw’s character varied greatly. In the days before the Dutch radicals’ coup of 1798 he was described by another Dutch politician as ‘a consummate villain; a greater deceiver of the people have we none’,⁵⁰ and he was said to have been partial to accepting bribes.⁵¹ On the other hand, the French representative at The Hague had written to Paris in 1794 that ‘I will not repeat the praise that I have given as much for his talents as for his unsullied and enlightened love of liberty’.⁵² Perhaps such extreme views were a reflection of the times in which they were expressed, but if Blauw’s tactics wavered, his fundamental views were consistent. He remained as Anglophobe and anti‐Orangist as he was Francophile and pro‐Patriot.⁵³ He was also a patriot with a small ‘p’, who keenly, and sometimes impatiently, sought meaningful independence for Holland. He divorced his first wife, but long afterwards tried to help her get an inheritance due to her.⁵⁴ To judge from his correspondence with his daughter, Cornelia, he was a devoted if somewhat didactic father, who sought to impart as well as to live by moral lessons.⁵⁵ As portrayed by David, Blauw was a man of virtue and moral courage.

David’s Portrait of Blauw

David’s portrait can be dated with some precision. It is inscribed with Blauw’s position as Ministre plénipotentiaire, a position in which he was not formally recognised in France until 22 June 1795. That recognition was presumably the catalyst for his portrait as well as that of his fellow ambassador Meijer, but neither is likely to have been begun before David had been released from prison during the first week of August or during his subsequent stay outside Paris, which lasted until at least 14 August. Since NG 6495 is dated ‘[year] 4 [of the Republic]’, it could not have been finished before 23 September 1795. Indeed it probably had not been started then, since David was in the course of completing the portrait of Pierre Sériziat.⁵⁶ Given the precariousness of the times and Blauw’s own delicate position vis‐à‐vis the French government, not to mention that of David, Blauw may not have wished to risk offending the authorities by giving David a commission before the artist’s reintegration into French society had been formally endorsed. This occurred on his nomination to the Institut national des Sciences et des Arts on 3 brumaire, an IV (25 October 1795) and on his being [page 149]amnestied the following day.⁵⁷ A letter from Blauw to David of 8 frimaire, an IV (29 November 1795) strongly suggests that the portrait was finished by this date, so the artist may have completed the portrait in a little over a month.⁵⁸ This is conceivable, because firstly David had few if any other paid commissions at this time,⁵⁹ and secondly, as his former wife (whom David would later remarry) wrote to him at this time about other paintings, he could finish a work quickly when he had a mind to do so.⁶⁰

Blauw’s letter to David is worth quoting in full: My wishes are finally satisfied, my dear David. You have brought me to life on canvas; in a sense you have immortalised me through your sublime brush and you have made dear to me for ever a mission, which, without that flower which you have thrown down thanks to your indulgent friendship, would have recalled only the prickly thorns with which to date it has been strewn.Do not believe, dear friend, that only the wish to have my portrait has determined me to commission you to do it. No: I have thought of you more than of myself; I wanted to own one of your masterpieces, and I wanted even more to have in this portrait an everlasting monument to my close bond with the first painter of Europe. Your talents, your reputation, your civic mindedness, your misfortunes, the great services which you have rendered to the French Revolution through the civic fêtes organised by your flair, how many headings there are to my admiration! How many reasons [there are] to wish to know you! My portrait has served me as a pretext and I prize it much more thanks to the friendship which got you to do it, than the talents which you have used.Raoul will bring you with this letter a small mark of my recognition; it is scarcely proportionate to the merit of the work; but it is less recompense than a keepsake which I have devoted to you and of which it will always be a pleasure and a duty to give you proof.Goodbye, fraternal feelings, esteem and friendshipBLAUW⁶¹ Beyond the rhetoric it is clear that Blauw saw himself as sharing with the artist both friendship and setbacks at the hands of France’s post‐Thermidorian government, as well as political sympathies.⁶² Indeed, David’s continuing flirtation with extreme elements⁶³ has its counterpart in Blauw’s continuing Jacobin leanings.

The attitude and action of the sitter in NG 6495 recalls to some degree David’s portrait of his uncle, Jacques‐François Desmaisons (Buffalo, Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, inv. 44‐1), made in 1782. David gives Blauw the same direct regard towards the viewer as he did Desmaisons, as opposed to the more pensive look of the gynaecologist Alphonse Leroy, shown like Blauw with pen in hand and with his writing arm resting on a table (Montpellier, Musée Fabre, inv. 829‐1‐1). The more striking resemblance of pose, attitude and action is, however, with earlier portraits by David’s contemporaries, namely Labille‐Guiard’s Portrait of a Woman of about 1787 (Quimper, Musée des Beaux‐Arts), albeit that her posture is more upright than Blauw’s;⁶⁴ two portraits by Antoine Vestier, of Joseph Depestre, comte de Seneffe of 1787 (Paris, private collection) and Joseph‐Pierre‐Xavier Foullon, baron de Doué of 1791(France, collection famille d’Estampes).⁶⁵ But the closest resemblance is with François‐André Vincent’s Portrait of the Goldsmith Léon Bernard of 1793 (fig. 4), in which the pose of the sitter is identical to Blauw’s.⁶⁶ Recently Blauw’s serious air has been compared to that of Jules‐François Paré in a portrait by Laneuville dated ‘l’an 3^e’ (22 September 1794–22 September 1795) (fig. 5) and exhibited at the 1795 Salon, which opened on 26 September that year.⁶⁷ Given the likely chronology of NG 6495 (see above), it seems probable that David saw the portrait of Paré before starting on his portrait of Blauw. In NG 6495 the sitter has, however, been brought further forward than Paré into the picture space. The turn of Blauw’s head directly towards the viewer and his domination, so to speak, of the still‐life objects on the table also combine to give him a more emphatic presence.

In painting Blauw and Meijer, David has correctly shown which of the two Batavian ambassadors might be the more ready to compromise. Meijer is shown costumed in red, white and blue, presumably in reference to the colours of the [page 150] Batavian national flag.⁶⁸ Blauw’s intense gaze, his unwigged head, his simple chair, and the firmness with which he grips the pen with one hand while partly concealing his snuffbox with the other, contrast with Caspar Meijer’s relaxed expression and grip, his laid‐back pose, the curl of his coiffure and coat collar, his more elaborate neckerchief, and the carved mahogany armchair with its armrests decorated with balls of ivory.⁶⁹

The strong blue of Blauw’s coat is possibly a play on the sitter’s surname. The only hints of red are the glimpse of the fabric covering of the chair and the pink of his chequered handkerchief. A similar handkerchief appears in David’s portrait of Emmanuel‐Joseph Sieyès of 1817 (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Art Museum) – an irony, presumably unintended, since Sieyès had been one of the French representatives who had gone over the heads of Blauw and Meijer to impose tough terms on the Dutch in May 1795. The handkerchief in NG 6495 confirms that the box on which Blauw rests his left hand is a snuffbox, possibly made of ebony, or more probably tortoiseshell,⁷⁰ and gold (or gilded metal). The top of the box has a circular decorative insert, but it is impossible to make out any detail. Richard Edgcumbe has suggested that since ambassadors traditionally received snuffboxes as gifts from their host nation, the French Republic might have continued this custom, in which case David possibly portrayed Blauw with his gift.⁷¹ It has been noted that like NG 6495, of which Tardieu’s print (see Related Works) in the same direction as the painting was exhibited at the 1796 Salon, Girodet’s portrait of Jean‐François de Bourgeon of 1800 also shows his sitter apparently interrupted during a quiet moment (fig. 6).⁷² The distinction, however, is that de Bourgeon, unlike Blauw and Paré, appears to be interrupted from leisured reading rather than from working.⁷³

General References

Chaussard 1806, p. 159; Annuaire nécrologique 1826, no. 29 in a list of portraits; Th[omé] 1826, p. 166; Coupin 1827, p. 55; Blanc 1862–3, vol. 2, p. 15, ‘J. Louis David’ (where incorrectly dated 1800); Chaussard 1863–4; David 1867, no. 36(?) (as ‘M.Cléan, Hollandais’);⁷⁴ David 1880, pp. 324–5, 641–2; Cantinelli 1930, p. 109, no. 94; Holma 1940 (no. 100, but there confused with David’s portrait of Caspar Meijer); [Geiger] 1968, no. 195, p. 50, and pl. XXXIX; Wildenstein 1973, nos 1223, 1810 and (?)1938; Wilson 1984; Nanteuil 1985, no. 27; Sahut and Michel 1988, p. 95; W. Roberts 1989, p. 109–11; Monneret 1998, p. 129; McPherson 2007, p. 224.

Notes