The House of Cards:
Catalogue entry

Catalogue contents

About the catalogue

Full title: The House of Cards (Portrait of Jean-Alexandre Le Noir)
Artist: Jean-Siméon Chardin
Inventory number: NG4078
Author: Humphrey Wine
Extracted from: The Eighteenth Century French Paintings (London, 2018)

Jean‐Siméon Chardin 1699–1779
NG 4078
The House of Cards (Portrait of Jean‐Alexandre Le Noir)

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).

1740–1

Oil on canvas, 60.2 × 72 cm

Signed at right: chardin

Inscribed on the counter near the table’s forward edge: 500¹

Provenance

Presumably commissioned by Jean‐Jacques Le Noir (1706/7–1796); possibly Jules‐Robert Auguste (about 1789–1850) posthumous sale, 9 rue Caumartin, Paris, 28–31 May 1850, lot 10, 255 francs;² John Webb; by inheritance to his daughter Edith Cragg, by whom bequeathed as part of the John Webb Bequest (see the Appendix to this volume on the NG website).³

Exhibitions

Paris Salon 1741 (72: ‘Autre [Tableau par Chardin], représentant le Fils de M. le Noir, s’amusant à faire un Château de cartes’);⁴ Paris 1979 (71);⁵ Paris, Düsseldorf, London and New York 1999–2000b (47; not exhibited in New York); Belfast, Ipswich and Bath 2001–2; Bristol, Newcastle and London 2005 (p. 17); Waddesdon 2012 (3).

Related Works⁶

(1) An anonymous copy in reverse was offered at Auktionhaus Stuker Bern, 2–9 May 2010, lot 1177 (offered with a copy, also in reverse after, the Louvre L’enfant au toton), there dated around 1800, oil on canvas, 17.5 × 21 cm.
(2) An engraving in reverse by François‐Bernard Lépicié père, announced in the Mercure de France in September 1743 (p. 2061) as after ‘le tableau original de J.‐B. Siméon Chardin’, published by L. Surugue and entitled Le Château de Cartes. Bocher catalogued only the one, finished state, but noted also the engraving listed at (3) below.⁷ Lépicié appended the following verses under the print’s title:
Aimable Enfant que le plaisir décide,
Nous badinons de vos frêles travaux:
Mais entre nous, quel est le plus solide
De nos projets ou bien de vos châteaux.
(3) According to Bocher, Simon Duflos made a bad copy in reverse after Lépicié, ‘qui ne diffère que par le tirage, qui est exécrable, et par la disposition de la lettre, qui est tout autre’, 19 × 20 cm.⁸
(4) An etching and engraving after Lépicié’s print was incorporated into the January 1762 issue of The British Magazine. Lettered ‘Simeon Chardin pinx. – Lepicie sculp., / The Castle of Cards given gratis to the Purchasers of the British Magazine for Jan.y 1762’. In the copy of The British Magazine in the British Library the page on which it was printed was unnumbered, but it follows an unsigned article on p. 32 entitled ‘Reflections on the Vanity of Human Pursuits’, the relevant part of which read: The print we here offer to the public is taken from a painting by Siméon Chardin, as ingenious in the design as happy in the execution. It was engraved by L’Epicie, one of the most celebrated artists in Paris. The thought is admirable: a more proper emblem could not be found to convey a just idea of the vanity of Human pursuits, than a child building cards houses … / … In fine, every human pursuit may be considered as building castles in the air, or houses of cards: for as the poet justly observes, concerning the life of man: ‘Both from the coffin to the cradle ’Tis all a wish and all a ladle.’⁹

Technical Notes

The condition is generally good, but there is wear in the shadowed areas and to the proper right hand and sleeve, small losses in the background at lower left just by the boy’s coat and at upper right, some age and drying cracks. Lining prior to the Gallery’s acquisition of the painting has flattened the impasto.¹⁰

The support is a fairly fine plain‐weave canvas,¹¹ mounted on a stretcher bearing the stamp ‘F.R. Leedham / Liner’, so dating it from the 1830s to 1857 (being the years Leedham was in business).¹² The stretcher is also marked in pencil, possibly (although it is difficult to read): ‘B D I’. At the top and bottom edges the canvas shows marked cusping. Some cusping is also present left and right, but here the canvas is not as distorted. The canvas has been lined several times, most recently in 1972, and is cut round the composition, removing all traces of original tacking edges.

The canvas was prepared with a thick, reddish ground layer of oil paint containing mainly red ochre, silica and silicates. In the one cross‐section available for study, taken from the grey‐brown background at the upper left edge, this ground layer has over it a grey‐brown layer containing lead white and black as well as earth pigments. The lack of samples from other parts of the picture makes it difficult to be certain whether this second layer has been applied across the whole canvas as a second ground, or whether it is an underlayer for the background (the cross‐section shows at least two further layers of background paint).

X‐radiography gives a rather patchy image suggesting an uneven application of the ground in broad vertical strokes from top to bottom (fig. 1). Also visible in the X‐radiographs, and in infrared reflectography, are a number of small changes made during the painting of the composition. There are changes to the shape of the hat, the bow tying the boy’s hair, the contour of the shoulder and the way the coat and sleeve rest on the table. The shape of the table has also been changed on the right, as have some of the cards, in particular the right edge of the card facing the viewer of the ‘house of cards’.

More difficult to interpret are the technical images of the [page 107][page 108] boy’s face. In the infrared reflectogram the profile appears to have been changed very slightly but not significantly, and it appears that Chardin underpainted the boy’s eye socket with darker paint, something he also did, but less emphatically, for the girl in NG 4077. In the X‐radiographs the lighter parts of the flesh paint show clearly, but the profile, especially the shape of the nose, is indistinct, with opaque brushstrokes crossing the end of the nose, blurring the contour. The head appears to be surrounded by an area of paint with a curved boundary. It has not been possible to determine what is causing this in the X‐radiography images, but it may be that the area where the head was to be painted was prepared more carefully, perhaps with an extra layer of ground, or some kind of light underpaint. No underdrawing was made visible with infrared reflectography.

**Fig. 1**
X‐radiograph of NG 4078. © The National Gallery, London

Along the edges of the painting are very small pin holes made at regular intervals of 2.7 cm, a measurement that is nearly equivalent to one Ancien Régime pouce. This suggests a squaring up of the painted image using a rule marked in pouces to place pins to which threads could be attached vertically and horizontally above the paint surface. The sharp edges of the pin holes indicate that the paint had dried before the pins were inserted, so that the squaring up was done with the intention of NG 4078 being reproduced, rather than as an aid to its being itself a reproduction of an existing picture.

Discussion

The subject of a young boy constructing a house of cards was one that Chardin painted several times.¹³ No other contemporary painted version of NG 4078 is known, but there is evidence that a copy in some medium, not necessarily paint, was planned (see Technical Notes). This reinforces the generally accepted view that NG 4078 was the painting exhibited by Chardin at the 1741 Salon. The other autograph variations of the subject are at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (fig. 2),¹⁴ the Louvre (fig. 3),¹⁵ and the National Gallery of Art, Washington (fig. 4).¹⁶ Their relative chronology has been proposed by Rosenberg and Temperini as follows: the earliest is the Waddesdon picture, which was conceived as a pendant to Chardin’s Lady taking Tea (Glasgow, Hunterian Museum) of 1735; the Louvre picture is considered to fall stylistically between the Waddesdon picture and those of Washington and London; then comes NG 4078 which, although exhibited at the 1741 Salon, has been considered on stylistic grounds to date to 1735–6, a conclusion possibly influenced by Rosenberg and Temperini, and Conisbee (wrongly in the present author’s view) seeing NG 4078 as a pendant to NG 4077,¹⁷ but primarily on stylistic grounds;¹⁸ finally the Washington picture, most likely conceived as a pair to Girl with a Shuttlecock (private collection), which is signed and dated 1737 and was probably exhibited at that year’s Salon. This chronology has been adopted by Conisbee, who cited with approval the opinion of Rosenberg.¹⁹ Marianne Roland Michel called the Washington painting the most formally rigorous and fully realised of the group, but she nevertheless considered NG 4078 to have been painted later, namely shortly before the 1741 Salon.²⁰

Chardin often exhibited his works many years after their execution. Consequently the fact that NG 4078 was exhibited four years after the probable date of the Washington picture cannot without more information determine their relative chronology. Nevertheless, and without denying the very high quality of Washington’s picture, the chronology proposed by Rosenberg and Conisbee is problematic. Firstly, it assumes a straight‐line stylistic development on the part of the artist, something of which we cannot be certain, especially in the case of a work that was commissioned, as presumably was NG 4078, as opposed to one executed speculatively. Secondly, the chronology proposed assumes that Chardin, who laboured over his compositions, painted four different variations on the same theme within the brief period 1735–7. Thirdly, it takes no account of the fact that NG 4078 was exhibited in 1741 as a portrait, and in particular a portrait of a child identified in the Salon livret whose appearance would have markedly changed since its supposed date of 1735–6.²¹ Fourthly, when in 1743 or soon thereafter Aveline made a print after the Washington picture (fig. 5), one that certainly post‐dated Lépicié’s print after NG 4078 (since Aveline adopted the latter’s verses), he added, as Conisbee noted,²² a strong diagonal shadow behind the boy’s back. This falls on his back at virtually the same point as it does in NG 4078. One could conclude from this that the absence of a shadow in the Washington picture was perceived by Aveline, presumably with Chardin’s approval, as a lacuna in the composition. If that is correct, it would follow that the Washington picture preceded the London one. Arguably its commissioning by Chardin’s friend, the Paris marchand mercier Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, was prompted by the (probable) exhibition at the 1738 Salon of Le portrait du fils de M. Godefroy, joailler, appliqué à voir tourner un toton (Paris, Louvre), a painting similar in size, dimensions, composition and theme.²³ For this combination of reasons a date before 1738 is unlikely.

[page 109]

Is it possible to suggest a more precise date? The boy’s costume does not assist. Three‐cornered hats were worn throughout the century; deep cuffs can be seen worn by males in, for example, Watteau’s L’Enseigne de Gersaint (1721; Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg ), Nattier’s Portrait of Louis Toqué (1739; Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum), and Chardin’s own L’Étude de dessin painted in 1749 and now known through the print after it by Le Bas. The sleeve buttons have been characterised as octagonal of around 1730–40,²⁴ but it is not clear that they are octagonal rather than a hybrid of octagonal and circular. It has been suggested that the rapid adjoining brushstrokes of the wall in the background, although more regular, resemble the manner [page 110] of painting of the background of Chardin’s Dead Rabbit and Copper Saucepan (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), which was bought in Paris by Count Tessin between 1738 and 1741.²⁵ But stylistic similarities, even if correct, need to be treated with some circumspection for reasons already given. A date after 1738 is further supported by the circumstances surrounding its presumed patron, Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, seigneur de La Motte.²⁶ His wife, Marie‐Joseph Rigo (died in Baugé on 5 March 1763),²⁷ whose subsequent portrait by Chardin, now known only through Louis Surugue’s print (fig. 6), was exhibited at the 1743 Salon,²⁸ had been born in the diocese of Liège, outside the Kingdom of France. No doubt principally to avoid the ‘droit d’aubaine’, the rule by which the property of a foreigner resident in France had to be forfeited to the French Crown on his or her death,²⁹ she obtained a grant of naturalisation in January 1730 (on her declaration, among other things, that she had lived in France for several years).³⁰ The droit d’aubaine did not affect those who had children born in France but, because of the high risk of infant mortality, it cannot be concluded that she was childless at that time. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the application for naturalisation was connected to her planned marriage to Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, which occurred in 1731 (the precise date is unknown).³¹ Assuming compliance with the norms of bourgeois morality, that year is the earliest when the Le Noir fils might have been born. If it is accepted that the child in NG 4078 is no younger than nine years old, the painting must post‐date that in Washington, making it the last of Chardin’s pictures on the theme of a house of cards. The date here proposed for NG 4078 is therefore 1740 or 1741.

**Fig. 2**
Jean‐Siméon Chardin, *The House of Cards*, 1735. Oil on canvas, 79 × 99 cm. Waddesdon, The Rothschild Collection (The National Trust). WADDESDON © 2017. Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Photo Scala, Florence

**Fig. 3**
Jean‐Siméon Chardin, *The House of Cards*, about 1735. Oil on canvas, 77 × 68 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. PARIS Musée du Louvre © RMN‐Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot

**Fig. 4**
Jean‐Siméon Chardin, *The House of Cards*, about 1737. Oil on canvas, 82.2 × 66 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection. WASHINGTON, DC National Gallery of Art, Washington © Courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

**Fig. 5**
Pierre‐Alexandre Aveline after Jean‐Siméon Chardin, *The House of Cards*, after 1743. Engraving, 28 × 19 cm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. PARIS Bibliothèque Nationale de France © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

**Fig. 6**
Louis Surugue after Jean‐Siméon Chardin, *L’Instant de la Méditation*, 1747. Engraving and etching, 20 × 25.4 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. PARIS Musée du Louvre © RMN‐Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado

At some date between 1753 and 1758 Jean‐Jacques Le Noir moved with his family to Baugé near Angers.³² On 4 November 1758 he bought the nearby château de la Motte, and three days later his son (the child portrayed in NG 4078), who became known as Jean‐Alexandre Le Noir de La Motte, married 16‐year‐old Thérèse‐Françoise Pioger de Pontigné. At some point thereafter Jean‐Alexandre succeeded to the post of Receveur des Tailles à Baugé previously held by his father‐in‐law, Pierre Pioger de Pontigné. In 1778 his father Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, known in Baugé as ‘Bonhomme Le Noir’ on account of his good humour, sold the land at La Motte, reserving however the right for the name ‘de La Motte’ to be used by Jean‐Alexandre and his wife for the rest of their respective lives. Jean‐Alexandre died at Baugé on 11 June 1781. He left eight children: Charles‐Marie‐Alexandre; Henriette‐Eulalie, who signed herself Henriette La Motte and who in 1792 married Louis‐Antoine Lemaignan (also known as Louis des Boiseries and as Lemaignan de la Desboiseries);³³ Alexandre‐Julien‐Hilaire (born 1766?), who became titular receveur‐général des finances following his father’s death;³⁴ Félicité‐Victoire‐Adelaïde, who married the future historian Jean‐François Bodin in 1794;³⁵ Amand‐Aubin‐Amator; Julie‐Agathe‐Rosalie; Julien‐Hippolyte; and Rose (or Rosalie). Another child, Marie‐Thérèse‐Alexandrine, predeceased her father. It was left to Jean‐Jacques Le Noir and his daughter‐in‐law, Thérèse‐Françoise, to bring up the children, the latter taking particular care to complete the education of Henriette and Adelaïde.

The theme of a child with a house of cards was familiar to Chardin’s contemporaries from seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century images. In addition to Chardin’s own variations of the theme, a child or children either building or destroying a house of cards feature, for example, in Charles‐Antoine Coypel’s presumed portraits of Dominique and Pierre d’Hariague painted in 1725 (now known through an engraving by François Joullain);³⁶ Jean‐Michel Liotard’s engraving and etching of 1742 or later after François Boucher’s Le château de cartes;³⁷ Charles‐Nicolas Cochin the Younger’s etching L’Enfance of 1740;³⁸ François Hubert Drouais’s Boy with a House of Cards (New York, Metropolitan Museum), known in two versions and the subject of an engraving;³⁹ and an engraving by Jacques Bacheley after Gravelot of about 1750, Le Château de Cartes.⁴⁰ Engravings after these images were usually accompanied by moralising verses, like those appended to Lépicié’s print after NG 4078. Quite apart from these verses, the ubiquity of images associating the house of cards with the ephemeral nature of human endeavour would have been inescapable to Chardin and his contemporaries. As well as emphasising the fragility of the house of cards, less usually (perhaps because card playing was so widespread a leisure pursuit), such verses might contain a warning against gambling, as in Joullain’s print after Charles‐Antoine Coypel.⁴¹ They probably do not express Chardin’s thoughts in relation to NG 4078, although it is reasonable to assume that he as much as his printmakers were aware of the moralising possibilities that a derivative print might offer to a wider market. There is evidently a reference to gambling in the chip and coin on the green baize of the table, and building a card castle is itself a harmless form of gambling in the sense that the chance of collapse of the whole edifice increases with the addition of each card. Only to that extent could NG 4078 be interpreted as a warning about gambling, but no more, [page 111]since there is no evidence that the child is accompanied by anyone with whom he might wager. On the contrary these items, probably left over from a game of piquet,⁴² appear not to interest him at all. His concentration is not on the colour or the value of the card he is holding, but on its reverse, which is blank, that is to say only on its value as a ‘brick’ in the house of cards. Indeed, some of the cards in NG 4078, as in the Washington picture, have been folded so presumably rendering them useless for gambling.

In NG 4078, and in his other paintings on the same theme, Chardin depicts a process rather than a moral. The process depicted may not be just that of building, or learning how to build. The house of cards in NG 4078 has one complete storey with a second about to be added, whereas Chardin’s contemporaries typically depicted houses of cards two or more storeys high. Arguably his emphasis on the incompleteness of the house of cards was a visual metaphor for the incompleteness of the child. Katie Scott has proposed that card castles are to be seen as signs of the imagination and that one should interpret the cards literally for knowledge of the content of that fantasy. Thus in the case of NG 4078 the boy is playing at military engineering, building models of castles he has in mind.⁴³ One may note that it was not the boy who commissioned the picture but his father, a merchant and maker of high‐end furniture, and it may be that Chardin alludes not to the child’s fantasy but to the father’s wish to see his son follow him into a business that was in both senses constructive.

While the faces of the cards are not fully visible, they are most likely a nine of diamonds forming part of the ‘castle’, and a seven or eight of clubs and jack of spades standing on end at the right.⁴⁴ The red card is likely no more than a means of drawing the eye into the picture space. The jack might have seemed appropriate for a young boy, and the choice of a spade, the senior suit, flattering, but when juxtaposed with a card from the other black suit would have also alluded to the sitter’s name, Le Noir.

Other compositions by, or attributed to, Chardin and treating the same theme are known to have been one of a pair. The Waddesdon Manor painting formed part of the same lot as A Lady taking Tea (Glasgow, Hunterian Museum) in a sale in 1765.⁴⁵ The studio copy of the Waddesdon picture in the Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, was paired in the Jacques Doucet Collection, Paris, at the turn of the last century with a version of Les Bulles de Savon (New York, Metropolitan Museum), and in 1779 the latter picture was paired with another now lost version of The House of Cards.⁴⁶ The question of whether NG 4078 was a pendant to NG 4077 is discussed (and rejected) on pp. 102–3. Nor is it likely that the lost portrait of Mme Le Noir was made as a pendant to NG 4078 – even assuming, as is likely, that Surugue’s print reversed the original – because to judge by the dimensions of the print its ratio of height to width differs too greatly from that of NG 4078.⁴⁷

General References

Blanc 1862–3, p. 15; Goncourt (1882) 2007, p. 110;⁴⁸ National Gallery Trafalgar Square and Millbank Directors’ Reports 1925, p. 3; National Gallery Trafalgar Square Catalogue 1929, p. 62; Wildenstein 1933, no. 145; Davies 1946, p. 16; Davies 1957, p. 29; Wildenstein 1963, no. 208 (as about 1741); Laclotte 1965, p. 26 (as about 1741); Wildenstein 1969, no. 208 (as painted about 1741); Rosenberg 1983, no. 105; Wilson 1985, p. 94; Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, pp. 107–8, ill. pp. 109, 110 (detail), no. 106 (as painted in 1735–6); Sanchez 2004, p. 342, note 956.

Notes

1 In the Directors’ Report published in 1926 and in the Gallery’s 1929 catalogue the initial digit on the counter was read as an 8. The initial digit could also be read as a 3, but on balance 5 looks more likely; it was so read in Davies 1946 and 1957. (Back to text.)

2 There described as ‘CHARDIN. Le Château de Cartes. Très joli tableau de ce maître avec sa gravure.’ In 1850 the Waddesdon and Washington paintings, which like NG 4078 were the subject of engravings, were in the Harcourt collection at Nuneham Courtenay and the Hermitage, St Petersburg respectively. The picture in the Auguste sale might have been a copy of either; or a hitherto unknown copy of NG 4078; or NG 4078 itself. John Webb (q.v.) was a frequent visitor to Paris and was buying paintings by 1850. In the same volume of Directors’ Reports NG 4078 was also said to have been lot 107 of the James Stuart sale, Christie & Manson, London, 18 April 1850, £12 to Chaplin, but, as Davies pointed out in 1946 and again in 1957, that picture, described as ‘A boy playing with a pack of cards’, was sold the day before the sale of Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress (NG 4077) and therefore not as its pendant, and was attributed to Greuze. In addition the auctioneer’s marks on the back of NG 4077 are absent from the back of NG 4078. It seems unlikely that lot 107, if by Chardin, would have been miscatalogued, since Greuze’s works were already familiar to the English art market. Indeed, other paintings by him were in the James Stuart sale. (Back to text.)

3 See the Appendix to this volume on the NG website. (Back to text.)

4 In the Sedelmeyer sale, Chevallier et Féral, Paris, 16–18 May 1907, lot 189, which is an anonymous pastiche of the picture now at Waddesdon Manor and is now in the Musée Cognacq‐Jay (inv. J.20/B.20), this was wrongly identified as the painting exhibited at the 1741 Salon: Burollet 1980, no. 23. According to Lady Dilke (1899, pp. 181–2), Jacques Doucet owned ‘une jolie réplique’ of the 1741 Salon painting. It is the studio copy now in the Oskar Reinhart collection, Winterthur: 1979 Paris, p. 210, and Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, no. 103A. (Back to text.)

5 NG 4078 did not travel to the Cleveland and Boston legs of this exhibition. (Back to text.)

6 Rosenberg (1979, p. 220) noted various sales occurring between 1832 and 1849, as well as an inventory made around 1800, which mention a picture by Chardin of a young man making a house of cards. As he points out, none gives a description sufficient to identify the picture with any particular composition of the subject by Chardin. To these may be added the sale of D.S.G., artiste, Paris, 25 March 1811 and following, lot 61, 15 francs to Jacques Langlier, presumably the picture, as noted by Rosenberg, in the Langlier sale, 24–27 September 1832, lot 9; and the 1850 sale of Jules‐Robert Auguste (see Provenance). (Back to text.)

7 Bocher 1876, p. 16. See also Hempelmann 1999, no. 55 (entry by D. Hempelmann on the example of Lépicié’s engraving in Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. IX, 550, 38). (Back to text.)

8 Bocher 1876, p. 16. (Back to text.)

9 The line is quoted from the poem The Ladle, A Tale by Matthew Prior. (Back to text.)

10 As was noted by Sir Charles Holmes (1925, p. 33). (Back to text.)

11 A thread‐count, taken from the X‐radiographs, shows there to be 14 horizontal and 13 vertical threads per square centimetre. (Back to text.)

12 Simon 2009 (online). (Back to text.)

13 For other versions, both autograph and not, [page 112]extant in 1979, see Rosenberg 1979, no. 65, pp. 218, 220, 236, and note 6 above. One may also note an oval painting, lot 108 of the 1907 Sedelmeyer sale (see note 4) illustrated in the sale catalogue and described as Jeune Garçon faisant un Château de Cartes by Chardin, 79 × 62.5 cm. This appears to be a pastiche. (Back to text.)

14 Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, no. 103, and no. 103A for a picture in the Oskar Reinhart collection, Winterthur, regarded by the authors as a good studio variant copy. (Back to text.)

15 Ibid. , no. 104, in which the authors note no. 104B to be a good studio replica, and doubt the autograph status of a now destroyed variant once in the Henri de Rothschild collection catalogued as no. 104C. (Back to text.)

16 Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, no. 110; Conisbee 2009, pp. 69–74. (Back to text.)

17 For the argument against NG 4077 and 4078 being pendants see the entry for NG 4077 in the present volume. (Back to text.)

18 According to Pierre Rosenberg (1999, p. 218), ‘For reasons primarily connected with the execution of [NG 4078] – particularly its enamelled, creamy appearance (unfortunately it has suffered from being relined) – Marianne Roland Michel’s hypothesis (that it was painted just before the Salon of 1741) does not convince us. The comparison with Girl with Shuttlecock, exhibited in the Salon of 1737, is the deciding factor.’ Rosenberg could not have been aware of the further facts concerning Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, which were published in Faroult 1999. (Back to text.)

19 Conisbee 2009, p. 71. (Back to text.)

20 Roland Michel 1994, p. 233, note 30. (Back to text.)

21 Roland Michel made a similar point ( ibid. , p. 233). (Back to text.)

22 Conisbee 2009, p. 71. (Back to text.)

23 Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, no. 112. An engraving of it by Lépicié was published in 1742. The child portrayed, Auguste‐Gabriel Godefroy, was born in 1728. The ratio of its height to width is 1:1.13; that of NG 4078 is 1:1.196. (Back to text.)

24 Russell‐Smith 1957, p. 37, fig. 6 and p. 38. (Back to text.)

25 The suggestion was made in Roland Michel 1994, p. 164. The painting is catalogued as Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, no. 93. (Back to text.)

26 Le Noir, ‘négociant à Paris et dame Marie‐Joseph Rigo son épouse, amis communs des parties’, were among the witnesses to Chardin’s engagement on 1 November 1744 to Françoise‐Marguerite Pouget: Rosenberg 1979, p. 232. In 1744 Le Noir dedicated to Chardin an engraving by J.‐P. Le Bas after a landscape by Boucher titled Seconde Vue de Beauvais, and is given as the owner of the painting engraved by Le Bas as Vue des Environs de Beauvais with a dedication to Monsieur le Febvre, whose coat of arms the print bears (Jean‐Richard 1978, p. 323, no. 1341 and no. 1340, p. 322). As Alastair Laing has advised, there is no indication that Le Noir owned the original of Jean‐Richard 1978, no. 1341, the print of which bears no coat of arms, nor do the pictures ever seem to have been together in their history. It is even likely that one, if not both, of the locations given is fanciful. The identification of the sitter in NG 4078 as the son of Le Noir has never been doubted, but in addition it receives indirect support from its apparently not being questioned by Mariette when he visited the 1741 Salon with Friedrich Karl von Hardenberg, a minister of the Hanoverian court (Köhler 2005). (Back to text.)

27 See the Registres paroissiaux et d’état civil des Archives départementales de Maine‐et‐Loire (available online at www.archinoe.fr). (Back to text.)

28 In 1743 Chardin had exhibited at the Salon (no. 57) the now lost Tableau représentant le Portrait de Mad. Le*** tenant une Brochure, which can be identified as a portrait of Mme Le Noir (Faroult 1999, p. 142) from the dedication of the print after it by Louis Surugue, which was announced in the Mercure de France, October 1747, p. 138. (Back to text.)

29 ‘Aubain’ and ‘Aubaine’, Encyclopédie , vol. 1, p. 863; and see generally Sahlins 2004, pp. 84–5. (Back to text.)

30 AN , O/1/224, fol. 248. The Lettres de naturalité were registered at the Chancellerie de Versailles on 30 March 1730 ( AP , DC 6/6, fol. 256r). (Back to text.)

31 Neil Jeffares (‘Le Noir, Simon‐Bernard. Paris 1729–1791’, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, online edn) notes that Le Noir was a correspondent of Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert as well as an amateur poet and art collector. I am grateful to Udo van de Sandt for drawing my attention to this reference in connection with Jean‐Jacques Le Noir. Additional information on Jean‐Jacques is contained there and in Faroult 1999, p. 142: he lived in the rue Mauconseil in the parish of Saint‐Eustache, Paris, where he remained until at least 1753. At some point between 1753 and 1758 he set up in business in Baugé with his son. Le Noir had started as an ironmonger, then speculated in privateering, initially with success, before losing money; after selling ‘un superbe cabinet de tableaux’ he transported the remainder of his collection to Baugé. This consisted of 75 pictures, of which the catalogue is now lost. He sold these in 1781 for 14,000 livres to his friend Pierre‐Louis Éveillard de Livois. (Back to text.)

32 Additional information here on members of the Le Noir family derives from Port 1876 and Gazeau 1930. I am grateful to Neil Jeffares for alerting me to these publications. He states that on 26 August 1769 Jean‐Alexandre Le Noir, Jean‐Jacques’s son, settled an annuity of 2,000 livres on Chardin, his wife and father. (Back to text.)

33 Henriette died at Baugé on 8 June 1826. Louis‐Antoine Lemaignan, who was sous‐préfet for Baugé from 1800 to 1804, was born there on 24 August 1747, and died there on 5 February 1835. He successively held other administrative or elected positions: Port 1876. (Back to text.)

34 Alexandre‐Julien‐Hilaire was still a minor so the charge was exercised by one sieur de La Ferrière under the watchful supervision of Alexandre’s mother until 1791. (Back to text.)

35 Bodin was payeur de l’Armee de l’Ouest at the time of the marriage. He died on 5 February 1829. The couple lived in Saumur and had a son, Félix. After Adelaide died on 29 August 1799, Félix was looked after by his maternal grandmother Thérèse‐Françoise until her death at Saumur on 28 July 1806. (Back to text.)

36 See Lefrançois 1994, no. 63. (Back to text.)

37 See Hempelmann 1999, no. 258 (entry by D. Hempelmann). (Back to text.)

38 Ibid. , no. 259 (entry by D. Lüdke). (Back to text.)

39 On the ubiquity of this theme (in England as well as France) see also Pointon 1993, p. 260, note 116. One might note also a drawing by Charles‐Nicolas Cochin the Younger, engraved by N. Dupuis, Two Children fighting over a Stack of Cards, sold at Christie’s, New York, 30 January 1998 (lot 273). Examples of an adult satirised shown seated at a table with a house of cards are two drawings, one by Charles‐Germain de Saint‐Aubin (Waddesdon Manor, National Trust, inv. 675.323) and an etching, A Great Archetect [sic] Modelling or Sir William Chambers in his Study (British Museum, inv. 1851,0901.506), published in London in 1791 by S.W. Fores. (Back to text.)

40 Part of engraving no. 6 of the series Petits Jeux d’enfants illustrated by Gravelot and engraved by Jacques Bacheley, an example of which is in the Musée national de l’éducation, Rouen (inv. 1979.35190). (Back to text.)

41 Snoep‐Reitsma (1973, p. 209) noted negative comments about card‐playing. However, Diderot took a more pragmatic approach, noting the tax yield on playing cards and suggesting that this might be increased by reducing the tax. His main complaint concerned the poor design of playing cards: Denis Diderot, ‘Cartes’, Encyclopédie , vol. 2, p. 715. There also existed playing cards that combined an educational purpose, for example a piquet pack of 32 cards each with a map of a different part of the world (British Museum, inv. 1982,U.4596.1‐32), and another pack with engraved illustrations of, and information about, figures from Greek mythology (British Museum, inv. 1938,0719.7.1‐22). (Back to text.)

42 Given the size of the table, it is difficult to imagine it accommodating more than two people, the number appropriate for piquet. The game, a combination of skill and chance, required 32 cards from the ace down to and including the seven: see Diderot in Encyclopédie , vol. 2, p. 711, and anon., ‘Piquet’, Encyclopédie , vol. 12, p. 650. The two folded upright cards, with faces partly visible, are a jack of spades and a six, seven or eight of clubs, to judge from the spacing of the pips. The seven or eight of clubs would be consistent with the game of piquet. The red card forming part of the ‘castle’ could be a four, five, six or nine of diamonds, but only the last would have been used in piquet. (Back to text.)

43 K. Scott, ‘Chardin: On the Art of Building Castles’, in Carey 2012, p. 41. (Back to text.)

44 See note 42, and for the identification of the jack of spades see the similarly designed jack of hearts ill. ibid. , fig. 29, p. 43. (Back to text.)

45 A Catalogue of the Noble Collection of Pictures from the Grand Cabinets of Cardinal Mazarine, and Prince Carignan Duke D’ Valentinois, London, Prestage, 26–28 February 1765, lot 37. The seller of this lot was an anonymous individual: Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, no. 102, p. 237. (Back to text.)

46 Trouard sale, 22 February 1779, lot 44. Rosenberg has pointed out that the discrepancy in quality between the paintings in New York and Winterthur speak against their having been paired in the Trouard sale: Rosenberg 1979, p. 210. At the Lille Salon of 1783 a certain Mlle *** exhibited two oval pastels, 13 pouces × 10 pouces: ‘106. Un jeune Garçon s’amusant à faire un Château de cartes. / 107. Une jeune Fille faisant des boules de savon’: Maës 2004, p. 209. (Back to text.)

47 Bocher (1876, no. 26) gives the dimensions of the print as 20.2 × 25.4 cm, giving a ratio of height to width of 1:1.26. The ratio for NG 4078 is 1:1.19. (Back to text.)

48 The provenances proposed by the Goncourts as possibilities are incorrect. (Back to text.)

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

John Webb (1799–1880) and Edith Cragg (died 1925)

Studio of François Boucher, Les Deux Confidentes (NG 4080)
Jean‐Siméon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress (NG 4077)
Jean‐Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards (Portrait of Jean‐Alexandre Le Noir) (NG 4078)
Jean‐Baptiste Pater, Fête galante with a Couple dancing, Musicians and Onlookers (NG 4079)

John Webb has been called the most important English dealer in the period 1830–70, and the one who also had the greatest impact on the South Kensington Museum.¹ His father was Charles Webb (1774–1849) whose business, conducted at various addresses in Old Bond Street and Piccadilly,² was to recover gold and silver thread from clothes and textiles. Webb has been described as having been ‘born into the luxury trade and in the midst of a huge turnover of second‐hand goods, the very environment from which he would later obtain his own stock’.³

John Webb’s own business was as an upholsterer and cabinetmaker, trading first at 8 Old Bond Street from 1825 to 1851 and then until the late 1860s at 11 Grafton Street, just off New Bond Street.⁴ That Webb was recognised as an expert in the field of decorative furniture and upholstery is evidenced by his being appointed a member of the jury in that category for the 1851 Great Exhibition.⁵ In the years 1855–7 he made and supplied pieces of high‐quality reproduction furniture to the Marquess of Hertford, including a reproduction now in the Wallace Collection of a large three‐stage Boulle writing table, the original of which had been made for Maximilian Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria.⁶ Webb also made Pugin’s most important furniture for the palace of Westminster: among other things, the Royal Throne in the House of Lords and 16 chairs for the Prince’s Chamber.⁷

An important part of Webb’s activities was as agent for the South Kensington Museum and the British Museum, on whose behalf he bid at auctions in London and Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, including from the Bernal collection.⁸ He also reported to the South Kensington Museum on the Soltykoff collection in 1860, offering to buy objects on its behalf on which it was outbid, so that he could submit them later when funds became available. The museum acquired 26 objects at the sale, including the celebrated Gloucester Candlestick. Among other significant purchases which the museum made from Webb were medieval ivories, including the front cover panels of the Lorsch Gospels dating from about 810, and examples of modern manufactures bought from or through him the following year were shown at the Paris Exhibition. In 1869 Webb signed an agreement with the museum to help fund his retirement, whereby the latter would rent a large part of the dealer’s remaining stock with a view to its ultimate purchase. Most of the items were bought during 1871–4, Webb retiring in 1873. This unusual arrangement was encouraged by Matthew Digby Wyatt, in his capacity as art referee, who wrote that ‘the specimens assume an exceptional value from the fact of their having been collected by Mr Webb at a time when his eye and judgement were unrivalled amongst all those who enjoyed opportunities of inspection and purchase at home and abroad’.⁹ By about 1868 Webb was wintering at the Villa Hollandia in Cannes,¹⁰ and in 1872 he, or his son‐in‐law Cecil Webb Cragg, also leased Wrotham Place, Kent, where Henry Cole stayed in October of the following year.¹¹

Besides his dealing activities, Webb fostered art education and he himself amassed significant collections of paintings and works of art. In connection with the first activity he was one of 64 guarantors of £1,000 each who helped underwrite the costs of the Great Exhibition of 1862;¹² he was on the committee of, and for a few years a judge for, the Society of Arts’ competitions held to encourage art‐workmanship applicable to manufactures;¹³ and he was among the ‘well‐known connoisseurs’ who helped make as complete as possible the first instalments of the Universal Art Inventory, the purpose of which was supplied by its subtitle: consisting of brief notes of works of fine and ornamental art executed before A.D.1800, chiefly to be found in Europe, especially in connection with architecture and for the most part existing in ecclesiastical buildings: compiled for the use of the South Kensington Museum and the Schools of Art in the United Kingdom.¹⁴

On her death in 1925, John Webb’s daughter, Edith Cragg, who remained at Wrotham Place for the rest of her life,¹⁵ bequeathed to the Gallery the four paintings specified in the heading to this biography.¹⁶ Apparently she had been offered a large sum of money for the two Chardins, but preferred to leave them to the nation as a memorial to her father.¹⁷ According to the catalogue of her posthumous sale, which took place on 26 June 1925 at Christie’s, London, the paintings being sold had been collected by Webb.¹⁸

Webb’s activity as a collector of paintings remains to be analysed, but some indications can be offered here. According to Wainwright, his name occurred constantly as a buyer at auctions in London and Paris.¹⁹ However, this assessment is probably more applicable to the decorative arts than to old master paintings.²⁰ So far as paintings are concerned, to judge from the Christie’s catalogues for the period 1830–63 in the National Gallery library (admittedly a partial sample of the hundreds of catalogues produced by various auction houses during this period), his presence was more intermittent than constant.²¹ The matter is complicated by there having been a collector of the same name who lived until 1848;²² but to extrapolate backwards from the 1855 Bernal sale (discussed below), when Webb was more inclined to buy miniatures and small portraits on his own behalf than larger, more expensive, paintings, it is likely that his first purchases at Christie’s were of two small oval portraits by Sir A. More and Gonzales respectively at the posthumous sale on 12 June 1841 of the Marquess of Camden.²³ For similar reasons, it seems probable that he was the Webb who bought two portraits on enamel, one of Henry, Prince of Wales, the other of Frederick III of Saxony, both by Henry Bone and included in the artist’s sale of 1 May 1846. Webb bought a portrait of a young man said to be by Holbein at the 1842 Strawberry Hill sale (where he also bid on behalf of the Duke of Bedford for historical portraits), and he was a buyer at Christie’s on 4–5 May 1849 at the sale of the so‐called Montcalm Gallery when he bought two paintings by Giovanni Paolo Panini which were to be included in his daughter’s posthumous sale in 1925.²⁴ Thereafter, Webb bought three lots at each of the sales of William Coningham and R. Nicholson in 1849, one at the Robert Hutchison sale in 1851, and one at each of the two Samuel Woodburn sales in 1853 and 1854. In 1854 he also bought three paintings at the sale of Thomas Emmerson, bidding at a higher level than hitherto,²⁵ and in 1857 Watteau’s The Artist’s Dream at the James Goding sale for £37 16s. This last painting was acquired, presumably from Webb, by John Ashley, 6th Earl of Shaftesbury, by 1867.²⁶ None of these purchases was to reappear in the 1925 sale.²⁷ Indirect reinforcement for the proposal that Webb’s acquisitions during this period were limited derives from the fact that when Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress (NG 4077), one of the paintings which his daughter later bequeathed to the Gallery, was auctioned in 1850, it was not Webb but another dealer, Fuller, who bought it. Similarly, it was Fuller, not Webb, who in 1848 had bought another Chardin at the John Newington Hughes deceased sale, later to be auctioned in the 1925 sale of Edith Cragg deceased.²⁸ It is possible, however, that in one or both cases Fuller was acting as Webb’s agent. The apparent tentativeness of Webb’s acquisitions of paintings changed in 1855 when he emerged as a major buyer in all categories of works of art, including paintings, at the Ralph Bernal sale. Then, in addition to miniatures and mainly unattributed pictures sold under the heading ‘Small Portraits’, 55 pictures were sold to him.²⁹ ~~The Times~~ The Times would report in 1925 on the occasion of the Edith Cragg sale that ‘many appear to have been acquired at the great sale of Ralph Bernal in 1855’.³⁰ In fact of the 62 lots in the 1925 sale only one, a small panel by Bilcoq, can with reasonable certainty be identified with an item in the 1855 sale,³¹ and even in that case it was not bought by Webb then but only eight years later.³² It is clear that Webb was not acting as a collector at the sale, but as a dealer or agent.³³ When the catalogue of the 1855 sale was republished later that year with the names of those then in possession of the lots, nine of the paintings knocked down to Webb were shown as owned by the Duke of Hamilton, six by Charles Mills, four by John Allcard and three by each of Francis Baring and the Marquess of Londonderry. Other owners in 1857 of lots which had been knocked down to Webb included George R. Smith and Thomas Baring MP. By the end of 1855 only five of the 55 pictures Webb had bought remained in his possession.³⁴ From that it can be inferred that, unless Webb turned over his stock with astonishing rapidity, his purchases were in almost all cases made on behalf of clients. The most acquisitive buyer for whom Webb acted at the Bernal sale was Francis Barchard of Horsted Place, East Sussex, who acquired 11 sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century paintings.³⁵ Barchard had had Horsted Place built in 1850–1 in Tudor style with a staircase designed by Pugin,³⁶ and it was John Webb who supplied the furniture.³⁷ Since the Bernal pictures were likely of more interest as illustrations of historical costume than as aesthetic objects, Webb and Barchard might both have seen the former’s activity at the Bernal sale as not much more than an extension of his usual business of furniture supply. Horsted Place was built by George Myers, Pugin’s favourite builder.³⁸ Myers had also worked at Burton Closes, the summer residence near Bakewell, which another of Webb’s clients, the Quaker banker John Allcard (1779–1856), had built in about 1845–8 in an Elizabethan style with interiors designed by Pugin.³⁹ The four ex‐Bernal paintings in Allcard’s collection were seventeenth century and so not quite in keeping with the neo‐gothic/Elizabethan architecture of Burton Closes.⁴⁰ They may have been hung at one of Allcard’s other residences at Stafford Green, Essex, or Connaught Place, Hyde Park.⁴¹

The six ex‐Bernal pictures acquired by Charles Mills, a partner in the bank Glyn, Mills & Co, who would be created a baronet in November 1868, were attributed to artists working in the seventeenth and/or ~~eighteenth‐centuries~~ eighteenth centuries (two to ‘Mignard’, one to Lely, one to Palomino, one to Rigaud and one to Largillierre). There was no apparent connection between the period of the paintings and that of either of Mills’s residences, the Regency period Camelford House, Park Lane,⁴² or the neoclassical Hillingdon Court built in the 1850s.⁴³ However, if Mills hung the paintings at Hillingdon Court, it would fit in with the pattern of Webb acquiring pictures to furnish his clients’ newly built properties. Nevertheless, the period bias in Mills’s picture acquisitions from the Bernal sale was not really echoed by the Hillingdon collection of French furniture, which was known for porcelain‐mounted pieces of the second half of the eighteenth century.⁴⁴ Nor were all of Webb’s clients furnishing recently built properties.

After Barchard, the next most acquisitive buyer from the Bernal sale was William, 11th Duke of Hamilton.⁴⁵ His purchases were most likely all for his London townhouse, Hamilton House, Arlington Street, Piccadilly.⁴⁶ Two paintings ascribed to Vanvitelli, views of the Tuileries and the Seine and of the Pont Neuf respectively,⁴⁷ were hung on the principal staircase of Hamilton House. A half‐length portrait of Charles I ascribed in the Bernal sale to Mytens⁴⁸ was probably the painting in the corridor ascribed to Van Dyck in 1864.⁴⁹ According to the 1864 inventory of Hamilton House, the entrance hall contained portraits of Charles II, Madame de Maintenon, maréchal de Saxe, Prince Charles Edward and maréchal de Foix. The portrait of Prince Charles Edward was not among the paintings in the Bernal sale. Otherwise, the portraits inventoried were probably those ascribed respectively in the Bernal sale to Nason,⁵⁰ Mignard,⁵¹ Rigaud⁵² and again to Rigaud.⁵³ Finally, a portrait ascribed to Hughtenborg, and said to be of Princess Maria Clementina Sobieski of Poland (mother of Bonnie Prince Charlie), on horseback, was hung in the duke’s sitting room. Godfrey Evans has pointed out to me that the placing of this last portrait is a reflection of the 11th Duke’s interest in the Jacobites,⁵⁴ and that the duke’s purchase of portraits of Charles I and Charles II mirrors his keen appreciation of the importance of those kings to the Dukes of Hamilton.⁵⁵ He has suggested that the other Bernal portraits bought by the duke indicate his orientation towards France, partly in continuation of the interest of his father, who had important contacts at the Napoleonic court and bought outstanding Ancien Régime furniture, and partly reflecting the fact that the 11th Duke was himself married to a cousin of Napoleon III and involved in French court life.⁵⁶ Webb certainly acted for the 11th Duke in the London salerooms on at least one further occasion, buying on his behalf two items in 1860 at the John Swaby deceased sale.⁵⁷ Another connection with Webb was the 11th Duke’s collection of Limoges enamels, some of which he exhibited to eye‐catching effect at the 1862 South Kensington Exhibition,⁵⁸ of which Webb was one of the guarantors.⁵⁹

There is no reason to suppose that following the Bernal sale there was any significant change in Webb’s modus operandi. From 1856 until 1863 his purchases at Christie’s were again intermittent and, with the exception of the Bilcoq mentioned above, no painting so acquired formed part of his daughter’s posthumous sale in 1925.⁶⁰ During this period only one of Webb’s old master purchases among the sales that have been examined was for a sum in three figures: namely, a View of the Thames from Temple Gardens by Canaletto which fetched £141.⁶¹ Ralph Bernal’s collection was announced as a principal source when Webb himself came to sell Sèvres porcelain, (mainly) French furniture and 75 historical portraits at Christie’s in 1869, including Drouais’s Madame de Pompadour at a Tambour Frame, now in the National Gallery (NG 6440).⁶² As has been shown, this was not the case so far as paintings were concerned, where Webb was buying mainly on behalf of clients.⁶³ One painting that appeared both in the Bernal sale and Webb’s 1869 sale was a portrait of Joanna, Countess of Abergavenny. At the Bernal sale it was bought by Webb for Reginald Neville, Esq., for £54 12s. as by Holbein. It was sold by Webb in 1869 as by an unknown artist for £210.⁶⁴ Conceivably Webb was selling on Neville’s behalf, and this may have been the case with another Bernal painting which most likely reappeared in Webb’s 1869 sale: namely, a portrait by Mignard of Madame de Maintenon which Webb had bought in 1855 for the Duke of Hamilton.⁶⁵

Whether Webb was repurchasing pictures from clients, or selling on their behalf, the Bernal sale indicates the range of Webb’s clientele concerned with paintings. In addition to those for whom Webb acted at the Bernal sale, he had business relationships with the estate of Karl Aders, whose sixteenth‐century copy of Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb Webb housed for many years,⁶⁶ and with Lord Taunton, whose The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius by Crivelli (NG 739) was delivered to the National Gallery in 1864 from Webb’s Cork Street premises.⁶⁷

Webb’s collection of furniture, porcelain and other objets d’art was ultimately sold in 1925 by the executors of his daughter, Edith Cragg, and realised over £15,180 7s., most of the notable prices being achieved by items of the Louis XV or XVI periods.⁶⁸ Lots 116 and 117 of the 1925 paintings sale, two vedute there attributed to Francesco Guardi, were described as ‘from the Manfrini Gallery’, a reference to the Manfrin collection in Venice which was dispersed in the years 1856–97.⁶⁹ They were nos 375 and 376 of the catalogue of that collection published in 1856,⁷⁰ but were not in the sale of part of the collection which took place that year.⁷¹ They were not in the sale by one of the heirs to the collection, the Marchese Antonio Maria Plattis in Paris in 1870,⁷² nor do they appear in a catalogue published in 1872 of the paintings belonging to the other heir, the Marchese Bortolina Plattis,⁷³ so Webb most likely acquired the pictures by private treaty when he was in Venice in 1857.⁷⁴ The few facts available concerning the dates when Webb acquired the paintings that he left to his daughter suggest that his purchases as a collector occurred from the end of the 1840s when he was already well established in the furniture business, and that the amounts that he was prepared to venture were quite modest. The nature of what he collected was also somewhat different to the nature of the pictures in which he dealt. Since Webb’s sale in 1869 was announced as consequent on his moving from the Grafton Street premises,⁷⁵ it may be assumed that he was selling stock rather than part of his collection as such – that is if he made any clear distinction between the two categories. The 1869 sale consisted of 69 lots, of which only one, a decorative panel by de Witte, was not a portrait. Webb had also had a sale two years earlier.⁷⁶ This too was mainly of historical portraits and the low prices achieved suggest a surplus sale, perhaps an initial disposal in contemplation of retirement. By way of contrast, approximately one half of the paintings in the 1925 sale were other than portraits. As well as the bequests to the Gallery, the attributions in the 1925 catalogue suggest that Webb had a preference for French eighteenth‐century paintings, not unusual among collectors in the later nineteenth century. There were paintings by, or at least attributed to, Bilcoq, Boucher, Chardin, Drouais, Grimou, Lancret, Lemoine, Jean‐Baptiste van Loo, Nattier, possibly Perronneau,⁷⁷ Schall,⁷⁸ Vernet and Watteau. There was, however, also a smaller grouping of settecento pictures – the Guardis already mentioned, Canaletto, Panini, Vanvitelli and Zuccarelli – and there were other paintings attributed to masters as diverse as Arellano, Bassano, Cuyp, Holbein, Netscher, Rubens and Wilkie.⁷⁹ Such eclecticism perhaps echoed Webb’s activities as a furniture supplier, as ready to work to Pugin’s designs as he was to make reproduction Boulle.

NOTES

1 Wainwright 2002. Except where otherwise stated, the above account of Webb’s life and activities in connection with the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) is based on that article, to which I am much indebted. For additional information on Webb’s activities in relation to the South Kensington Museum, see also Davies 1999, passim; and for additional information on him as a furniture dealer, see Westgarth 2009, pp. 181–3. The ‘John Webb’ written of here cannot of course be the same person as the ‘John Webb’ whose posthumous sales of paintings took place on 8–10 and 24 February 1849 and who had died at Vanves, near Paris, in August 1848. (Back to text.)

2 Charles Webb’s final addresses were 48 Piccadilly and Park Hill House, Clapham: The Times, 21 April 1849, p. 9. For a summary description of the substantial property called Park Hill House, see Supplement to The Times, 18 March 1850. (Back to text.)

3 Wainwright 2002, p. 63. (Back to text.)

4 Originally John Webb was in partnership with Joseph Cragg who was married to Webb’s sister Anne. The partnership was dissolved in April 1828 with Webb receiving one‐third of the stock and carrying on the business alone: information kindly supplied by Ian Dungavell. From about 1857 until 1864 or later, Webb traded, or traded also, from 22 Cork Street, just east of New Bond Street: Watson 1956, p. 239; and NG 739 dossier, letter of 5 August 1864 from R.N. Wornum to John Webb. (Back to text.)

5 The Times, 30 May 1851, p. 6. (Back to text.)

6 Watson 1956, pp. 237–40 and pl. 94. In some cases Webb was not entirely open about the extent to which he mis‐described the objects he dealt in (Wainwright 2002, pp. 70–1), but he seems to have avoided any taint to his reputation during his lifetime, the Art Journal in its obituary stating that his ‘discrimination and taste, and, above all, his probity, had obtained for him for many years the position of trusted agent of the Government in their purchases’ (new series, vol. 19 (1880), p. 300). (Back to text.)

7 Levy 1995. (Back to text.)

8 Wainwright 2002 and the obituary of Webb (written by Henry Cole according to Clive Wainwright), The Times, 21 June 1880, p. 12. The sales of the Bernal collection occurred during 1853–5. (Back to text.)

9 Cited in Wainwright 2002, p. 70. According to The Times (24 June 1925, p. 13), after his retirement Webb’s business was carried on in Bond Street and elsewhere by Annoot, then by Robson, Radley and Mackay, and finally by R. Robson. (Back to text.)

10 Wainwright 2002, p. 70. For information on the Villa Hollandia, see dossiersinventaire.regionpaca.fr. Edith Cragg was also recorded living there in 1903: Le Littoral, 21 December 1903, p. 1. (Back to text.)

11 Wainwright 2002, p. 70. Wrotham Place is described in Pevsner as ‘two‐thirds of an Elizabethan mansion, of red brick with stone dressings, much tampered with in the C19’: Pevsner and Newman 1969, pp. 591–2. I am grateful to Clive Thomas, Chairman of Wrotham Historical Society for the date Wrotham Place was leased to the Webb Cragg family. He has informed me that the house was owned by Mary Anne Poynder (née Edmeades), who in 1873 left it to her cousin, General Henry Edmeades of Nurstead Court, Meopham. Webb died at Wrotham Place but, according to his will, he normally wintered at the Villa Hollandia, and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth, whom he probably married on 1 October 1835 at St George’s, Hanover Square, died there on 22 March 1894, leaving her effects valued at £11,926 13s. 7d. to her daughter, Edith Cragg: information kindly supplied by Ian Dungavell. Conceivably some of the pictures in Edith Cragg’s 1925 sale had been inherited by her from her mother. (Back to text.)

12 The Times, 9 March 1861 (‘The proposed Great Exhibition of 1862’). (Back to text.)

13 Graham 1993. He had also been among the jurors for exhibits of decorative furniture and upholstery for the Great Exhibition of 1851: The Times, 30 May 1851, p. 6. (Back to text.)

14 The Times, 8 October 1877 (‘Universal Art Inventory’). The first part of this work was published in London in 1870. (Back to text.)

15 Stead 1998, p. 57. (Back to text.)

16 The date of Edith Cragg’s death was 18 March 1925: The Times, 19 March 1925, p. 1. Probate to her will dated 12 March 1921 and codicil of 8 August 1924 was granted on 22 May 1925. The bequest of paintings to the National Gallery was made by Clause 10 of the will. One of her executors was Sir Aston Webb, a successful architect whose works included the entrance facade of the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Back to text.)

17 Holmes 1925. Conceivably, Edith Cragg may have sold another French eighteenth‐century picture during her lifetime – namely, J.‐B. Perronneau’s Portrait of a Man (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 65.2652). The sitter was formerly identified as Francis Hastings, Earl of Huntington. According to a receipt in the Museum’s files, the painting was once in the collection of ‘Mrs. Cragg, England’ at some time before its acquisition by Wildenstein. Whether this was Edith Cragg is unknown, as is the earlier provenance of the painting, which was not in the 1925 sale. I am grateful to Victoria Reed for information about the Boston painting. For a summary of Edith Cragg’s bequests to the Victoria and Albert Museum, see The Times, 1 June 1925, p. 13. (Back to text.)

18 For a report on the separate sale by Edith Cragg’s executors of furniture, objets d’art and porcelain on 24 June 1925, see The Times, 25 June 1925, p. 11. She had inherited not only the paintings collection, but also the property in Cannes. She was buried at St George’s Church, Wrotham, where Webb himself and her husband, Lieutenant‐Colonel Cecil Webb Cragg of the Rifle Brigade (retired), had been buried. I am grateful to Amy Jones of Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Stuart Bligh of Kent County Council Archive and Local History Service for information about the burials. Information about Edith Cragg’s husband is from The Times, 24 June 1925, p. 13. He had died aged 61 on 21 February 1898 at Wrotham Place: The Times, 28 February 1898, p. 6, where his military career is summarised. (Back to text.)

19 Wainwright 2002, p. 64. (Back to text.)

20 I have not considered Webb’s acquisitions of modern British pictures which he made from time to time: for example, at the sale of Messrs. Lloyd Brothers on 29 March 1867: The Times, 30 March 1867, p. 12. (Back to text.)

21 The collection in the Gallery’s library is extensive but incomplete. (Back to text.)

22 See note 1. (Back to text.)

23 Lots 6 and 7. (Back to text.)

24 See lot 53 of day 20 of the Strawberry Hill sale for Webb’s purchase on his own behalf, and lot 94 of the following day for that on behalf of the Duke of Bedford. Lot 17 of the 1849 sale was described as ‘Pannini. Christ driving the Moneychangers out of the Temple and the companion’. Webb paid £8 8s. The pair formed lot 141 of the Edith Cragg sale in 1925 where described as ‘G.P. Pannini. Christ expelling the Money‐Changers; and The Stoning of St. Stephen: Designs for ceilings – a pair 2. 15½ in. by 10 in.’. They were sold for £42 to Lewis & Simmons. (Back to text.)

25 Lot 57, £53 11s. (‘A. Durer – Portrait of the Artist’); lot 63, £51 9s. (‘Van Eyck – St. Giles seated in a landscape’); and lot 72, £131 5s. (‘Watteau – A grand fête champêtre … a party of ladies, in a car drawn by four white horses, are halting on the left’). This is not Jean‐Baptiste Pater, Fête galante with a Couple dancing, Musicians and Onlookers (NG 4079), which has no horses in it, white or otherwise. No painting in the 1854 Thomas Emmerson sale corresponds to the Studio of Boucher Les Deux Confidentes (NG 4080), which The Times was later wrongly to state was acquired there by Webb: The Times, 24 June 1925, p. 13. I am grateful to Michael Hardy for sending the National Gallery a copy of this catalogue. (Back to text.)

26 Eidelberg 2002, pp. 218–19. The painting was lot 503 of the James Goding sale, sold on 21 February 1857. (Back to text.)

27 William Coningham sale, 9 June 1849, lots 1, 39, 54; Anon. (R. Nicholson of York deceased), 13–14 July 1849, lots 170, 189, 209; Robert Hutchison sale, 4 May 1851, lot 219; Samuel Woodburn sale, 24–25 June 1853, lot 120, and Samuel Woodburn sale, 15–25 May 1854, lot 49. (Back to text.)

28 Christie’s, 14–15 April 1848, lot 27, £2 6s. to Fuller, there described as ‘The Artist in his Studio’. It was lot 109 of the 1925 sale, and there identified as from the collection of J.N. Hughes: The Times, 24 June 1925, p. 13. (Back to text.)

29 According to a marked‐up copy of the sale catalogue in the National Gallery library. The total number excludes miniatures and lots appearing under the heading ‘Small Portraits’. (Back to text.)

30 The Times, 24 June 1925, p. 13. (Back to text.)

31 Lot 105 of the 1925 sale was described as ‘Bilcoq. A Lady, in slate‐coloured dress, seated by a table on which is a marble bust, books and other objects, holding an open book. Signed, and dated 1782. On panel – 7 in. by 6 in.’. It most likely corresponds to lot 625 of the Bernal sale of 1855 there described as ‘Bilcoq. A lady seated reading at a table, on which is a bust of Homer – 7 in. by 6 in.’, £11 11s. to Emery. Lot 99 of the 1925, a drawing after F. Zuccaro of Princess Elizabeth treading on a Tortoise, was described in the catalogue as from the Bernal sale. (Back to text.)

32 It was bought by Emery at the 1855 sale. Webb bought it at the G.H. Morland sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, 9 May 1863, lot 134, £13 13s. (Back to text.)

33 An undated bill from John Webb to the 11th Duke of Hamilton shows Webb charging 5 per cent commission on purchases made for the duke at the 1860 Swaby sale. I am grateful to Godfrey Evans for this information (letter of 17 September 2008). (Back to text.)

34 Illustrated Catalogue of the Distinguished Collection of Works of Art and Vertu … collected by the late Ralph Bernal, Esq … with the Purchasers’ Names and Prices, London 1855. The figures for the number of pictures bought and subsequently retained by Webb exclude miniatures and small, mainly unattributed, portraits, in which case Webb’s retentions were proportionately greater. (Back to text.)

35 According to annotations to the copy catalogue of the 1855 Bernal sale in the National Gallery’s library, which were apparently made on a visit to Horsted Place in 1933, and apparently informed by conversation with Mrs Barchard. (Back to text.)

36 Nairn and Pevsner 1965, p. 564. (Back to text.)

37 Jarvis 1972, no. B6. According to this source the furniture was supplied by Webb from an address at 13 George Street, Hanover Square, but ‘it is possible … that Webb acted as a middleman and obtained the Gothic furniture at Horsted from the firm of J.G. Crace, who normally executed Pugin’s designs, and may have had some furniture by him in stock at the time of his death in 1852’. (Back to text.)

38 Nairn and Pevsner 1965. (Back to text.)

39 Beale 2002, pp. 78, 83, note 43; and Pevsner and Williamson 1978, pp. 77–8. Paxton designed the conservatory at Burton Closes (Beale, op. cit. ). Apparently one of his daughters, Victoria, was married to George, one of John Allcard’s sons: Spectator, 31 January 1857, p. 33. (Back to text.)

40 For photographs of Burton Closes taken in about 1855, see Jan Stetka, Paxton and Pugin at Burton Closes, posted online in connection with planning application NP/DDD/0513/0409, at pam.peakdistrict.gov.uk. I am grateful to Jan K. Stetka for the information on Allcard’s other residences. ~~Allcard died at Connaught Place: The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, May 1856, p. 551.~~ (Back to text.)

41 Allcard died at Connaught Place: The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, May 1856, p. 551. (Back to text.)

42 For Camelford House, see British Library Cartographic Items Crace Port. 10.63; and Edward Walford, ‘Apsley House and Park Lane’, Old and New London: Volume 4, London 1878, pp. 359–75 at British History Online: www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol4/pp359-375 (Back to text.)

43 ‘Hillingdon, including Uxbridge: Introduction’, in Baker, Cockburn and Pugh 1971, pp. 55–69, at British History Online: www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/mddx/vol4/pp.55-69 (Back to text.)

44 Dauterman and Parker 1959–60; Rieder 2002; and The Dimitri Mavrommatis Collection: Important French Furniture and Sèvres Porcelain from the Chester Square Residence, London, Sotheby’s, London, 8 July 2008, lot 52. (Back to text.)

45 William Alexander Archibald Hamilton (1811–1863) succeeded to the title on the death of his father in 1852. (Back to text.)

46 I am grateful to Godfrey Evans for information about the ex‐Bernal paintings in the 11th Duke of Hamilton’s collection, and for sending me a transcript of relevant parts of Inventory of Household Furniture[,] Pictures[,] Rare China, Ornaments & c & c [at] Hamilton House[,] Arlington Street[,] Piccadilly London, December 1864 (Hamilton Archive, M4/78), which was compiled after the duke’s death the previous year. The papers of the Dukes of Hamilton and Brandon are held privately: the UK National Register of Archives notes , correspondence and papers of the 11th duke under record number NRAS2177 (information kindly supplied by Alison Lindsay). (Back to text.)

47 Lots 868 and 871 of the Bernal sale. (Back to text.)

48 Lot 796. (Back to text.)

49 Hamilton Archive, M4/78, p. 76. (Back to text.)

50 Lot 794, where the measurements are given as 46 x 36 in. Hamilton bought another portrait of Charles II at the Bernal sale (lot 653 ascribed to van Thulden), but its size (13 x 19 in.) was considerably smaller than the other portraits here noted as hanging in the entrance hall, making it a less likely companion. (Back to text.)

51 Lot 675, where said to have been bought at the Quintin Craufurd sale. On Craufurd, see Wine 2001, p. 252, note 1; and J.M.J. Rogister, ‘Craufurd, Quintin (1743–1819)’, ODNB (where the index entry describes him as ‘author and friend of the French royal family’). (Back to text.)

52 Lot 787, where described as a portrait of Marshal de Belle‐Isle, in armour, wearing the badge of the Saint‐Esprit and Golden Fleece. It was catalogued as by ‘Van Loo’ in Christie’s 1882 Hamilton Palace sale catalogue (lot 1114), but the post‐sale catalogue corrected the attribution to ‘H. Rigaud’ and the identification to ‘Mareschal Fouqet de Belle Isle, great grandson of the Minister of Louis XIV’, and noted that it had been lot 787 of the Bernal sale. (Back to text.)

53 Lot 786, where described as a portrait of ‘Marshal Vauban’. Catalogued as ‘Marechal de Foix’ by ‘H. Rigaud’ in the 1882 Hamilton Palace sale, it was identified as a portrait of ‘Vauban’ in the post‐sale catalogue with a reference to lot 786 of the Bernal sale added. (Back to text.)

54 On this interest, see Evans 2003, especially pp. 138–48. (Back to text.)

55 Charles I had bestowed the dukedom upon the family in 1643, and the first and second dukes had died supporting Charles I and Charles II in the Civil War. (Back to text.)

56 The duke died in Paris in July 1863. His body was taken to Glasgow on board a French man‐of‐war, while his widow and children stayed at Saint‐Cloud with the Empress: The Times, 17 July 1863, p. 12. (Back to text.)

57 Phillips, London, 5–13 March 1860. There is an undated bill from Webb in the Hamilton Archive, bundle 679, for ‘a portrait of Alexander King of Scotland’ and ‘a fine old miniature of Charles’, costing £54 and £32 respectively. Webb charged commission of £4 6s. on these, that is to say 5 per cent. Annotations at the bottom of the bill record that Webb was already owed £524 by the duke, so bringing the total outstanding to £614 6s. Webb apparently received £314 ‘By Cash’ on 19 July 1860, so reducing the outstanding amount to £300. I am grateful to Godfrey Evans for this information. (Back to text.)

58 McLeod 2001, p. 369. For a Limoges triptych which caught the eye of The Times correspondent, see p. 5 of the 9 June 1862 issue of that newspaper. For the pieces exhibited by the 11th Duke of Hamilton, see Robinson 1863, ~~passim~~ passim . (Back to text.)

59 Hamilton was also one of the guarantors for the purchase of the Soulages collection in 1858 (which Webb helped organise): The Times, 1 May 1858, p. 5. Hamilton spent much of his time in Paris, to which Webb made frequent visits: Wainwright 2002, passim. (Back to text.)

60 According to the catalogues which I have checked, Webb bought at the following Christie & Manson sales: Samuel Rogers dcsd., 28 April–20 May 1856; Thomas Emmerson dcsd., 21–31 May 1856; Edmund Phipps dcsd., 25 June 1859; Isambard K. Brunel dcsd., 20–21 April 1860; Anon. (Fauconnier?), 5 May 1860; Percy Ashburnham, 19 May 1860; Charles Scarisbrick dcsd., 17–18 May 1861; G.H. Morland, 9 May 1863; Walter Davenport Bromley, 12 June 1863; John Allnatt dcsd., 18 June 1863. (Back to text.)

61 Sale of the Hon. Edmund Phipps deceased, Christie’s, 25 June 1859, lot 51, £141. Whereabouts now unknown: see Constable 1976, vol. 2, p. 416, discussed under no. 425. (Back to text.)

62 Christie, Manson & Woods, 20 March 1869, lot 69. According to the catalogue, a number of the lots came from the Bernal collection, which was the subject of sales in the years 1853–5. See also the announcement of the 1869 sale in The Times, 18 March 1869, according to which the sale was a consequence of the sale by Webb of his property in Grafton Street. The date of the sale must therefore be the terminus ante quem for Webb’s retirement, which he had been contemplating since 1867: Wainwright 2002, pp. 69–70. Whether the 1869 sale was of Webb’s stock or of all or part of his private collection – if indeed he made a distinction between the two – is not clear. One picture in Webb’s 1869 sale then unsold and which reappeared in the 1925 sale was the portrait of Sir Henry Guildford by Holbein (lot 41 of the 1869 sale and lot 118 of the 1925 sale). (Back to text.)

63 Webb may have later bought some pictures from clients for whom he acted at the Bernal sale, but it has not been possible to identify pictures which were both in the Bernal sale and Webb’s 1869 sale other than as mentioned in the text. The lot descriptions in the 1869 sale are usually less precise than those in the 1855 sale, many of which included dimensions. (Back to text.)

64 Lot 928 of the Bernal sale and lot 40 of Webb’s 1869 sale where sold to Aerst. (Back to text.)

65 Lot 675 of the Bernal sale was described as ‘Mignard. Madame de Maintenon, in a yellow damask dress, and blue robe lined with ermine, her hand resting on a book, seated at a table, on which is an hour‐glass – 52 in. by 40 in. This important portrait was purchased at the Sale of Quintin Crawford.’ It then sold for £84. It was probably lot 55 of Webb’s 1869 sale and there described as ‘Mignard. Madame de Maintenon, in a yellow brocade dress and blue velvet robe lined with ermine, seated holding a book’ (£40 19s. to Durlacher). However, as Godfrey Evans has pointed out, it should be noted that the 1882 Hamilton Palace sale included (lot 1113) a portrait of Mme de Maintenon seated in an ermine robe and holding a book in her left hand which was the same size as lot 675 of the Bernal sale. (Back to text.)

66 Davies 1999, p. 108. (Back to text.)

67 NG Archive. (Back to text.)

68 The Times, 25 and 26 June 1925. (Back to text.)

69 On this collection, see Penny 2004, pp. 209–10; and Penny 2008, p. 321. (Back to text.)

70 Catalogo dei Quadri esistenti nella Galleria Manfrin in Venezia, Venice 1856. (Back to text.)

71 NG Archives, Board Minutes, 9 June 1856. (Back to text.)

72 Delbergue, Paris, 13–14 May 1870. I am grateful to Suz Massen of the Frick Art Reference Library for this information. (Back to text.)

73 [Nicoletti] 1872. (Back to text.)

74 For Webb’s visit to Venice with his wife, see Westgarth 2009, p. 182. (Back to text.)

75 Christie’s, 24–25 June 1925. (Back to text.)

76 Christie’s, 5 April 1867. (Back to text.)

77 According to Wildenstein, through whose hands passed Perronneau’s Portrait of a Man (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 65.2652), the painting had belonged to ‘Mrs. Cragg, England’. (Back to text.)

78 The painting by Schall was auctioned in London: Christie’s, 3 December 2008, lot 193. (Back to text.)

79 The Holbein portrait of Sir Henry Guildford, lot 118 of the 1925 sale, had been exhibited at South Kensington in 1866: The Times, 27 June 1925. (Back to text.)

Abbreviations

AN: Allgemeines Künstler Lexikon
AP: Archives privées

Technical abbreviations

Macro‐XRF: Macro X‐ray fluorescence
XRD: X‐ray powder diffraction

List of archive references cited

Archives privées, DC 6/6, fol. 256r: Lettres de naturalité, 30 March 1730
London, British Library, Cartographic Items, Crace Port. 10.63
London, National Gallery, Archive, curatorial dossier for NG739: R.N. Wornum, letter to John Webb, 5 August 1864
London, National Gallery, Archive, NG1/4: Minutes of the Board of Trustees, vol. IV, 12 November 1855–11 February 1871
Paris, Archives nationales, O/1/224, fol. 248
[privately held], Papers of the Dukes of Hamilton and Brandon, Hamilton Archive, bundle 679: John Webb, bill, undated
[privately held], Papers of the Dukes of Hamilton and Brandon, Hamilton Archive, M4/78: Inventory of Household Furniture[,] Pictures[,] Rare China, Ornaments & c & c [at] Hamilton House[,] Arlington Street[,] Piccadilly London, December 1864

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Wildenstein 1933: Wildenstein, Georges, Chardin, Paris 1933
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Wine 2001: Wine, Humphrey, National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth Century French Paintings, London 2001

List of exhibitions cited

Belfast, Ipswich and Bath 2001–2: Belfast, Ulster Museum; Ipswich, Christchurch Museum; Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Travelling Companions: Chardin and Freud, 2001–2
Bristol, Newcastle and London 2005: Bristol, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery; Newcastle, Laing Art Gallery; London, National Gallery, The Stuff of Life, 2005
Paris 1741: Paris, Paris Salon, 1741
Paris, Cleveland and Boston 1979: Paris, Grand Palais; Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Chardin 1699–1779, 1979 (exh. cat.: Rosenberg 1979)
Paris, Düsseldorf, London and New York 1999–2000: Paris, Grand Palais; Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof; London, Royal Academy of Arts; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chardin, 1999–2000 (exh. cat.: Rosenberg 1999)

The Organisation of the Catalogue

This is a catalogue of the eighteenth‐century French paintings in the National Gallery. Following the example of Martin Davies’s 1957 catalogue of the Gallery’s French paintings, the catalogue includes works by or after some artists who were not French: Jean‐Etienne Liotard, who was Swiss, Alexander Roslin, who was Swedish, and Philippe Mercier, born in Berlin of French extraction but working mainly in England.

Works are catalogued by alphabetical order of artist, and multiple works by an artist are arranged in order of date or suggested date. Works considered to be autograph come first, followed by works in which I believe the studio played a part, those which are studio productions, and later copies. Artists’ biographies are summary only.

The preliminary essay and all entries and artist biographies are by Humphrey Wine unless initialled by one of the authors listed on p. 4.

Each entry is arranged as follows:

Title: The traditional title of each painting has been adopted except where misleading to do so.

Date: The date, or the suggested date, is given immediately below the title. The reason for any suggested date is explained in the body of the catalogue entry.

Media and measurementS: Height precedes width, and measurements (in centimetres) are of the painted surface to the nearest millimetre ignoring insignificant variations. Additional information on media and measurements, where appropriate, is provided in the Technical Notes.

Inscriptions: Where the work is inscribed, the inscription is given immediately after the note of media and measurements. Information is derived from observation, whether by the naked eye or with the help of a microscope, by the cataloguer and a member of the Conservation Department. The use of square brackets indicates letters or numerals that are not visible, but reasonably presumed once to have been so.

Provenance: Information on former owners is provided under Provenance and the related endnotes. A number of significant owners, including Sir Bernard Eckstein; Ernest William Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe; John Arthur and Mary Venetia James; Yolande Lyne Stephens; Sir John Pringle; Mrs Mozelle Sassoon; James Stuart of Dunearn; John Webb; and Consuelo and Emilie Yznaga, are discussed further in an appendix to this volume on the National Gallery website, ‘Former Owners of the Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings’ (see ~~https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/national‐gallery‐catalogues/former‐owners‐of‐the‐eighteenth‐century‐french‐paintings~~ https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-resources/national-gallery-catalogues/former-owners-of-the-eighteenth-century-french-paintings-in-the-national-gallery-1 ).

Exhibitions: Long‐term loans to other collections have been included under this heading, but they do not appear in the List of Exhibitions at the end of the catalogue. Exhibitions in that list appear in date order.

Related Works: Dimensions are given where known, and works are in oil on canvas unless otherwise indicated. They have not been verified by ~~first hand~~ first‐hand inspection. Dimensions of drawings or prints, other than in captions to illustrations, are not given unless they are exceptional. Dimensions are given in centimetres, but other units of measurement used in, say, an auction catalogue have been retained. The metric equivalent of an Ancien Régime pouce is 2.7 cm and (after 1825) that of an inch is 2.54 cm. In the case of prints, where measurements are given, it has not always been possible to determine whether they are of the plate or the image.

Technical Notes: All works in the catalogue were examined in the Conservation Studio by Paul Ackroyd and Ashok Roy of the Conservation and Scientific Departments respectively, generally together with the author of the catalogue entry. The records of these observations were used to compile the catalogue’s Technical Notes. In support of these studies, paint samples for examination and analysis were taken by Ashok Roy from approximately 60 per cent of the paintings in order to establish the nature and constitution of ground layers, the identity of certain pigments, to investigate possible colour changes in paint layers and to answer curatorial enquiries relating to layer structure (as determined by paint cross‐sections). A few more works had already been sampled, mainly in conjunction with past conservation treatments, and the observations from these past studies were reviewed and incorporated. These studies were carried out by Ashok Roy, Marika Spring, Joyce Plesters and Aviva Burnstock. Paint samples and cross‐sections were examined by optical microscopy, and instrumental analysis of pigments was based largely on scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X‐ray analysis. Early in the cataloguing programme, some work with X‐ray diffraction analysis ( XRD ) was carried out for further characterisation of certain pigments. Some of these results had already been published separately; these papers are cited in the catalogue text. Similarly, any published analyses of the paint binder are cited, or if not published then reference is made to the reports in the Scientific Department files. The majority of the [page 36]analyses of the organic component of paint samples from works in this catalogue were carried out by Raymond White.

At a later stage in the cataloguing programme Rachel Billinge carried out infrared reflectography on 30 of the 72 works using an OSIRIS digital infrared scanning camera with an indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) array sensor (8 had already been examined by infrared imaging, usually in connection with a conservation treatment). At the same time she reviewed the entries, adding observations from technical imaging (both X‐radiography and infrared reflectography) and incorporating some additional details about materials and techniques from stereomicroscopy (photomicrographs were made of 12 works). Where X‐radiographs have been made, the individual plates were scanned and composite X‐ray images assembled. Some, but not all, were further processed to remove the stretcher bars from the digital image. Some further paint samples from a few works for which there were still outstanding questions at this stage in the cataloguing programme were examined and analysed. These analyses were carried out by Marika Spring, with contributions on individual paintings from Joanna Russell, Gabriella Macaro, Marta Melchiorre di Crescenzo, Helen Howard and David Peggie.

Macro‐X‐ray fluorescence scanning was carried out by Marika Spring and Rachel Billinge on one work, Perronneau’s pastel, A Girl with a Kitten (NG 3588), to provide fuller understanding of its means of creation than had been available from earlier analyses of the materials. The pastel was scanned during the summer of 2015 thanks to the loan of a Bruker M6 Jetstream macro‐X‐ray fluorescence scanner by Delft University of Technology through collaboration with Dr Joris Dik, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Chair, Materials in Art and Archeology, Department of Materials Science and Dr Annelies van Loon, now Paintings Research Scientist at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. This mobile system, the first commercially available macro‐XRF scanner, was developed by Bruker Nano GmbH in close collaboration with Antwerp University and Delft University of Technology (see Alfeld 2013, pp. 760–7). This examination included transmitted infrared reflectography and some further directed sampling to aid interpretation of the new results.

Frames: Information is given only in the case of a frame which is, or which is likely to be, original to the painting.

Text: With the exception of the Lagrenée, which was not formally acquired until July 2016, the entries take account of information and opinions of which the cataloguers were aware as at 30 June 2016.

Lifespan dates, where known, are given in the Provenance section and in the Index.

General References: These do not provide a list of every published reference. The annual catalogues published by the Gallery before the First World War mainly repeat the information in the first Gallery catalogue in which the painting in question was published. Consequently, only the first catalogue and later catalogues containing additional or revised information have been referenced. In all relevant cases references have been given to Martin Davies’s 1946 and 1957 catalogues. In the case of works acquired after 1957, reference is made to the interim catalogue entry published in the relevant National Gallery Report. No reference to entries in the Gallery’s Complete Illustrated Catalogue (London 2001) has been given since they contained no previously unpublished information. Other references are to catalogues raisonnés and other significant publications concerning the painting in question.

Bibliography: This includes all references cited in the endnotes to catalogue entries other than references to archival sources, which are given in full in the endnotes. Cited articles from newspapers, magazines, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Who Was Who have usually been accessed via their respective online portals.

List of Exhibitions: This is a list of exhibitions in which the paintings have appeared. The list is in date order. The author of the accompanying exhibition catalogue or catalogue entry is given where known. Exhibition catalogues are included in the Bibliography, by author.

About this version

Version 3, generated from files HW_2018__16.xml dated 06/03/2025 and database__16.xml dated 09/03/2025 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 03/01/2025. Entries for NG1090, NG2897, NG4078, NG5583, NG6422, NG6435, NG6445, NG6495, NG6592, NG6598 and NG6600-NG6601 marked for publication.

Cite this entry

Permalink (this version): https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E8S-000B-0000-0000
Permalink (latest version): https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E7D-000B-0000-0000
Chicago style: Wine, Humphrey. “NG 4078, The House of Cards (Portrait of Jean‐Alexandre Le Noir)”. 2018, online version 3, March 9, 2025. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E8S-000B-0000-0000.
Harvard style: Wine, Humphrey (2018) NG 4078, The House of Cards (Portrait of Jean‐Alexandre Le Noir). Online version 3, London: National Gallery, 2025. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E8S-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 18 March 2025).
MHRA style: Wine, Humphrey, NG 4078, The House of Cards (Portrait of Jean‐Alexandre Le Noir) (National Gallery, 2018; online version 3, 2025) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E8S-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 18 March 2025]

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The House of Cards:Catalogue entry