By contrast, the hang at Grove House, Roehampton, was less ordered. For example, a Greuze genre scene (no. 20), further discussed below, hung apparently next to Adam-François van der Meulen’s Philippe-François d’Arenberg saluted by the Leader of a Troop of Horsemen (no. 20), a painting now in the National Gallery (NG 1447).35 Wouwerman’s A Horseman arriving at the door of a stable (no. 79) was apparently hung next to a Bellini, Virgin and the Infant Jesus in a Landscape (no. 80), and a painting by Murillo, Saint Joseph and the Standing Infant Christ (no. 106) appears sandwiched between an Ostade genre subject (no. 105) and a Dujardin hunting scene (no. 107).36 More generally, the pictures at Roehampton were more weighted to genre and to landscape and, where they can be identified in the 1895 sale catalogue, they were on average smaller. Whereas the paintings at Lynford Hall were large gallery pictures chosen and hung in a formal fashion as a backdrop to entertaining on a grand scale, those at Grove House were more intimate in nature. Consistent with this is the sentimental character of the Murillo, the only religious picture at Grove House.37
This divide between the grand and the domestic was apparent in the way that pictures of the French School were split between the two properties. The Lynford pictures were large-scale portraits of the seventeenth century or in the seventeenth-century tradition, such as Philippe de Champaigne’s formidable looking Cardinal de Richelieu (NG 1449) and Largillierre’s Woman at her Dressing Table of 1695–1700.38 The Grove House paintings, on the other hand, were of the Régence period or later Ancien Régime. There was a Nattier portrait, signed and dated 1757, which, based on the additional description and photograph contained in the 1895 sale catalogue, can be identified as Madame de Maison-Rouge in the guise of Venus, a painting now in the Resnick Collection, Los Angeles.39
There were three paintings by Greuze at Grove House. One was inventoried (no. 19) as ‘The Drunkard A mother with her two children is reproaching her husband who enters in a state of intoxication canvas gilt frame’, and was lot 354 of the 1895 sale, the catalogue of which, not a model of accuracy, confusingly described it as ‘a replica of the celebrated engraved work in the Louvre’. The provenance given there, ‘La Regniére [sic], Very [sic], d’Ayazon [sic] and Rothschild’ would identify it as the painting now in the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. It may, however, have been only a copy.40 The second Greuze listed in the inventory (no. 74) was described as ‘a young woman praying she is kneeling and leaning against a bed with her eyes raised to Heaven Wood Gilt frame’. It must correspond to lot 355 of the 1895 sale,41 where it was bought in, and lot 98 of the Stephens Lyne Stephens 1911 sale, where sold to Huggins for £1,207 10s. It was presumably a version of the composition in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier.42 The third Greuze, no. 190 of the Grove House inventory, corresponds to lot 355 of the 1895 sale: ‘A Young Woman, in white muslin dress and pink sash, with her head leaning on her left hand, holding a wreath of flowers. 23½ in. x 19½ in.’ This may be Greuze’s Portrait of Jeanne-Philiberte Ledoux. If it is that picture, part of its interest is in the fact that Mrs Lyne Stephens bought it, presumably in Paris, in 1889 or later.43 That is to say, that she was still adding to her collection in her seventy-seventh year. The only other French picture originally intended for bequest to the National Gallery was a small canvas by Claude, no. 176 of the Grove House inventory and no. 359 of the 1895 sale, in the catalogue of which it was described as ‘The Artist sitting on the Shore drawing … [etc.] … 13 in. x 19 in.’ and as having come from the Calvieri and Dubois collections and corresponding to Liber Veritatis no. 130. Apparently it is one of two copies,44 and was by 1958 in the Riechers collection, Neuilly-sur-Seine.45
There were French paintings at Grove House never intended for the National Gallery: an unidentified François Lemoyne, Nymphs bathing (1895 sale, lot 353); two paintings by Pater, La Balançoire and La Danse, recently sold as a pair at auction and now in a French private collection;46 Vigée Le Brun’s Portrait of the marquise d’Aguesseau de Fresnes, now in Washington; 47 and an oval portrait by Nattier said to be of the comte d’Artois as a young man.48
35 The painting was called ‘Horsemen saluting a personage in a carriage drawn by six horses’ in the 1887 inventory. It was bought by Agnew’s on the National Gallery’s behalf at the 1895 sale.
36 The Ostade’s other neighbour was Aelbert Cuyp’s Equestrian Portrait of Cornelis and Michiel Pompe van Meerdervoort with their Tutor and Coachman, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to The Times, 13 May 1895, it was the best of the Dutch pictures in the Lyne Stephens sale.
37 For the history and attribution of this picture, see Baticle and Marinas 1981, no. 157.
38 Rosenfeld 1981, no. 19. It was lot 362, and presumably bought in, since it reappeared in the 1911 sale of Stephens Lyne Stephens: Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 16 June 1911, lot 105, £1,627 10s. to Partridge Lewis Summers.
39 For this portrait, see Salmon 1999b, no. 77. According to this, the earliest known provenance was that given by Paul Mantz in 1894 who said that the painting had ‘recently’ been sold at the hôtel Drouot, Paris. However, it was acquired by Yolande Lyne Stephens before April 1874 when it was lent by her to an exhibition in Paris: Explication des ouvrages de peinture exposés au profit de la colonisation de l’Algérie par les Alsaciens-Lorrains, Palais de la Présidence du Corps legislative, Paris, 23 April 1874, no. 363. The painting was lot 363 of the 1895 sale. Bernard Jazzar (email of 23 March 2009) kindly informed me that he had discovered a paper label attached to the stretcher bar which reads ‘ce tableau appartient à Madame Lyne Stephens’ followed by an undecipherable signature.
40 The previous owners of the Portland painting included the marquis de Véri, Grimod de La Reynière, the comte d’Arzujon and baron James de Rothschild, in whose 1860 Paris sale it was. There is no other provenance for the Portland picture between 1860 and 1920. This, and the generally high overall quality of the Lyne Stephens collection, also tend to support the supposition that the Lyne Stephens picture and the Portland picture are one and the same. Edgar Munhall, however, considers that it must have been a copy, noting that the 1895 sale catalogue described it as a replica, and that several copies of the work are known: Munhall 1976, no. 94. At the 1895 sale it was apparently sold to ‘Walters’ for £367 10s. However, a number of other paintings so sold reappeared in the 1911 sale, from which it seems likely that ‘Walters’ was a code for bought in. It was probably the painting offered as lot 99 of the 1911 sale with identical dimensions, but without the illustrious provenance given in the 1895 sale. In 1911 it was called The Unhappy Family and sold to Schnell for £294.
41 Where sold to Walters. See the previous note for the possible significance of this.
42 The Musée Fabre painting is a panel, 91.5 x 79 cm, inv. no. 836.4.21.
43 See Munhall 1976, no. 103 (entry by Edgar Munhall).
44 Kitson 1978.
45 Roethlisberger 1961, vol. 1, pp. 316–17; and email of 12 February 2016 from Marcel Roethlisberger.
46 Tajan, Paris, 19 December 2007, lot 33, for 471,361 euros including tax and buyer’s premium, to Louis Grandchamp des Raux, by whom sold Sotheby’s, Paris, in collaboration with Artcurial, Paris, 26 March 2015, lot 10.
47 For the identification of the sitter originally as the marquise de Fresne, see Baillio 1980; and for a comprehensive discussion of the painting in which the sitter’s name has been corrected by Joseph Baillio, see Conisbee 2009, no. 94 (entry by Joseph Baillio).
48 The comte d’Artois was nine years old when Nattier died.