The Young Schoolmistress
Catalogue entry
Jean‐Siméon Chardin –
NG 4077
The Young Schoolmistress
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).
Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 66.5 cm
Signed at the right: chardin
Provenance
Probably acquired by James Stuart (1775–1849) of Dunearn, Fife and finally of 4 Boyne Terrace, Notting Hill, in or after 1831; in his posthumous sale, Christie & Manson, London, 19 April 1850 (no. 185, ‘Chardin … A girl teaching a child to read – very elegant’, £10 to Fuller);1 John Webb; his daughter, Edith Cragg (died 1925), by whom bequeathed in 1925 as part of the John Webb Bequest. See the entries for James Stuart of Dunearn, and for John Webb and Edith Cragg, in the Appendix to this volume on the NG website.2
Exhibitions
Paris Salon 1740
? (62: ‘la petite Maîtresse d’École’);
London, National Gallery, April 1943 Picture of the Month
;3 London 1968 (137); London 1978b (11); Paris, Cleveland and Boston 1979 (70); London 1986, p. 29; London 1987a, pl. 21; Belfast, Ipswich and Bath 2001–2; Ottawa, Washington and Berlin 2003–4 (40); Ferrara and Madrid 2010–11 (47).4
Related Works
Paintings: Versions or Copies
- (1) The Young Schoolmistress, oil on canvas, 62 × 73 cm (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Hugh Lane Bequest, 1918) (fig. 1). The status of this and the following painting is discussed in the text.
- (2) The Young Schoolmistress, oil on canvas, 58.3 × 74 cm (Washington, National Gallery of Art) (fig. 2). A similar size painting, described as ‘une jeune fille faisant lire un enfant’, on canvas and 21 × 27 pouces (that is 56.6 × 73.1 cm), was part of lot 81, Chariot, Paris, 22 April 1776 and following, sold for 314 livres.5
- (3) Probably destroyed during the Second World War, formerly in the collection of Henri de Rothschild, oil on wood (?), 25 × 20 cm. The composition was in vertical format and in reverse to that of NG 4077. A copy, to judge from the photograph in Dayot and Vaillat 1908.6
The following is a list of the numerous versions of Chardin’s composition, some autograph and some the same picture reappearing, which have passed through the salerooms.
- (4) Sale of Rohan‐Chabot, Wâtelet etc., Paillet, Paris, 23 May 1780 and following, lot 26 (‘deux Tableaux … l’un représente un jeune garçon qui fait des boules de savon. L’autre est une jeune fille qui montre à lire à un enfant. Sur toile, hauteur 21 pouces & demi. Largeur 27.’), 58.2 × 73.1 cm. Given the similarity of their descriptions and measurements, these are probably the paintings in the 1776 Baché, Brillant, de Cossé and Quené sale, Paris, 22 April 1776 and following, lot 81.
- (5) Sale of Claude‐Henri Wâtelet, Hayot de Longpré, Paris, 12 June 1786 and following, lot 10, 200 livres to Desnon (‘Deux Tableaux pendans, l’un représente un jeune garçon faisant des boules de savon, l’autre une femme occupée à faire lire un enfant … sur toile, hauteur 24 pouces, largeur 30 pouces’), 65 × 81.2 cm.
- (6) Sale of Antoine‐Charles Dulac et al., Paillet, Paris, 6 April 1801 and following, lot 19 (‘Deux tableaux … l’un représente un écolier qui fait des bules [sic] de savon; l’autre, une jeune fille qui fait lire un enfant’). No measurements are given in the sale catalogue.
- (7) Didot de Saint Marc sale, Bonnefons, Paris, 28 December 1819 and following, lot 25, 15 francs to De Sommerard. Described as from the collection of Mme Geoffrin. Also on canvas and in vertical format, 20 × 17 pouces (mesures usuelles), that is, 55.55 × 47.21 cm.7
- (8) Magnan de la Roquette posthumous sale, Bonnefons de [page 96][page 97]Lavialle, Paris, 22 November–1 December 1841, lot 116, 205 francs. No size is given but the lot description includes the words ‘Ce délicieux petit tableau est accompagné de la gravure par Lépicié’.
- (9) Aguado, marquis de Las Marismas posthumous sale, Bonnefons de Lavialle & Renou, Paris, 18–22 April 1843, lot 7, described only as ‘Chardin – La maîtresse d’école’.
- (10) Anonymous sale, Bonnefons de Lavialle, Paris, 5–6 March 1852, lot 29, described as ‘La Maîtresse d’école, grisaille’. The sale catalogue notes that the attributions in it are those under which the seller acquired the works.
- (11) Devere sale, Pouchet (Ferdinand Laneuville, expert), Paris, 17 March 1855, lot 8, as by Chardin, ‘La Maîtresse d’école. Sujet gravé’, 1,525 francs. It was this picture that was noted by the Goncourt brothers.8
- (12) Signol posthumous sale, Ch. Pillet, Paris, 1 April 1878, lot 44, as attributed to Chardin, ‘La leçon de lecture. Une fillette vue à mi‐corps et vêtue d’une robe bleue, donne à son jeune frère les premières leçons… / Gracieuse composition qui a été gravée… / Toile. Haut., 57 cent.; larg., 63 cent.’, 115 francs.
- (13) Ph. Sichel posthumous sale, Chevallier & Duchesne, Paris, 22 June 1899, lot 8, 250 francs, there described as attributed to Chardin, oil on canvas, 23 × 27 cm.
- (14) Mme H. sale, Paris, 30 April 1926, lot 26, 760 francs, 22 × 26 cm. Possibly the same painting as (13) above.
- (15) A copy of the painting once in the Henri de Rothschild collection (see (3) above) was sold at Toulouse, Groupe Gersaint, 7 November 1998, oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm.
- (16) A copy in reverse was sold at Stockholm, Stockholms Auktionsverk, 22 May 2001, lot 1439, 18,000 SEK. Oil on canvas, 22.8 × 27.94 cm. Its size suggests that this may be the same painting as (13) and/or (14) above.
Engravings
- (1) In reverse by François‐Bernard Lépicié père (fig. 3) (of which an example of the second state is in the Bibliothèque nationale),9 dated 1740, published by L. Surugue, Paris 1740, and entitled La Maitresse d’Ecole (in three states, according to Bocher).10 Etching and engraving. Exhibited at the 1740 Salon;11 announced in the Mercure de France, October 1740, p. 2178. Lépicié added the following verses below the title:
Si cet aimable enfant, rend bien d’une Maitresse
L’air serieux, le dehors imposans,
Ne peut on pas penser que la feinte et l’adresse
Viennent au Sexe, au plus‐tard en naissans - (2) Simon Duflos, mentioned as in Paris in 1752 according to Bocher, made an engraving.12 A hand‐coloured example entitled The Young Schoolmistress is in the Musée national de l’Education, Rouen (inv. 1979.7103.1) and there dated about 1750 (fig. 4). It reverses Lépicié’s print and is probably after it.
- (3) A variant composition in vertical format published by Robert Sayer, 53 Fleet Street, London, 15 March 1787, entitled School Mistress and Scholar and lettered below the image ‘A Pleasing task, to teach the Young Ideas how to shool [sic]’. Christopher Lennox‐Boyd has suggested that Sayer may [page 98]not have been the first publisher of this print, but that there might have been an intermediary state, since it is the sort of image that might have been issued or reissued when Bennett managed the business between 1774 and 1785.13
- (4) An engraving (on wood according to Bocher) by Gauchard after a drawing by Hadamard appeared in Le Magasin pittoresque, 29 December 1861, p. 408. It is in the same direction as NG 4077 and accompanied an anonymous text entitled ‘La Soeur Ainée’.14
- (5) For
LucienLucian Freud’s etching in reverse, see Andrew Lambirth in Morphet 2000, ill. p. 132.
Technical Notes
The condition is good apart from a vertical damage about 10 cm long to the right of the younger child’s head, some minor losses elsewhere, and numerous retouchings along the top. The ground is pale brown in colour. A visible pentimento to the contour of the older girl’s back shows in the X‐radiograph (fig. 5), which suggests that her head may once have been painted some 2 cm to the right. Examination with infrared reflectography also suggests that the position of her head, and indeed that of the younger child, may have changed; that there were slight changes to the contour of her back and to the position of his proper right hand; and that her eye socket was underpainted with darker paint. There is also a minor pentiment to the proper right shoulder of the younger child.
The canvas, which was lined at some date prior to its acquisition,15 is a quite fine plain weave. Its cusping is marked along the right‐hand edge and along the bottom, but this is less pronounced along the left. What appears to be an addition of some 2 cm along the top edge is in fact part of the original canvas, reclaimed from having been turned over on an earlier, smaller stretcher. The stamp of ‘F. Leedham, Liner’ on the back of the stretcher shows an earlier lining to have occurred between the 1830s, when Francis Leedham started working in Soho, London, and 1857, when his business was taken over by George Morrill.16 The current lining was applied in 1972, when NG 4077 was last restored. The stretcher is marked in pencil along the top bar ‘15 D 5’.
Other Versions and Dating
In his catalogue of Washington’s French paintings Philip Conisbee forcefully argued for the inclusion of Washington’s version of The Young Schoolmistress (fig. 2) among Chardin’s autograph works.17 Consequently, and thanks to Pierre Rosenberg, who curated the 2011 Chardin exhibition at the Prado, and to the lending museums, the opportunity was taken to hang Washington’s picture close to both NG 4077 and the Dublin picture (fig. 1).18 It thus became apparent that whereas NG 4077 and the Dublin picture were autograph, the Washington picture was not19 – for the present author on account of its tonality and facture and the ‘prettification’ of the young child’s features. Conisbee also discussed the question of whether it was the London picture or the Dublin picture that was shown at the 1740 Salon, and rightly argued that the superior state of conservation of the former was not of itself evidence that it was the Salon picture. He tended towards the Dublin picture as having figured in 1740 for two reasons. Firstly, unlike the Dublin picture, NG 4077 shows less of the image than is shown in Lépicié’s print, whereas Lépicié’s prints are habitually faithful reproductions of Chardin’s paintings. Secondly, ‘the London canvas exhibits many fewer pentimenti than the Dublin picture, which retains clear traces of the artist’s careful adjustments to the positioning of the figures’.20 The London painting may have been marginally trimmed down the left‐hand side, which might account for it showing less of the image, but that does not apply to the bottom and right‐hand edges (see Technical Notes). It is therefore correct that NG 4077 shows less of the girl’s dress and of the night table than is shown in the print. However, the Dublin picture (and, for that matter, the [page 99]Washington picture) does not itself entirely correspond to the print, being curtailed along the bottom edge. Possibly the Dublin picture was reduced along its bottom edge. However, in that case its proportions would no longer correspond to those of Lépicié’s print. Either way, the correspondence between the Dublin picture and the print is scarcely better than that between the print and NG 4077.21 It is not therefore the case that the Dublin picture exhibits the print’s compositional entirety22 and no conclusion can be drawn from the relative correspondence of the two pictures with the print. It has been suggested that Lépicié was reproducing NG 4077 but chose to extend the composition, perhaps in order to create an image that better matched its ‘pendant print’, namely Lépicié’s print after NG 4078.23 However, this explanation seems unlikely given that Lépicié’s print after NG 4077 preceded the other by three years, and in any event it is no more likely that the prints any more than the paintings were pendants (see below).
Regarding the number and importance of the pentimenti in the Dublin and London paintings, Conisbee was unaware of the results of the X‐radiograph of NG 4077 (see Technical Notes), which indicate that it, too, was altered during the course of its execution.24 Given that this and the Dublin picture both show pentimenti, and that neither precisely corresponds to the print, is it possible that both were works in progress, so to speak, towards a third, now lost, composition, of which the print is evidence and which was the picture exhibited at the 1740 Salon? A parallel case is that of the hypothetical fourth lost version of Soap Bubbles, supposed by Conisbee to account for the fact that none of the three known autograph versions of that composition precisely corresponds to Filloeul’s print.25 A detail in Lépicié’s print not discussed in earlier accounts of the London, Dublin or Washington pictures, and which is at least consistent with the theory of a third now lost composition, is the fact that, unlike in the London or Dublin paintings, the page from which the child is reading has decipherable letters on it.26 Its condition renders it impossible to make out any such letters in the Dublin picture. The London picture has indecipherable marks on the page, the number and spacing of which, however, correspond to those on the print.27 But there may well be other reasons (see below) for Lépicié having added letters. Pending other supporting evidence, a hypothetical lost third version should for now be placed in abeyance; it is better to assume that Lépicié simply chose to extend the image.
In his discussion of the Washington picture, Conisbee, who was rightly cautious in identifying any one of the versions of The Young Schoolmistress with the Salon exhibit, wrote that ‘the year of exhibition of a prime version does not necessarily give us anything more than a terminus post quem for subsequent repetitions…’. This would imply that NG 4077, if it was not the Salon picture, was executed later than 1740. However, as Martin Kemp has pointed out, Chardin’s compositions were sometimes exhibited several years after their execution.28 Rosenberg suggested 1736 for NG 4077,29 and Marianne Roland Michel 1738–9,30 while Conisbee proposed around 1740.31 There are similarities between NG 4077 and the Louvre version of The Young Draughtsman (fig. 6) in the facture, especially in the modelling of the hands, the painting of the background, the sinuous profile of the figures’ backs, and the relationship of the figures and the accessory furniture to the picture plane. The Louvre painting is signed and dated 1737, and while it can be sometimes misleading to assume that stylistically similar paintings by an artist are necessarily chronologically close, on that basis and in the absence of contrary evidence a date around 1737 is here proposed for NG 4077. Such contrary evidence might, for example, be that NG 4077 was the conceptual pair to NG 4078, which was exhibited at the 1741 Salon, but for the reasons given below, such a pairing is unlikely.
Subject Matter
A girl of about 12 or 13 is teaching a younger child.32 She wears a type of indoor (linen?) nightcap with a close‐fitting crown and decorated with a ribbon, popular from the 1730s to the 1780s and known as a dormeuse, and a scarf and pinafore over her dress.33 Her hair has been tightly curled in a style known as tête de mouton, which had been adopted in France from the 1720s.34 The sex of the younger child is unclear, although it is probably male, and was so assumed, for example, in Le Magasin pittoresque in 1861.35 A similar protective headdress, called a bourlet, is worn by two identifiably male children in other works by Chardin: that in his destroyed Un petit enfant avec des attributs de l’enfance (now known through Charles‐Nicolas Cochin’s engraving of 1738), in which the child is clearly male, as evidenced by his toy drum and the fact that the portrait’s assumed pendant [page 100]was a Petite fille assise, s’amusant avec son déjeuner;36 and the seated child in Le Bénédicité, who also has a toy drum hanging over the back of his chair37 and who was identified as the ‘petit frère’ in the verses appended to Lépicié’s print after the painting of 1744. On the other hand, the toys of the seated child in Boucher’s Le Déjeuner of 1739 (Paris, Louvre; oil on canvas, 81.5 × 65.5 cm), who like the child in NG 4077 wears a bourlet, are a female doll as well as a toy horse, and for many years that child was assumed to be Boucher’s own four‐year‐old daughter.38
The figures stand at a night table, a piece of bedroom furniture with a compartment that might house a chamber‐pot, although, unlike the table illustrated in the Encyclopédie , the compartment is here shown closed by double doors rather than open and it may also have been constructed from mahogany rather than walnut.39 It has been suggested that the tray top, the diamond‐shaped inlaid keyhole escutcheons and the probable use of mahogany point to the night table (which is not among the items recorded in the November 1737 inventory of Chardin’s household effects)40 having been made in England.41 The unadorned nature of the item locates the action within the domestic sphere of a bourgeois household.
Although it is impossible to make out what is written on the pages being studied by the child (either here or in the Dublin or Washington pictures), Lépicié’s print clearly shows the marks as letters, so indicating a reading lesson. This would be consistent with eighteenth‐century pedagogic practice as advocated by Jean‐Baptiste de La Salle in his widely used and frequently republished Conduite des écoles chrétiennes divisée en deux parties (1717). This proposed that reading should be taught before writing and counting, and that within the discipline of reading learning to spell should precede reading by syllables.42 Another author recommended that children learn their ABC from the age of two or three,43 and another that children should learn to read, write and speak properly from the age of three or four, at which age teaching should take place at home.44 Thus a contemporary viewer of NG 4077 would have understood this to be the age of the younger child, rather than the five to seven years old that has been elsewhere proposed.45 The older child appears to be too young to be a governess, so is perhaps an older sister or other relation. It has been suggested that the painting is a pendant to NG 4078, which portrays the son of Chardin’s friend Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, a Paris ébéniste and furniture dealer, and that it shows others of Le Noir’s family; but their identity cannot be confirmed.46 The possibility that NG 4077 is a genre portrait of children in Chardin’s circle is possible, particularly because other genre paintings with subjects close to the picture plane, as in this case, were at the time also identified as portraits.47 The question of whether NG 4077 and 4078 formed conceptual pendants is discussed below.
By virtue of its subject matter NG 4077 has been linked to certain Dutch seventeenth‐century paintings: Gerard ter Borch’s The Reading Lesson (Paris, Louvre), Caspar Netscher’s A Lady teaching a Child to read (London, National Gallery, NG 844),48 and, by way of contrast, to the more directive teaching being administered in Jan Steen’s The Strict Schoolmaster, in which the child’s finger and the teacher’s pointer both press on the page, as in NG 4077.49 The Ter Borch may never have been in Paris during Chardin’s lifetime. However, as Conisbee pointed out, the Netscher was in the Orléans Collection in the Palais Royal, Paris, when NG 4077 was painted.50 There it was called ‘La maîtresse d’école’ in Dubois de Saint‐Gelais’s catalogue of that collection, both in the 1727 edition and in that of 1737,51 so perhaps the choice of title for the painting exhibited at the 1740 Salon, quite apart from anything else, was a nod towards the Netscher. In addition, two details in NG 4077 suggest Chardin’s knowledge of it – firstly the gesture of the child’s right hand and secondly that of its mother, who, like the girl in NG 4077, also holds a pointer. However, NG 4077 is conceptually different from these Dutch paintings because the teacher, unlike that in the Ter Borch or the Netscher, is an older sibling or cousin rather than a mother or governess, and Chardin’s foregrounding and intense observation of the two individuals is itself suggestive of their concentration on the task in hand.
Although John Locke had recommended that young children be taught to read by an older sibling,52 the traditional model, in France at least, was for young children of both sexes to be educated by their mothers,53 whose own education was therefore necessary.54 Until the mid‐eighteenth century at least, mothers who acted as teachers were bourgeois rather than aristocratic.55 It was said of Chardin that C’est toujours de la Bourgeoisie qu’il [Chardin] met en jeu … Il ne vient pas là une Femme du Tiers‐Etat, qui ne croye que c’est une idée de sa figure, qui n’y voye son train domestique, ses manieres rondes, sa contenance, ses ocupations [sic] journalieres, sa morale, l’humeur de ses enfans, son ameublement, sa garde‐robe (It is always the bourgeoisie that Chardin puts in play … There isn’t a woman of the Third Estate who comes [to the Salon] who does not believe that it’s a notion of her look, who doesn’t see her home life, her plain style, her appearance, her daily occupations, her morals, her children’s moods, her furniture, her wardrobe).56One might suppose that while the immediate catalyst for this oft‐cited remark was the exhibition at the 1741 Salon of his La toilette du matin (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), the use of the word toujours suggests it was equally informed by the exhibition of genre subjects in earlier years, including that of La Maîtresse d’école in 1740. Part of the appeal of NG 4077 to contemporaries was perhaps in the precociousness of the older ‘sister’ in taking the role of the ideal mother, who, as one writer put it in 1728, ‘par sa bone [sic] Education est dévenue prudente, douce, patiente, laborieuze, intelligente, gracieuze, économe, modeste, juste, bienfaizante, ocupée des soins de la premiere Education de ses enfans…’ (‘through her good education has become careful, kind, patient, hard‐working, intelligent, gracious, economical, modest, equitable, charitable, occupied with the oversight of her children’s early [page 101]education’).57 It would not have been difficult for some of these qualities to be read into Chardin’s young schoolmistress – especially because it was probably painted at just the time when Louis Desplaces made engravings after a pair of pictures by Charles‐Antoine Coypel contrasting different approaches to education: Education douce et insinuante donnée par une Sainte and Education Seche et rebutante donnée par une prude.58 More specifically, however, and as the title of both the Salon painting and the print after it suggest, the girl was likely seen as imitating not so much her mother as her teacher, or at any rate her mother in her role as teacher.59 In her silence and her use of a baguette (pointer), she seems to be following closely the advice to teachers of one of the Orders established in Paris for teaching girls: Il sera bien utile que toutes les maîtresses s’accoutument à se servir plus de signes de que les maîtresses ne perdent du temps, que les filles ne répondent pour s’excuser et que les autres n’en soient distraites, elles en seront toutes plus attentives, plus respectueuses et plus accoutumées au silence. (It will be very useful for all schoolmistresses to get used to utilising a pointer rather than words to express what they want to say to the girls, something which will stop the mistresses losing time and the girls from replying with excuses that distract the other pupils, so that they’ll be more attentive, more respectful and more accustomed to the silence.)60Thus the young schoolmistress in NG 4077 is seen both to adopt a proto‐schoolmistress role and to apply the teaching methods to which she herself, one might assume, has been subject. Whether or not The Young Schoolmistress might be read (whether on its own or as part of a pair) as conveying moralising points associated with the seventeenth‐century iconography of the schoolroom, it is more than an illustration of education,61 because the content as well as the process of education were seen as imbued with moral purpose. According to l’abbé de Saint‐Pierre, the ideal mother who had received a good education would contribute incomparably more to the happiness of her family than one who on account of her bad education might become ‘vaine, fière, impatiente, oisive, joueuze, dépensiere, d’une humeur aigre, dissipée, incomplaizante & uniquement ocupée de ses amuzemens’ (‘vain, proud, impatient, lazy, prone to playing games, spendthrift, bad‐humoured, dissipated, unhelpful and concerned only with her pleasures’).62
Nevertheless, the process of educating girls created a tension not only because the display of too much learning by a woman was deemed inappropriate,63 but also because reading was seen as capable of undermining a woman’s virtue.64 When female children were mentioned in eighteenth‐century texts, they tended to be seen not as children but as future women;65 in the eighteenth‐century novel girls were generally transformed into women with affective sexuality at the age of 12 or 13 – precisely the proposed age of Chardin’s schoolmistress in NG 4077 . 66 Chardin’s genre pictures might have been seen as rose‐tinted visions of domesticity offering a promise of harmony.67 In the context of contemporary perceptions of pubescent girls, however, Chardin’s schoolmistress and her relationship with the young child offered other possibilities to the imagination. Démoris wrote of NG 4077: Few canvases show more clearly than this one how much the ‘Chardin effect’ is based on the absence of psychological indications, what were known at the time as the signs of the passions. One might imagine some grumpiness on the part of the child, a smile on the part of the young girl. There is nothing here other than the intensity of the glance and the situation from which it arises.68Chardin certainly eschewed the conventional signs of the ‘passions’ adopted by history painters, but it is the absence of these, which is not the same as an absence of psychological indications, that (as with the paintings of Watteau for example) gives space for imaginative interpretations and for the affective qualities of his genre paintings.69
It was this space that Lépicié’s print reduced by encouraging the viewer to interpret
it, and by a form of osmosis the painting itself, in terms of the ‘concentration boudeuse et confiante du plus jeune, le mélange d’attention et de distraction,
de tendresse et de supériorité moqueuse de l’aînée déjà si coquette…’ (‘the sulky, inward concentration of the younger child, the mixture of attentiveness
and distraction, of kindness and superciliousness of the already so
selfconciously
self-consciously
elegant older child …’).70 The print directs the viewer towards a reading of the girl as mischievous, if not
somewhat malign, in various ways.71 Most obviously, Lépicié added verses, which may be translated: ‘If this charming child puts on so well the serious manner and the imposing appearance
of a schoolmistress, may one not think that artifice and subtlety are granted to the
fair sex no later than at birth.’72 The verses reinforce changes (by reference to NG 4077) to the image: the strengthening
of the protagonists’ eyebrows and eyelashes, the reinforcement of the eyelids and
the lips of the girl, indicating marginally more of the pupil of her eye and giving
her nose a slightly more pointed tip. This combination of alterations
make
makes
her more a young adult and less a pre‐adolescent child, a process of sexualisation
further advanced by Duflos’s engraving, in which the lips of the young schoolmistress
have been coloured crimson.
Another difference between print and painting is that in the painting the child is reading from a book, of which the right‐hand side (from our point of view) is covered by a loose sheet of paper bearing indecipherable marks. The suggestion is that the loose sheet covers clues – pictograms, perhaps – to what the child is trying to read in the uncovered part of the book. On the other hand, in the print Lépicié obscured the separateness of the loose sheet so that what appears to be presented to the child to read is an open exercise book or a single, wide sheet of paper on which decipherable letters have [page 102]been engraved (fig. 7).73 Lépicié also added letters to the pages the child is trying to read. They are (from top to bottom): ‘O P B[?] O / A[?] P O / O’. The letters evidently do not correspond to the order of the alphabet, nor to any known word (whether in French or in Latin, the languages commonly taught at elementary level).74 Rather they are likely to be based on a method for teaching children to read as advocated by Pierre Pipoulain‐Delaunay in his Méthode du sieur Py‐Poulain de Launay ou l’Art d’apprendre à lire le François et le latin (1719) and as published by his son in abbreviated form in Alphabet pour les enfans, contenant les 8 leçons de la méthode de M. De Launay … (1750).75 According to this method, after a child had learnt the names of the letters it was to be taught double and triple letters; as it learnt to spell, it was claimed, the child would naturally also learn to read. The first lesson was the alphabet, the second lesson double letters, the third double consonants and triple letters, and so on. Tables of letters such as ab, ac, ad and ba, ca, da, and so on, provided examples for the second lesson, and another set of tables of letters such as br, fl, sc and then ecr, odr, eph, bli provided examples for the third.76 Pipoulain‐Delaunay claimed his father’s method to be an advanced way of teaching based on experience.77 Lépicié’s print appears to show the older child’s use and adaptation of the method for the benefit of the younger. The method’s apparent popularity – the 1750 edition of Pipoulain‐Delaunay’s book was the fourth – makes it likely that the print‐buying public would have recognised this. The claim that NG 4077 shows Chardin’s advocacy of a particular method of teaching might therefore be better made for Lépicié’s print – with one qualification. From the younger child’s point of view the letters are upside down, so rendering its task exceptionally difficult, and one might wonder whether Lépicié has subtly changed the narrative of Chardin’s painting from a sympathetic observation of sibling behaviour to one in which the older child is given a more knowing, indeed mocking, nature (but is herself mocked in the appended verses). Arguably, and this applies as much to the painting as to the print after it, the use of a night table (if that is what it is) as the ‘seat of learning’ itself gently mocks the pretensions of the older child.78
If NG 4077 is considered as a painting on its own terms, and without any additional meaning adduced by Lépicié’s modifications, it becomes more difficult to assume that it was a conceptual pair to any other painting by Chardin. Conisbee considered that the version of The House of Cards now in the National Gallery (NG 4078), showing the son of the ébéniste M. Le Noir, was quite likely painted as the pendant to NG 4077, while noting ‘“minor” variations in dimensions and the differences in handling … probably [attributable] to the space of about a year in their execution’.79 Conisbee was much influenced by their respective formal qualities and their complementary colours: positive warm notes in NG 4077 and the cool range of NG 4078. He also noted the contrast between the boy’s self‐absorption in NG 4078 and the psychological contact in NG 4077 between the ‘schoolmistress’ and her young charge. Rosenberg had hinted at the possibility of the two pictures being pendants in 1979, when suggesting that NG 4077 might show other children of M. Le Noir,80 and was firmly of that opinion in 1999;81 he was less so when the painting was exhibited in Madrid in 2011.82 Conisbee had meanwhile reiterated his earlier opinion, citing with approval Marianne Roland Michel’s view that the two pictures were pendants and that the children in NG 4077 were other members of the Le Noir family. Roland Michel noted that both paintings were engraved by Lépicié and that they accorded with each other in tonality and scale, and even in their sentiment.83 The fact that NG 4078 was painted some three or four years after NG 4077 (see entry to NG 4078) does not of itself exclude the later painting from having been conceived as a pendant to the earlier. On the other hand, the fact that they were both engraved by Lépicié is not sufficient reason to regard the two paintings as pendants, particularly because their respective authorial identifications were given in different form, that of NG 4077 in French (‘Peint par Chardin’) and that of The House of Cards in Latin (‘J.B. Simeon Chardin pinxit’). In addition, different fonts were used for the appended verses, a curious thing to do had Lépicié himself intended to market the prints as pendants.
The two paintings certainly work well together when hung as pendants (as they often have been at the National Gallery, on either side of Drouais’s portrait of Mme de Pompadour) and, seen through the prism of Lépicié’s prints and their appended verses, the connection is reinforced thematically. However, it seems improbable that Chardin, having painted NG 4077, supposedly showing two children of his friend Jean‐Jacques Le Noir, on a canvas to which he was likely to have had ready access, would paint as a pendant another child of Le Noir on a canvas some 5.5 cm wider. In addition, no mention is made in the 1740 Salon livret of the picture being a pendant, unlike some other Salon paintings by Chardin exhibited singly, for example no. 71 of the 1746 Salon and no. 60 of the 1747 Salon. The same applies to the livret of the 1741 Salon, at which The House of Cards was exhibited. There is no reference whatever during the eighteenth century to a composition that might be NG 4077 being a pendant of NG 4078, nor to it as showing any of the Le Noir children. Indeed, if a date for NG 4077 of around 1737 is accepted, it is impossible that the older child could be a legitimate daughter [page 103]of Le Noir, since his marriage took place in 1731.84 Rather, as Rosenberg and Conisbee have themselves noted, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries if a painting that might be NG 4077 was referred to as a pair with anything it was with a version of Les Bulles de Savon.85 Such a pairing was also assumed more recently by Wildenstein.86 However, of the extant autograph versions of Les Bulles de Savon (in New York, Washington and Los Angeles) only the first, which has apparently been cut down on the right‐hand side, had dimensions that may originally have corresponded to those of NG 4077. That painting, however, was probably the one paired in the 1779 Trouard sale with a composition of a young boy making a house of cards.87 This does not entirely answer the question of whether NG 4077 was once a pair to another picture by Chardin, since, as mentioned above, there may have existed a fourth, now lost version of Les Bulles de Savon.88 Nevertheless, in the absence of further information either about the extended Le Noir family (leading to a possible identification of two of its members with the children in NG 4077) or about the early provenance of the picture, it is impossible to suppose with any conviction that NG 4077 and NG 4078 were in the same collection before the second half of the nineteenth century or that NG 4077 was a pair to any other picture. It is more likely that it was John Webb, experienced dealer in furniture, who recognised the value of marrying NG 4077 with The House of Cards.89
Critical Reception
When NG 4077 or another autograph version of it was shown at the 1740 Salon, together with four other paintings by Chardin (La mère laborieuse, Le bénédicité and two singeries), the Mercure de France wrote of them collectively thus: Les Tableaux de ce Peintre sont dans une réputation constante de plaire au Public & géneralement à tout le monde, aux sçavans, aux ignorans, & aux gens de tout âge et de tous Etats; en effet, dans les Ouvrages de cet habile Artiste, la Nature est imitée avec tant de justesse & de naiveté, que cela a fait dire à quelques Conoisseurs [sic] que le Peintre avoit trouvé, par son aplication [sic], les moyens de prendre la Nature sur le fait, & d’enlever furtivement ce qu’elle a de plus naif & de plus piquant. (This painter’s pictures are always reputed to please the public and everyone generally, the knowledgeable, the ignorant, people of all ages and all classes; in effect, in this talented artist’s works, nature is imitated with so much correctness and straightforwardness, that it has caused some connoisseurs to say the painter has found through his diligence, the means to catch nature in the act, and to sneakily kidnap its most innocent and original properties.)90According to another commentator, M. Chardin a sçu se conserver les bonnes graces du Public, par trois petits Tableaux qui ont beaucoup plû: La Mère laborieuse, la petite Maîtresse d’École, le Benedicité. Quelle élégance, quel naturel, quelle vérité! Le spectateur sent plus qu’il ne peut dire. (M. Chardin has known how to harbour the goodwill of the public with three small pictures which have been a great success: The Hard‐working Mother, the little Schoolmistress and Saying Grace. What style, what unaffectedness, what truth! The viewer feels more than he can express.)91The work was not, however, singled out for comment at the time, except possibly indirectly in Philippe Mercier’s ironic The Bible Lesson, and the mezzotint made after it by John Faber the Younger in 1743, in which a mother reads to a small girl, whose concentration is elsewhere, and a younger boy who appears partly to cover his ears (London, British Museum).92 Nor was NG 4077 singled out by Messrs Christie & Manson when they advertised the James Stuart sale in 1850,93 or the subject of further press comment until its acquisition by the Gallery in 1925, when The Times called it a ‘charming and masterly example of [Chardin’s] work’.94 Now considered by all recent authorities on the artist to be the better of the extant autograph versions of the composition, Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress has in recent years also been greatly appreciated by contemporary British artists (see under Exhibitions).95
General References
Blanc 1862–3, p. 15; Goncourt (1882) 2007, p. 93; National Gallery Trafalgar Square and Millbank Directors’ Reports 1925, p. 3; National Gallery Trafalgar Square Catalogue 1929, pp. 61–2; Pascal and Gaucheron 1931, p. 132 (referring mainly to the version once in the Henri de Rothschild collection); Wildenstein 1933, no. 169; Davies 1946, pp. 15–16; Davies 1957, pp. 128–9; Wildenstein 1963, no. 80, as about 1731–2; Wildenstein 1969, no. 80; Laclotte 1965, p. 26; Rosenberg 1983, no. 104; Wilson 1985, p. 92; Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, ill. pp. 114–15, p. 117 and no. 105 (as painted in 1736).
Notes
1 In Rosenberg 1983 and Rosenberg and Temperini 1999 it was suggested that NG 4077 might have been lot 107 of the Sir Robert Bernard sale, London, 9 May 1789, where described as ‘Chardin A domestick scene of mother and daughter’. However, this description does not correspond to NG 4077 and might more easily fit, for example, with a version of Stockholm’s The Morning Toilet. In Rosenberg 2010a, p. 160, and Rosenberg 2011, p. 171, the English provenance since 1829 was said to be certain on the basis of the Sir Robert Bernard sale of 9 May of that year. But no Robert Bernard sale in 1829 is known; the reference to that year is presumably an error. James Stuart is unlikely to have acquired NG 4077 before 1831, although following his bankruptcy in 1828 his 1829 sale in Edinburgh did include a different painting attributed to Chardin (‘Jean‐Baptiste Siméon Chardin Woman Peeling onions, Sketch’, Edinburgh, 9 February, 1829, lot 7, two guineas). (Back to text.)
2 NG 4077 and 4078 were initially hung in the National Gallery’s Room XXI (now Room 4; letter of 12 September 1925 from George S. Brock, Edith Cragg’s cousin, to Sir Charles Holmes, National Gallery Subject Files, Miscellaneous Filing, 1925, A–D [290.25]). (Back to text.)
3 For a succinct history of the National Gallery’s Picture of the Month scheme during the Second World War, see The Times, 5 March 1943. (Back to text.)
4 NG 4077 was shown only at the Madrid leg of the exhibition, which had opened under the title Chardin Il pittore del silenzio, Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti on 17 October 2010. It was no. 47 in the exhibition catalogue. (Back to text.)
5 Wildenstein 1933, no. 170, Wildenstein 1963, no. 81, and Rosenberg 1979, p. 230 (where the 1776 sale is said to be of Baché, Brillant, de Cossé, Quené etc.). (Back to text.)
6 Dayot and Vaillat 1908, no. 14 and pl. 14; Pascal and Gaucheron 1931, pp. 132–3. According to Gimpel the picture was painted on a sheet of metal and was not by Chardin: Gimpel 1963, p. 399 (entry for 31 October 1929). I am grateful to Pierre Rosenberg for bringing this reference to my attention. For the ex‐Rothschild picture, see also Dayot and Guiffrey 1907, no. 198 (where wrongly identified as the painting exhibited at the 1740 Salon). (Back to text.)
7 Wildenstein 1933, no. 174. Another copy on wood was noted in Rosenberg 1979, p. 230, with Helbing, Frankfurt, 3 April 1932, lot 71. (Back to text.)
8 Rosenberg (1979, p. 230) points out that it was to this version that the Goncourts were referring in their L’Art du XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1859–75, 12 fascs, fasc. II: Chardin (1864), p. 151: ‘[Chardin] sait mettre dans toutes ces petites expressions qui commencent un visage de femme … sa jolie petite mine doctorale, lorsqu’elle montre, avec son aiguille, l’A B C à un petit frère, coiffé du lourd bourrelet du temps!’ (Goncourt 2007 edn, vol. 1, p. 93.) (Back to text.)
9 Recueil. Collection Michel Hennin. Estampes relatives à l’Histoire de France. Tome 96, Pièces 8345–8416, période: 1740–1743, no. 8358. Sjöberg 1977, p. 401. (Back to text.)
10 Bocher 1876, pp. 34–5. For a recent discussion of Lépicié’s print, see Hempelmann 1999, no. 54 (entry by D. Hempelmann). (Back to text.)
12 Bocher 1876; Rosenberg 1979, p. 230. (Back to text.)
13 See British Museum Collection Database. The British Museum also holds a state before letters, inv. 2010,7081.3224. (Back to text.)
14 Bocher 1876; Rosenberg 1979, p. 230. (Back to text.)
15 National Gallery Manuscript Catalogue, vol. 13, 12 May 1925 (NG 10/13/4077). (Back to text.)
16 Simon 2009 (online). (Back to text.)
17 Conisbee 2009, pp. 79–84. (Back to text.)
18 Additional thanks are due to Gabriele Finaldi and to Fionnuala Croke for facilitating the relevant loans. (Back to text.)
19 As considered by Pierre Rosenberg in conversation, 28 February 2011. (Back to text.)
20 Conisbee 2009, pp. 81–2; Bailey 2003, p. 198. (Back to text.)
21 The height of the print image is 0.84 times its width. The corresponding calculations for the London, Dublin and Washington paintings to the third decimal point are 0.926, 0.849 and 0.788 respectively. (Back to text.)
22 As stated in Conisbee 2009, p. 81. (Back to text.)
23 Carey 2012, no. 11 (entry by Juliet Carey). (Back to text.)
24 No X‐radiograph of NG 4077 had been made when Thomas Bodkin asserted the primacy of the Dublin picture on account of the pentimento to the fichu of the ‘schoolmistress’ (Bodkin 1925). This article was written in response to Holmes 1925, which announced the Cragg bequest of NG 4077 and NG 4078 but failed to mention the Dublin version of the former. For Bodkin’s continuing sensitivity over the relative merits of the London and Dublin pictures, see his letter in The Times (12 April 1943), Geoffrey Hutchinson’s reply ( ibid. , 15 April 1943) and Bodkin’s further letter ( ibid. , 20 April 1943). (Back to text.)
25 Conisbee 2009, p. 65. (Back to text.)
26 In the print they read: ‘O P B[?] O / [A]? P O / O’. (Back to text.)
27 On the Washington picture it is not possible to decipher any letters on either page of the book. There are no grey or black smudges on the page to which both children are pointing, and the smudges on the other page are just that. I am grateful to Anne Halpern for this information. (Back to text.)
28 Kemp 1978, p. 22. (Back to text.)
29 Rosenberg 1983, p. 94, and Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, p. 239. (Back to text.)
30 Roland Michel 1994, p. 123. (Back to text.)
31 Bailey 2003, p. 198. (Back to text.)
32 According to Louis de Jaucourt, ‘Dans les villes, & chez les gens aisés, les enfans accoutumés à des nouritures succulentes & abondantes, arrivent plûtôt à cet état [i.e. puberty]; à la campagne & dans le pauvre peuple, les enfans sont plus tardifs, parce qu’ils sont mal & trop peu nourris; il leur faut deux ou trois années de plus. Dans toutes les parties méridionales de l’Europe, & dans les villes, la plûpart des filles sont pubères à 12 ans…’, (‘Puberté’, Encyclopédie , vol. 13, p. 549). The figures’ clothing and the furniture in NG 4077 indicate a reasonable level of comfort, and, since Chardin never left Paris, the children can be assumed to be among Jaucourt’s town‐dwelling ‘gens aisés’. (Back to text.)
33 On the dormeuse see Ribeiro 2002, p. 155. (Back to text.)
34 Ibid. , p. 48. (Back to text.)
35 Le Magasin pittoresque, 29, December 1861, p. 408; see Related Works, Engravings (4). (Back to text.)
36 On the two paintings see Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, nos 91 and 92. (Back to text.)
37 As kindly pointed out to me by Emma Barker (email of 25 November 2011). (Back to text.)
38 New York, Detroit, Paris 1986–7, no. 33. (Back to text.)
39 Encyclopédie , vol. 10, p. 139. (Back to text.)
40 For this inventory see Pascal and Gaucheron 1931, pp. 63–70. (Back to text.)
41 I am grateful to Jamie Mulherron for this suggestion (email, 17 July 2012). It was then an extremely modern item of furniture (letter from J. Mulherron, 23 July 2012). (Back to text.)
42 Chartier 1976, pp. 114, 117 and 126. (Back to text.)
43 ‘Le premier bureau, apelé abécedique, pour l’usage d’un enfant de deus à trois ans, n’est qu’une table come celle où les comis de la poste rangent les lettres missives…’, Louis Dumas, La Bibliothèque des Enfans ou les premiers elemens des lettres contenant le sisteme du Bureau Tipographique, n.p. [1732], pp. 24–5, cited (with ‘corrected’ orthography) in Chartier 1976, p. 131. (Back to text.)
44 Saint Pierre 1728, pp. 162–3. (Back to text.)
45 By Andreas Gruschka, ‘Eine Blickschule Chardins
Beobacthtung
Beobachtung
pädagogischer Praxis’, in Hempelmann 1999, p. 67. (Back to text.)
46 For this suggestion and for information, albeit limited, on the Le Noir family, see Rosenberg 1979, p. 232. Others to have accepted that NG 4077 and NG 4078 probably form a pair are Conisbee (1986, p. 147), Roland Michel (1994, pp. 46, 204) and Rosenberg and Temperini (1999, pp. 238–9). However, more recently Rosenberg did not commit himself on this point (2011, p. 171). Marianne Roland Michel (1994, p. 204) suggested that Chardin used the same model for The Girl with a Shuttlecock (private collection) and the girl in NG 4077. No other authority has accepted this; it is not accepted here. (Back to text.)
47 See 1738 Salon , nos 116 and 149; 1741 Salon, no. 72; and 1743 Salon , no. 57. (Back to text.)
48 See Conisbee 2009, pp. 82–3 and fig. 4 for the thematic link of the Ter Borch with Chardin’s composition, and Conisbee 1986, pp. 148, 152 and fig. 144 for Netscher’s. (Back to text.)
49 Gruschka in Hempelmann 1999, pp. 67–8, and fig. 4. Later in the eighteenth century a variant composition of Steen’s painting was the subject of a print by Noach van der Meer II: De Schoolmeester met de Plak (British Museum, inv. 1862,0208.289). (Back to text.)
50 Conisbee 1986. The provenance of Ter Borch’s The Reading Lesson has not been traced back further than the posthumous sale (Paris, 26 November 1822 and 7 January 1823) of Louis‐Robert de Saint‐Victor: Foucart 2009, p. 97. (Back to text.)
51 Saint‐Gelais 1727, pp. 162–3 (2nd edn 1737, pp. 161–2). (Back to text.)
52 Johnson 1990, pp. 64–5. Locke’s Some thoughts concerning education was published in London in 1693 and frequently republished throughout the eighteenth century, including French translations, the first of which by Pierre Coste was published in Amsterdam in 1695 as De L’education des enfants. (Back to text.)
53 Sonia Cherrard, ‘De l’éducation des mères à une possible éducation publique: Mesdames d’Épinay et de Miremont’, in Brouard‐Arends and Plagnol‐Diéval 2007, pp. 93–102, at p. 93. Fathers, however, were seen as having the educative role where older boys were concerned. The role of women in the education of young children was acknowledged with approval by the marquise de Lambert in her Avis d’une mère à son fils et à sa fille, Paris 1728, p. 98. (Back to text.)
54 Brouard‐Arends 1991, pp. 133–4. (Back to text.)
55 Ibid. , p. 243. The changing role of English aristocratic mothers seems to have occurred earlier: Glaser 2006, p. 190. (Back to text.)
56 Lettre à Monsieur de Poiresson‐Chamarande … au sujet des Tablaux [sic] exposés au Salon du Louvre, Paris 1741, p. 33. (Back to text.)
57 Saint Pierre 1728, p. 83. Similar sentiments were expressed, albeit more disparagingly of women, by Dubois de Fosseux. In a lecture to the Académie d’Arras in 1782 he wrote of women’s talent for educating children: ‘… quelque chose [page 105]de plus que ce qu’on appelle du bon sens, un peu de ce qu’on appelle de l’esprit, beaucoup moins que ce qu’on appelle le génie, un certain nombre de connaissances, une façon de parler délicate, une patience à toute épreuve, du tact, de la finesse, du discernement, da la fermeté, surtout de la douceur, voilà ce qu’exige l’éducation et voilà ce que nous trouvons aisément dans les femmes’, cited in Philippe Marchand, ‘La part maternelle dans l’éduction des garçons au XVIII siècle’, in Brouard‐Arends and Plagnol‐Diéval 2007, pp. 45–61, at pp. 47–8. In her perceptive essay ‘Child’s play’, Katie Scott concluded that the girl in NG 4077 was imitating the role of mother, and that the ‘closeness of the fit between the child and the role so far collapses performance into essence that the girl resurrects, in a manner of speaking, the conventions of the child‐as‐miniature‐adult that dominated representation before the “discovery” of childhood’ (Bailey 2003, pp. 90–105, at p. 100). (Back to text.)
58 See Hempelmann 1999, nos 222 and 223 (entries by D. Hempelmann) for the engravings published in 1737, and Lefrançois 1994, nos P.169 and P.170 for the paintings, where the former are dated around 1735–7 and the latter, following an inscription on the reverse, 1736. That visual culture in France in the eighteenth century was condemnatory of strict educational methods is also evidenced by Jean‐Joseph Baléchou’s print of about 1744 after Dandré‐Bardon’s L’Enfance, in which the appended verses of Jean‐Baptiste Rousseau read: ‘Dans l’Enfance toujours des pleurs / Un Pédant porteur de tristesse, / Des livres de toutes couleurs, / Des châtimens de toute espéce.’ (Back to text.)
59 The mimetic quality of the girl’s action has been emphasised by Gerar Edizel, citing the writings of Locke and Fénelon on the use of play in education: Edizel 1995, pp. 188–9. This interpretation of NG 4077 takes no account of, for example, the Règlemens de la communauté des Filles de Saint‐Anne (1688). There is no evidence to support Edizel’s claim that Chardin had a particular ‘approach’ to children’s education or, specifically in relation to NG 4077, that the girl is enunciating anything. (Back to text.)
60 Règlemens de la communauté des Filles de Saint‐Anne (1688, 1698), cited in Sonnet 1987, pp. 229–30, who points out (p. 229) that other girls’ schools followed a similar practice. (Back to text.)
61 Johnson (1990) argues that NG 4077 was Chardin’s attempt to communicate the processes of thinking, learning and teaching on the lines that had been advocated by Locke and Fénelon. Sheriff follows a similar line of argument (1988, p. 20). La petite maîtresse d’école was confused with La mère laborieuse by E. Snoep‐Reitsma (1973, p. 219), where she cites verses published in the Mercure de France in 1740. (Back to text.)
62 Saint Pierre 1728, p. 83. On the moral as well as practical purpose of education, see also Sonnet 1987, pp. 264–5, 269. (Back to text.)
63 Mme de Lambert, Avis d’une mère à sa fille, Paris 1728, pp. 146–7. The work was published in numerous subsequent editions. (Back to text.)
64 Fauchery 1972, p. 164. (Back to text.)
65 Glaser 2006, p. 190. (Back to text.)
66 Fauchery 1972, p. 174, citing in this case three English novels published between 1714 and 1758. (Back to text.)
67 For such an interpretation, see Undank 1989, pp. 6, 13. (Back to text.)
68 ‘Peu de toiles montrent plus clairement que celle‐ci combien l’effet – Chardin tient à l’absence d’indications psychologiques, de ce que l’époque appelait les signes de passions. Qu’on imagine quelque mauvaise humeur chez l’enfant, un sourire de la jeune fille. Il n’y a rien ici que l’intensité du regard et la situation où il se produit’ (Démoris 1999, p. 100). See also Démoris 2005, p. 453, proposing that the unfocused handling of the child emphasises the relatively ‘unformed’ character of its body, so underlining its distance from the girl who is, in Démoris’s opinion, undoubtedly possessed of sexuality. (Back to text.)
69 Andreas Gruschka has noted the open‐endedness of NG 4077, asking whether the ‘schoolmistress’ is correcting the child, showing him the next page, or pressing down the page so he can see it better (‘Eine Blickschule Chardins Beobachtung pädogogischer Praxis’, in Hempelmann 1999, pp. 67–75, at p. 68). The affective qualities of Chardin’s genre paintings for his contemporaries are evident, for example, in ‘Vers d’un Professeur du College du Plessis à M. Chardin, Peintre de l’Académie Royale de Peinture, sur les deux Tableaux qu’il a fait pour le Roy’, Mercure de France, 39, December 1740, pp. 2710–11 commenting on La mère laborieuse and Le bénédicité (Paris, Louvre, invs 3201 and 3202). See also Pierre Estève’s appreciation written in 1756 of La toilette du matin (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) and La gouvernante (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada), or at least of the engravings after them: Delpierre 1995, p. 297. (Back to text.)
70 Rosenberg 1979, p. 231. (Back to text.)
71 In this case I see Lépicié as more directive than permissive, as has been proposed by Katie Scott in connection with other prints by him after Chardin in her essay ‘Chardin multiplied’, in Rosenberg 1999b, pp. 61–75, esp. pp. 67–8. (Back to text.)
72 I have adapted, with minor alterations, Philip Conisbee’s translation in Bailey 2003, p. 198. As has been pointed out, the captions to prints after Chardin do not necessarily convey his thoughts or intentions, but rather reveal the associations to which the images lent themselves: Démoris 2005, p. 453. (Back to text.)
73 Dorit Hempelmann (1999, no. 54) also noticed the addition of letters by Lépicié. (Back to text.)
74 Both French and Latin were taught at elementary level: see Launay 1741. For the suggested use of pictograms as reading aids see Berthaud 1744. (Back to text.)
75 The 4th edition (1750) was consulted: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 8‐BL‐1466. (Back to text.)
76 Ibid. , pp. 12, 56–7, 58–61. (Back to text.)
77 Ibid. , pp. 2, 8. (Back to text.)
78 The suggestion was made by Jamie Mulherron (letter of 23 July 2012). (Back to text.)
79 Conisbee 1986, pp. 147–8. (Back to text.)
80 Rosenberg 1979, p. 232. (Back to text.)
81 Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, p. 239. (Back to text.)
82 Rosenberg 2011, p. 160. (Back to text.)
83 Roland Michel 1994, p. 204. (Back to text.)
84 For information on Jean‐Jacques Le Noir and his family, see the entry for NG 4078. (Back to text.)
85 Baché, Brilliant, De Cossé, Quené, etc., sale, Paris, 22 April 1776 and following, lot 81, oil on canvas, 21 × 27 pouces (the measurements, the metric equivalent of which are about 56.9 × 73.1 cm, do not correspond to those of NG 4077); Rohan‐Chabot, Watelet, Breteuil, Billy, Angervilliers, Robert sale, Paris, 23 May 1780 and following, lot 26, oil on canvas, 21.5 × 27 pouces; Watelet sale, Paris, 12 June 1786 and following, lot 10, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 pouces (about 65 × 81.2 cm); Dulac sale, Paris, 5 April 1801 and following, lot 19. (Back to text.)
86 Wildenstein 1969, p. 159, where NG 4077, there said to have been in the 1786 Watelet sale, was called the companion piece to the version of Soap Bubbles in the same sale. (Back to text.)
87 See Rosenberg 2011, nos 30–2, for the most recent catalogue entries on the New York, Washington and Los Angeles pictures. For the 1779 Trouard sale, see Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, p. 298, where the House of Cards is identified with the painting of that subject in the Oskar Reinhart collection (Rosenberg and Temperini 1999, no. 103A). (Back to text.)
88 See note 25 and Rosenberg 2011, p. 131, concurring with the theory of a lost prime version. (Back to text.)
89 A now lost portrait of Mme Le Noir by Chardin was exhibited at the 1743 Salon (no. 57). To judge from Surugue’s print of 1747, the ratio of its proportions (1: 1.14) did not precisely correspond to those of NG 4077 (1: 1.08) or NG 4078 (1: 19). Assuming that the print shows the composition in reverse, its pair, if any, might have been NG 4078, but the respective backgrounds of the two compositions, as well as the discrepancy in proportions, make this unlikely. (Back to text.)
90 Mercure de France, October 1740, p. 1274. (Back to text.)
91 Pierre Guyot Desfontaines, known as l’abbé Desfontaines, Observations sur les écrits modernes, lettre CCCXXVII, 31 August 1740, pp. 283–4. Desfontaines was a controversial figure who was stripped of his benefice in 1736 for having criticised the Académie française. He lived from what he wrote and was accused of venality: Jean Sgard, ‘Pierre Guyot Desfontaines (1685–1745)’, Dictionnaire des journalistes online at http://dictionnaire‐journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/383‐pierre‐guyot‐desfontaines accessed 29 December 2011. (Back to text.)
92 A version of Mercier’s painting was listed in the collection of John Wanamaker around 1904 as by Chardin, but that may have shown no more than awareness on the cataloguer’s part of Lépicié’s print. This version, on which see Ingamells and Raines 1976–8, pp. 54–5 (no. 233), was offered at Christie’s, South Kensington, 5 July 2013, lot 175, oil on canvas, 100.3 × 127.3 cm. (Back to text.)
93 The Times, 26 February 1850, p. 12. (Back to text.)
94 The Times, 3 August 1925, p. 10. (Back to text.)
95 See Andrew Lambirth in Morphet 2000, pp. 129–39, both ill. p. 130. It has also been suggested that La Grande Soeur by Charles Chaplin was inspired by NG 4077: sale catalogue entry, Sotheby’s, New York, 31 October 2000, lot 110. (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'
James Stuart of Dunearn (1775–1849)
- Jean‐Siméon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress (NG 4077)
James Stuart was the first son of Dr Charles Stuart of Dunearn (1743–1826), a Scotsman
who was for some years minister of the parish of Cramond in Linlithgowshire, and from
1795 to 1826 was a physician in Edinburgh.1 James Stuart studied at Edinburgh’s High School from 1785 to 1789 and graduated in
law at the University in 1797, becoming a
writer
Writer
to the Signet the following year. In 1802 he married Eleonor Maria Anna (died 1868),
the only daughter of Dr Robert Moubray of Cockairnie.
Stuart was a prominent Whig supporter and achieved notoriety for his part in one of the last legal duels held in Scotland. This took place on 26 March 1822 with his vehement Tory opponent Sir Alexander Boswell.2 Stuart fatally wounded his rival who died the next day. Following the suggestion of friends, he went to Paris and there surrendered to the British ambassador. He returned to Scotland to stand trial for murder and was acquitted on 10 June 1822.3
Stuart spent the next years at his countryside residence at Hillside, near Aberdour, in Fifeshire. This house was built on the site of a seventeenth‐century building.4 Now a school, at the time it was a great mansion served by gate lodges to the south and the north. Nineteenth‐century maps show three avenues and a walled garden to the north of the house, and it is known that Stuart greatly improved Hillside’s grounds.5
In the following years Stuart became crippled by the expenses of his continuous political activities and of overgenerous hospitality.6 Further extensive, but unsuccessful, speculations in land, and the 1825 England stock‐market crash and consequent bank panic, led to his bankruptcy in 1828.7 His house was sequestrated and his art collection sold the next year. He then decided to leave Scotland, and his creditors, for America, reaching New York on 23 August 1828 and returning in 1831. Two years later he published Three years in North America, a two‐volume account of his stay.8 The book’s success led to its being reprinted in the following years and ensured him a small profit.9
In the spring of 1831, when the Whigs had been in power for a few months, Stuart asked his friend Henry Brougham, then Lord Chancellor, for a job as consul in New York or in Europe, but a section of the Whig ministries refused to give a government office to an undischarged bankrupt.10 He had to take refuge in Jersey until he could pay for his discharge, which he did thanks to an estate he anticipated inheriting on the death of an uncle.
In 1832 Stuart returned to London and became editor of the Courier (1792–1842), an influential London evening newspaper initially edited by James Perry. In 1809 it had became a leading Tory paper under T.G. Street. However, during his editorship Stuart strongly supported the Whig party. During that time the Courier was not prosperous, and he tried to increase its popularity by publishing a double number of eight pages once a week, with one page devoted entirely to reviews. In fact many of the reviews were merely reprints of the morning papers.11 He was editor of the Courier until 1841, when it returned to supporting the Tory party.
In 1833 Stuart at last obtained a government job, becoming temporary assistant commissioner for Scotland on the royal commission for the employment of children in factories. From then until his death he held the role of factory inspector in Scotland and Ireland. He also became chairman of the North British Assurance Company in London in the late 1830s. He died of heart disease aged 74, on 3 November 1849, at 4 Boyne Terrace, Notting Hill, London, without issue.
There are two portraits of James Stuart of Dunearn by Sir Daniel Macnee (1806–1882), one of which is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and was possibly exhibited in 1844 at the Royal Scottish Academy.12
Collection
Following Stuart’s bankruptcy his sequestrated estate was auctioned at his family house, 20 Moray Place, Edinburgh, on 9–11 February 1829.13 The names of the artists whose works were in the sale were taken from a list that Stuart himself had made. There were several paintings described as by masters of different schools, including Correggio, Guido Reni, Murillo, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Cuyp, Jan Both, Hobbema, Ruisdael, Berchem, Wouwermans [sic], Swanevelt, Willem van de Velde, de Hooch and Watteau. The modern pictures, with the exception of a few by Sir Joshua Reynolds and others of the English School, were principally by eminent Scottish artists. According to the catalogue the paintings were all ‘in fine condition, and elegantly framed’.14
The works were sold room by room, giving us an idea of Stuart’s house in Edinburgh, and in particular of the rooms where the paintings used to hang: two of his few French paintings – namely, Pair of views of Ludlow and Powys Castle curiously attributed to Watteau and the sketch of a Woman peeling Onions by Chardin15 – were displayed in the principal bedroom, together with a painting by Salvator Rosa, a group of Dutch paintings, and some miniatures. The most valuable paintings were in the dining room. These were said to be by Guido Reni, Correggio, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Murillo and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Some of the Scottish works and some drawings were hung in the anteroom, and the large drawing room was dedicated to paintings by Watteau, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Soldi, Netscher, Berchem, Wouwerman, Willem van de Velde, Jan Both and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Finally, the small drawing room was dedicated to Dutch paintings by Hobbema, Cuyp, Berchem, van Goyen and others. Other paintings, such as Watteau’s Fête champêtre (which at 100 guineas made one of the highest prices in the sale) and a copy after Poussin, the so‐called Tomb of Germanicus,16 were sold on the third day of the sale and were not located in any of the rooms mentioned above. According to the author of the auction catalogue, Stuart’s collection was: ‘One of the most select private collections of Old Pictures ever brought to sale in Scotland, many of which have been long in the possession of Stuart’s Family, besides purchases made by himself with great taste and judgement’.
Among the noblemen interested in the sale was Walter Scott’s friend, the young 5th Duke of Buccleuch. On 2 February 1829 Scott wrote in his diary that he looked at the pictures to find something for the duke: he saw Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis (lot 120), now in the National Gallery (NG 830), but did not find it appealing. The next day he wrote to the duke reporting that it was ‘fitter for an artist’s studio than for a nobleman’s collection’.17
On 9 February, the first day of the sale, Scott wrote of Stuart: This poor man fell, like myself, a victim to speculation. And though I had no knowledge of him personally, and disliked him as the cause of poor Sir Alexander Boswell’s death,18 yet ‘had he been slaughterman to all my kin’, I could but pity the miserable sight of his splendid establishment broken up, and his treasures of art exposed to public and unsparing sale …19
As the author of the auction catalogue indicated, Stuart’s works of art were the result of collecting activities of other members of the family as well as himself. James’s father, Charles, was also a collector and was described as follows by the writer Dr Thomas M’Crie: ‘In Dr. Stuart I always found the honourable feelings of the gentleman, the refined and liberal thinking of the scholar, and the unaffected and humble piety of the Christian.’20 An interesting description of Charles and his collection can be found in Thomas Pennant’s book A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772: I had the pleasure of seeing, near Aberdour, a most select collection of pictures, made by Captain Stuart, who, with great politeness, obliged me with sight of them. It is in vain to attempt the description of this elegant cabinet, as I may say, one part or other used to be always on the march. This gentleman indulges his elegant and laudable passion so far as to form out of them un cabinet portatif, which is his amusement, on the road, in quarters: in short, the companions of all his motions. His house is very small: to get at his library I ascended a ladder, which reminded me of the habitation of Mynhier Bishop, at Rotterdam, the richest repository in Europe, under the poorest roof. But the comparison fails on this: Bishop was a brute, our countryman the reverse.21
Julia Williams has also pointed out that James was not the only collector in the family: there are two sales linked to the name of Alexander Stuart of Dunearn (died 1786), who was possibly James’s uncle.22 The first was held in 1786.23 The exhibition of the paintings, 283 of which were Dutch and Flemish, was held for almost a month in the Large Rooms of the Royal Exchange of Edinburgh. There is also the record of an Alexander Stuart of Dunearn posthumous sale held in London in 1788,24 consisting of paintings from the family house in Dunearn by Italian artists such as Bassano, Giordano, Parmigianino and Domenichino, and examples by Rubens, van Herp, Teniers, Cuyp, Berchem, Wouwerman and Watteau, among others. Alexander Stuart’s nephew, James, possibly participated in the auction and bought a painting described as by F. Hals for £5 15s.
James Stuart of Dunearn started collecting again on his return from America. He died in 1849 and the next year a sale of his collection of 155 paintings, mostly Dutch and English, and drawings, was held at Christie’s in London.25 In his obituary, published in 1849, the author writes: ‘He was distinguished by his taste for, and knowledge of, the fine arts; and his many excellent qualities made him highly esteemed and beloved by a wide circle of attached and intelligent friends.’26
Very few details can be found about Stuart’s second collection of paintings in his London house. He might have bought paintings, possibly in France, between spring 1831 and 1832, just before his return to London from Jersey, where he was waiting to have his bankruptcy discharged. Beyond having solved his financial situation with the British Government, he might have spent part of his anticipated inheritance in starting to rebuild his collection. Earnings from his two employments, as a factory inspector and as chairman of the United Kingdom Insurance Company (or North British Assurance Company, as it was called by the Gentleman’s Magazine),27 presumably helped.
Stuart possibly found the time to collect again in the years between 1836 and his death. In 1840–1 William John Wood, who had served briefly as factory superintendent in Scotland from November 1836 to January 1837, and John Beal, Stuart’s factory superintendent for East Scotland, combined to denounce him for failing in his role of supervisor to the royal commission for the employment of children in factories.28 Beal, in particular, accused Stuart of running his district from the London office at the Courier, as well as spending part of his time in France on private business.29 This information reinforces the possibility that his ‘private business in France’ could have involved the purchase of works of art, in particular his French paintings, among them six paintings by Greuze, and Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress (NG 4077), which was called in the 1850 sale catalogue A girl teaching a child and then sold for £10.30
The provenance, direct or indirect, of some of Stuart’s paintings was noted in the sale catalogue: some from Viscount Hartcourt [sic], others from Mr Gilmore’s collection, the Montcalm Gallery (Greuze, lot 117b), the King of Bavaria (Wouwermans [sic], lot 182), Lady Stuart’s collection (Jan Both, lot 183), Marshal Maison’s collection (Canaletto, lot 196) and from Edward Gray’s collection, Harringay (van der Neer, lot 208). John Smith’s collection was often cited in the provenance details.31
James Stuart of Dunearn’s second collection was quite like his first. Many of the works were by artists he or his family members had collected before. Dutch and Flemish paintings formed the greater part of the collection, but a small number of French and Italian paintings could also be found. He continued to be interested in paintings by contemporary Scottish artists, in particular those depicting landscapes of Scotland and Aberdour.
NOTES
1 Basic information about the life of James Stuart of Dunearn can be found in Michael S. Moss, ‘Stuart, James (1775–1849)’, ODNB. (Back to text.)
2 See Anonymous, ‘Duel between Sir A. Boswell and Mr. Stuart’, The Examiner, 744, 7 April 1822, pp. 217–18; and Anonymous, ‘The late Scotch duel’, The Examiner, 745, 14 April 1822, p. 232. (Back to text.)
3 Stuart 1822. (Back to text.)
4 For more details see the British Listed Buildings website at www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk and Hillside School’s website (www.hillsideschool.co.uk), accessed 2013. (Back to text.)
5 Ross 1885, p. 379. (Back to text.)
6 Henriques 1971, p. 22. (Back to text.)
7 See Dunbar,
Dingwall
Fordyce and de Maria 1838, vol. 8, pp. 392–4. (Back to text.)
8 Stuart 1833. (Back to text.)
9 Henriques 1971, p. 26, note 2. (Back to text.)
10 According to U.R.Q. Henriques ( ibid. , p. 22), on his flight to America he had brought with him £2,000 from the Scottish Widows’ Fund of which he was treasurer. (Back to text.)
11 Fenner 1994, p. 21. (Back to text.)
12 Sir Daniel Macnee, James Stuart of Dunearn (1775–1849), inv. NP 1143. Given by M.V. Erskine Stuart, Esq., 1930. (Back to text.)
13 Catalogue of Pictures, Prints and Drawings, belonging to the sequestrated estate of James Stuart of Dunearn. Mansfield and Davidson, Monday, 9–11 February 1829. Stuart’s collection of books had been sold separately, at D. Speare, Edinburgh, 26 January 1829; a copy of the catalogue is in the library of Harvard University (Hollis no. 007126723). For a complete overview of the sale see the Sale Catalogs Files of the Getty Provenance Index, BR 3226. (Back to text.)
14 See the introduction in James Stuart’s sale catalogue, 9–11 February 1829, cited in previous note. (Back to text.)
15 Possibly a sketch for Chardin’s The Kitchen Maid, 1738, Washington, National Gallery of Art, inv. 1952.5.38. A replica, the so‐called Woman Peeling Turnips, is in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. 1090. (Back to text.)
16 The original of Poussin’s painting is The Death of Germanicus in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, inv. 58.28. (Back to text.)
17 Pope‐Hennessy 1939, p. 67. (Back to text.)
18 According to Bold 1989, p. 30, Sir Walter Scott took inspiration from this contemporary event for the duel in his novel St Ronan’s Well (Edinburgh 1823), his only novel with a nineteenth‐century setting. (Back to text.)
19 Scott 1890, 9 February 1829. (Back to text.)
20 Dr Thomas M’Crie, ‘Character of Dr. Charles Stuart, of Dunearn’, in the book by his son, Revd Thomas M’Crie (M’Crie 1840, appendix, no. 3, pp. 447–50). (Back to text.)
21 Pennant 1772, Part 2, p. 207. (Back to text.)
22 Lloyd Williams 1992, pp. 17–20 and 170. A collector’s file for James Stuart of Dunearn exists in the Getty Provenance Index and mentions the other collectors of the family. (Back to text.)
23 Catalogue of Capital Paintings by the First Masters Collected by the Late Alexander Stuart, Esq. of Dunearn. Now on exhibition at the Large Rooms Royal Exchange, Edinburgh, 24 July to 12 August 1786, privately published ( Lugt 4076). In a copy in the library of the National Gallery, London the annotator wrote that the sale raised £2,302 and commented: ‘… such was the very low state of the Arts at Edinburgh’. (Back to text.)
24 Catalogue of a Valuable Collection of Italian, French, Flemish and Dutch Pictures, the Property of the late Alexander Stuart, Esq. deceased; brought from his seat at Dunearne in Scotland, Christie & Manson, London, Monday 25 February 1788. (Back to text.)
25 Dutch and English Pictures and Drawings selected with the great taste by that well‐known collector James Stuart, Esq., deceased, late of Boyne Terrace, Notting Hill, Christie & Manson, London, 18–19 April 1850. (Back to text.)
26 ‘Sylvanus Urban, Gent.’ (the pseudonym of the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine), Gentleman’s Magazine, 32, July–December 1849, p. 659. (Back to text.)
27 Ibid. , p. 660. (Back to text.)
28 S.C. on Mills and Factories, Fourth Report, pp. 80–1, in IUP PP , Industrial Revolution, Factories, i, 1840–1. (Back to text.)
29 Henriques 1971, p. 35. (Back to text.)
30 The author of the catalogue wrote the words ‘very elegant’ next to this lot. (Back to text.)
31 For provenance references the author of the sale catalogue also quotes the London dealer John Smith’s book, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, London 1829–42. (Back to text.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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
Technical abbreviations
- Macro‐XRF
- Macro X‐ray fluorescence
- XRD
- X‐ray powder diffraction
List of archive references cited
- London, British Library, Cartographic Items, Crace Port. 10.63
- London, British Museum, British Museum Collection Database, inv. 2010,7081.3224
- London, National Gallery, Archive, curatorial dossier for NG739: R.N. Wornum, letter to John Webb, 5 August 1864
- London, National Gallery, Archive: J. Mulherron, letter, 23 July 2012
- London, National Gallery, Archive, NG1/4: Minutes of the Board of Trustees, vol. IV, 12 November 1855–11 February 1871
- London, National Gallery, Archive, NG 10/13/4077: National Gallery Manuscript Catalogue, vol. 13, 12 May 1925
- London, National Gallery, Archive, Subject Files, Miscellaneous Filing, 1925, A–D [290.25]: George S. Brock, letter to Sir Charles Holmes, 12 September 1925
- Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Getty Provenance Index: collector’s file for James Stuart of Dunearn
- Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Getty Provenance Index, Sale Catalogs Files, BR 3226
- [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
List of references cited
- Alfeld et al. 2013
- Alfeld, A., J.V. Pedroso, M. van Eikema Hommes, G. Van der Snickt, G. Tauber, J. Blaas, M. Haschke, K. Erler, J. Dik and K. Janssens, ‘A mobile instrument for in situ scanning macro‐XRF investigation of historical paintings’, Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, 2013, 28, pp. 760–7
- Anon. 1822a
- Anon., ‘Duel between Sir A. Boswell and Mr. Stuart’, The Examiner, 7 April 1822, 744, pp. 217–18
- Anon. 1822b
- Anon., ‘The late Scotch duel’, The Examiner, 14 April 1822, 745, pp. 232
- Art Journal 1880
- ‘[Obituary of John Webb]’, Art Journal, 1880, new series, 19, 300
- Bailey 2003
- Bailey, Colin B., ed., The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting (exh. cat. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), New Haven and London 2003
- Baker, Cockburn and Pugh 1971
- Baker, T.F.T., J.S. Cockburn and R.B. Pugh, A History of the County of Middlesex, vol. 4: Harmondsworth, Hayes …, London 1971
- Baker and Henry 2001
- Baker, Christopher and Tom Henry, The National Gallery Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
- Beale 2002
- Beale, Catherine, ‘A Forgotten Greenhouse by Joseph Paxton: The Conservatory at Hampton Court, Herefordshire’, Garden History, spring 2002, 30, no. 1, 74–83
- Berthaud 1744
- Berthaud, l’abbé, La Quadrille des enfans, Paris 1744
- Blanc 1862–3
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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
- Ferrara and Madrid 2010–11
- Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, Chardin: Il pittore del silenzio, 2010–11 (exh. cat.: Rosenberg 2010)
- London 1943
- London, National Gallery, Picture of the Month, April 1943
- London 1968
- London, Royal Academy of Arts, France in the Eighteenth Century, 1968 (exh. cat.: Sutton 1968)
- London, National Gallery 1978
- London, National Gallery, The Artist’s Eye: An Exhibition Selected by Richard Hamilton, 1978 (exh. cat.: Hamilton 1978)
- London 1986
- London, National Gallery, The Artist’s Eye: An Exhibition Selected by Patrick Caulfield, 1986 (exh. cat.: Caulfield 1986)
- London, National Gallery 1987
- London, National Gallery, The Artist’s Eye: An Exhibition Selected by Lucian Freud, 1987 (exh. cat.: Freud 1987)
- New York, Detroit and Paris 1986–7
- New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts; Paris, Grand Palais, François Boucher 1703–1770, 1986–7 (exh. cat.: Laing 1986)
- Ottawa, Washington DC and Berlin 2003–4
- Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art; Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, 2003–4 (exh. cat.: Holland 1963)
- Paris 1740
- Paris, Paris Salon, 1740
- 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)
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 1, generated from files HW_2018__16.xml dated 14/10/2024 and database__16.xml dated 16/10/2024 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 14/10/2024. Structural mark-up applied to skeleton document in full; entry for NG4077, biography for Chardin and associated front and back matter (marked up in pilot project) reintegrated into main document; document updated to use external database of archival and bibliographic references; entries for NG5583, NG1090, NG4078, NG6598, NG6495, NG6440, NG6445, NG6422, NG6435, NG6592, NG6600-NG6601, NG1653 and NG2897 prepared for publication; entries for NG1653, NG4077 and NG6440 proofread and corrected.
Cite this entry
- Permalink (this version)
- https://data.ng.ac.uk/087W-000B-0000-0000
- Permalink (latest version)
- https://data.ng.ac.uk/086G-000B-0000-0000
- Chicago style
- Wine, Humphrey. "NG 4077, The Young Schoolmistress". 2018, online version 1, October 17, 2024. https://data.ng.ac.uk/087W-000B-0000-0000.
- Harvard style
- Wine, Humphrey (2018) NG 4077, The Young Schoolmistress. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2024. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/087W-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 11 November 2024).
- MHRA style
- Wine, Humphrey, NG 4077, The Young Schoolmistress (National Gallery, 2018; online version 1, 2024) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/087W-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 11 November 2024]