Book Reviews A Bibliographical Repertory of Italian Private Collections. By Elizabeth Gardner. I: Abaco–Cutolo, xvi + 438 pp. (Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza, 1998), 49.06. ISBN 88– 7305–659–8; II: Dabalà–Kvitkta, 416 pp. (Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza, 2002), 50. ISBN 88–7305–950–3. Reviewed by BURTON FREDERICKSEN
must be counted among the most zealous and indefatigable contributors to the history of collecting, a field championed during the first three quarters of the last century by a relatively small number of enthusiasts who, without the benefit of automation, found very individual ways of coming to grips with the mass of relevant material, most of it lodged in a nearly bottomless reservoir of intriguingly obscure sources. Gardner came to this pursuit through her involvement with the paintings collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and from the start her participation was strictly pragmatic, beginning with a card file on everyone who had ever owned any painting in the collection, then, while narrowing her interest to Italian collectors, carrying her compilation into uncharted territory. With the intention of eventually turning her files into a reference book, she began to collect every useful allusion she could find to the possessions of any Italian collector from any time, a task, it must be admitted, well beyond the means of any one person to fulfil. Although dedicated to a much smaller geographical entity, among the works of Gardner’s predecessors it is probably Theodor von Frimmel’s Lexikon der Wiener Gemäldesammlungen of 1913–14 that this Bibliographical Repertory most resembles. The former never advanced beyond the letter ‘L’, but the goal of assembling everything the author could find on the collections of a single city was perhaps achievable, and nearly a century later we still miss the second half of the alphabet he was unable to complete. With the entire Italian peninsula in play, however, any hope of a definitive result is inevitably unfulfillable. Before her unexpected death in 1985 Gardner had compiled a remarkably large archive, and numerous colleagues had already been consulting it for many years, but it was obvious that an enormous effort would be required to put it into publishable form. Following Gardner’s death, Alessandro Bettagno of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini took the project in hand, assigning it to Chiara Ceschi to edit and standardise. The first volume, encompassing the letters A–C, appeared in 1998 under the primary sponsorship of the Cini and, in addition to having transformed Gardner’s cards into a relatively consistent format, Ceschi had also succeeded in incorporating a very large amount of new material published between 1985 and 1998. The second volume, comprising the letters D–K, has TH E L A T E EL IZ A B E T H G A R D NE R
material gleaned from sources published as recently as 2002, the year this book was printed, and once again, the efforts of Ceschi, this time assisted by Katharine Baetjer, Gardner’s longtime colleague, have added considerably to the value of the publication. The two volumes now consist of over five thousand entries. Large reference books are becoming increasingly rare, and those that are attempted are usually derived from automated sources, or at least compiled in automated form. Gardner’s Bibliographical Repertory may be the last to have been compiled on cards. No template was employed during compilation to make the information uniform, and the entries vary widely. In some, such as the one dedicated to conte Pietro de Terzi Lana of Brescia, more than a page is devoted to a description of a gallery, detailing approximately ninety paintings taken from Giulio Antonio Averoldo’s guide of 1700, but the majority consist of a brief paragraph or a sentence derived from a single source, leaving it to the reader to consult that source in order to learn what the collection contained. Obviously not every relevant source can have been found. In many entries the only reference is to individual paintings from early, usually Italian, exhibition catalogues, or to paintings in museums that have been traced to an Italian collection, and in such cases no explanatory text is attempted. Here one assumes that only a small portion of the potentially relevant paintings have been included. All this is very welcome, though it is not always clear why some sources deserved to be quoted at length and others not. One might imagine that the longest citations would come from the earlier and more obscure sources, but in fact many are taken from books published within the last ten or twenty years. Although edited and published in Italy, the book is in English because Gardner compiled her notes in that language. But the alphabetisation is Italian, meaning that Martino d’Anna is found under the letter ‘D’ and not ‘A’, while in the bibliography some German noble names are under ‘V’ for ‘von’, but some are not. There are no cross-references. Users will quickly adjust to this, but the change of language has led to errors. The Milanese collector d’Abbadia, for instance, represented by a single Dutch painting in an exhibition reviewed by Hoogewerff in 1922, is found as both ‘Abbadis’ in volume one and ‘d’Abbadia’ in volume two, each with the same reference. The bilingual nature of the publication is also the source of some inconsistency in the spelling of place names, such as Lione and Lyon when referring to the same book. A prominent feature is the lengthy bibliography, which consumes about one third of each volume, although a very large proportion is necessarily duplication. This was no doubt thought necessary because the volumes are being published at long intervals and would be of limited use without the bibliography, but it adds considerably to the bulk. A brief test does not indicate that this duplication has led to the correction of errors: Emmanuele Vaccaro’s 1838 catalogue of the collection of Antonio Lucchesi-Palli, principe
di Campofranco, for instance, is incorrectly dated 1888 in the bibliography of both volumes, but given correctly in the principal part of volume one under ‘Campofranco’ (which, if it were consistent with the rest of the volume, should have been placed under ‘Lucchesi-Palli’). However, under the circumstances, one is prepared to forgive such oversights. One might even enjoy Science in the Service of Art Mistery (I, p.308). Coverage can never be complete, but some inconsistencies are hard to explain. A valiant attempt has been made, for instance, to include a brief commentary on every inventory from Gerard Labrot’s Collections of Paintings in Naples, 1600–1780 published in 1990 and containing transcriptions of eighty-three Neapolitan documents. But for some reason, those collectors whose names begin with the letter ‘B’ are omitted. Other sources seem to have been incompletely mined as well, though it is hard to know how extensive this is. The contemporary Milanese dealer Gilberto Algranti is represented by five paintings cited in recent exhibition catalogues or monographs, but no mention is made of the catalogues published by his own firm containing dozens of his pictures. Scholars consulting these volumes will readily appreciate what an accomplishment they represent. In spite of the current wave of publications and the burgeoning popularity of the subject, the Bibliographical Repertory will stand as an essential guide to the history of collecting in Italy for decades to come. It is unlikely ever to be attempted again, but if it is, it will surely require a whole team of Elizabeth Gardners.
Inventaire Géneral des Dessins du Musée du Louvre. Ecole Espagnole, XVIe– XVIIIe Siècle. By Lizzie Boubli. 224 pp. with 232 b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2002), 85. ISBN 2–7118– 4492–7. Reviewed by NINA AYALA MALLORY THI S C ATALO GUE OF T HE holdings of Spanish drawings from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre is another important contribution to the study of this relatively undeveloped field. Lizzie Boubli has completed a work she started in 1991 with an exhibition that took place at the Louvre, Dessins Espagnols: Maîtres des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, the first show of such drawings to be held in France. The present catalogue looks again at the development of the collecting of Spanish drawings in France and also provides an account of the production of drawings in Renaissance Spain, starting with those of Yañez de la Almedina in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Yañez, who worked in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci, remained faithful to the methods he learned there (metalpoint on prepared paper), which were becoming less and less common, and throughout the sixteenth century Spanish drawing remained closely
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tied to that of Italy. Artists from the peninsula regularly travelled to Rome and Philip II invited several Italian artists to his court to work on the decoration of the Escorial. The most outstanding works in the first section of the catalogue are the drawings by Alonso Berruguete and Pedro Machuca, both of whom spent time in Rome and Florence. The holdings of the Cabinet des Dessins are relatively rich in examples of drawings by Spanish artists of the Golden Age but, just as El Greco is missing from their sixteenth-century holdings, the lack of drawings by Velázquez and Zurbarán creates a significant gap in the coverage of the working methods of their generation. There is, however, an abundant representation of the work of Ribera, Murillo, Alonso Cano, Valdés Leal and the Madrid school of the latter part of the seventeenth century. Contrary to what might be expected, the Cabinet des Dessins is practically devoid of examples by the artists who worked after the accession of the Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish throne in the eighteenth century. On the other hand, Goya is richly represented, and his work forms the bulk of that part of the catalogue devoted to the eighteenth century. Within the divisions by century, the publication is arranged alphabetically by the artist’s name, and for each one it provides an extensive biography and analysis of his œuvre. The entries follow the customary format of physical description, provenance and bibliography, and, in the case of the more important works, a detailed discussion of stylistic characteristics, purpose and iconography. After the entries of accepted works come those attributed to the artist’s workshop, to followers, or works made after his work. The items rejected by the author are catalogued at the end. In the section on the seventeenth century, Cano’s drawings receive the careful study they merit, with special attention to cat. nos.40–43, which are unequivocally his. These are preparatory drawings for both extant and lost paintings done in a free and expressive manner. Claudio Coello’s four secure drawings (nos.67–70) include a compositional study for the large painting of the Virgin and Child with the cardinal virtues and saints in the Prado (no.67), and two beautiful portrait heads of monks (nos.68 and 69), studies for figures in Coello’s largest work, the Adoration of the Sagrada Forma by Charles II and his court in the Escorial, both drawn in charcoal and sanguine. The drawings by Murillo form the most important group of seventeenth-century sheets, one of the richest in existence, alongside that of the British Museum. They vary in medium from pen and ink to charcoal (or combinations of the two), as well as in size. Three of them (nos.85, 100 and 101) are studies for known paintings, either for the entire composition or for a portion of it. Others (nos.96–99) deal with subjects often treated by Murillo, but they cannot be directly related to any one painting. One of Murillo’s most important pieces, the Vision of a nun (no.86), which can be dated c.1660–70, is a highly finished work, as nuanced in its tonal values
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as any painting, but its iconography is still unclear, and there is no extant work for which it may have served as a preparatory drawing. An unusual group of drawings by Murillo is that of ten angels carrying the instruments of the Passion (nos.87–95), of the 1660s, for which there is no known related work. Whatever their purpose may have been, it is interesting to note how close they are in character and handling to Bernini’s angels for the Ponte Sant’Angelo, which are approximately contemporary (1667–69). The section devoted to Goya begins with a large sheet, the handsome Head of an angel (no.187), one of his first known drawings, done in sanguine on coloured paper in preparation for his frescos in the basilica of El Pilar in Zaragoza, his first documented and dated work. The Cabinet also owns a series of thirteen gouache drawings, most of them with autograph titles, four of smaller format (nos.189–192), approximately 19 by 12 cm., and nine a few centimetres larger (nos.193– 201). They are satiric in content and prepare the way for the publication of the Caprichos in 1799; some of them (from Album B) in fact acted as models for the etchings. The larger drawings – with the exception of no.193, the satirical ‘They ascend merrily’ – are powerful images of daily life, with great depth of human feeling, and all but one show the figures on a plain white ground. Finally, nos.202 and 203, which are part of Album C and are done with lithographic crayon, belong to Goya’s stay in Bordeaux from 1824 to 1828 during the last years of his life. No.202 (Fuego) expresses the derangement caused by panic, and no.203 illustrates the madness of suicide, a man jumping from a balcony after reading a note he still holds in his hand. A final section dealing with the different papers used by Spanish artists in the works inventoried here and an extensive bibliography complete a catalogue that is altogether a work of great thoroughness, intelligence and sensibility.
The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny. By Alden R. Gordon, edited by Carolyne Ayçaguer-Ron, assisted by Maria L. Gilbert, Elizabeth A. Spatz and Patricia A. Teter (Documents for the History of Collecting: French Inventories, I). 677 pp. with 93 b. & w. ills. (The Provenance Index of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2003), £95. ISBN 0–89236–694–X. Reviewed by ALASTAIR LAING The National Trust O N E O F THE more regrettable failures of the National Gallery, London, to acquire important eighteenth-century French paintings under export review in recent years was to have to let go Louis-Michel Vanloo’s poignant portrait of the Marquis de Marigny with his wife at her toilet table of 1769 which forms the frontispiece to the present book (Fig.42). Not only would it beautifully have complemented
Drouais’s portrait of the marquis’s sister, Madame de Pompadour, acquired at the Mentmore sale, but it would have been a conspicuous reminder of the remarkable French works of art – furniture, above all – that came to England, as this portrait did, by an intriguing succession of inheritances. For the marquise de Marigny, Marie-Françoise-JulieConstance Filleul (1751–1822), officially the daughter of a wine salesman in the employ of the fermier-général, Michel Bouret, but very probably in fact the daughter of the latter – shades of Dame Maggie Greville and the Rt. Hon. William McEwan, but with the vintnerage substituted for the beerage! – was married off to Marigny at the age of sixteen, legally separated from him in 1777 after her flagrant affair with the young cardinal de Rohan, and, after Marigny’s death, became the wife of the comte de Bourzac. She was the sister of Adelaïde Filleul, comtesse de Flahaut de la Billarderie (who, through her husband, became the sister-in-law of Marigny’s successor-but-one as directeur des bâtiments du Roi, the artistically influential comte d’Angiviller), subsequently Mme de Souza. As Alden Gordon urbanely puts it (pp.23–24), the two sisters ‘strategically managed to unburden themselves of their aristocratic second husbands and to float through the French Revolution and the First Empire without serious consequences . . . Louis Michel Vanloo’s double portrait of the marquis and marquise de Marigny went from Marigny’s estate to Julie and from her to her sister Adelaïde’s illegitimate son by Talleyrand, Auguste de Flahaut. An aide-de-camp to Napoléon, he married Margaret Mercer [Keith, subsequently suo jure Baroness Keith and Nairne], to the chagrin of her father, Admiral Lord Keith, who detested Bonapartists. Ultimately his collections and hers, plus what they bought together, descended through their eldest daughter [Emily Jane Mercer Elphinstone de Flahault, Baroness Nairne] into the Landsdowne collections [by her marriage to Henry, 4th Marquess], from which the portrait was sold in 1994 and acquired for the Musée du Louvre.’ It is one of the frustrations of Gordon’s long-awaited book – though the fault is not his, but that of the otherwise astonishingly thorough French ancien régime process of notarial inventory taking, which mostly omitted details, and always omitted valuations, of family portraits, because they did not fall into the divisible estate – that very few of the portraits of Marigny or of his sister can be identified in it with any certainty.1 The Drouais of Mme de Pompadour, ‘mise devant un metier en Tapisserie’, and the Vanloo of Marigny, ‘un autre grand portrait en pie[d] du même près de M.me De Menars’ (the title that he was accorded in 1778, and that he graciously allowed her to use, despite their legal separation) were, however, exceptions, even being parts of adjacent items in the inventory (nos.1106 and 1107). But it is a further limitation of these otherwise minutely systematic inventories, that they tell us nothing about how or where the two portraits were hung, since, in order to ensure that the experts (Fran-
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çois Basan and François-Charles Joullain) could comfortably assess the works of art from Marigny’s numerous and widely scattered residences, they were all gathered together into the gallery of a property that he only rented for the last three years of his life, the former hôtel de Pomponne in the place des Victoires; even so, they took from 11th to 25th July 1781 over the task, and these and other portraits – also not requiring valuation – were the last of the 450 items (many of them, like these, comprising more than one painting, drawing, print, sculpture, porcelain or ‘curiosité’). Merely to have transcribed Marigny’s posthumous inventories almost in toto (2,265 items in all, including reproducing in extenso the lengthy summaries of legal documents which, rather surprisingly, were also included in inventories such as that of his estate, over which legal claims impended, but excluding the books, because, as Gordon very reasonably maintains, these are all detailed in full in the catalogue of their subsequent sale), and to have had these published in book form (all praise to Burton Fredericksen and his successors at the Getty Provenance Index) would alone have been a work deserving the remission of millennia in purgatory, but Gordon has done more than this. He has, as he himself says, essentially spliced two books. One consists of the inventories themselves, complete with helpful annotations and identifications, although, with commendable restraint, he has avoided swelling their bulk further by identifying each and every item and its present whereabouts. The other comprises an introduction to Marigny, his buildings and collections, his taste, and the claimants of his inheritance, followed by a notional walkthrough of each of his residences in the steps of the inventory takers, explaining and expounding what we ourselves – not immersed in the man and the period as is Gordon – would find it very difficult to extract from the dry succession of ‘Item, . . . Item, . . . &c.’. As if this were not enough, Gordon and his editors have eased our path with a great apparatus: two glossaries, one of abbreviations (especially those used in legal documents), and the other of specialised and archaic words; four indexes, of art objects and household goods, of artists, of subjects, and of proper names; four appendixes consisting of transcriptions of Hooghstael’s invoice for cleaning and restoring Marigny’s paintings in 1777; of the shipping manifests of porcelain and arms transported from the château de Menars to Paris in 1779; of a list of nine auctions of chattels from the estates of Mme de Pompadour and Marigny – with transcriptions of the two rarest of these: of items from Le Pâté-Bercy on 4th May ff. 1785, and of gems and a few glazed and framed drawings on 6th–8th February 1787; and of a list of the no less than seventeen (two fewer than Tyntesfield!) heirs making claims on the estate, and their dozen notaires; together with a bibliography; two pull-out genealogical tables; and finally, six plans of Marigny’s residences tucked into the back cover of the book.
42. The Marquis de Marigny with his wife at her toilet table, by Louis-Michel Vanloo. 1769. 130 by 97.5 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
It is a remarkable achievement, going back to Gordon’s original discovery of this set of inventories in the Minutier central of the Archives nationales in 1982. It is very much to be hoped that it will be a prelude, not simply to the publication in book (rather than the threatened on-line) form of other French inventories, and to the discoveries – especially of Marigny’s furniture (it is a telling indication of how far in arrears the study of this is, that almost all the illustrations in this book are of pictures and sculpture) – that it will surely facilitate, but also to the long-bruited exhibition devoted to Marigny. The recent exhibitions at Versailles, Munich and the National Gallery, London, devoted to his sister were in many ways a disappointment, since what was significant about her was her personality; there was no such thing as a goût Pompadour. One devoted to Marigny would have much greater coherence. If Gordon’s book and the inventories have a leitmotif, it is that of Marigny’s moderate classicising taste, as far removed from the excesses of the goût grec as it was from those of the ‘chicorée moderne’ (the Rococo): as Gordon says, one might almost call it Palladian. And certainly, the prevalence of mahogany furniture and of English scientific instruments in his capharnaums, suggests that it was markedly à l’anglaise: another reason to be sorry that we cannot repay the compliment by admiring his portrait in the National Gallery. 1 The one place where I would take issue with Gordon over his interpretation of the inventory and of associated documents, is his suggestion (p.82) that Boucher’s 1756 portrait of Madame de Pompadour, now in Munich, was the unattributed ‘tableau avec sa bordure representant une jeune femme occupée à lire’ that was shipped from Marigny’s chambre à coucher at Menars to Paris in 1778, and that (p.294, note 94) it can thus be identified with the equally unattributed ‘portrait de f[emm]e assise dans un fauteuil’ in the inventory of the works of art assembled in the gallery of the hôtel de Menars on 21st July 1781 (no.805). Not only were both Mme de Pompadour and
Boucher sufficiently notorious to be named (though sometimes discretion seems to have guided the pens of the inventory takers over the former), but she is neither shown reading nor on a fauteuil in Boucher’s portrait, nor would she have been referred to as a ‘jeune femme’. Instead, her portrait by Boucher remained in all probability at Menars, where it can reasonably be identified in the inventory taken there on 11th October 1781 (not by an expert – hence the omission of Boucher’s name as the artist), in the chambre à coucher on the ground floor of the west wing, as ‘un Tableau peint sur Toile dans sa bordure de bois doré . . . representant Mad. de Pompadour’ (no.1850), which is probably exactly where it had been seen by Joseph Jekyll in 1775: ‘The bed was still in an interesting disorder: and . . . I was lost in the comparison of beauty which arose between the portraits of the Marchionesses of Pompadour and de Marigny, and the contemplation of a group of the most amiable pugs imaginable which belonged to the latter’ (A. Bourke, ed.: Correspondence of Mr. Joseph Jekyll, London 1894, p.60). Following their separation, Marigny evidently took down the portrait of his wife, but Boucher’s of his sister remained at the château (by then in the possession of their Poisson de Malvoisin cousins), to be listed by the Revolutionary commissars on 21st October 1792 as one of the paintings to be transferred to the new museum at Blois, along with another life-size portrait of her by Vanloo: ‘l’autre par Boucher, représentant . . . cette femme assise, et appuyée sur une table, avec une attitude et un costume voluptueux, son chien favori à ses pieds’ (M.A. Dupré: ‘Recherches Historiques sur le château, les seigneurs, et la paroisse de Ménars-lès-Blois’, Mémoires de la Société des Sciences et Lettres de la ville de Blois 6 (1860), p.168). It never reached the museum, but may instead have passed directly into the hands of its first subsequently recorded owner, Casimir Perrin, marquis de Cypierre, son of the intendant of Orléans, and grandson of the previous intendant, and purchaser of Mme de Pompadour’s château d’Auvilliers, Jean-Claude François Perrin de Cypierre.
Kenwood. Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest. By Julius Bryant. ix + 434 pp. incl. 127 col. pls. + 269 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003), £50. ISBN 0–300–10206–2. Reviewed by RICHARD GREEN
1928 K E N WO O D HOUS E in Hampstead opened to the public showing sixty-three paintings which had been bequeathed to the nation the previous year by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, along with the house (remodelled by Robert Adam for the 1st Earl of Mansfield) and its parkland. The Iveagh Bequest is characterised by acknowledged masterpieces from seventeenth-century Holland and Flanders; by British eighteenthcentury portraits of women and children, and by fancy pictures; works by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney feature prominently. It was the distillation of a collection which had been four times the size of the bequest, chiefly assembled between 1887 and 1891 in order to furnish a house in Grosvenor Place and to help launch the then younger Guinness and his wife into London society. The catalogue under review covers both the paintings bequeathed by Lord Iveagh and those subsequently acquired for Kenwood. Of the latter, only four works from the
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benefactor’s original collection, which came through the bequests of descendants in 1946 and 2003, and the spectacular late Gainsborough, Hounds hunting a fox, allocated from the Rosebery estate in 1978, could be said to perpetuate the Iveagh taste. Others relate to Lord Mansfield, his wife and his long-horned cattle, while paintings by Dughet and Batoni (artists not collected by Guinness) were purchased in 1986, having previously appeared in pioneering monographic exhibitions at Kenwood. Also included are the decorative paintings executed by Zucchi for the library and entrance hall of the house, still in situ, and Ibbetson’s detached decorations for the music room. The publication follows the generous format now de rigueur for catalogues devoted to major museum collections. There is an extended essay on each work supported by the standard apparatus of provenance, exhibition history (up to 1928) and selected literature, accompanied by a good, usually full-page, colour illustration, with the occasional detail in colour too. There are welcome notes on condition and framing, while a conspicuous feature is the lavish provision of comparative illustrations in black and white – to the extent that even so famous a painting as the Laughing cavalier is reproduced in connection with the Hals at Kenwood. Biographical information on the artists is incorporated in the discursive essays. These sift the available evidence in order to define a context for the creation of each work, while attempting to convey its essential qualities. The result is unfailingly illuminating although, at the point where value judgments are made, readers might prefer to have reached for themselves such conclusions as that the Vermeer is ‘one of the world’s most exquisite works of art’. This substantial volume is the successor to a modest booklet of thirty-eight text pages and sixteen black-and-white plates last reprinted in 1978. Guinness’s paintings have stood the test of time well, but the new catalogue records the demotion of one of his three Bouchers, The flower gatherers, to the status of a posthumous replica by an assistant. Of four Kauffmans from the Cook bequest, the retitled Cupid bound by the Graces is now presented as a ‘mechanical’ painting from Matthew Boulton’s factory. On the other hand, three canvases associated with Gainsborough (cat. nos.45, 50 and 52) are rescued from the limbo of ‘attributed’ works and rehabilitated, with varying qualifications. One of the strengths of the book is its lucid account of Guinness’s picture-buying, with reference to that of his contemporaries in England and the United States. This and an appendix which lists by date of purchase, with the prices paid, the 250 or more works that Guinness bought through Agnew’s (for he was that firm’s greatest client) provide invaluable material for the study of taste and collecting. The largest sum that Guinness gave for a single painting was 20,000 gns. for Gainsborough’s Two shepherd boys with dogs fighting, whereas his Vermeer, The guitar player, cost a mere 1,000 gns. This is not surprising because
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Vermeer was then, in 1889, only just beginning to emerge from obscurity and, as Bryant perceptively points out, Guinness was buying ahead of international taste. What is fascinating, however, is a comparison of prices paid for the full-length Gainsboroughs known as Mary, Countess Howe and Lady Brisco. The former, a seductive fusion of formality and informality, is regarded today as a supreme example of Gainsborough’s art, whereas the latter is the sort of picture many might wish the artist had not painted: no amount of bravura brushwork can compensate for its formulaic suavity or the effect, aptly described by Bryant, of the spaniel reaching up and toppling over a garden statue. Yet Guinness must have seen things differently, because in 1888 he paid just £10,000 for the first but the following year over £15,000 for the second. Curiously, the author does not seem to be aware that Snyders’s Figures with fruit and game features in the standard modern catalogue of this artist’s work by Hella Robels, where it is entitled Peasants on the way to market, dated to the ‘1620s(?)’ and presented as a variant of a picture in Prague datable to before 1610.1 The X-ray photograph of the Kenwood picture reproduced by Bryant supports this derivation, while the drawing shown as his fig.5 is copied from the earlier version.2 With regard to the provenance of the eight paintings by Arthur Boyd Houghton (currently hidden away in Kenwood’s lecture room) there is a discrepancy between Bryant’s introduction, which refers to their having been purchased, exceptionally, from Gooden & Fox on the evidence of labels on the back, and the catalogue entry, which gives E. Leggatt as the source, without mention of any labels. And Bryant is mistaken in claiming that the illegitimacy of Miss Murray, the sitter in the Iveagh Bequest’s single Lawrence, has not been noted previously, for the entry in Kenneth Garlick’s catalogue raisonné, which he cites, opens with the words ‘Natural daughter . . .’. Such minor points do not detract from the immense value of this exemplary catalogue, which serves the pictures at Kenwood well. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the redecoration of certain rooms in the house which took place four years ago.3 The ‘Kenwood problem’ has always been how to reconcile a paintings collection of international museum quality with the setting of an historic house of great architectural distinction but comparatively modest scale, bereft of its original and subsequent furnishings. In an attempt to resolve this, the dining room and music room, which occupy northern extensions of the 1790s, have been redecorated in a sumptuous, eclectic style, with paintings illuminated by individual picture lights, on the principle that this is how Lord Iveagh might have developed those rooms, had he lived in the house for any length of time (in fact he slept there only for five nights). The overall effect is in its way magnificent but, while we should not begrudge the English Heritage team and its advisers the fun they must have had in inventing these interiors, such magnificence is at the expense of the pictures, which now
play a subordinate role in a greater decorative scheme. In the dining room, Rembrandt’s self-portrait is robust enough just about to hold its own and is wittily surmounted, as part of a generally welcome double-hang, by Reynolds’s self-portrait. The victim is the ‘most exquisite’ Vermeer, relegated to a wall between two windows, which would probably have been occupied by a pier-glass. Here the coupling with Romney’s Mrs Musters, hung above, is less happy, although at least the latter keeps her head above water, while the Vermeer drowns in a sea of gold-fringed damask drapes. In a corresponding position in the music room Mrs Sandilands, painted by Batoni, looks apprehensive in her opulent new surroundings. Whereas Bryant’s catalogue is definitive, the redecoration of these rooms must be regarded as experimental. 1 H. Robels: Frans Snyders: Stilleben- und Tiermaler 1579–1657, Munich 1989, pp.87–88, no.23, and pp.173– 74, no.4, respectively. 2 Ibid., pp.496–97, no.AZ1. 3 See J. Bryant: ‘Re-presenting the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood’, English Heritage: Collections Review 3 (2001), pp.85–90.
Paula Rego’s Map of Memory: National and Sexual Politics. By Maria Manuel Lisboa. 240 pp. incl. 20 col. pls. + 100 b. & w. ills. (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003), £52.50. ISBN 0–7546–0720–8. Reviewed by JANE RYE P AULA RE GO LE FT Salazar’s Portugal for England in 1951 at the age of seventeen, urged by her liberal father on the grounds that Portugal was no place for a woman. Under the dictatorship, it seems, women needed permission to travel from husband or father even to get a passport. Ten years later, after leaving the Slade School of Art, Rego produced a series of pictures whose titles, if not their images, were explicitly concerned with the political situation in her country: works such as Salazar vomits the homeland; Iberian dawn, with its satirical echo of nationalistic rhetoric; and We used to have a house in the country, where Portugal’s colonies are referred to as the nation’s ‘country cottage’. We are accustomed to thinking of Paula Rego’s work as uncomfortably subverting our ideas of childhood innocence and family life, creating a sinister world in which fierce, stocky women and horrible little girls with enormous hair-ribbons reduce their menfolk to passive and emasculated playthings; ‘my work’, she has said, ‘is all about revenge’. Maria Manuel Lisboa, Portuguese like her subject, and Senior Lecturer in Portuguese, Brazilian and African Lusophone Literature at Cambridge, maintains in this book that Rego’s mature work, while appearing to be about the battle of the sexes and the dynamics of family life, is as much fuelled by political feeling as the overtly political works of the early 1960s.
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Taking four groups of paintings of the last twenty years (the Girl and dog series; the Family paintings; the Sin of Father Amaro pastels; and the untitled series on abortion), Lisboa demonstrates that they are filled with references to Portugal’s colonial past and nostalgia for the days of her lost maritime supremacy (references which she uncovers with fascinating erudition and an, at times, almost excessive ingenuity), which constitute a ‘savage critique’ of Salazar’s regime. Rego and Lisboa believe that thirty years after the end of the dictatorship, its legacy, so closely bound to the Catholic church, is still active in Portuguese attitudes today. Family life was exalted by the regime, regarded as a cornerstone of the state and also as a metaphor for it. In these pictures, Lisboa argues, ‘the political is translated back into the immediately accessible vocabulary of the personal: history is paraphrased in images drawn from domestic life, and national politics finds expression through the familiar lexicon of interpersonal relations’. She is concerned with putting Rego’s art in its historical context – ‘the inscription of the text . . . in history’ in academic lingo – and limits herself to this ‘reading’. She makes it clear that she is not an art historian, does not deal with aesthetic matters and rather brushes aside more personal or autobiographical interpretations of Rego’s work, even those suggested by the artist herself. In general the case is well but over-elaborately argued, and Rego’s pictures certainly repay close scrutiny. However, the temptation to enhance the evidence is not always resisted, lessening one’s trust in the author’s reasoning: a brother having his hair combed in Departure quickly becomes a ‘tonsured brother’ and in the blink of an eye we are contemplating suggestions of ‘mutilation’. In the delirium of an argument in which exciting possibilities are thrown up at every turn, somewhat feverish theories sometimes rest on questionable assumptions, as when a man is only likely to be shaved by ‘a (black) subaltern’ (thus allowing the introduction of a colonial element) or will only be shaved by someone else if he is ill or enfeebled. The substance of this book is interesting and accessible, but its academic language is rebarbative. As an example of truly luxuriant impenetrability I offer the following passage discussing a 1939 anti-regime poem by Miguel Torga: ‘The juxtaposition of authority (despotic teachers, patriotic preachings, nationalistic declarations) against a stance which rejects them operates through a discourse which, almost as a by-product, also alters the priorities of nation-speak: the sea, which has defined Portuguese national identity for the past five centuries, in Torga becomes at best nice, if not necessary (and elsewhere in his work, at worst, a national liability), the peripheral embroidery stitched on second thoughts upon a land which itself is given telluric primacy’ – one needs a machete to hack one’s way through this jungle. The syntax in such passages is wildly unhelpful, and the drier the subject-matter, it seems, the richer the
proliferation of metaphor. A little more academic rigour applied to the writing might have prevented this as well as grotesque neologisms such as ‘Genisiacal’ and ‘angelology’ (not to mention such curious howlers as ‘hounds of dog’ for Dominicans). These may be petty criticisms but they contribute to what begins to seem a deliberate obfuscation, all the more tiresome because the author is perfectly capable – as the introductory resumé of Portuguese history demonstrates – of writing with admirable succinctness and clarity. The curious self-consciousness (pepperings of ‘Let us see’ and ‘as I shall hope to show’) and punctilio of academic writing becomes obtrusive. Decorous curtsies to other experts in the field at the end of every sentence evoke some stately scholastic pavane or recondite piece of court ceremonial designed to obscure the fact that the monarch is human. The second half of the introduction is devoted to the author’s ‘method’ and the ‘longstanding polemic between New Historicists or Cultural Materialists on the one hand and Postmodern and Post-structuralist methodology on the other’. This is a New Historicist reading. Granted that it is precisely their ambiguity that makes Paula Rego’s paintings so disturbing, Lisboa’s remarkable examination of every iconographic detail in the selected works in the light of Portuguese history and feminist sensibility is impressive, despite its frustrating stylistic shortcomings.
Publications Received Museum and collection catalogues The National Gallery Companion Guide. By Erika Langmuir. 325 pp. incl. 210 col. pls. + 10 b. & w. ills. (National Gallery, London, 2004), £12.95. ISBN 1–85709–959–1. The new monumental format of the official catalogues of the National Gallery limits their use to the library. Written by the most distinguished scholars in their fields – including Judy Egerton, Lorne Campbell and Dillian Gordon – they cannot be read in front of the paintings, as could the old paperback catalogues – by Martin Davies and Michael Levey among others – with pleasure. The National Gallery has made up for this by publishing Erika Langmuir’s portable companion guide, which could hardly be bettered, even though it now appears in a revised and expanded edition. Written with wit, perception and concision, Langmuir has a passionate engagement with the work immediately before her eyes and urges the visitor to look at paintings as various as Carlo Dolci’s Adoration of Kings (p.195) or Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey (p.285), not the author’s top painting although one of the most popular with the public. While this is a genuine working guidebook, arranged according to the gallery’s groundplan, the intelligent use of cross-references and the linking introductory sections create a virtual introductory history of western painters and painting, technique and iconography. Anteprima della Galleria Nazionale di Cosenza. Edited by Rossella Vodret. 119 pp. incl. 30 col. pls. + 22 b. & w. ills. (Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, 2003), 19. ISBN 88–8215–557–9. This catalogue was published to celebrate the transfer of the collections of the Cosenza National Gallery to a new seat in Palazzo Arnone. After twenty years’ work, part of the palace has been restored and the paintings are
again on display. It is planned to open a space for temporary exhibitions at a later date. The collection’s strength lies in Neapolitan painters active in Calabria – Luca Giordano, Corrado Giaquinto, Sebastiano Conca – and Mattia Preti, born in Calabria. New acquisitions are being made, including Giordano’s Jezebel devoured by dogs, the pendant to the London National Gallery’s Phineas and his companions turned to stone. Il museo dell’Osservanza di Bologna: guida alle collezioni d’arte. Edited by Donatella Biagi Maino with the assistance of Giulia Gandolfi. 295 pp. incl. 58 col. pls. + 120 b. & w. ills. (Costa editore, Bologna, 2003). No ISBN. A catalogue of the Museum’s minor and decorative arts (metalwork, terracotta statuettes, reliquaries, codices, etc.). La peinture italienne au Musée des Augustins: Catalogue raisonné. By Axel Hémery. 224 pp. incl. c.120 col. pls. + num. b. & w. ills. (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, 2003), 36. ISBN 2–901820–32–8. The Musée des Augustins at Toulouse, if famous for its sculpture collection, is not renowned for its Italian paintings, although it has some exceptional works such as Guercino’s Martyrdom of Sts John and Paul of the early 1620s, painted for the cathedral at Reggio Emilia and seized from the Duke of Modena’s collection by the French army in 1796, and Guido Reni’s Apollo and Marsyas, also appropriated by the French army. Another intriguing work is the Hunt, attributed to Giovanni di Francesco and of exceptionally long and thin dimensions (236 by 27 cm.), which most probably came from Urbino. This catalogue raisonné by the Museum’s curator is handsomely illustrated. J.T.M. Early Prints. The Print Collection of the Royal Library of Belgium. By Jan Van der Stock. 185 pp. incl. 16 col. pls. + 574 b. & w. ills. (Harvey Miller Publishers, London and Turnhout, 2002), 165. ISBN 1– 872501–29–X. This monumental volume is a welcome addition to the study of early print-making. It contains descriptions and illustrations of prints that have rarely or never been reproduced before. The information given is to the point and there are many details on the provenance of the prints and the origin of the collection which substantially add to our knowledge of mid-nineteenthcentury collecting, the period in which the majority of the prints discussed here were assembled. The book puts the Brussels print room on the map and scholars who are interested in the early appearances and use of prints, colouring by hand, unusual techniques, inventive decorative patterns, either printed or drawn, will have to consult this publication. The chapters are devoted to anonymous woodcuts, metal cuts and white-line prints; northern engravings of the fifteenth century; nielli; and early Italian engravings. The contrast between the abundance of early Netherlandish woodcuts and the scarcity of Italian prints is striking and demonstrates that the curators serving the young Belgian nation paid more attention to prints originating in their own region than to those of the great Italian masters who had formed the canon for some centuries. GER LUIJTEN
El tesoro del delfín. Alhajas de Felipe V recibidas por herencia de su padre Luis, gran delfín de Francia. By Letizia Arbeteta Mira. 373 pp. incl. c.350 col. pls. + 1 b. & w. ill. (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2001), 48. ISBN 84–8480–024–5. This is a very useful and attractively produced catalogue raisonné of the Museo del Prado’s collection of treasures inherited by Philip V from his father, Louis, dauphin of France (1682–1772). Arbeteta introduces the book with an essay on royal collections of gems and jewels from Louis XIV to Philip V, and includes a comprehensive list of documentary sources (catalogues, inventories, photographs, etc). Her second catalogue essay covers general but important considerations on the the burl ington m agazin e
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materials from which these objects were made, the sculptors and their workshops, as well as the styles and types of cases in which the objects were kept. Each entry of the 130 objects catalogued includes comprehensive documentation on provenance and previous literature and is accompanied by excellent colour reproductions. Pintura Europea del Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia. Edited by Fernando B. Doménech and José Gómez Frechina. 292 pp. incl. 85 col. pls. + 40 b. & w. ills. (Consorci de museus de la comunitat Valenciana, Valencia, 2002), 25. ISBN 84–482–3259–3. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Valencia on the Museum’s little-known collection of European paintings, several of which have been recently restored. The catalogue includes relatively familiar paintings such as Pinturicchio’s Virgen de las fiebres as well as works by minor artists mainly from Italy and Flanders. Spanish Paintings. By Gudrun Maurer. 193 pp. incl. 12 col. pls. + 91 b. & w. ills. (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2001), SEK 295. ISBN 91–7100–652–4. This informative book is an up-to-date catalogue of the forty Spanish paintings in Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum. The collection was mainly gathered during the last two centuries and features paintings by, among others, El Greco, Murillo, Zurbarán and Goya. Each entry gives provenance and literature, includes technical notes and description, before embarking on an interpretation of each picture. There is a certain amount of debate as to the significance and authorship of several of the pictures, in particular Goya’s Poetry and Truth, Time and History, which have been recently proposed as pendants, commissioned by Manuel Godoy. This book can be warmly recommended for its good reproductions, comprehensive bibliography and concise references. Dibujos de maestros europeos en las colecciones portuguesas 1500–1800. By Nicholas Turner, with the assistance of Manuela Fidalgo and José Alberto Seabra Carvalho. 195 pp. incl. 88 col. pls. (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2002), 18. ISBN 84–8480–034–2. Little is known about drawing collections in Portugal before the nineteenth century, so that Nicholas Turner’s publication (a catalogue to a touring exhibition of 2000–02) is a useful starting point for understanding the taste of Portuguese collectors from 1500 to 1800. European collectors other than Portuguese ones are discussed in the catalogue, above all Italian collectors, whose drawings collections were broken up during sales after their death. For instance, most of the Italian drawings in this catalogue can be traced to the artist Jeronymo de Barros Ferreira (1750–1803) who, in turn, must have acquired them from an anonymous Italian collector (once thought to be Carlo Ridolfi). The figure of Francisco de Holanda is also considered here, both as draughtsman and collector. For example, there is evidence that Holanda had attributed to Polidoro da Caravaggio a Roman landscape (now in the Museo de Arte Antiga in Lisboa) and inscribed the latter’s name on it. Other artists discussed in the catalogue are Dürer, Cambiaso, Goltzius, Van Dyck (attributed), Poussin and Watteau. MARTA CACHO CASAL
The Christopher Tower Collection of Family Portraits, Pictures and Miniatures at Ashridge, Hertfordshire. Essays by Rupert Kinglake Tower and Michael Thompson; catalogue by Michael Burrell. 156 pp. incl. 92 col. pls. (Christopher Tower Collection/The Burlington Magazine Publications, London, 2003), £20. ISBN 0–9511350–4–X. The works of art here catalogued, mostly portraits of several generations of the Tower family, originally hung at Weald Hall, the Towers’ home in Essex (demolished 1950). After the death of Christopher Tower in 1998, the collection, which Tower had cared for and enlarged, found a new home at Ashridge Management
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College which occupies a house in the Gothic Revival style by James Wyatt. The interest of the collection comes from its evocation of an English family and its fortunes rather than from any high intrinsic merit of the works themselves. There are, however, a nice group of four portraits by Beechey, a pretty Child asleep by Reynolds, a robust Frank Holl and an extraordinary full-length of Christopher Tower in Arab dress painted in 1949 by Sir James Gunn. All works are carefully and fully catalogued. R.S. Cecil Higgins Art Gallery. Prints. By Caroline Bacon, James MacGregor and Julia Nurse. 240 pp. incl. 310 col. pls. + 1 b. & w. ill. (Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, 2004), £35. ISBN 0–9512657–4–1. Under the terms of Cecil Higgins’s will, all purchases made by the Gallery that he endowed in Bedford and that bears his name must be approved by a senior curator from a national museum. For over forty years until his death in 1999 that role was fulfilled (with regard to art post-1850) by Ronald Alley of the Tate Gallery, who was thus responsible for the selection and acquisition of almost every one of the three hundred or so works in the Gallery’s print collection, which he himself initiated in 1964. Although it includes examples by Dürer, Rembrandt, Piranesi and Goya, its focus from the start has been on late nineteenth- and twentiethcentury art. Most major British, European and American printmakers of the period are represented, with particularly strong holdings of work by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Sutherland, Bawden, Hamilton and Hockney. At a time when many regional museums are unable to publish even basic catalogues of their collections, the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery is to be commended for the production of this handsome and excellently illustrated volume, together with the companion catalogue of the watercolours and drawings collection, reviewed in this Magazine 145 (2003), pp.42–43. American Masters from Bingham to Eakins. The John Wilmerding Collection. Edited by Franklin Kelly. 166 pp. incl. 63 col. pls. + 66 b. & w. ills. (National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2004), £40/$60. ISBN 0– 85331–903–0. John Wilmerding was born into a family of collectors – his great-grandparents were Henry and Louise Havermeyer, the celebrated benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, while his grandmother’s collection of American art formed the genesis of the Shelburne Museum, VT. Formerly deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Wilmerding is a distinguished scholar of nineteenth-century American art who, over the past forty years, has assembled a fine collection of works by artists in his specialist field, including Frederic Church, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Fritz Hugh Lane. This publication accompanies an exhibition drawn from Wilmerding’s collection on view at the National Gallery of Art (to 10th October), and includes, besides a full catalogue of the fifty-one exhibited works, a tribute by Franklin Kelly to Wilmerding as scholar, teacher and collector and a bibliography of his published writings. Alexis Forel. Graveur et collectionneur. 1852–1922. By Thomas Tixhon, Pietro Sarto and Stéphanie Geux. 108 pp. incl. 82 col. pls. + 2 b. & w. ills. (Editions 5 Continents, Milan, 2003), 20. ISBN 88–7439–062–9. This publication served as the catalogue to two exhibitions held last year – a retrospective of drypoints by the Swiss etcher Alexis Forel at the Musée Alexis Forel, Morges (9th October to 30th November 2003), and an exhibition at the Musée Jenisch, Vevey (6th June to 14th September 2003) drawn from Forel’s wide-ranging collection of prints by, among others, Dürer, Goltzius, Ribera, Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Millet, Corot and Seymour Hayden. This collection, illustrated and catalogued here in full, has been on deposit since 1998 from the Musée Forel at the Cabinet cantonal des estampes at the Musée Jenisch.
French Impressionists. By Jane Munro. 142 pp. incl. 64 col. pls. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), £13.95. ISBN 0–521–01281–3. This latest addition to the series of Fitzwilliam Museum Handbooks details sixty-four paintings and drawings in the Museum’s collection, including several works from the Keynes Collection at King’s College, Cambridge, which are on long-term loan to the Fitzwilliam. Degas is the artist who features most prominently – represented by nineteen pieces, including the Museum’s most recent acquisition catalogued here, his early, luminous view of Capodimonte. Familiar works by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro and Cézanne are all included, as are seascapes by two Impressionist precursors, Cals and Boudin, and several post-Impressionist examples by Gauguin, Seurat and Signac. Almost in its entirety, the Fitzwilliam’s Impressionist collection has been acquired by either gift or bequest; and Jane Munro’s sprightly introduction to the catalogue places the Museum’s major benefactors in this area (Frank Hindley Smith, Capt. Stanley William Sykes, the Revd. Eric Milner White and Andrew Gow, as well as J.M. Keynes) in the context of collecting modern French art in Britain. One slight irritation is the absence of dates in the captions to the works themselves. Graphic Modernism. Selections from the Francey and Dr Martin L. Gecht Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Edited by Suzanne Folds McCullagh. 180 pp. incl. 140. col. pls. (The Art Institute of Chicago in association with Hudson Hills Press, Manchester VT, 2003), $39.95. ISBN 0–86559–207–1. This publication accompanied an exhibition drawn from the collection of late nineteenth- and twentiethcentury works on paper from the Gecht collection, shown at the Art Institute of Chicago from 15th November 3003 to 11th January 2004. Thirty-one of the 135 works catalogued here constitute a promised gift from the Gechts to the Institute, filling several gaps in its permanent collection. Among the works pledged are Toulouse-Lautrec’s La chaine Simpson, the only poster lacking in the Institute’s holdings of the artist’s work; an early pen-and-ink self-portrait by Matisse (c.1901); a definitive edition of Picasso’s 1905 drypoint The two saltimbanques; important Cubist drawings by Picasso and Braque; key graphic images by Klee, Kirchner and Nolde; and Picasso’s 1922 metalpoint portrait of his first wife, Olga. Catalogue of the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art. By Roger Wollen. 224 pp. incl. 82 col. pls. + 32 b. & w. ills. (The Trustees of the Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art, Oxford, 2003), £22.50. ISBN 0–9538135–1–7. The Methodist Church collection comprises thirtynine paintings and drawings, mostly by British artists and all on a religious theme, including a Deposition by Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra’s The pool of Bethesda, a Crucifixion by William Roberts, a still life of a crucifix and candles by Patrick Heron, a study by Ceri Richards for his Supper at Emmaus altarpiece for St Edmund Hall, Oxford, two canvases by Roy de Maistre and two aquatints by Georges Rouault. The core of the collection was formed in the early 1960s by the Revd. Douglas Wollen, an art-loving Methodist minister, and was widely exhibited on a nationwide tour between 1963 and 1965. Dispersed among Methodist schools and colleges over the following three decades, the collection has now been re-united under one roof at the Oxford Westminster Institute of Education at Oxford Brookes University. This extremely thorough catalogue, written and compiled by a son of Douglas Wollen’s, includes full entries on all the works (as well as a maquette for Epstein’s St Michael and the Devil for Coventry Cathedral, on long-term loan from the Methodist Church to Wesley House, Cambridge); detailed biographies of the artists represented; transcriptions of Wollen’s correspondence with Ceri Richards, Sutherland and Keith Vaughan; and a checklist of works of art in Methodist schools, colleges and churches. J.B.