S. Avery-Quash and C. Huemer (edited by), London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780-1820. Part Two

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London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780-1820
Edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer

Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, 2019

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part Two

Paolo Veronese, Portrait of a Woman with a Dog, Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (from the Orléans Collection)
Source: https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/veronese/portrait-woman-dog

Go Back to Part One

Part II  Index - Collections

• Malcolm Baker, Introduction to Part Two;
• Camilla Murgia, From Private to National: Exhibiting Fine Arts in London around 1800;
• David Alexander, The Evolution of the Print Market and Its Impact on the Art Market, 1780-1820;
• Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Angelica Kauffman: The Acquisition and Dispersal of an Artist’s Collection, 1782-1825;
• Susanna Avery-Quash and Nicholas Penny, The Dispersal of the Orléans Collection and the British Art Market;
• Sarah Bakkali, The Trumbull Sale of 1797: Players in the Paris-London Art Market during the French Revolution;
• Rebecca Lyons, Selling the Collection of Welbore Ellis Agar in 1806

The Orléans Collection

The sale of the Orléans collection has been already discussed in Part One as the moment that enshrined the primacy of the London art market compared to the rest of Europe. In a very dense essay, Susanna Avery-Quash and Nicholas Penny recalled the features of that sale and carried out important in-depth considerations on its modalities. The collection, put together by Philippe of Orleans (the regent of France between 1715 and 1723, during the minor age of Louis XV), included works coming in turn from the collection of Christine of Sweden, which previously belonged to the Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg.

Put on sale in the late eighteenth century, the collection was sold in two sections; the first, consisting of French and Italian paintings, was disposed of in 1792 to the Belgian banker Édouard de Walckiers (1758-1837), who sold it to François Louis Jean-Joseph de Laborde de Méréville (1761-1801), a financier emigrated to England following the revolution. In turn, Laborde had managed to get hold of it only thanks to a loan he was granted by the banker Jeremiah Harman (1763-1844), just appointed as the director of the Bank of England in those years. Harman, who became the owner of the collection at the beginning of 1798, finally ceded it to the merchant Michael Bryan (1757-1821). The latter was the representative of a syndicate between him, the Duke of Bridgewater, his nephew Lord Gower and his cousin, count of Carlisle. Between the end of 1798 and July 1799 the first  section of the collection was therefore exhibited and put up for sale in two locations: Bryan’s Gallery and the Lyceum in the Strand, where it was possible to house the paintings of larger dimensions.

Sebastiano del Piombo, The Resurrection of Lazarus, London, The National Gallery (from the Orléans collection)
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sebastiano_del_Piombo,_The_Raising_of_Lazarus.jpg

Curiously, much faster (and therefore more immediate) was the dispersion of the second tranche of the collection with German, Dutch and Flemish works, bought and sold already in April 1793 by Thomas Moore Slade (1749-1831), a dealer who also acted as a representative of a syndicate.

Already from these few notes, some basic elements emerge. The sale of the Orléans collection was a novelty: For the first time a collection of this importance was changing ownership neither because of the right of conquest nor by agreements between European courts (think of the sale of the Este collection to Augustus of Saxony in 1745). The necessary conditions for all this to occur were instead the existence of a very versatile and flexible banking system, the presence of ample liquidity in cash, but also the emergence of a public that considered owning such prestigious artworks as a status symbol and saw, therefore, collecting as the prove of their enhanced social standing. At the same time, precisely these circumstances explain why we should indeed speak of the “dispersion" of the collection and not of its transfer. The paintings were exhibited and sold individually and therefore ended up in thousand houses. To confirm how important it was to own a work that had once been part of the Orléans collection, just think that, even in the mid-1830s, connoisseurs like Passavant and Waagen, visiting England, tried to rebuild it 'ideally' by identifying their existing locations in those years.

Again: the strong role of finance is testified by the fact that several counterparts were signing syndicates to acquire part of the collection. Individuals were making agreements to purchase the collection, reserving the right to hold the works they considered the best, as they expected to cover their costs thanks to the profits made by selling the rest of the collection.

The paintings - as mentioned - were mostly exhibited in Bryan’s Gallery, and also this was a new development, which Camilla Murgia reconstructed in its genesis in From Private to National. Initially, as she highlighted, the exhibitions did not have commercial purposes or only indirect ones (for example, the sale of prints taken after the originals) and encompassed not only the Ancient Masters, but also contemporary British artists. At the end of the 18th century there was already an active network of "art locations" that included auction houses and commercial galleries. Most of these structures were located in London's West End, between Pall Mall and St. James's Street, hosting a sort of 'art district' (a similar phenomenon, although in different ways, happened for print producers, as reported by Alexander in The Evolution of the Print Market and Its Impact on the Art Market, 1780-1820).

Rembrandt, The Mill, Washington, National Gallery of Art (from the Orleans Collection)
Source: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1201.html

Moreover, sales were not awarded via auctions, but against private direct agreements. It was an "invention" (which for us today is quite obvious) by that Noël Desenfans, whom we have already mentioned in the first part of this review. He introduced the system in 1786 (see p. 197), achieving ample success for a number of reasons: part of the public was reluctant to make purchases in auction houses because they feared being too influenced by the auctioneers; private selling involved setting a fixed price (naturally determined by the seller’s initial offer) on which it was easier to negotiate; and there were tax advantages compared to the auction system. Most importantly, the system introduced by Desenfans provided for a much longer duration of the exhibits, which lasted months (sometimes with the request for an entrance ticket) and allowed to display the artworks to a much larger audience. It should also be added that private sales and auctions were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but could rather be complementary. Frequently the canvases remained unsold after a long exposition destined for private sale were offered on the occasion of subsequent auctions.

Other collections

Each collection, of course, has a peculiar history, and this section summarizes the events relating to those belonging to Angelica Kauffman, John Trumbull and Welbore Ellis Algar.

The collection of Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) actually was established when the artist, who had lived for fifteen years in London, moved to Rome. The most interesting aspect is that, after the death of the lady, many of her works were bought and resold in England. We are faced with a case in which the origin of the works and the fact that they belonged to an artist who had been co-founder of the Royal Academy gave them a particular value in the eyes of potential buyers.

The Trumbull sale deserves special attention. Dispersed in the auction between 17 and 18 February 1797, that of John Trunbull (1756-1843), an American painter who moved to Europe in the 1780s, was a sui generis 'collection', in the sense that it was established in the arc of a few weeks, clearly for speculative purposes. In the catalogue printed on that occasion, the auctioneer James Christie spoke of a collection of artworks fortunately collected in a situation of total chaos, in which Trumbull acquired property by owners hastily forced to sell, because subject to banishment in France after the revolution. In reality, Christie’s dramatic tones (he was famous for his hyperboles) did not totally correspond to reality. Thanks to the financing by three American industrialists, Trumbull turned in 1795 to French intermediaries who had the paintings in their stocks for years and bought eighty of them. First of all, there was, of course Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun (whom we already met in the first part of the review) who, in addition to supplying some canvases, had urged other merchants working with him to do the same. Lebrun had in any case contractually secured (in addition to the sale price) a share equal to one third of the profits realized at the time of resale. Except for some exceptions, therefore, the works had reached the French dealers not after the months of the Terror, but were already in their possession, mostly because of inheritance events after the (natural) death of their owners. One can rather imagine that, in an overall situation of financial crisis, the dealers had their stores unsold, receiving very few requests from domestic customers and, therefore, needing to 'make liquidity', selling to England. It should however be pointed out that none, starting with Lebrun, had any scruples about practicing a "two ovens" policy, especially after the establishment of the Louvre, as the new museum institution was for them another potential interlocutor to sell the works they owned.

John Trumbull, Self-Portrait, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery
Source: https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/24912

Chronologically, Welbore Ellis Agar (1735-1805) belonged to a slightly later period, or in the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century. The case is emblematic to underline how, on occasions of particularly important sales, the measures were advertised not only in England, but also abroad. Once again organised by Christie, the auction of the collection was scheduled for 2 and 3 May 1806 (the heirs had decided to disperse it after the death of their natural father in 1805). We know a catalogue raisonné written in French (the lingua franca of the time) and printed in Dresden a few months before the auction. This catalogue was distributed across the continent. However, no catalogue was produced in English, and the reason is very simple: in April 1806 Robert Grosvenor (1767-1845) made an offer much above market conditions and bought the entire collection in bulk before the auction was held. Therefore, there was no need to print a catalogue in England anymore. The whole affair shows, however, that a primary concern of those who organized the auctions was to alert the international market (according to the chronicles, several dealers came across from all over Europe, given that it had not been possible to warn all that the auction would no longer be held) and, only secondly, to involve the compatriots.

Part III Index – Dealers

• Filip Vermeylen, Introduction to Part Three;
• Julia Armstrong-Totten, From Jack-of-All-Trades to Professional: the Development of the Early Modern Picture Dealer in Eighteenth-Century London;
• Francis Russell, James Christie: Auctioneer and More;
• Carol Blumenfeld, Pierre-Joseph Lafontaine and His Exploitation of European Art Market Imbalances in Paris and London, 1795-1815;
• Maria Celeste Cola, Thomas Hope and Gioacchino Marini: “Roman Agent of English Gentleman”;
• Ana María Fernández García, Commercial Agents of Spanish Painting in the United Kingdom, 1780-1820.

The concluding section of the volume edited by Avery-Quash and Huemer is dedicated to in-depth studies on individual dealers in the world of art, with interesting "trespassing" in Italy and Spain. To my eyes, Julia Armstrong-Totten provided the most stimulating contribution. Starting from the cases of Slade and Bryan (that is, of the two leading figures who purchased and then dispersed the Orlèans collection), she tried to profile how the art dealer's job changed within a few decades. It is clear that a process of specialization (the "division of labor" theorized by Adam Smith comes to my mind) was taking place, in which everyone was carving out a specific competence by meeting (and often managing to anticipate) the needs of the market. From this point of view it is perhaps fair to point out that today we know the most prominent figures of the time, but that in reality, in this competition to emerge as commercial reference points, there were more failures than successes, according to a process of natural selection which is very reminiscent of the evolution of the Darwinian species. The fortune itself of Slade and Bryan, although lasting, was however temporary: both were accused, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of selling fake paintings and had to declare bankruptcy in 1809. If there is an element to be highlighted, moreover, is that the turbulent times between eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries also saw the emergence of the great dynasties of modern English retailers such as the Colnaghis or the Christies.

James Christie (1730-1803), who was succeeded by his eldest son (also James Christie 1773-1831), was, of course, a legendary figure. Founder of the auction house of the same name, Christie is taken into consideration here because he fully understood the need to transform the sales of the collections at his headquarters in Pall Mall into mundane occasions. But Christie was not just what we would today call a "marketing man". He had the ability to act as true confidante and adviser, retaining customers’ loyalty on the basis of the trust that he was able to achieve. It is certainly not by coincidence - Francis Russel wrote – that some of his purchasers entrusted him with the sale of their collections many years later (more rare, but also present, was the reverse case).

Rembrandt, Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (sold by Lafontaine via Christie's in 1807)
Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459082

A lesser-known figure, but whose importance, in quantitative terms, has emerged precisely from the counting of the data included in the Getty Provenance Index^© is that of Pierre-Joseph Lafontaine (1758-1835), whose first biographical portrait was provided by Carole Blumenfeld. Between 1795 and 1815 the database showed 1690 transactions on his behalf in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and Great Britain; and already so it is possible to get an idea of ​​how large the area in which the merchant operated during his career. Of Flemish origins, Lafontaine was first of all a painter (as often, in these cases); he moved to Paris and became a member of the Academy in July 1789, practically in the days of the Storming of the Bastille (July 14). Maybe because he was deprived of real talent as a painter, but more likely because he was overwhelmed by a collapsing world, since the mid-1790s he switched to art trade. Lafontaine was the exact prototype of an intermediary making his business case from buying in low-cost markets and reselling in others where it was possible to tick higher prices. Of course, one of the markets to which he reserved most attention was London, but one of most characteristic features of its activity was the extreme mobility not only of his own, but of its stock of works (including not only paintings but precious objects in general, comprising furniture). Intervening personally, without using transport agents, and therefore saving time (perhaps even money), Lafontaine rotated in a whirling tourbillon the objects that remained sold in a particular location by moving them to other countries and physically looking for buyers: the most astonishing aspect is that all this took place in years which were certainly not quiet for Europe, coinciding with wars and naval blocs that did not seem to upset him excessively.