It is still difficult to make an assessment of Philippe without the benefit of hindsight, in particular his role in the death of Louis XVI. He possessed many admirable traits in his character: he was a cultivated, liberal reformer, a devoted and enlightened father, and genuinely concerned for the welfare of his fellow Parisians, who reciprocated by showing a real devotion to the House of Orléans. And the leading radicals who supported his cause, making the Palais-Royal a key place in the early stages of the French Revolution, were some of the most talented men in France, though they often acted purely to further their own political agenda.
Certainly Philippe must have been aware of, even if he did not originate, the numerous plots and intrigues based on the Palais-Royal, but his vacillation verged on cowardice as he appeared, on several occasions, to lose his nerve just as he was about to seize power. Ultimately, it is difficult to feel much sympathy for someone blessed with unbelievable privilege, the richest man in France and a royal prince, who managed to lose his fortune and to earn the opprobrium of supporters and opponents alike by the time of his death. Thomas Carlyle, writing his famous The French Revolution: a History in 1837, summed up the ambivalence of Orléans’s career: ‘For he was a Jacobin Prince of the Blood: consider what a combination.’ Despite his efforts to prove himself a man of the people, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, was part of the Ancien Régime and his demise was symptomatic of the passing of the old order in France as much as the execution of the king. The sale of his art collection in England, however, can be seen in a wider context.
Although the duke was a committed anglophile, France and Britain had been on opposing sides in every major conflict throughout the eighteenth century and the victories of Robert Clive at the battle of Plassey in 1757 and James Wolfe’s capture of Quebec two years later during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), resulting in the loss of India and Canada, had destroyed French dreams of a worldwide empire. The wealth the British gained, particularly from their Indian possessions, the way that country used its maritime power to promote trade within the empire, together with the many inventions that vastly increased its ability to manufacture goods, gave Britain enormous prosperity. France’s effort to extract revenge by supporting the American colonials in the American War of Independence (1775–83), though it played a crucial role in the colonials’ success, virtually bankrupted the state.
Louis XVI’s finance ministers struggled to introduce much-needed financial reforms and to increase the crown’s revenues in order to reduce the enormous government debt. Earlier efforts under Louis XV to levy the tax on revenue known as the vingtième had been only partially successful owing to the refusal of the nobility and the clergy to contribute. This intransigence continued into the following reign, with a succession of finance ministers attempting, with limited success, to increase taxes which invariably fell on the poorer sections of the population, thus provoking bitter resentment.
This failure to reform the system contrasted with the success of the British economy in the late eighteenth century, caused by a combination of financial reform, overseas trade and the development of a series of manufacturing techniques that were to transform British society. The Rape of Europa was brought across the Channel just as Britain was becoming the most prosperous nation in Europe. Her new-found economic strength was, however, to be tested to the limit by a resurgent France and the most brilliant figure to emerge from the French Revolution: Napoleon Bonaparte.
6
The Taste for Titian in Nineteenth-Century Britain
From 1793 to 1815 Britain was almost constantly at war with France, a country with almost three times the population and far superior military resources. The fact that she survived this unprecedented period of warfare and emerged victorious over a nation led by the greatest general of the age and one of the most brilliant men in European history, demonstrates the tenacity of the British and the country’s underlying economic strength. The fleets of Nelson and later the armies of Wellington played a crucial role, but what is equally impressive is the way that Britain had the financial resources to cope with the expense of a war lasting almost without interruption for over 20 years. It was this capacity for survival and the role that the country played as paymaster to France’s many continental enemies that ensured Napoleon’s ultimate defeat.
Unlike the French government, whose inability to reform the nation’s finances had been a major cause in the downfall of the Ancien Régime, in Britain William Pitt the Younger, the most able prime minister of the century (1783–1801 and 1804–6), introduced far-sighted financial reforms. His most important success was to increase the collection of much-needed revenue. Pitt had three methods of doing this: by increasing taxation, notably through the introduction of Income Tax in 1798; by reducing import duties, which led to the decrease in smuggling; and by cutting government spending by the abolition of numerous profitable sinecures.
These financial reforms, together with Britain’s maritime supremacy, which enabled trade to be maintained throughout the British Empire during the Napoleonic Wars, greatly strengthened the economy. At the same time a series of inventions in generating new manufacturing processes was transforming industrial production. It came to be called the Industrial Revolution and was to make Britain the richest nation on earth. England possessed plentiful, natural resources, with rich coal and iron ore deposits and swiftly flowing rivers. A series of new spinning and weaving machines, using these natural resources, initially powered by water and later by steam (James Watt invented a highly efficient steam engine), meant that the dramatic increase in the production of textiles gave Britain a significant advantage over her economic rivals.
The Agricultural Revolution in the early eighteenth century, improving crop production, had resulted in an increase in population, and a gradual migration from the countryside into urban centres. The construction of canals, improved roads and railways (George Stephenson built the first railway line to use steam locomotives), enabled manufactured goods to be moved to the cities where there was a ready market. Many of the increased population lived in the new industrial cities in the north of England, where they worked in mills mass-producing textiles which were distributed, using the new forms of transport, both at home and abroad. For most of the nineteenth century it was be British industry, British ships, British capital and British financial institutions that dominated world trade. It was not until the end of the century that other nations, in particular Germany and the United States, which had also, belatedly, enjoyed their own Industrial Revolutions, began to catch up and then overtake Britain’s economic output.
It is fascinating to look at the link between industry and art during the heyday of Britain’s economic supremacy. Magnates such as Coke of Norfolk, a great patron of the arts, had pioneering new agricultural methods, but the profits he made from increased agricultural output bore no comparison with those generated by the Industrial Revolution. The grandee who benefited most was Francis Egerton, Third Duke of Bridgewater. Following an Act of Parliament the duke had commissioned the construction of the Bridgewater Canal in 1759 to transport coal from his mines at Worsley to Manchester. He followed this by commissioning a second canal in 1762 from Liverpool to Manchester, thus beginning what was to be known as Canal Mania. Barges on canals could transport goods more effectively than packhorses or horses and carts on badly-maintained roads (Thomas Telford, ‘the Colossus of Roads’, was to revolutionize road-building in the early nineteenth century). The Bridgewater Canal cost a staggering £168,000, almost four times the £43,000 the consortium led by Bridgewater paid for the Orléans paintings over 30 years later, but Bridgewater was far-sighted enough to take the risk. From the moment the canal opened, the price of coal in Manchester halved, and the duke was soon earning himself a fortune, reputedly as much as £80,000 a year, and became the richest nobleman in England.
Bridgewater was not known for his interest in art but he sensed a wonderful business opportunity in the sale of the Orléans Collection. The Dutch a
nd Flemish paintings purchased by Thomas Moore Slade had soon found ready buyers. The Italian and French paintings, on the other hand, remained for several years in the hands of Laborde-Mereville, who had brought them over to England, while various attempts were made by leading collectors to buy them. King George III, who had observed that ‘all his noblemen were now picture dealers’, was himself interested and tried to purchase 150 paintings for the nation with the help of his prime minister, William Pitt, and the President of the Royal Academy, the American painter Benjamin West. In the event, it was the art dealer Michael Bryan who acquired them in 1798 for £43,500 on behalf of a syndicate composed of three leading noblemen: the Duke of Bridgewater, the principal investor, his nephew and heir Earl Gower (later Second Marquess of Stafford and First Duke of Sutherland), who knew the Orléans Collection from his time as ambassador in Paris in 1790–2, and Gower’s brother-in-law the Fifth Earl of Carlisle.
Under Bryan’s guidance, the sales made by the syndicate were spectacularly successful. Having purchased the whole collection, the paintings were then valued independently which almost doubled their value to £72,000. Bridgewater, Gower and Carlisle retained 94 pictures for themselves and disposed of the rest. Bridgewater’s eclectic taste echoed that of the Duke of Orléans who had formed the original collection, and included two Madonnas by Raphael, the two paintings of Diana from Titian’s poesie, as well as Poussin’s Seven Sacraments. Gower and Carlisle had more classical taste and preferred the works of Annibale Carracci, the chief seventeenth-century Bolognese painter working in the style of Raphael.
Regardless of the duke’s motives, which were regarded merely as a matter of commercial speculation, in the opinion of a writer on the Notice Historique in Paris, this was a wonderful opportunity for British art collectors. The Italian paintings that the Bridgewater Syndicate purchased were of better quality than anything seen in England for many years. Grand Tourists, on the whole, had had few opportunities to buy major Italian Old Masters and had tended to purchase works by contemporary painters instead: views of Venice and Rome by Canaletto and Giovanni Paolo Panini, and portraits by Pompeo Batoni. Now Bridgewater and his fellow aristocrats were being offered examples by the greatest masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque.
Of the remaining Orléans paintings, 135 were sold immediately, and a further 66 at auction, for a total of 41,000 guineas. They were exhibited in Bryan’s Galleries in Pall Mall and the Lyceum in the Strand from December 1798 to July 1799, with the public being charged 2s. 6d for admittance, compared with the normal 1s. Public exhibitions had been held in London since 1760, notably at the Royal Academy, but few people attended, and still fewer had access to the major collections in grand country houses, so the public had very little knowledge of great Old Master paintings.
The exhibition created a sensation. The essayist and critic William Hazlitt, already an admirer of Titian, was quite overcome by the Orléans Collection, in particular the group of works by the Venetian master, and wrote in the London magazine: ‘I was staggered when I saw the works there collected and looked at them with wondering and longing eyes. A mist passed away from my sight: the scales fell off … We had heard the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido, Domenichino, the Carracci – but to see them face to face, to be in the same room with their deathless productions, was like breaking some mighty spell – was almost an effect of necromancy.’ Mary Berry, who had formed a circle including the leading literary figures of the day (similar to that of Félicité de Genlis in the Palais-Royal), put it more succinctly: this was ‘by far the finest, indeed the only real display of the excellency of Italian school of painting that I ever remember in this country’. The prices these paintings fetched demonstrate this enthusiasm. Raphael’s Holy Family, known as La Belle Vierge, went to the Duke of Bridgewater for 3,000 guineas, while Annibale Carracci’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ fetched an astonishing 4,000 guineas.
The sale was not, however, universally successful. On entering the Lyceum, the viewer was confronted on the right-hand wall by the Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo, a Venetian contemporary of Titian, flanked by Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, with the Rape of Europa and Perseus and Andromeda as companion pieces. The Sebastiano was immediately purchased by John Julius Angerstein for £3,500 on 26 December, the opening day of the exhibition (Angerstein was to be one of the founders of the National Gallery and the Sebastiano is listed as no. 1 in the inventory), and the Duke of Bridgewater kept the two Diana paintings at the asking price of 2,500 guineas each, but neither the Rape of Europa nor Perseus and Andromeda attracted a bidder.
There were a number of reasons for this. Britain had been at war with Revolutionary France since 1793, but this does not seem to have been a major factor, particularly after Nelson’s recent, decisive victory at Aboukir Bay, at the mouth of the Nile, at the beginning of August 1798, destroying the French navy and leaving the French army stranded in Egypt (its ruthless commander Napoleon sailed home to France shortly afterwards, leaving his soldiers to their fate). A more prosaic reason for the lack of bidders was the distance of the Lyceum from the clubs and fashionable shops of the West End (the organizers eventually halved the entry price to encourage buyers). Amabel Lucas, who had admired Titian’s poesie in Paris, complained that their ‘colouring [which] looked so fine at the Palais Royal, did not appear so beautiful here’. Contemporary artists were worried that the amount of Old Masters would affect prices for their own work. The Irish painter James Barry was to be seen lingering at the Lyceum, loudly criticizing the works on view while privately writing to the prestigious Dilettanti Society recommending that it should purchase Titian’s Diana and Actaeon.
The most likely reason, however, was simply that there was a glut of top quality art on the market and consequently buyers were spoilt for choice. There were 27 works by Titian in the Orléans Collection (modern expertise has downgraded these to 11), including the Rape of Europa and three other of Titian’s poesie, plus the Death of Actaeon which relates closely to the series. There were also other important collections coming on to the market. The impact of the French Revolution had led to the dispersal of art collections, both within France itself and in the countries that the French armies had conquered. In Italy Napoleon’s defeat of the Austrians in Northern Italy in 1796 was followed by the overthrow of the Venetian Republic, and the subjugation of the Papal States.
At the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 between France and the Papacy, the French took many of the finest paintings and sculpture from the Vatican back to France, where they were installed in the Louvre Museum. They formed part of one of the most extraordinary collections of art ever seen, organized by the dynamic director of the Louvre, Dominique Vivant Denon, who displayed works taken from countries the French had conquered in Europe and beyond, notably Egypt. However, when Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815, the most important paintings and sculpture were returned to their countries of origin. It was now the British collectors which were to be the envy of European connoisseurs, and they were to prove the main beneficiaries from the sale of the Orléans Collection.
The noble families of Italy, who had watched these developments with horror, and had been reduced to near penury by the French invasion, were compelled to sell the priceless masterpieces they still owned to raise money. In Britain unscrupulous dealers such as William Buchanan, William Young Ottley, Alexander Day and Andrew Wilson were only too happy to take advantage of this opportunity to buy, and were soon busy organizing the export of paintings from Italy. As Anna Jameson, a pioneer female art historian of the Italian Renaissance, wrote in her Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art: ‘Carraccis, Claudes, Poussins, arrived by ship-loads. One stands amazed at the number of pictures introduced by the enterprise of private dealers into England between 1795 and 1815, during the hottest time of the war.’
For the wealthy connoisseur it was a marvellous time to collect paintings, with some truly superb examples appearing on the market. To g
ive an example, the treasures on offer at Alexander Day’s exhibition in 1800 included two Titians and a Gaspard Poussin from the Colonna Gallery, sold jointly for 6,000 guineas, a Leonardo da Vinci and an Annibale Carracci from the Aldobrandini Cabinet valued at 3,000 and 2,000 guineas respectively, another Carracci from Genoa valued at 2,500 guineas, and a Raphael from the Borghese Gallery, also valued at 2,500 guineas.
In the case of major artists like Titian, however, there were simply too many works attributed to the master. The Orléans paintings had an established provenance but the attribution of other paintings was much less certain. Anna Jameson was very scathing, commenting:
We must take it for granted, that in many cases, a Titian, a Paul Veronese, etc. means simply a Venetian picture, of the style and time of Titian or Veronese. I firmly believe, for instance, that half the pictures which bear Titian’s name, were painted by Bonifazio [Veronese], or Girolamo de Tiziano, or Paris Bordone, or some other of the Capi of the Venetian school, which produced such a swarm of painters in the sixteenth century.
In addition, the prevailing neo-classical taste preferred works by the leading classical artists, strongly influenced by the art of antiquity. There was nothing available by Michelangelo, who had painted almost exclusively in fresco, i.e. directly on to the wall, so it was Raphael who was the most sought after artist (his Sistine Madonna was reputed to have been bought by the King of Saxony in 1754 for £8,500, by far the highest price paid for any work of art at that date). Coincidentally, in November 1798, a number of important works by Raphael, which had been brought back by the French from Italy, were unveiled at the Salon in Paris. These works, including his late masterpiece the Transfiguration, cemented Raphael’s reputation as the supreme master. The catalogue of the exhibition waxed lyrical over ‘the immortal Raphael’ and ‘the perfection we see in the Transfiguration’.
The Rape of Europa Page 14