Orleans Collection - Dispersal in London

Dispersal in London

In 1787 Louis Philippe d'Orléans, the Regent's great-grandson, whose huge income could not keep pace with his gambling habit, had sold his equally famous collection of engraved gems to Catherine the Great of Russia, and in 1788 he was in serious negotiations with a syndicate organized by James Christie, founder of Christies, the London auctioneer, for the sale of the paintings. Christie got as far as arranging that the collection should be made over to him upon the deposit of 100,000 guineas in the Bank of England, before the negotiations collapsed when the Prince of Wales having subscribed his name in the book for 7,000 guineas, and his brothers the dukes of York and Clarence for 5,000 each, no further subscribers were to be found. It was Dawson Turner's opinion that the failure was owing to the general sense that at the division of the spoils the lion's share would go to the Royals.

In 1792 Philippe Égalité impulsively sold the collection en bloc to a banker of Brussels who immediately sold it at a huge profit to the enlightened connoisseur Jean-Joseph de Laborde de Méréville, who set about adding a gallery to house it attached to his hôtel in rue d'Artois. Ruined by events, he was forced to sell it once more.

The 147 German, Dutch and Flemish paintings were sold by Orléans to Thomas Moore Slade, a British dealer, in a syndicate with two London bankers and the 7th Lord Kinnaird, for 350,000 livres in 1792, and taken to London for sale. There were protests from the French artists and public, and from the Duke's creditors, and Slade found it prudent to tell the French the pictures were going overland to Calais, but actually to sneak them onto a barge by night, and ship them down the Seine to Le Havre. These paintings were exhibited for sale in London's West End in April 1793 at 125 Pall Mall, where admissions at 1 shilling each reached two thousand a day, and sold to various buyers.

Philippe Égalité, as he had renamed himself, was arrested in April 1793 and was guillotined 6 November, but in the meantime sale negotiations for the Italian and French paintings were renewed, and they were sold for 750,000 livres to Édouard Walkiers, a banker of Brussels, who soon after sold them on, unpacked, to his cousin, Count François-Louis-Joseph de Laborde-Méréville, who had hoped to use them to add to the French national collection. After the start of the Terror, and the execution of his father as well as the Duke of Orléans, Laborde-Méréville saw he had to escape France, and brought the collection to London in early 1793.

The French and Italian paintings then spent five years in London with Laborde-Méréville, the subject of some complicated financial manoeuvres, including the failure of an attempt supported by King George III and the Prime Minister Pitt the Younger to buy them for the nation. They were finally bought in 1798 by a syndicate of the canal and coal-magnate Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, his nephew and heir, Earl Gower, later 1st Duke of Sutherland, and the Earl of Carlisle. Gower, who was perhaps the prime mover and must have known the collection well from his time as British ambassador in Paris, contributed 1/8 of the £43,500 price, Carlisle a quarter, and Bridgewater the remaining 5/8s.

The pictures were put on exhibition for seven months in 1798, with a view to selling at a least a part of them, in Bryan's Gallery in Pall Mall, with the larger ones at the Lyceum in the Strand; admission was 2/6d rather than the 1s. usual for such events. On first seeing the collection there, William Hazlitt wrote "I was staggered when I saw the works ... A new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new Earth stood before me." In 1798, 1800 and 1802 there were auctions of those paintings not sold via the galleries, generally achieving rather low prices, but 94 out of 305 of the paintings were retained by the syndicate, as seems always to have been intended, and these largely remain in their families today. However these paintings represented over half of the valuations placed on the whole portion bought by the syndicate. Even at the often low prices realized, the sales to others, and entry receipts to the exhibitions, realized a total of £42,500, so even allowing for the expenses of the exhibitions and auctions, the syndicate got their works very cheaply. Castle Howard, home of the Earls of Carlisle, originally had fifteen works, now much reduced by sales, donations, and a fire, but the Bridgewater/Sutherland group remain intact to a large degree.

The London market in these years was flooded by both other collections from France itself, and those dislodged by the French invasions of the Low Countries and Italy—by 1802 including Rome itself. As is often the case with old collectors, their choices of what to keep and what to sell seem in many cases very strange today: the two "Michelangelos" were only sold in the auctions, and for only 90 and 52 guineas. Many Titians were sold, but many Bolognese Baroque works, as well as most of the later (but not the earlier) Raphaels, were retained. The single Watteau went for only 11 gn, while one Carracci was valued at £4,000 for the galley sale, where all 33 Carraccis were sold, while works attributed to Giovanni Bellini and Caravaggio remained at the auction stage. The current location of many of the pictures can no longer be traced, and many are now attributed to lesser artists or copyists. Overall the prices realized for the better pictures were high, and in some cases their level would not be reached again for a century or longer. As an extreme case, a Ludovico Carracci valued at 60gn in 1798 was auctioned by the Duke of Sutherland in 1913 raising 2gn.

An example of a work now only known from a replica (in the Galleria Borghese in Rome) and studies is Aeneas and his Family Fleeing Troy, the only secular history painting by Federico Barocci. The prime version was given in 1586 by Francesco Maria II, the last Duke of Urbino, to Rudolph II in Prague, and was later looted by the Swedes. It was taken to Rome by Queen Christina, passed to the Orleans collection, and finally sold at auction in London for 14 guineas in 1800 (the price probably reflecting the poor condition some sources mention), since when its whereabouts are unknown. The Rome version was painted in 1598, presumably for Cardinal Scipio Borghese.

The paintings of both portions of the collection were bought by a wide range of wealthy collectors, the great majority English, as the wars with France made travelling to London difficult for others. Major buyers included Thomas Hope, a Dutch banker (distantly of Scottish extraction) sheltering in London from the Napoleonic Wars, who with his brother (of Hope Diamond fame) bought the two large Veronese allegories now in the Frick, and works by "Michelangelo", "Velásquez" and Titian, John Julius Angerstein, a Russian-German banker whose collection later became the foundation of the National Gallery, the Earl of Darnley, the Earl of Harewood, who bought Titian's The Death of Actaeon, and Earl FitzWilliam, whose collection was to found the Fitzwilliam Museum.

An analysis by Gerard Reitlinger of "most" of the buyers (of the Italian and French pictures) divides them as follows:

• Nobility - 12, including the syndicate
• Merchants - 10, including 4 Members of Parliament and 3 knights; mostly as speculators according to Reitlinger - their purchases were mostly resold within a few years
• Dealers - 6, including Bryan, who handled matters for the syndicate
• Bankers - Hope and Angerstein (both foreign)
• Painters - 4: Walton, Udney, Cosway and Skipp
• Gentleman Amateurs - 6, including William Beckford and the critic Samuel Rogers.

- a breakdown he describes as "quite unlike anything in Europe and grotesquely unlike pre-revolutionary France", where the main collectors were the tax farmers. Many of the same figures appear in the similar list of buyers of the Northern paintings.

Much of our information about the sales comes from the Memoirs of Painting, with a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures of Great Masters into England by the Great Artists since the French Revolution, by William Buchanan, published in 1824, of which the first 200 pages of Volume I are devoted to the Orleans sales, listing the works and most prices and buyers. Buchanan was himself involved in the import of art from 1802 onwards, and had his information from the dealers involved. He presents his own "exertions", and those of others, in the area in a thoroughly patriotic light, by implication as a part of the great national struggle with the French. Nicholas Penny notes the "somewhat comic" disparity between Buchanan's "sonorous words" on the subject and the "coarse and mercenary business letters" he reprints—many by himself.