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A Louvre Painting Collection Visits Mayfair

by Zoe Strimpel
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 at 4:37 PM

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My companion and I were about half a century below the average age at last night's private viewing of 18th-century paintings at the Wallace Collection in Mayfair. No matter — this was a momentous opening and deserved all the gravitas it got. We were there to inspect the "greatest" bequest of paintings ever received by the Louvre, from the collection of the Parisian doctor, Louis La Caze (1798–1869).

Perhaps not, ostensibly, the most exciting man, La Caze distinguished himself through his passion for collecting and the razor-sharp eye that enabled him to make his first real find: a piece by Jean-Siméon Chardin for just 15 francs in a Paris flea market. However, at the time he began collecting, what we now call iconic 18th-century paintings were surprisingly cheap, since they were associated with the frivolity of pre-revolutionary France. La Caze's appreciation of Spanish painting was also unusual in France at the time; the country was barely represented at all in the Louvre. So his bequest was seen as filling an important and interesting hole in the definitive French collection.

La Caze's bequest — so significant a part of France's artistic heritage that the French ambassador to England made a speech last night — includes work by Jean Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and some less well-known artists. The star Boucher here is a mythological piece: "Venus in Vulcan's Workshop" (1746), an oval-shaped painting with a finely muscled Vulcan at its center, commissioned by the palace for the dauphin's bedroom in Versailles. (The dauphin then rejected it and it went to the royal château at Marly.) The Fragonards are not of the ladies-swinging-from-trees variety; rather, they are from his line of "portraits de fantasies" — fantasy portraits, so called because they often show unknown people in dramatic positions wearing fancy dress. Here is an image of a pretty woman in an exquisite ruffed dress, simply called "Song" ("Le Chant"). From Spain, there is a particularly striking 17th-century painting by Jusepe de Ribera, showing a grinning beggar boy with a clubfoot. The foot is not the focus, however; his misshapen but cheery mouth grabs the eye, evoking a sense of poignant sadness mixed with jollity.

La Caze was a genuine philanthropist, eager to spread appreciation of art through collecting. The show at the Wallace can only help advance such an aim.

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