E-news #15

The passing of Ger Luijten put an abrupt end to a brilliant directorship which, to the outside world, was evident above all from his impressive acquisitions and exhibitions policy; it also transformed the Fondation Custodia to its very soul. When he succeeded Mària van Berge-Gerbaud in 2010, Ger’s energetic and innovatory approach soon caught the attention of the Parisian art world. His charismatic personality and innate talent for communication played no small part in this, and the dissolution of the Institut Néerlandais in 2013 meant that his activities were no longer concealed behind the banner of our partner in the Rue de Lille. But Ger Luijten’s career had many other facets. For many people, especially outside France, he was primarily considered as an outstanding connoisseur of prints, author of some of the best and most original exhibition catalogues on the subject and editor of the indispensable Hollstein series. This aspect of his personality is particularly connected with the twenty years he spent as curator, then head, of the Print Room at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, although he later pursued an equally remarkable acquisition policy for prints at the Frits Lugt Collection.

‘Anyone who had the opportunity to meet Ger surely hasn’t forgotten that’, wrote Chris Stolwijk at the beginning of his obituary in the RKD Bulletin. The influx of messages of support which arrived in the days following his death confirmed the prestige enjoyed by Ger – among colleagues, among art dealers, as a source of inspiration and as a mentor and friend. The Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad and the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer both devoted articles to his death and, in Die Zeit, Florian Illies summed up Ger’s ability to appeal to any audience with the phrase ‘Nie war alte Kunst so neu’ (‘Never has ancient art seemed so new’). Later in 2023, articles in his memory written by colleagues appeared in journals such as The Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, Print Quarterly, La Tribune de l’Art and Nouvelles de l’Estampe.

Peter Hecht, Huigen Leeflang, Gijsbert van der Wal, Klaas Teeuwisse, Taco Dibbits, Ilona van Tuinen, Arjan de Koomen, Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, Christophe Leribault, Jane Munro, Bob Haboldt, Cécile Tainturier and members of Ger’s family spoke at the two celebrations held in his memory, on 4 March in Amsterdam at the Oude Lutherse Kerk and on 26 March at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris. Hundreds of people attended. In March, in Ger’s honour, was organised at the Salon du Dessin a small exhibition of the acquisitions he had made at the Salon, whilst the traditional reception held at the Louvre on the eve of the opening was devised as a homage to Ger, with the presentation of a number of drawings by his favourite artists. In his memory, the Rijksmuseum acquired four unique drawings by the painter and draughtsman Adriaen de Weert, as did the private contribution in the purchase of a painting by Berthe Morisot for the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The exhibition titled From Scribble to Cartoon at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp was dedicated to his memory, as was the recently published book Listening to What You See. Selected Contributions on Dutch Art by Peter Hecht. A special issue of Simiolus will be published in 2024 in Ger’s honour; he was a member of the editorial committee of the journal for more than thirty years. Ger’s collaborators, including those who have since left the Fondation Custodia, are currently preparing an exhibition which will display a choice of acquisitions among the thousands of works which have entered the collections since his appointment in 2010. This will be presented at the Rue de Lille from 27 April to 7 July with the title A Passionate Eye. Ger Luijten and twelve years of acquisitions.

Our institution has also benefited from numerous gifts in memory of Ger, from art dealers with whom he forged excellent relations, but also from private individuals wanting to pay tribute to a friendship sometimes based on a single inspiring meeting. I should like to thank them warmly once again for their engagement with the Fondation and for the generosity with which they have enriched our collections. The works of art in question are listed separately in this newsletter.

Hans Buijs

On 8 January, two exhibitions closed that had been organised by him to the very last details: Nineteenth-century French Drawings and Léon Bonvin (1834-1866). Drawn to the Everyday. The first of these, realised with our team of curators, produced a panorama of what has become, over the course of recent decades, a field that has gained increasing importance and which contained a considerable number of drawings acquired by Ger himself. Some of these already revealed his desire to build up, alongside the long-favoured landscape drawings, a collection of figure studies. He did not have the time to develop this any further.

A retrospective of the work of the young Léon Bonvin (1834-1866), who died tragically young, was a wish very close to Ger’s heart ever since he discovered Bonvin’s delicate, melancholy work at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore – where the main body of his output is kept. The project took shape in close collaboration with Gabriel P. Weisberg and his wife Yvonne, primary connoisseurs of the work of Bonvin, and was mounted at the Fondation Custodia by Maud Guichané. The two exhibitions were accompanied by academic publications, as is traditional at the Fondation Custodia, the second of them also spurring the appearance of an English translation. The inclusion of a catalogue raisonné makes this a reference work indispensable to the study of the artist.

From 25 February to 14 May last year, two exhibitions, Process. Design Drawings from the Rijksmuseum 1500-1900 and Cabinet of Dutch Drawings. The Eighteenth Century, were devoted to old master drawings, always at the heart of the Fondation Custodia’s activities. The first presented nearly two hundred drawings connected to the decorative arts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century from the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A unique collection, assembled mainly by Reinier Baarsen, curator emeritus of the museum, and described by him in the English language catalogue. The exhibition had previously been shown at the Design Museum Den Bosch in Holland; it was distinguished by its original approach to the subject, aiming as it did to establish the real function these drawings fulfil in the creative process.

The fact that the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels possess an admirable collection of eighteenth-century Dutch drawings, already partially built up during the eighteenth century itself, was known only to initiates. The eighty sheets, hitherto mainly unknown, selected by curator Stefaan Hautekeete for Cabinet of Dutch Drawings, all of excellent quality and remarkably well-preserved, offered a comprehensive overview of this still somewhat neglected period in Dutch art. The exhibition was held in Brussels in 2019 and at the Rijksmuseum Twente in Enschede in 2020. Ger Luijten had considered showing it in Paris for some time, and it complemented the Process exhibition perfectly. A team of top specialists, brought in by Stefaan Hautekeete, wrote the catalogue Cabinet des plus merveilleux dessins. Dessins néerlandais du XVIIIe siècle issus des collections des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.

On 16 June, the exhibition of the work of the almost unknown seventeenth-century painter Jacobus Vrel finally opened. This was a project shared between the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Fondation Custodia. After years of research led by a constellation of specialists under the supervision of the exhibition’s progenitors Bernd Ebert, Quentin Buvelot and our colleague Cécile Tainturier, the catalogue had been printed in three languages in 2021 when the Covid pandemic entered the fray and put a stop to all plans. Once the three curators were able to start afresh it became clear that the Alte Pinakothek would have to withdraw from the project. The exhibition opened its doors on 16 February in The Hague. For its presentation in Paris, under the title Jacobus Vrel. Enigmatic Forerunner of Vermeer, it was considerably enlarged so that half the work known today to be by him, twenty-two paintings plus the only drawing attributed to the artist, was on display in Rue de Lille. Thanks to a large selection of paintings, drawings and prints by his contemporaries, Vrel’s subjects and themes were highlighted and placed in a wider context. The exhibition enjoyed enormous success and the catalogue, which has become a work of reference as it deals with all questions raised by the work of this mysterious artist, was sold out several weeks before the last day of the exhibition.

By the end of the exhaustive research that preceded the exhibition Vrel had still revealed very few of his secrets. Stripping the archives was not enough to produce any new biographical details. It has been possible however to locate a number of the buildings in his town views to Zwolle, in the east of the Netherlands, and to get closer to dating his panels through dendrochronological analysis. During the final days of the exhibition, on 10 and 11 September, a symposium organised by CODART was held at the Fondation Custodia; here the authors of the catalogue and interested colleagues could discuss the results of the research with the paintings in front of them.

At the same time, the Parisian public was able to discover the work of the Dordrecht artist Rein Dool (born 1933) at a retrospective of his work, originally presented a few months earlier at the Dordrechts Museum. A French version of the catalogue, written by Huigen Leeflang, curator in the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam and a long-term friend of the artist, was published for the occasion titled Rein Dool. Les dessins. After the exhibition, the Frits Lugt Collection received a very generous gift from the artist, a series of fifteen drawings representing different periods of his career, in all sorts of styles and techniques. They were chosen with his help by Huigen Leeflang and Rhea Sylvia Blok who, with Juliette Parmentier-Courreau, were responsible for organising the exhibition in Paris. The masterpiece is indisputably one of the monumental charcoal park views in Dordrecht, a series on which Dool has been working since 2013 and which inspires admiration for its near perfect technique.

The catalogue raisonné of the Fondation Custodia’s little-known collection of Asiatic porcelain, dating mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and originally acquired by Frits Lugt and his wife, was drawn up since 2018 by Christiaan J.A. Jörg, emeritus curator of the Groninger Museum and eminent specialist in the subject. During the ‘Printemps asiatique’ in June 2023, Chinese and Japanese Porcelain in the Frits Lugt Collection was finally revealed. In addition to being an indispensable reference work, it is a particularly attractive publication thanks, notably, to the quality of the photographs taken by Pascal and Catherine Faligot, and to the original layout by our graphic designer Wigger Bierma. The volume, edited by Maud Guichané, is dedicated to the memory of Ger Luijten.

Since the spring of 2021, in the most unexpected places, our colleagues at the Fondation Custodia could find themselves face to face with the draughtswoman Christelle Téa, her huge sketchbook on her knees, depicting our two buildings from all angles. The outcome of her project is forty large drawings, which Ger Luijten aimed from the start to reunite in a special edition. This volume was published just before Christmas and the artist’s many admirers were able to acquire a copy of Christelle Téa à la Fondation Custodia, signed by the artist and usually accompanied by an informal little drawing. This edition was brought to the press also by Maud Guichané, who with Ger Luijten conducted the introductory interview with the artist.

From 2 to 7 July last year, a seminar on The Art of Drawing was held at the Rue de Lille. This gave a dozen postgraduate students from universities in Holland and abroad the chance to familiarise themselves with the specific problems linked to research in the field of Old Master Drawings. Organised by the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History (NIKI) in Florence, in partnership with the Fondation Custodia, this study week – originally scheduled for January 2023 – constituted the second phase of a programme that had begun in Florence in September 2022. Under the leadership of Gert Jan van der Sman, researcher and librarian at the NIKI, and Arjan de Koomen, associate professor at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the board of our Fondation, the students in Paris were able to take part in the presentation of the collection by the curators of the Fondation Custodia and its conservator Corinne Letessier; they exchanged points of view based on case studies. They were also welcomed by Jean-Gérald Castex and Dominique Cordellier of the Department of Graphic Arts of the Louvre, and enjoyed a private visit to the collection of German drawings assembled by Nicolas Schwed.

With a luminous view across the Gulf of Naples to the island of Capri, by the young Danish painter Harald Jerichau (1851-1878) (fig. 1), who died young, and the view of Hyde Park by George Garrard (1760-1826) (fig. 2), painted in 1793 from his home in Knightsbridge, some missing masters were added to the panorama of the European oil sketch that Ger Luijten has managed to bring together in more than five hundred examples. The attribution of a study of a pumpkin to Antoine Chazal (1793-1854) (fig. 3) may not be entirely secure, but the painting is no less memorable for that – and unique in its genre.

By Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1680) (figs. 4a-b), Ger managed to add a preparatory drawing for a print to the three already in the collection. In addition to a magnificent group of drawings by Van Ostade, the Fondation Custodia possesses the almost complete collection of his prints. And with the acquisition of an extremely rare etched landscape (fig. 5), Ger succeeded in completing the small oeuvre of Johannes Lagoor (ca. 1620-1660 or after) already present in the Frits Lugt Collection, six etchings in all.

Paul Scheppers, who was active in Malines and died in Saragossa under the name of ‘Pablo Esquert’, spent several years in Naples (fig. 6). Ger was able to acquire a unique design for the decoration of the cupola in the church of the Santi Severino e Sossio convent in Naples. The sheet is probably a vidimus, a contract drawing presented to the commissioner for his approval: it is signed by both ‘Paulo Scheppers’ and by a certain Father Petropaulo, the latter representing the convent. Scheppers executed the frescoes, which mostly remain, in collaboration with his compatriot Jan van Stinemolen (1518-1589), whose daughter he married. The sheet, which must date from 1565, is the only drawing that can be attributed with any certainty to his name, the name of one of those forgotten Netherlandish artists who travelled all over Europe from the sixteenth century onwards.

Finally, we should mention an exceptional purchase made in December 2023, a year after Ger Luijten’s death. At the sale of the renowned collection of Sam Josefowitz (1921-2015) of Lausanne, it was possible to acquire the first state of the Old Woman Seated in a Cottage, with a String of Onions on the Wall by Rembrandt (1606-1669) (fig. 7a), one of the etchings made by the young artist in Leiden, usually dated to about 1629. A copy of the second state (fig. 7b) already existed in the excellent Rembrandt collection assembled by Frits Lugt. In this second state, the plate has been reworked, probably by another hand, and provided with the master’s signature and the date 1631. It is not very rare, whereas there is only one other copy of the first state in existence. The etching is part of a group of prints, mostly with a single figure, in which Rembrandt experimented with the etching technique and which he probably only printed in a few copies. Here, he has attempted for the first time to render a badly-lit interior in etching. Because the acid was left too long, some of the shadows are somewhat heavy. The sheet, printed with a lot of plate tone, can boast an illustrious provenance, going back probably to Willem Six (1662-1733), the nephew of Rembrandt’s friend the mayor Jan Six. It counts among its previous owners Edward Rudge (1763-1846), whose collection only appeared under the hammer in 1924, giving Frits Lugt the opportunity to add to his ever-growing collection thirty prints by the master in one fell swoop. As co-organiser of one of the best ever exhibitions of Rembrandt’s prints, Rembrandt the Printmaker (2000), Ger Luijten would undoubtedly have been enchanted by this acquisition.

Among the circa ten thousand items that have entered the collection since 2010, some have already been displayed to the public at various exhibitions and some will be shown here for the first time. The visitor is invited to discover this remarkable display via a trajectory organised by technique (drawings, prints, paintings, oil sketches, letters and manuscripts, contemporary artists).

The variety of the schools on show is testimony to Ger Luijten’s great curiosity. Although the Dutch and Flemish schools are lavishly represented, Danish drawings rub shoulders with British prints, a German drawing with a Spanish sketch. Famous names hang close to lesser-known or even anonymous artists. All the works share a common radiance, a poetic presence, a reflection of the personality and taste of Ger Luijten.

Stijn Alsteens, born in Leuven (Belgium) in 1976, is a leading expert of old master drawings, especially those from the Low Countries, and currently head of the department of Old Master Drawings at Christie’s. Previously, he was a curator at the Fondation Custodia in Paris (2001-2006) and at the Department of Drawings and Prints of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2006-2016). His knowledge and broad experience, his international career and his enthusiasm for old master drawings and prints make him ideally suited to pursue the work of Frits Lugt and his successors at its customary high level. Expanding the collection, facilitating its access to researchers and sharing it with the widest possible audience will continue to be paramount objectives.

Stijn Alsteens: ‘The Frits Lugt Collection has shaped me as an art historian more than any other place, and it is a great honour for me to return there now as director. The works of art that Frits and Jacoba Lugt-Klever brought together during their long lives, constantly enriched after their deaths, will continue to be a source of inspiration for the programme of exhibitions, publications and acquisitions that I will try to develop from now, together with the Board and staff of the Fondation Custodia. Lugt remains an example not only as a scholar and connoisseur, but also as a passionate art lover, and I look forward to sharing his wonder with a wide audience – in Paris and far beyond.’

‘Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw and waste no time’, these are the words Michelangelo wrote on a drawing by Antonio Mini (1506-1533) who became his pupil in 1523, aged 16. It is surely because of this frequently cited comment that Mini still enjoys a certain fame, as he does not seem to have been a great talent. Nevertheless, Michelangelo (1475-1564) must have been fond of him. When Antonio conceived the plan to try his luck in France in 1531, he gave him a large number of drawings, two crates of sculptural models, and the large painting representing Leda and the Swan, originally destined to the Duke of Ferrara, along with the cartoon for that painting (the full-size work drawing). Another large cartoon, for a Noli me tangere, would become his once the painting it was intended for was completed.

Mini was determined to travel to the French court and offer King Francis I the Leda for sale. His adventures from his departure can be followed in the nine letters he wrote to Michelangelo, who remained behind in Florence, between late November 1531 and early May 1533. One of these the Fondation Custodia has now been able to acquire at a London auction (fig. 1).¹ The letter was written on 27 February 1532² in Lyon, where Mini, waiting for the Leda to arrive by sea to Marseille, was accommodated by an acquaintance of his master, one of the merchants who numbered the flourishing Florentine colony in the city. Together with his travelling companion, the young painter Benedetto del Bene (life dates unknown), they filled their time by making copies of the Leda based on the cartoon they had brought with them. Judging by our letter, these went off greedily: ‘Whoever wants a Leda and whoever wants another panel painting in our manner, they can get it, and they pay that which we say, because they will not care what they spend [...] I tell you, men make themselves away from their homeland’.

The Leda itself had arrived by now. Mini assures Michelangelo that he has placed the panel with a Florentine banker in Lyon, Leonardo Spina, not without repeating that he intends to present it in person to the king: ‘I would like to be the one who catches this hare. You should know there are many hunting dogs wanting to catch it for themselves [...] and show it to the king, as a sign of their great affections’. He further asks his master to help him to finally get his hands on the cartoon for the Noli me Tangere, which Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1557) had executed for Michelangelo. Mini has already arranged the transport to Lyon with Girolamo Gondi through the latter’s father, another Florentine banker in Lyon.

The letter is addressed to Michelangelo ‘in Florence, or wherever he is’. Apparently news had already reached Lyon that Michelangelo would soon be summoned to Rome: ‘Here it is said that the pope has sent for you in order to arrange about your affair’, Mini writes, alluding to the future new contract for the tomb of Julius II, the unfortunate project that had occupied Michelangelo since 1505. ‘May it please God that for the rest you may be able to repose a little with a quiet mind, since for me there could be no contentment or joy equal to yours, for I know for how long you have been troubled [...] remember that if it were possible you have more than a son [in me]’. Mini’s great affection for his master speaks also from the signature: ‘your affectionate Antonio Mini in Lyon, who through you is alive and well and happy’.

‘There are many hunting dogs wanting to catch it for themselves’ – for all his confidence, Mini seems to have a dark premonition of what might happen. This would unfortunately be confirmed. After two unsuccessful attempts to gain access to the court in Paris and Nantes, he provisionally returned to Lyon, leaving the Leda with his neighbour in Paris, Giuliano Buonaccorsi, a Florentine who held a high position at court as treasurer and receiver of the finances of the Provence. The latter took advantage of his absence to offer the painting to the king himself. When Mini came to retrieve it a year later, Buonaccorsi strenuously denied that he was the owner. Mini’s subsequent complaint was apparently unsuccessful, as the Leda was cited three years later as being in the possession of Francis I, now with an elaborate frame designed by Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540). Poor Mini himself had died by then, probably at the end of 1533. His Michelangelo drawings must soon have found their way among the Italian artists at the French court, judging by the use they made of them in their own works. The Leda probably perished in Fontainebleau in the 17^th century.

Just as he was about to move to the Marquesas Islands, in June 1901, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) discovered that he needed the permission of his wife, Mette-Sophie Gad (1850-1920), to sell his house on Tahiti. She had lived in Copenhagen with their children since 1884, and he hastily sent a letter to his friend and agent Daniel de Monfreid (1856-1929), asking him to persuade her to sign a procuration. That letter could recently be acquired (fig. 2),³ six pages in which, of course, many other subjects figure that occupied Gauguin at the time: the possible purchase by Gustave Fayet (1865-1925) in Béziers, who was becoming increasingly interested in his work, of a wooden relief that he had had shipped to France (La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), the exhibition of the local Société des Beaux-Arts, the potential purchase of a painting by that city, in which Fayet could mediate, the low prices paid by Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) for his canvases, his participation in exhibitions in Sweden and Norway. He also writes about his expectations for his new life: ‘I think that in the Marquesas, with the ease with which one gets models (something that is becoming increasingly difficult in Tahiti), and with landscapes still to discover – in short, completely new and wilder elements, I’m going to make beautiful things. Here my imagination was beginning to cool down, and also the public was getting too used to Tahiti. [...] As for the Degas clientele, for example, it is also possible that to complete their collection they will buy Marquesas subjects’.

The letter consists of a double and a single leaf, both with a woodcut vignette showing Gauguin’s initials between two peacocks, once printed in full, once only for the central part.⁴ The letter had already come up for auction in 2022,⁵ but the second leaf was missing, so the Fondation Custodia privileged the acquisition of another, slightly earlier letter by Gauguin, also to Daniel de Monfreid and bearing a woodcut vignette (fig. 3).⁶ Indeed, the two sheets of the 1901 letter had been separated at some moment after 1970, when it first came up for auction as part of a series of letters to De Monfreid.⁷ Only very recently both parts were reunited by a Swiss collector.⁸

A few months after Gauguin’s death on the island of Hiva Oa, on 8 May 1903, what remained of his estate was transferred to Papeete to be auctioned off. A young French maritime doctor with literary aspirations was on the ship that came to collect the 16 chests and still had the chance to see Gauguin’s ‘Maison du Jouir’ and speak to those who had known him closely. On the way back, he had plenty of time to inspect the contents of the crates, a discovery that would change his life. From then on, in articles, books and novels, or as the editor of his letters to De Monfreid, Victor Segalen (1878-1919) would become the advocate of Gauguin and his art. In the unpublished letter to the poet Saint-Pol-Roux (1861-1940) which the Fondation Custodia acquired on the same occasion, Segalen informs him of the artist’s recent death and recounts the sad September auction in Papeete (fig. 4). He also reports on his own acquisitions: prints, drawings and seven paintings, including masterpieces such as Gauguin’s Self-portrait near Golgotha (São Paolo, Museo de Arte), and even the carved wooden panels that had decorated the entrance to the ‘Maison du Jouir’. It was Saint-Pol-Roux who had advised him to go and see Gauguin in Tahiti, and on his return to France Segalen would offer him these panels for his house in Camaret-sur-Mer.

If there is one artist whose letters are works of art in themselves, it is Egon Schiele (1890-1918) and it is understandable that he was appointed clerk during his military service in World War I precisely because of his handwriting.

It has long been a wish to add another specimen of his script to the collection, in addition to the postcard to his brother-in-law Anton Peschka (1855-1946) from 1917 already present (fig. 5).⁹ Schiele’s extensive correspondence shows great variation in lettering, even between letters dating from the same months. With its strict, controlled rhythm and elongated vertical letters, the small note to Oskar Reichel acquired in 2023 is a beautiful example of the artist’s idiosyncratic calligraphy (fig. 6).¹⁰ Schiele’s mention of his home town, Krumau (now Český Krumlov, Czech Republic), allows us to situate the undated writing between May and August 1911 when Schiele had settled in his mother’s birthplace in order to escape the busy Viennese life. It thus dates from a crucial period in his existence: a year before, barely 20 years old, Schiele had decided to establish himself as an independent artist and had begun experimenting with the themes and highly expressive style with which he would become famous.

Oskar Reichel (1869-1943) was a Viennese internist, later gallery owner, and prominent collector of Austrian modernism. He was among Schiele’s earliest admirers and collectors. Besides his own 1910 portrait (whereabouts unknown), he would eventually bring together more than 16 paintings by the artist and an unknown number of drawings. In our letter, Schiele asks him to go and select four or five of his drawings at the Wiener Werkstätte and send him payment by return. If he wishes, Reichel can later exchange the sheets for others he likes better. By the same occasion, he can visit the Wiener Werkstätte and have a look at its products, especially the new ladies’ hats, and the director’s room with the successful reproductions after Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). The Wiener Werkstätte, whose aim was to develop all kinds of modern decorative art, had been founded in 1903, in part by the architect Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956). Schiele was friends with Hoffmann and would provide some designs, notably for postcards, for the institution, which also supported him by taking his drawings on consignment.

Money worries are a constant theme in Schiele’s letters from this period to Reichel – some ten are known – and others from the circle of protectors he had surrounded himself with. He did not hesitate to harass them with dramatic requests for immediate purchases in cash, as in this letter: ‘Since I have been here, I have managed with 15 crowns [...] 32 or about 30 drawings of mine are with Professor Hoffmann at the Wiener Werkstätte [...], take 5 and send me the money, don’t leave it at the Wiener Werkstätte, if only because they sell each sheet for 30 crowns. [...] I’m sure you’ll send me the money straight away, I really have nothing. I have no bed, no other furniture, no easel, no mirror, no armchair, no brushes, few colours, and I miss many other things.’

Hans Buijs

The missive was penned on 2 September 1815, while Canova was busy in Paris reclaiming the works ceded to France by the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797. The sculptor addresses the letter to ‘Madame Tambroni’, in other words Teresa Couty (1781-1823), to inform her that her husband Giuseppe Tambroni (Bologna 1773 – 1824 Rome) is in serious financial difficulties. Indeed, Tambroni’s life was shaped by the political changes that marked Italy’s transformation from the Revolution to the Empire. Tambroni was a government official in Bologna and then in Milan but fled to Chambéry in 1799 because of his allegiance to Napoleon.² There he met and married Teresa Couty (fig. 2), ‘who, to the charm of her features, added all the grace of a lively and gentle nature’.³

In 1811 he was appointed consul to the Kingdom of Italy and was able to set up house in Rome with Teresa. In Rome the couple made friends with Antonio Canova; together, Tambroni and Canova founded the Accademia d’Italia in Palazzo Venezia, to support artists in the same manner as the Académie de France. However, the institution, born of such idealism, as well as semi-philantropic and unmistakeably didactic aspirations, in which Tambroni also invested his capital, was to have as fleeting a life as a comet in the sky. In July 1814, the directorship was withdrawn from Tambroni and entrusted to the Austrian plenipotentiary Ludwig von Lebzeltern (1774-1854), who spread slanderous rumours about his predecessor.⁴ Tambroni found himself alone in Rome, the city which had turned against him.⁵ He began a sorrowful ‘odyssey’ (his word) in order to preserve his educational missions and to restore his reputation. He went to Vienna, then to Milan, but remained on the margins of the Congress set up to re-establish order in Europe after the Napoleonic period.

During this time, Canova continued to support his friend. In the letter in question here, he informs Teresa of his meetings with the Emperor and with Metternich to plead the cause of Giuseppe Tambroni. But the letter is not simply sent to the wife of a friend to sooth her troubled mind: Canova is addressing a woman with whom he is conducting a passionate love affair.

‘You cannot imagine the pain your short note caused me, and then the letter of the 19^th which I received by post, hearing that you are unwell, feeling that you have been robbed of your strength, and feeling also that you have not yet recovered’.⁶ The text thus opens with the sculptor’s anxiety about Teresa’s fluctuating state of health. He thanks Nicola Maria Nicolaj (1756-1833) for having visited his friend on his behalf. He invites her to use his carriage and his summer house in Albano, where Juliette Récamier also stayed;⁷ He asks Teresa if she has received the package and the box he sent her, and avows that ‘whether a little or whether a lot, I have written to you twice a week’.⁸ The expressions of affection sprinkled throughout the letter suggest that the link between Canova and Teresa far exceeded straightforward friendship.

Other sources bear witness to this relationship. Stendhal (1738-1842) describes an encounter with Teresa Couty, whom he designates as the official ‘mistress’ of Canova.⁹ Francesco Hayez (1791-1882) executes a portrait of her, to be given secretly to the sculptor on his return to Rome (fig. 3).¹⁰ In addition, the names of Canova and Teresa stand side by side on a clay model dated 1810, a preparatory sketch for the Three Graces (fig. 4).¹¹ The model was presented by Canova to Juliette Récamier and bequeathed by her to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon where it remains to this day.¹² On the plinth are inscribed the words ‘Idea/made in Frascati/in the house of Madame Tambroni 1810’¹³ (fig. 5), testifying to the date and time when the artist first conceived the sculpture group, as well as to the name of the woman who accompanied his reflections.

Filippo Agricola (1795-1857), who was then a resident at the Accademia d’Italia, painted a picture of Teresa (fig. 6) in which she is elegantly dressed, her dark hair carefully coiffed; she has a round face with arching eyebrows and full lips. The affinities between Agricola’s portrait and Canova’s figure style at that time¹⁴ suggest that, to the sculptor, Teresa’s features remained his constant model during the 1820s.

The letter closes with a highly informal farewell, a gentle ‘adieu… adieu…’. The same soulful exclamations can be found in Canova’s correspondence with Juliette Récamier. In the letters addressed to Madame Récamier, the words are expressed with vehemence, in the letters to Teresa they are more restrained – probably due to the need to retain the appearance of a simple friendship, and to cover any trace of a correspondence between lovers. Canova’s note on the fourth page, beneath a badly damaged seal, is curious: ‘The seal has been broken by me, according to your rules’.¹⁵ An enigmatic pronouncement; the artist declares that he has complied with Teresa’s request that her seal be damaged so that it cannot be recognised by whomsoever carries the letter to its recipient. Or perhaps that the message contained no secrets and could be mixed in with the others, having no stamp to betray the identity of the sender.

In the light of these considerations, the recent discovery of a second letter from Canova to ‘Madame Thérèse’ in a private collection was a very fortunate event. The friendly tone, the handwriting, the date and contents show that this was a letter sent by Canova in Paris on 25 September 1815 to the wife of Giuseppe Tambroni. The sculptor declares to her that he has spoken again about the situation of his friend with Prince von Metternich, who has made a vague promise to look into the matter when he is in Rome. He alerts Teresa to his forthcoming departure for London, then his return to Rome.¹⁶ The final words of the letter are filled with affection. The artist asks her to kiss her children for him, to give his respects to Tambroni, without ‘forgetting to love me too, who will always be your friend C[anova]’.¹⁷

Canova’s support was particularly needed by Teresa and Giuseppe Tambroni that year. The letters of the period betray real anxiety on Tambroni’s part, in the tone of Jacopo Ortis, a favourite reading for that generation. At the beginning of his letter of 5 September 1815, even Canova admits to ‘having understood that Tambroni in the end has accomplished nothing, only cherished hopes’.¹⁸

Tambroni returned to Rome in 1816 with a modest civil service pension. Later he devoted his time more pleasurably to historiographical and artistic writings, continuing to favour Classicism in its purest form, thus maintaining his solidarity with Canova. Tambroni was also one of the last friends to see the sculptor before his final departure for Possagno in 1822. His relationship with Teresa must have gone the same way. Over the years, between Italy’s vicissitudes as a nation and the fate of the Accademia d’Italia, she remained a close friend, a silent muse and gentle presence, of whose replies to Antonio Canova no trace remains, the one who always signs ‘with all my heart and with all my soul […] your true friend’.¹⁹

Ester Giachetti²⁰

A moonlit sky dominates this landscape, delicately executed in gouache. The clouds gradually fade out, giving way to moonlight and the accompanying stars. In the distance, a village plunged in nocturnal peace can be made out. On the right are two figures, one of them on horseback, leaving the beaten track by the river to disappear into a dense, dark wood. The sheet was acquired by Frits Lugt in London in 1929 from a certain Richeton, with nine other works. On the relevant inventory card can be read ‘Anonymous, in the manner of Agricola’.

Although the parallel made here with the delicate gouaches by the Ratisbon artist Christoph Ludwig Agricola (1665-1724) is comprehensible, the drawing in the Fondation Custodia bears much closer similarities with works by Jean-Daniel Heimlich (1740-1796) in the Cabinet des Estampes et des Dessins of the Musées de Strasbourg (CED), in particular with one sheet which entered the collection in 2019 (fig. 1).¹ If we compare the two drawings, the same hand can be detected in the modelling of the leaves on the trees, the form of the belfry with its spire leaning slightly to the right, the transparency of the treatment of the water in the river in the background.

‘Heimlich’ means ‘secret’ in German, and the artist bearing this name is indeed somewhat evasive. For many years, sources regarded the signature attached to a series of Views of the Environs of Paris, which appeared in 1765, as the pseudonym of the German artist Johann Eleazar Schenau (1737-1806). There is nothing however to indicate the participation of this artist, who worked in Dresden, in the series which also bears the address of a Parisian publisher.² Little information about Heimlich has come down to us. He was baptised in Strasbourg on 13 February 1740, and was apprenticed in 1756 to the Tribu de l’Échasse, a Strasbourg guild which included painters. After his apprenticeship, Heimlich was in Paris, probably from 1759 to 1765; he was back in Strasbourg in 1772, the year in which he attained his mastership in the Tribu de l’Échasse. He reappears during the upheaval of the revolution when he is a member of the revolutionary censorship, responsible for religious painting in Strasbourg Cathedral. He died in his native city on 24 November 1796.³

Unlike his prints, which are usually signed Heimlich fecit or D. Heimlich. f, the artist hardly ever seems to have taken the trouble to sign or date his drawings, so we are reduced to the art of stylistic comparison if we want to identify his pages.⁴ They are often executed in gouache, with dimensions usually hovering around 150 mm by 170 mm, and it is easy to recognise his distinctive manner of representing foliage: after having established the trunk and the twisted branches, he adds the leaves, beginning from a major branch. Leaf by leaf, he paints three spots in different greens, creating a dense volume of verdant foliage. Another of his characteristics is the way he treats the human figure. Heimlich’s people almost disappear into the surrounding countryside, an effect achieved by using the same tones as the background. Their faces are not particularly distinct, they are often stockily built with square shoulders, and dressed in the same garments from one drawing to the next.⁵

There are undoubtedly other works by our almost-unknown artist lurking in other collections; they could be added one day to the small body of work associated today with Jean-David Heimlich. The artist painted and engraved portraits, religious and pastoral subjects as well as landscapes and views of Strasbourg which reflect his interest in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. A particular sensitivity to Dutch art of the Golden Age is present – and not by chance – in the art of Alsace in the following century. The Rhine, in fact, served as a trade route for artists as well as for commerce. Thus, the subjects so close to the heart of the Dutch artists can be found in the pastoral scenes of Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), clearly heavily influenced by the art of Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683), or in the interiors of Martin Drölling (1786-1851) and his sons, who imitated Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685).⁶

Nora Belmadani

In September last year, Mària van Berge-Gerbaud, director of the Fondation Custodia until 2010, described her amazement when in April 1990, during a trip to India, she encountered the collector and artist Jagdish Mittal of Hyderabad (born 1925) who already knew of the collection of Frits Lugt. When she arrived at his house in the farthest corner of a suburb of the city of Hyderabad, her host, dressed simply in a traditional dhoti, raised one arm on high and exclaimed loudly: ‘Lukt collection, Lukt collection, Lukt collection!’ Imagine Mària van Berge-Gerbaud’s astonishment! This is how the collector expressed his great enthusiasm for the miniatures. The encounter made clear to Mària van Berge-Gerbaud that the paintings, although few in number, arouse interest that extends far beyond the simple French sphere. In fact, the collection is characterised by the great quality of the work. The paintings are real gems, they spell enchantment for all lovers of Indian art.

Frits Lugt (1884-1970) and his wife Jacoba Lugt-Klever (1888-1969) acquired twenty-two Indo-Persian miniatures between 1921 and 1961. Ten of them were Indian, eleven Persian and one of uncertain origin, either Indian or Persian. This of course was small beer in comparison with their collection of works on paper, prints and drawings.¹ However, their regular purchases over the years underline the continuity of their sustained curiosity about this specific genre, when they could simply have abandoned this feature of their collection.

Their first purchase in the field took place quite early, in December 1921, at the Alfred Strölin sale in Paris, when they had only been collecting for six years. They bought four Indian miniatures, including two portraits, one in the Moghul style shows an officer holding a falcon against a background of opaline green (fig. 1). The other, in the Murshidabad style, shows Nawab Suraj-ud-Daula of Bengal in the company of his brother (fig. 2). There is also a Deccanese painting of the garden of an idealised palace (fig. 3). They were bought for a total of 100 Dutch Florins, a considerable sum of money at the time. Another miniature, listed as number 778, is described by Frits Lugt in his inventory as depicting a married couple under a canopy surrounded by dancers. He adds later that this painting was unfortunately lost during the Second World War.

According to Carlos van Hasselt (1929-2009), former director of the Fondation Custodia, the Lugts’ interest was first aroused before 1921, as evidenced by their acquisition on 5 November 1920 of one of the twenty-five drawings made by Rembrandt from Moghul miniatures (fig. 4).² If the purchase made in 1921 of the two portraits is viewed in this context, the choice of the Deccanese miniature is an original one for the period, when the attention of collectors as a whole had not yet fixed on miniatures from Central India³: was it just due to the fact that the three paintings were sold at the same sale? Or did the Lugts appreciate this view of the idealised garden in the same way as the two portraits? Did they recognise the outstanding quality of the piece? Whatever the truth of the matter, the third miniature proves to have been an excellent buy and probably would not have been possible today, given the spectacular rise in the price of miniatures in the art market.⁴

The tone of the collection of Indo-Persian miniatures had been set: it would be largely centred on the art of portraiture at the Moghul court. Later, successive directors, Carlos van Hasselt in particular, were to enrich the collection regularly, broadening the choice of subjects to include illustrations of classical texts, religious iconography and regional schools of painting, mainly from Northern India. Most of the miniatures were exhibited at the Institut Néerlandais in 1974, 1979 and 1986, then at the Fondation Custodia in 1991. The most recent exhibition of miniatures at the Fondation Custodia, Couleurs de l’Inde, Nouvelles acquisitions de la Collection Frits Lugt, took place in 2002. Since then, the exceptional works continue to be loaned to institutions world-wide. Finally, and up to the present day, the Indo-Persian collection has been enriched by purchases and gifts – forty-four additional miniatures bring the total holding to 230 in the inventory.⁵

Dr Anne-Colombe Launois

Dr Anne-Colombe Launois has just received the Prix Flora Blanchon 2023 from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres in Paris. The prize will help finance the publication of her doctoral thesis entitled Images d’une royauté indienne, la dynastie sikhe de Patiala et son palais fortifié, 18e et 19e siècles. Her doctorate in History and Civilisation was defended in December 2021 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) at the Center for South Asian Studies. Publication will be undertaken by the Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, in the collection ‘Mondes d’ailleurs’. Her research centred on North Indian painting, particularly in the Qila Mubarak, the fort in Patiala where Dr Launois inventoried about 1100 mural paintings, inspired for the most part by the art of miniatures and manuscripts.

She joined the Fondation Custodia in February 2023 to sort out the Indian and Persian miniatures with a view to putting the collection online – a task she is completing in collaboration with the curator Rhea Sylvia Blok.

Relying on his knowledge as an art historian, and on the acuity of his discerning eye, Lugt assembled a collection of objects from Asia that was much bigger than it is today – before deciding to concentrate specifically on porcelain decorated with cobalt blue. Today, his high-quality collection comprises 122 Chinese pieces and 3 Japanese. The group consists of pieces made for the export trade to Europe, as well as pieces for Chinese use, basically between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries (fig. 2). It reflects the Dutch preference for Kraak, Transitional and Kangxi pieces, but also contains some Ming and Qing porcelain.

A few rare specimens were added to the collection by the directors of the Fondation Custodia after Frits Lugt. The most notable contribution was made by Ger Luijten who acquired some outstanding pieces: among these is a rare plaque decorated in trompe-l’oeil in imitation of a seventeenth-century Dutch print or drawing, which links it to other items in the Fondation (fig. 3). Inspired by his insatiable desire to explore every detail of the collection, and to share his treasures with as many people as possible, Ger Luijten decided to publish a catalogue raisonné of the Chinese and Japanese porcelain in the Fondation Custodia. The task was entrusted to the eminent Dutch specialist in the field, Christiaan J.A. Jörg. The catalogue replaces the small publication of 1981, illustrated mainly in black and white and written by Daan Lunsingh Scheurleer. This update was both necessary and possible thanks to the important scientific progress made in recent decades. In this new catalogue, each of the 125 pieces is reproduced from multiple angles, described in detail and placed in a scholarly context. Special attention is paid to iconography, inscriptions, and marks. A longer, informative essay elaborates on the history of the collection and shorter essays introduce each of the six sections into which the catalogue is chronologically divided (fig. 4).

The plan to produce a catalogue raisonné provided a perfect opportunity to carry out a scientific project on the collection of Chinese porcelain in the Fondation Custodia. A lengthy process of verification and identification of the objects allowed us to update the inventory of the collection. Each piece was subject to a detailed description and programme of documentation and research was undertaken to gain a better understanding of the pieces. The material condition of the items has also been the subject of scrutiny. Before a comprehensive photographic record of the collection could be made, each piece was dusted off with great care. An overall evaluation of the condition of the collection made it possible to identify pieces that required specific types of conservation, or lengthy treatment. These pieces were entrusted to the conservation workshop of Cécile de Chillaz in Paris (fig. 5a-c). She restored them to their pristine condition in a way that respected their historic and heritage character.

The catalogue raisonné of the Fondation Custodia’s Chinese and Japanese porcelain collection was presented to an audience of connoisseurs and the press on 8 June 2023, in the presence of its author, Christiaan J.A. Jörg, as part of the Printemps asiatique in Paris.

Chinese and Japanese Porcelain in the Frits Lugt Collection
Christiaan J.A. Jörg
Paris, Fondation Custodia, 2023
272 pages, c. 430 colour illustrations, 28 × 25 cm, hardcover, in English
ISBN 9 782958 323431
45,00 €

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CANCEL

Dr Peter Fuhring retired on 1 October 2022. A specialist in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century ornament and decorative arts, he joined Rhea Sylvia Blok and Laurence Lhinares in 2005 to work on the new, augmented edition of Frits Lugt’s reference work. The outcome of the project was the online database, which was launched in 2010. Since then, the inventory has been considerably enlarged with new collectors’ marks and many updates. Peter Fuhring will continue for a while to write entries for the database as an external collaborator.

In 2023 we had the great pleasure of welcoming Regina Luijten and Marie-Liesse Choueiry to the team of Les Marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes. Marie-Liesse Choueiry has collaborated with Pierre Rosenberg as academic contributor on the catalogue of Italian drawings, then on the Flemish, Dutch and German drawings in the collection of Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774). Regina Luijten was a curator at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon; she will be working in particular on the institutional marks of the museums in Portugal and Spain. Their joint interest in the history of collectors and collections, as well as their experience in the field of research, will be a tremendous asset to our team.

Since May 2023, following technical problems with updates and in order to adapt to new and evolving IT systems, a complete overhaul has been made of the online database of the Marques de collections with the firm Altea. The new version is similar in its functioning to the one we knew before, with a few new search options. It is now available online.

To consult the free database: www.marquesdecollections.fr.
To contact the team: marques@fondationcustodia.fr.
To read more about the new features.

The Scottish National Gallery’s outstanding collection of French paintings is fully described in this two-volume illustrated catalogue. Underpinned by extensive scholarly research, it includes many of the great names such as Cézanne, Degas, Delacroix, Monet, Poussin and Watteau. Since the Gallery first opened to the public in 1859, its collection of French paintings has continued to grow, thanks to many purchases and generous donations. This collection’s history, reflecting changing tastes and priorities over the years, is related in the introductory essay. Every artist is introduced by a concise biography, followed by detailed entries on the individual works of art.

This handsome catalogue provides a magnificent overview of two centuries of the art of drawing in the Netherlands, with works by master painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Cornelis Massijs, Lambert Lombard, Frans Floris, Hans Bol, Maerten de Vos, Johannes Stradanus, Otto van Veen, Lucas van Uden, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques Jordaens, Jan Breughel the Elder, David Teniers and Frans Snijders. They illustrate the multiple roles that drawing could play. There are exercises and copies of works by the great masters of the past, made by young artists during their training; studies of anatomy, poses and expressions of the human body and face, which are all stages in the creative process of a painting; and more elaborate studies for a painting, tapestry or stained-glass window, in which the artist sketches out the entire composition. Finally, there are the independent drawings, produced as gifts for clients or artist friends, or to be sold as stand-alone works of art.
A selection will be on show in Brussels this autumn.

This volume is published on the occasion of the exhibition with the same title in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that opened on January 30. The rich history of blue paper, from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, illuminates themes of transcultural interchange, international trade, and global reach. Through the examination of significant works, this study investigates considerations of supply, use, economics, and innovative creative practice. How did the materials necessary for the production of blue paper reach artistic centers? How were these materials produced and used in various regions? Why did they appeal to artists, and how did they impact artistic practice and come to be associated with regional artistic identities? How did commercial, political, and cultural relations, and the mobility of artists, enable the dispersion of these materials and related techniques?

Wilfred de Bruijn