Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie Antoinette's Court: The Princesse De Lamballe 9781138480827, 9781351061827

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 From Wife to Widow: Early Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe
2 Paying Court: Careerism, Sentiment and Sorority in Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe
3 The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe: Portraits, Prints, Gardens and Anglomania at the Court of Marie-Antoinette
4 ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’: The Private Collection and Public Patronage of the Princesse de Lamballe, a Courtier-Collector
5 Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie-Antoinette’s Court

This comprehensive book brings to light the portraits, private collections and public patronage of the princesse de Lamballe, a pivotal member of Marie-Antoinette’s inner circle. Drawing extensively on unpublished archival sources, Sarah Grant examines the princess’s many portrait commissions and the rich character of her private collections, which included works by some of the period’s leading artists and artisans. The book sheds new light on the agency, sorority and taste of Marie-Antoinette and her friends, a group of female patrons and model of courtly collecting that would be extinguished by the coming revolution. Sarah Grant is Curator, Prints, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Cover image: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1782, oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm (Versailles: Château de Versailles) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles) / Gérard Blot

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Series Editor: Stacey J. Pierson, University of London

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 provides a forum for the broad study of object acquisition and collecting practises in their global dimensions. The series seeks to illuminate the intersections between material culture studies, art history and the history of collecting. It takes as its starting point the idea that objects both contributed to the formation of knowledge in the past and likewise contribute to our understanding of the past today. The human relationship to objects has proven a rich field of scholarly inquiry, with much recent scholarship either anthropological or sociological rather than art historical in perspective. Underpinning this series is the idea that the physical nature of objects contributes substantially to their social meanings, and therefore that the visual, tactile and sensual dimensions of objects are critical to their interpretation. This series therefore seeks to bridge anthropology and art history, sociology and aesthetics. Silver in Georgian Dublin Making, Selling, Consuming Alison FitzGerald Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London The Burlington Fine Arts Club Stacey J. Pierson Nature and the Nation in Fin-de-Siècle France The Art of Emile Gallé and the École de Nancy Jessica M. Dandona Collecting and Displaying China’s “Summer Palace” in the West The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France Louise Tythacott Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie-Antoinette’s Court The Princesse de Lamballe Sarah Grant For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/The-Historiesof-Material-Culture-and-Collecting-1700-1950/book-series/ASHSER2128

Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie-Antoinette’s Court The Princesse de Lamballe Sarah Grant

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Sarah Grant to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-48082-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06182-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Richard and Cherrilyn Grant

Contents

List of Illustrationsviii Acknowledgmentsxv Introduction

1

1 From Wife to Widow: Early Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe

6

2 Paying Court: Careerism, Sentiment and Sorority in Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe

31

3 The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe: Portraits, Prints, Gardens and Anglomania at the Court of Marie-Antoinette

83

4 ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’: The Private Collection and Public Patronage of the Princesse de Lamballe, a Courtier-Collector

137

5 Epilogue

211

Bibliography216 Index227

Illustrations

Colour Plates   1

  2

  3   4

  5   6   7   8

  9 10

Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, portrait of the family of the duc de Penthièvre, 1768, oil on canvas, 177 × 255.5 cm (Versailles: musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1770, pencil, watercolour and gouache on paper, 25.5 × 19.3 cm (Chantilly: Musée Condé) © Grand Palais (domaine de Chantilly)/ René-Gabriel Ojéda Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, portrait presumed to be of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1768, oil on canvas, 114 × 90 cm (private collection) © Formerly The Matthiesen Gallery and Stair Sainty, London Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, portrait of the duc and duchesse de Chartres with their families, c. 1775–1776, oil on canvas, 130 × 194 cm (Paris: musée Nissim de Camondo) © MAD, Paris/Laurent Sully Jaulmes Marie-Victoire Lemoine, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1779, oil on canvas, 61 × 49.5 cm (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse) © Banque de France Joseph Ducreux, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1778, oil on canvas, 123 × 96 cm (Versailles: Château de Versailles) © RMNGrand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Daniel Arnaudet Jean-Laurent Mosnier, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1780, oil on canvas, 206 × 145 cm (Lamballe: Mairie de Lamballe) © Ville de Lamballe Karl Anton Hickel (1745–1798), portrait of the princesse de Lamballe. Vaduz, LIECHTENSTEIN. The Princely Collections— Vaduz-Vienna. Oil on canvas, 66 × 44 cm, Inv.: GE 1675. © 2018 LIECHTENSTEIN, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna/SCALA, Florence, © Photo SCALA, Florence Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1782, oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm (Versailles: Château de Versailles) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot Claude-Martin Goupy (c. 1720–1793), chaumière aux coquillages (constructed 1779–1781), in the princesse de Lamballe’s English garden at the Château de Rambouillet © Philippe Berthé/Centre des monuments nationaux

Illustrations ix 11

12 13

14

15 16

Claude-Martin Goupy (c. 1720–1793), interior of the chaumière aux coquillages (constructed 1779–1781), with furniture by ToussaintFrançois Foliot (1748–c. 1808), in the princesse de Lamballe’s English garden at the Château de Rambouillet © Colombe Clier/ Centre des monuments nationaux François Boucher, ‘Aminta freeing Sylvia surprised by a Satyr’, 1755, oil on canvas, 104 × 139 cm (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse) © RMN-Grand Palais/Christian Jean/Jacques L’hoir Interior of the princesse de Lamballe’s salon at the Hôtel de Toulouse (now called the Salon Fragonard), showing François Boucher, ‘Sylvia relieving Phyllis from a Bee Sting’, 1755, oil on canvas, 104 × 139 cm (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse) © Banque de France Interior of the princesse de Lamballe’s salon at the Hôtel de Toulouse (now called the Salon Fragonard) with original boiseries from the 1780s (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse) © Banque de France Jan van Huysum, still life (one of a pair formerly in the princesse de Lamballe’s collection), c. 1718–1722, oil on panel, 80.2 × 60.3 cm (private collection, Courtesy of Sotheby’s) Photograph of the garden façade of the Hôtel de Lamballe today, with its double revolution staircase. Photo: Author

Figures 1.1 1.2

1.3 1.4

2.1 2.2

2.3

Guarino Guarini, Palazzo Carignano, 1679, Turin. Childhood residence of the princesse de Lamballe. Photo: Author. Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, portrait of the family of the duc de Penthièvre, 1768, oil on canvas, 177 × 255.5 cm (Versailles: musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot Joseph Highmore, portrait of Jane Vigor with family and friends, 1744, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 99.1 cm (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Detail of Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, portrait of the duc and duchesse de Chartres with their families, showing the princesse de Lamballe with paint brushes and a palette, c. 1775–1776, oil on canvas, 130 × 194 cm (Paris: musée Nissim de Camondo) © MAD, Paris/Laurent Sully Jaulmes Miniature of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1780, watercolour on ivory (?), 5.8 × 4.3 cm (Rome: Palazzo Colonna) © Palazzo Colonna, Rome Marie-Louise Adélaïde Boizot after an untraced sculpted portrait medallion by Louis Simon Boizot (probably), ‘Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Savoie-Carignan, Pr.e Douairière de Lamballe, Bru de M. le D. de Penthievre’, c. 1775, etching, published by André Basset, Paris, 12.5 × 9 cm (Paris: BN) © Bibliothèque nationale de France Charles-Nicolas Cochin (probably), portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1770s, black chalk with touches of blue watercolour (hair ribbon and eyes) within a pen and ink circle, 17 cm (diameter) (private collection) © Heritage Images

7

12 18

25 34

37

38

x  Illustrations 2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7 2.8

2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13

2.14

2.15 2.16

3.1

Boulogne, Les vœux accomplis par l’heureux accouchement de la Reine, et la naissance de monseigneur le Dauphin, le désiré de la nation, né à Versailles le 22 octobre 1781, Paris: BN © Bibliothèque nationale de France François Pigeot after Joseph Ducreux, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe showing nineteenth-century additions from Gavard’s Galeries historiques de Versailles. Steel engraving, 1838–1843, 31 × 22.5 cm Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018 Louis-Édouard Rioult (after original eighteenth-century portrait by Drouais?), the princesse de Lamballe, 1843, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 55 cm (Versailles: Château de Versailles) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot Anonymous, ‘Le Triomphe de la Coquetterie’, c. 1780, etching and engraving, 37.5 × 48.3 cm (NY: Met) Pierre Adolphe Hall, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, after 1778, 10.4 cm in diameter (reproduction from 1906–1908 catalogue of J. P. Morgan’s miniature collection) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Detail of Plate 7, Jean-Laurent Mosnier, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1780, oil on canvas, 206 × 145 cm (Lamballe: Mairie de Lamballe). Photo: Author. Simon Malgo after Anton Hickel, portrait of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, published London 1794, mezzotint, 63.6 × 44.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum Simon Malgo after Anton Hickel, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, published London 1793, mezzotint, 63.2 × 44.7 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, presumed portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1783, pastel, dimensions unknown (current location unknown) repr. in Passez Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803), miniature of the princesse de Lamballe with the children of Marie-Antoinette, 1780s, formerly in the collection of J. P. Morgan (current location unknown) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Anonymous, plate 2 from La Journée amoureuse, ou les derniers plaisirs de M . . . Ant. . . . . . . Comédie en trois actes, en prose, représentée pour la première fois au Temple, le 20 août 1792, etching, Paris, 1792 (private collection) © Ader Anonymous, satirical print showing a harlequin figure with three women, Paris, 1780s (Paris: BN) © Bibliothèque nationale de France Anonymous caricature of the duchesse de Polignac from, Les Fouteries chantantes, ou Les, Récréations priapiques des Aristocrates en vie, published 1791, etching, 9.5 × 6.5 cm (Paris: BN) © Bibliothèque nationale de France Wedgwood basalt ware medallion, black with white relief figure of the princesse de Lamballe; late eighteenth/early nineteenth century (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

40

43

45 47

48 50 54 55 57

68

71 72

73

91

Illustrations xi 3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5

3.6

3.7

3.8

3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14

Jean-Baptiste Pillement after Francesco Bettini, ‘Vue du Kiosque de Rembouillet [sic]’, title plate of the 11th cahier from ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’ published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Balancoire a Rambouillet’, detail from a plate in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Balancoire à Rambouillet’, detail from a plate in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Detail from Figure 3.3, ‘Balancoire a Rambouillet’, detail from a plate in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Vue d’un Pont à Rambouillet’ and ‘Pont prés la Chaumière à Rambouillet’, detail of plate 15 from the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Grotte dans les Jardins de Rambouillet’, detail of plate 17 in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Chaumiere á Rambouillet; Projet d’un Hermitage á Rambouillet; Bascule á Rambouillet’ plate 18 in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Detail of the courtyard façade of the Palazzo Carignano in Turin, designed by architect Guarino Guarini in 1679, showing the eight-pointed star. Photo: Author Trade card of Rémy Bergny (fl. c. 1777–1788), ‘Md d’Estampes de S.A.S. Madame la Princeße de Lamballe’, c. 1780–1788, etching (Paris: BN) © Bibliothèque nationale de France Francesco Bartolozzi after Angelica Kauffman, ‘Shakespeare’s Tomb’, 1782, London, published by Antonio Cesare Poggi, stipple etching, 43.5 × 34 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum Peltro William Tomkins after Francesco Bartolozzi, ‘Affection and Innocence’, 1785, London, published by James Birchall, stipple etching, 30.5 × 35.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum Robert Pollard and Francis Jukes, ‘Lady Harriet Ackland’, 1784, London, published by Robert Pollard, etching and aquatint, 44.4 × 55.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum John Raphael Smith after Joshua Reynolds, ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton’, 1781, London, published by John Raphael Smith, mezzotint, 64.6 × 39.7 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

97

98

99

100

101

102

103 105 111 113 114 115

116

xii  Illustrations 3.15 William Wynne Ryland after Angelica Kauffman, ‘Her Grace, The Dutchess of Richmond’, the Duchess of Richmond in Turkish dress, 1775, published by Ryland, stipple etching, 37.1 × 27.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum 3.16 Francesco Bartolozzi after James Nixon, ‘Georgiana, Dutchess of Devonshire’, 1783, published by William Dickinson, stipple etching, 16.7 × 13 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum 4.1 Jean-Baptiste Sené, chair from the princesse de Lamballe’s apartment at Versailles, 1787, mahogany and velvet. © Daguerre, Paris 4.2 André-Charles Boulle, bureau plat from the princesse de Lamballe’s apartment at Versailles, c. 1710, rosewood (palissandre), gilt-bronze and black morocco leather, Archives Nationales, Paris. Photo: Author 4.3 James Watson after Angelica Kauffman, ‘The parting of Hector and Andromache’, 1772, London, published by Robert Sayer, mezzotint, 46 × 57.4 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum 4.4 Gabriel Scorodumoff after Angelica Kauffman, ‘Fortitude’, 1777, published by Robert Sayer and John Bennett, London, stipple etching, 35.9 × 30.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum 4.5 David Roentgen, writing table, detail showing the marquetry top depicting Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius fleeing Troy, 1775–1780, cherry and oak veneered with maple, mahogany, tulipwood and other woods (London: V&A, Jones Bequest) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 4.6 ‘Jardinier’ and ‘Jardinière’ figures, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain, 1780s. De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images 4.7 Figure of the actor Volange as ‘Janot’, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain, c. 1780, 30 × 11.5 cm (London: V&A Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 4.8 Louis-Simon Boizot, ‘La Nourrice’, 1774–1775, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain figure, 19.5 cm (private collection, Courtesy of Sotheby’s) 4.9 Étienne-Maurice Falconet, ‘La Fête au Château/La Fidélité Modèle’, c. 1766–1773, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain, 20.1 × 15.9 cm (private collection, Courtesy of Sotheby’s) 4.10 Belisarius (after a print/frontispiece designed by Hubert François Gravelot for Marmontel’s Bélisaire), c. 1765–1789, Lunéville, biscuit porcelain (London, V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 4.11 Antoine Capelle, Pierre-André Le Guay, Etienne-Henri Le Guay and Philippe Parpette, Sèvres cup and saucer (gobelet et litron), 1781, soft-paste porcelain, 7 × 9.4 cm (LA, CA: Getty) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program 4.12 Design for a firedog by François Rémond commissioned for the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1780, Paris, pencil and wash drawing (St. Petersburg: The State Hermitage Museum) © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg 4.13 François Rémond, firedogs, c. 1785, gilded bronze, 43 × 50 cm (Lisbon: Museu Calouste Gulbenkian) © Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

117 119 144 145 148

149

151 152 153 154 155 156

157

159 160

Illustrations xiii 4.14 Dark hardwood mould for sugar paste table decoration, carved with the coat-of-arms of the princesse de Lamballe, French, eighteenth century (Durham: The Bowes Museum) © The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co.Durham 160 4.15 Jean Marot, ‘Veue et Perspective du devant de l’Hostel de la Vrilliere, du dessein de Mr Mansart, Architecte’, view and perspective of the Hôtel de la Vrillière [the Hôtel de Toulouse in the 17th century, showing the entrance and internal courtyard], c. 1635–1650, Paris, published by Pierre Mariette I, etching (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) © Victoria and Albert 161 Museum, London 4.16 Jean Marot, ‘Veue et Perspective de l’Hostel de la Vrilliere du costé du Jardin, du dessein de Mr Mansart Architecte’, view and perspective of the Hôtel de la Vrillière [the Hôtel de Toulouse in the 17th century, showing its formal garden], c. 1635–1650, Paris, published by Pierre Mariette I, etching (London: Victoria and Albert 162 Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 4.17 View of the garden of the Hôtel de Toulouse today, looking towards 163 the Galerie dorée. Photo: Author 4.18 Gilded medallion of Terpsichore playing a harp, 1780s, detail of mouldings in the princesse de Lamballe’s salon at the Hôtel de 166 Toulouse. Photo: Author 4.19 Louis-Simon Boizot (1743–1809), pair of Sèvres biscuit porcelain oil lamps with gilt-bronze flame finials showing the allegorical figures of Study and Philosophy, c. 1785, 29 × 30 cm © Frank Partridge 168 4.20 Sèvres figures of Venus and Mercury after works by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, c. 1770, soft-paste porcelain, 23.3 × 24 cm (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum) © The Walters Art Museum 169 4.21 Sèvres group of Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1764–1773, soft-paste biscuit porcelain, 36.1 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum170 4.22 Amédée Van Loo (after), ‘Le déjeuner de la Sultane’, c. 1783, Sèvres painted porcelain plaque, 39 × 49 cm (Sèvres: Cité de la céramique) © 2018 Photo Josse/Scala, Florence © Photo SCALA, Florence 171 4.23 Sugar bowl and saucer from the princesse de Lamballe’s Sèvres service ‘double fillet bleu, roses et barbeaux’, painted and gilded soft-paste porcelain, 1781 (Creil: Musée Gallé-Juillet) © Musée Gallé-Juillet, Ville de Creil 171 4.24 Soup plate from the princesse de Lamballe’s Sèvres service, c. 1788, painted and gilded soft-paste porcelain (Sèvres, Cité de la céramique). © RMN-Grand Palais (Sèvres, Cité de la céramique)/ Martine Beck-Coppola 172 4.25 Charles-Léopold Grevenbroeck, ‘Passy et Chaillot, vus de Grenelle’, 1740, oil on copper, Paris, musée Carnavalet, © Musée Carnavalet/ Roger-Viollet180 4.26 John Raphael Smith after William Lawranson, ‘Palemon & Lavinia’, 1780, London, published by Smith, mezzotint, 50.3 × 35.3 cm (London: BM) 182

xiv  Illustrations 4.27 Jean Moyreau after Philippe Wouwermens, ‘Le Grand Marché Aux Chevaux’, from ‘Oeuvres de Philippe Wouwermens Hollandois’, Paris, etching, 1737, 44.8 × 65.7 cm (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 4.28 Jean-Antoine Belleteste, Venus and Cupid, eighteenth century, carved ivory with ebony plinth, 22.3 cm (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum) © The Walters Art Museum 4.29 Adam Weisweiler, a late Louis XVI ormolu and cameo-mounted burr yewwood and mahogany table travailleuse with Wedgwood plaques commissioned by the marchand mercier, Dominique Daguerre, c. 1785–1790 (private collection photo) © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images 4.30  François Dequevauviller after Nicolas Lavreince, ‘L’Assemblée au concert’, c. 1783, Paris, published by Dequevauviller, etching and engraving, 40.2 × 50.2 cm (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 4.31 Detail of Figure 4.30 showing the princesse de Lamballe playing a pianoforte or harpsichord 5.1 C. Jules Porreau after Georges François Marie Gabriel, ‘Princesse de Lamballe’, 1845, etching, published by Vigneres, Paris (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 5.2 Reliquary ring containing interwoven hair from Marie-Antoinette and the princesse de Lamballe, 1790, pearls, gold and hair (Paris, musée Carnavalet) © Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet 5.3 Joseph Caraud (1821–1905). ‘Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI at the Trianon with Madame Lamballe’, 1857. Christie’s Images Limited. oil on canvas. 88.9 × 116.8cm © 2018. Christie’s Images, London/Scala, Florence © Photo SCALA, Florence 5.4 Lady Ampthill (Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria 1885– 1901), dressed as the princesse de Lamballe at the Devonshire House Ball, 27 July 1897 (London: V&A Lafayette Photograph Archive) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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192 193 212 213

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Acknowledgments

I first became interested in the princesse de Lamballe in 2008 when accompanying the V&A’s Drouais portrait of Marie-Antoinette to the exhibition on the queen at the Grand Palais in Paris. Wandering the empty gallery as the last few pictures were hung, I came face to face with Hickel’s portrait of the princess and was struck by how at odds its lively representation was with her reputation. In the decade that has followed, I have been fortunate enough to receive assistance from many people. I wish to begin by thanking my former supervisors, Professor Geraldine A. Johnson and Dr Linda Whiteley. I am enormously grateful to them both for their time, expertise and continuing support. I warmly thank Madame Geneviève Eltvedt for her kind interest and for passing on numerous useful details to me. I gratefully acknowledge the generous assistance of Professor John Rogister, who gave me the benefit of his extensive specialist knowledge. I am indebted to His Excellency, Mr Hakki Akil, the former Turkish Ambassador to France, for so graciously allowing me to visit the hôtel de Lamballe. This was pivotal to my understanding of the princess’s collections and I respectfully thank His Excellency for so kindly extending me this courtesy. For his vital and generous help I owe a debt of gratitude to M. Olivier Delahaye. I also thank Mme Béatrix Saule and Mme Noémie Wansart for their kind assistance in the early stages of my research. I received essential and most kindly extended assistance from M. Pierre Jugie at the Archives Nationales, and M. Patrick Latour and M. Goran Proot at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I am grateful to Dott.ssa Edith Gabrielli and Dott.ssa Maria Barbara Bertini at the Archivio di Stato and Biblioteca Reale in Turin. Special thanks go to Mme Paulette Dobet-Pincemin and Mme Marylène Languille at the Mairie de Lamballe. I am also most grateful to Mme Anne Brock at the Banque de France. For their support during my DPhil, I am thankful to Geoff and Carol Vogel. This book is supported by a Publications Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Its publication has also been made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. During the course of my doctoral research and preparation for this book, numerous individuals were kind enough to help me: Lena Ånimmer, Prof. Laura Auricchio, Louise Baker, M. Christian Baulez, Mme Helen Bieri Thomson, Judith Bohan, Clare Browne, Mme Léonor Brun, Melissa E. Buron, Julie Bush, Dr Anne Byrne, Valentina Calamandrei, Juliet Carey, Davide Cermignani, Pier Franco Chillin, Heather Cole, M. Hubert Demory, Mme Virginie Desrante, Robert P. Emlen, Sally Goodsir, Prof. Antony Griffiths, Mag. Alexandra Hanzl, Kate Heard, Dawn Heywood, Amanda Isaac, M.

xvi  Acknowledgments Thierry Jaegy, Prof. Colin Jones, Mme Marion Kalt, Marian Kelly, Dr Cory Korkow, Nora S. Lambert, Adrian LeHarivel, Elenor Ling, Carlotta Margarone, Dr Meredith Martin, Dr Tessa Murdoch, Charles Noble, Dr Susan North, Elissa O’Loughlin, Karin Olsson, Frank Partridge Andrew Peppitt, Dr Patrizia Piergiovanni, Mikael Persenius, Prof. Gervase Rosser, Marina Rouyer, Michael Ryan, Dr Jon L. Seydl, Petr Slouka, Dr Jennifer Tonkovich, James Towe, Dr Nuno Vassallo e Silva and Inès Villela-Petit. This research was completed with financial aid from, in particular, The Gen Foundation and The Funds for Women Graduates. For their generous grants I would also like to thank The Bibliographical Society, The BSECS, The Art Fund, The Voltaire Foundation, St Edmund Hall, St Hilda’s College and the History Faculty and History of Art Department of the University of Oxford. Portions of the text were presented at conferences held by The Tansey Miniatures Foundation, the Institute of Historical Research, the University of Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Society for Court Studies and the National Gallery of Australia. Finally, I thank my family who are so dear to me: Richard, Cherrilyn, Charlotte, George, Beatrice and Eloise, for, as ever, their steadfast support and very fine company. And to my husband, Nik, who has lived through all of this with me and been a tower of strength, with all my love and affection, I thank you.

Introduction

On the 2nd of March 1775, the Mémoires Secrets, that penetrating chronicle of French court life, recorded that the princesse de Lamballe had returned to Versailles after a long period away to find that her mistress, Marie-Antoinette, had traced a portrait of the absent princess on a mirror in her palace apartment.1 When the queen gazed at her own reflection, she would see that of the companion from whom she was separated: a double portrait. A probable inspiration for this telling episode was Pliny the Elder’s account of the Corinthian maiden who used the light of a lamp to trace the profile of her departing lover’s shadow on a wall, giving rise to the ‘discovery’ of portraiture. Marie-Antoinette’s choice of support was highly symbolic; she chose not paper, canvas or panel, but a looking glass: the very emblem of Versailles and a singularly apt metaphor for the most closely scrutinised queen in all French history. There are of course obvious connotations of narcissism and superficiality as well, but the story is compelling because it vividly unites two of the themes that most preoccupied MarieAntoinette and her circle: portraiture and female friendship. Here, the bonds of friendship were quite literally expressed through the poignant creation of an ephemeral portrait, one that came to life only when viewed alongside its flesh and blood pendant. This book examines the portraiture and patronage of that intimate friend: Marie Thérèse Louise de Savoie-Carignan, the princesse de Lamballe (1749–1792). It is the first comprehensive and detailed study to be undertaken of the princess’s portraits and activities as a patron of the arts more generally. Born in Turin, the princess of a minor, if distinguished, cadet branch of the House of Savoy, Lamballe rose to the highest levels of French court society becoming Marie-Antoinette’s closest and longest serving confidante. Once appointed Superintendent of the queen’s household the princess ruled over all other female, and many male, courtiers, enjoying unrivalled privileges and much-coveted access to the royal family. However, while once a central figure of Marie-Antoinette’s court, Lamballe is today largely forgotten, remembered solely for her death at the hands of a mob during the September massacres of 1792, reduced to a sensational anecdote illustrating the violence and bloodshed that ensued in Paris during the last tumultuous years of the eighteenth century. The princess’s true character and activities have long been lost in the mawkish narratives peddled by the wave of nineteenth-century biographies that succeeded her death. This sentimental revival of interest in her person was closely interwoven with the propaganda that attended the royalist cult of Marie-Antoinette and has coloured all subsequent interpretations.2 The portraits produced of the princess during her lifetime represent the final apogée of eighteenth-century French court portraiture, from late rococo to high neoclassicism. Among the artists she sat for were well-known official portrait painters, a high

2  Introduction number of women artists and other once-esteemed practitioners who are comparatively little-known today. Her collection of fine and decorative arts was spread across numerous royal palaces and private residences. The patronage she extended throws further light on court taste within the context of the last years of the Enlightenment and also encompasses some of the period’s leading composers and a number of writers. To date, most of the scholarship produced on the princess has been biographical: at least twenty-one biographies of the princess were published between 1801 and 1995.3 The few art historical publications to treat her portraits have been skewed by a false view of the princess as a lachrymose simpleton, propagated by a number of spurious or otherwise suspect sources perpetuated by her biographies. The very first of these is Élisabeth Guénard’s 1801 biography of the princess, the first to be published and which continues to be cited in the art historical literature.4 This work was denounced by the princesse de Lamballe’s former lady-in-waiting, the marquise de Lâge de Volude, immediately following its publication. The marquise was so incensed by its fabrications and the author’s false claim to have been an intimate of the princess that she went so far as to publish a ‘warning’ against the book in French newspapers, which was later reiterated in her own posthumously published memoirs.5 Even more fanciful are the apocryphal memoirs of the princess penned by Catherine Hyde, the self-styled ‘marchioness’ of Govion Broglio Solari, which were declared a forgery on their publication in 1895 but which have nonetheless continually been drawn on by many historians and art historians.6 In a similar vein were the Secret Memoirs of the courts of Louis XV and XVI: taken from the memoirs of Madame du Hausset, lady’s maid to Madame de Pompadour, and from the journal of the Princess Lamballe (London, 1904), which the author claimed were derived from the papers of the princesse de Lamballe in whose voice, in some sections, the narrator speaks.7 In truth, the widespread nineteenth-century literary convention of publishing posthumous ‘memoirs’ in the name of prominent figures, or through an individual purportedly close to them, is a problem that plagues all historians of the eighteenth century. Many of these memoirs are indeed fictionalised; others are a literary representation of fact and it is often difficult to distinguish between them.8 But the greatest damage to the princess’s posthumous reputation was caused by her former adversary, Madame de Genlis, whose malicious description of the princess, published in the countess’s memoirs of 1825, speaks of residual resentment towards events long past and is conspicuous in being the sole dissenting voice among the positive opinions given of the princess by her peers. Regrettably, its piquancy has caused it to be favoured over that of more neutral sources such as the baronne d’Oberkirch and Madame Campan. The first scholarly attempt at a biography of the princess was that of François Adolphe Mathurin de Lescure in 1864, which was then built on significantly by Georges Bertin in 1888 with further useful contributions made by Raoul Arnaud (1911) and Augustin Cabanès (1922).9 As with Marie-Antoinette, the authenticity of the princess’s letters, including those published by Feuillet de Conches on which many biographers and art historians have relied, is a continuing subject of debate.10 Thus in three centuries, the representation and interpretation of Lamballe has advanced little beyond that first offered in 1801 and alternates between oversimplification and hagiographic sentiment. There exists a small body of modern critical discussion of the princess as a cultural figure and an even slighter art historical treatment. Janet Burke has revealed the centrality of masonic thought and rituals to the princess and discusses the function of

Introduction 3 late eighteenth-century female masonic society generally as a forum for protofeminist thought.11 Chantal Thomas and Lynn Hunt have discussed Lamballe’s appearance in the subversive and misogynistic pornographic pamphlets that targeted MarieAntoinette.12 Terry Castle has explored the fetishising mythology that engulfed the queen and her attendant in the nineteenth century.13 Antoine de Baecque does the same in his account of the princess’s death and mutilation, part of a study of the public spectacle and power of ‘the corpse’ during the French Revolution, founded chiefly on nineteenth-century sources.14 Lescure was the first to attempt a list of portraits of the princess, later supplemented by Bertin, Gustave Brunet and a number of other biographers, but Olivier Blanc’s has been the most complete to date.15 The princess’s portraits by Charpentier, Ducreux, Gautier-Dagoty, Hickel, Kauffman and Vigée Le Brun have been mentioned summarily in a series of exhibition catalogues over the past two centuries but have only received scholarly analysis in a handful of articles and essays. In addition to Blanc’s summary, the most significant of these is Philippe Bordes’s brief exploration of Charpentier’s portraits of the duc de Penthièvre and his family.16 As for the princess’s patronage in other fields, there are just three articles that focus specifically on aspects of the princess’s collecting: nineteenth-century librarian and book historian Émile Mahé’s discussion of the princess as a bibliophile; social historians Robert Avezou’s and M. Dumoulin’s examination of the history of the Hôtel de Lamballe, the princess’s house in Passy; and an article by Pierre Verlet, the former Versailles curator, on one of her porcelain services.17 The objective of this book is therefore to address this longstanding neglect of the princesse de Lamballe as artistic patron, by considering her portraits, determining the governing ideologies in the princess’s iconographical programmes and detailing the scope and nature of her public patronage and private collection. As attention on this half of the century has traditionally focussed on Marie-Antoinette to the relative exclusion of all other important female sitters at her court, it addresses a significant gap in our current understanding of late eighteenth-century courtly female patronage. Moreover, as a case study of an independent, professionally ambitious and childless widow with few conventional dynastic persuasions, a class of individual seldom discussed in the history of collecting, it helps to identify a wider range of motives and cultural meanings than has previously been ascribed to female court portraiture of this period. In particular, through its recovery of the full extent of the princess’s range of art patronage and other cultural activities, the book challenges the negligible influence and role attributed to the princesse de Lamballe and, by extension, the other women of Marie-Antoinette’s circle, on the arts of their time. It also contributes to a burgeoning area of research with which historians and art historians are presently much occupied: the agency of female courtiers, princesses and consorts; the use of etiquette and court offices as a political tool; and the cultural transfers and diplomatic agendas effected through the ‘importation’ of princesses to foreign courts via marital alliances.18 The first chapter demonstrates that the early depictions of Lamballe as a docile and grieving princess were largely dictated by her father-in-law, an identity the princess subsequently shed when she assumed a professional role at court. Chapter 2 examines portraits executed during the princess’s rise to political and social prominence and shows that her attachment to the queen and the length of time she spent in her company and service, together with her publicly visible roles as freemason and salonnière, made her a figure of considerable renown and influence and thereby a highly

4  Introduction significant patron at the French court. This was enhanced by the princess’s international reputation as a talented amateur artist in her own right and by her financial and social support of aspiring artists and art institutions. The princess’s engagement with the cult of sentiment and advocacy of women artists is allied to the sorority encouraged by Marie-Antoinette within the women of her select circle. Complementary chapters on the princess’s previously unknown anglophile inclinations (discussed in Chapter 3) and her private collections, library, and musical and literary patronage (considered in Chapter 4) further reveal that Lamballe was an informed and cultivated female patron who operated at the very centre of Marie-Antoinette’s circle.

Notes 1 Entry from 1775 published in the 1785 volume. L. P. de Bachaumont (so-called, et. al.), Mémoires secrets pour servir a l’histoire de la république des lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours (36 vols, London, 1783–1789) xxix, p. 293. 2 Most twentieth- and twenty-first-century biographers of Marie-Antoinette or historians of the French Revolution have repeated without question the folklore circulated in the nineteenth-century literature. Évelyne Lever, for example, writes that the princess pursued an ‘idle life’, remarking that ‘she was so sensitive that she fainted at the slightest thing’ and describes the position of Surintendante as ‘an honorary function’. E. Lever, Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France (London, 2000), p. 91. Claude Manceron, who relies on and cites Mme de Genlis, describes the princess as a virtual simpleton: ‘her large, vacant blue eyes, amiable to the point of idiocy, always agreeing with everything [. . .] Sweetly plaintive, she loves to be pitied [. . .] Hysteria is her compensation for an empty head’. C. Manceron, trans. N. Amphoux, Age of the French Revolution Volume Two: The Wind from America 1778–1781 (New York, 1989), p. 334. 3 This figure does not include biographies of the princess contained in more general publications. 4 É. Guénard, Mémoires Historiques de Marie-Thérèse-Louise De Carignan, Princesse de Lamballe (Paris, 1801). 5 F. Pollard review of Hyde biography, English Historical Review X (XXXIX) (1895), pp. 588–591, 590. B. S. de Lâge de Volude, Souvenirs d’Émigration de la Marquise de Lâge de Volude, 1792–1794 (Évreux, 1869), p. 59. The duke’s valet de chambre and biographer, Fortaire, also dismissed this biography: P. M. Fortaire, Mémoires pour servir à la vie de M. de Penthièvre (Paris, 1808), p. 140, note 1. 6 Pollard, English Historical Review, p. 590. 7 This was a revised and expanded version of Mémoires de Madame du Hausset, femme de chambre de Madame de Pompadour (Paris, 1824), in which Lamballe was barely mentioned. See Alden R. Gordon’s exploration of the damaging consequences of relying on this source, vis-à-vis Mme de Pompadour. A. R. Gordon, ‘The Longest-Enduring Pompadour Hoax: Sénac de Meilhan and the Journal de Madame du Hausset’, in E. Goodman (ed.), Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century: New Dimensions and Multiple Perspectives (Newark and London, 2001), pp. 28–37. In this same class of fictitious memoirs purportedly issuing from one of Lamballe’s intimates are Moritz von Berg’s (under the pseudonym, Kaisenberg) The Memoirs of the Baroness Cécile de Courtot, Lady-in-Waiting to the Princess de Lamballe (New York, 1900), whose authenticity was immediately rejected by historians on their publication. See C. D. Hazen, ‘Reviewed Works: The Memoirs of the Baroness Cécile de Courtot, Lady-in-Waiting to the Princess de Lamballe by Cécile de Courtot, Moritz von Kaisenberg and Jessie Haynes’, The American Historical Review 6 (1) (October 1900), pp. 103–133. There was no such person in Lamballe’s employ or circle as her household records confirm. 8 On the blurred boundaries between memoirs and fiction in one of the key texts used by historians of this period see, D. Marie, Les Tentations de la Baronne d’Oberkirch. Des Mémoires Entre Autobiographie et Roman (Besançon, 2001).

Introduction 5 9 M. F. A. de Lescure, La Princesse de Lamballe: Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Savoie-Carignan. Sa Vie—Sa Mort (Paris, 1864); G. Bertin, Madame de Lamballe: D’Après Des Documents Inédits (Paris, 1888); R. Arnaud, La Princesse de Lamballe 1749–1792: D’Après Des Documents Inédits (Paris, 1911); A. Cabanès, La Princesse de Lamballe, Intime: D’Après Les Confidences De Son médecin: Sa Liaison Avec Marie-Antoinette, Son rôle Secret Pendant La Revolution (Paris, 1922). 10 See J. Flammeront, ‘A propos d’une fausse lettre de Madame de Lamballe’, Revue Historique 43 (1890), pp. 74–86. Even the authorship and reliability of the Mémoires Secrets are in question and a project that began at the Université Lyons 2 in 2011 to produce a revised edition of the ‘memoirs’ undertakes to resolve this. 11 J. M. Burke, ‘Princesses of the Blood and Sisters in Masonry: The Duchesse de Chartres, the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Princesse de Lamballe’, Ritual, Secrecy and Civil Society, 1 (2) (Winter 2013–2014), pp. 3–14; J. Burke, ‘Freemasonry, Friendship and Noblewomen: The Role of the Secret Society in Bringing Enlightenment Thought to Pre-Revolutionary Women Elites’, The History of European Ideas, 10 (33) (1989), pp. 283–293. 12 C. Thomas, trans. J. Rose, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette (New York and London, 2001), L. Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution’, in D. Goodman (ed.), Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (London, 2003), pp. 117–138. 13 T. Castle ‘Marie-Antoinette Obsession’, in Goodman, Marie-Antoinette, pp. 199–238. 14 A. de Baecque, trans. C. Mandell, ‘The Princesse de Lamballe or Sex Slaughtered’ chapter in A. de Baecque, Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution, 1st edn. (New York and London, 2001) pp. 60–84. 15 G. Brunet, ‘Variétés iconographiques’, Revue universelle des arts (1865–1866) xxii, pp. 130–140, pp. 131–132; Blanc, Portraits de femmes. 16 P. Bordes, ‘Portraiture in the Mode of Genre: A social interpretation’, in P. Conisbee (ed.), French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in the History of Art 72: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Symposium Papers XLIX (New Haven and London, 2007), pp. 256–273. Margot Bécard noted the Charpentier portrait’s resemblance to English conversation pieces. M. Bécard, ‘Le tableau de mode, entre portrait et conversation piece. Portrait de la Famille du duc de Penthièvre par Jean-Baptiste Charpentier le Vieux (1728–1806)’, l’estampille l’objet d’art 494 (2013), fiche 494 B. 17 Though objects derived from the princess’s collections are mentioned in more general publications on the decorative arts. É. Mahé, ‘La princesse de Lamballe Bibliophile’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3 (20) (1898), pp. 379–388, 387; R. Avezou and M. Dumoulin, ‘La Maison de Mme de Lamballe A Passy’, Bulletin de la Société historique d’Auteuil et de Passy, vi (1907), pp. 95–101; P. Verlet ‘Le Beau Service de la Princesse de Lamballe. 1780–1788’, Revue de l’art, 34 (1976), pp. 66–67. 18 See for example, C. Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Europe 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort (Cambridge, 2004), the conference proceedings, G. Calvi and I. Chabot (eds.) Moving Elites: Women and Cultural Transfers in the European Court System (Florence, 2010), and most recently the conference: Femmes à la cour de France. Charges et fonctions (Moyen Âge-XIXe siècle), Colloque International 8–9 October 2015, Paris.

1 From Wife to Widow Early Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe

1.1 Turin The single most defining factor for the visual programme of Italian-born Savoy princess Maria Teresa Luisa di Savoia Carignano was her marriage on the 30th of January 1767 to the French Prince de Lamballe, and his death fifteen months later. Together these events placed her in the path of Marie-Antoinette which in turn set her on a course for fame and notoriety at the most cosmopolitan court in all of Europe and before the easels of some of the most famous and talented artists of the late eighteenth century. There is no more vividly persuasive evidence of this fact than the example of Lamballe’s own sisters, the Princess of Melfi (1744–1807), Princess of Paliano (1762–1823) and the Princess of Lobkowicz (1748–1828), all three dispatched to the secondary courts of Rome and Vienna for their respective marriages, and thus all three still shrouded in obscurity today, with among them only two portraits known in circulation.1 The princess’s first experience of portraiture was the highly formal style adopted by the House of Savoy and the First Families of the Piedmont region, epitomised by portraits of the family of the King of Sardinia. These rigid works with their sombre and darkly baroque palette reflected the atmosphere of a court where etiquette and public ceremony reigned supreme.2 The King of Sardinia, Lamballe’s great-uncle by blood and maternal uncle by marriage,3 Charles Emmanuel III (1701–1773), was a deeply Catholic and moral prince. Dedicated and hardworking, he was ‘constamment sobre, simple, laborieux, par choix et par goût’, and the court was expected to follow in his example.4 The king was committed to a complex regime of official audiences, lavish ceremonial occasions and repasts established under his father, Victor Amadeus II (1666–1732). A central role was played in these, and in the royal family’s identity, by the Holy Shroud, a dynastic rather than church-owned relic, and a key source of the Savoy court’s authority and prestige.5 Maria Teresa was a Savoia-Carignano princess, a cadet branch of the House of Savoy, which had established a rival court to that of the king, with its ‘own precinct of influence’ (see Figure 1.1).6 One manifestation of this was the family’s independent proBourbon foreign policy that brought about Maria Teresa’s marriage.7 However, despite their importance, and efforts to distinguish themselves from the main court, there are few surviving portraits of the Carignano princes and princesses and we know little of the portraits produced of the princesse de Lamballe before her arrival in France.8 In 1864, the historian Mathurin de Lescure described a portrait of Lamballe as a young girl, in the Palazzo Reale in Turin. This pastel by an unknown French artist cannot

From Wife to Widow 7

Figure 1.1 Guarino Guarini, Palazzo Carignano, 1679, Turin. Childhood residence of the princesse de Lamballe Photo: Author

be located today9, but Lescure gave a detailed description of a swan-necked, narrowchested young girl with delicate childish features holding a lace fan and wearing the hairstyle of a woman far beyond her years: a chignon crowned with a diadem.10 Apart from this there are today no eighteenth-century portraits of the princesse de Lamballe in any of the museums, palaces or public collections in Turin or the Piedmont region.11 From Lescure’s description we can deduce that the pastel was probably similar to the stately yet accomplished portraits executed by Giuseppe Duprà (1703–1784) of the princess’s cousins-once-removed, daughters of the King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus III, the future comtesse de Provence and comtesse d’Artois (Stupinigi: Palazzina di caccia di Stupinigi).12 Like Lamballe with her tiara and fan—a mere child depicted with all the regal trappings of an adult princess—the two little girls, aged 6 and 7, hold flowers and doves that allude to their youth and innocence, but their throne-like chairs, the younger sister’s ermine cloak and the map of the sabaudian territories leave the spectator in little doubt as to their pedigree. There was a strong eighteenth-century tradition within the House of Savoy of commissioning portraits in this style of infant princes and princesses. While visiting Turin in 1733, Louis-Michel Van Loo (1701–1771), for instance, was commissioned to produce portraits of the four children of Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy.13 Most of the portraits produced of the princely families of Turin, with the notable exception of the talented Duprà, were executed by itinerant French artists and the likelihood is that any portraits of the young Maria Teresa that are still to surface

8  From Wife to Widow would resemble in character those produced of her mother, the princesse de Carignan, an Austrian-born protestant who was painted swathed in ermine and velvet holding her rosary beads (Racconigi: Castello reale di Racconigi). A pastel of the princesse de Carignan executed the year of her daughter’s wedding is similarly modest: she wears a peaked lace cap and lappets (Racconigi: Castello reale di Racconigi). Lamballe’s grandmother meanwhile, Maria Vittoria, the princesse de Carignan, is positively vestal in her sober portrait where she chose to be painted as she might appear at church, kneeling and resting her prayerbook on the ledge of a prayerstool which has been draped with a length of red velvet resembling an altar cloth, embroidered in gold thread with the Savoy cross (Racconigi: Castello reale di Racconigi). These family portraits are, without exception, conservative and subdued, executed for the most part by unknown, and arguably forgettable, artists from the Piedmontese or French school. Certainly one of the most significant early portraits produced of the young Maria Teresa would have been the betrothal portrait sent to her intended husband, as was the custom. We know nothing of its appearance or whereabouts today, though some light is shed on its fate later in this chapter. An extraordinary document survives however, detailing the lavish cost and sheer number of jewels and portrait miniatures dispensed as gifts by Maria Teresa’s father-in-law, Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, the duc de Penthièvre (1725–1793), as the future princesse de Lamballe made her way from Turin to Nangis for her wedding.14 Individuals who had played a central role in bringing about this dynastic tour de force were richly recompensed. Many of these took the form of jewelencrusted gold boxes mounted with miniatures, a traditional royal and diplomatic gift. In this way, the princess’s likeness was disseminated in opulent and manifold form. The princess’s brother, Victor, Prince de Carigan, who had served as proxy bridegroom in Turin, was given a large oval box bearing a portrait of his sister encircled by diamonds. The baron de Choiseul, the French Ambassador who had helped the duke to negotiate the wedding with the King of Sardinia and the princess’s parents, was given a large square enamel and diamond box, also with a portrait of the young princess. These cost 5,040 and 4,940 livres, respectively. The court treasurer also received a box mounted with a portrait of the young bride. Others were rewarded with gold watches and étuis. Gifts were even dispensed en route to military escorts and doctors, quite literally paving the princess’s path with gold. At the pont de Beauvoisin, the handover point, where the princess was to be led on by the duc de Penthièvre’s own retinue, three further gold boxes with portraits of the princess and one with a portrait of the duke were distributed. On the princess’s safe delivery in Nangis, the French courtiers who welcomed her were also thanked. The comtesse de Guébriant, wife of Louis JeanBaptiste Spiridion, comte de Guébriant, an officer in the duke’s household, was given an existing enamelled box belonging to the duke, which had been newly fitted with a portrait of the princesse de Lamballe; the marquise d’Épinay was given a box mounted with a portrait of the groom and Charles Antoine Renaud, the chevalier de Lastic, first gentleman to the duke, one with a portrait of the princess.15 Finally in Paris, a further three boxes with portraits of Lamballe (one mounted together with a portrait of her new husband) were given out. In total, the duke had commissioned twelve miniatures of the princesse de Lamballe. All of this was customary to bring a proper sense of ceremony and munificence to the occasion, to commemorate an important union and to reward those who speeded a successful conclusion to the proceedings. On top of this, the duke presented the princess with an assortment of jewels purchased from the Paris jeweller and goldsmith, Garand, which befitted her new standing as a princess

From Wife to Widow 9 in a royal house of France. Included in the gift were lacquer, ivory and gold boxes; decorative flasks; a gold repeating watch and chain; a little golden egg; a gold shuttle; a diamond-embellished fan; and in particular an ivory box bearing a portrait of himself encircled by diamonds. In total, the duke spent 99,103 livres on gifts for the princess’s journey. For the wedding itself, the duke purchased a further 60,000 livres worth of diamonds, jewels and accessories for the couple from another Paris jeweller, Leblanc.16 The bride received, among other pieces, two bracelets of yellow diamonds; two pearl bracelets; a diamond watch chain; diamond shoe buckles; a diamond cloak fastener; and diamond hair and bodice ornaments. The prince de Lamballe also received diamond shoe buckles. The duke himself gave over 461 carats worth of diamonds from his collection to be mounted into the new jewellery made for the couple. The effect of the teenage couple on the day of their wedding, dripping from head to toe in diamonds, precious metals and stones, would have been blinding. A further 95,672 livres was spent by the duke on a range of expenses from transport and refreshments for his retinue, gardeners, musicians and furnishings for the château de Nangis, where the wedding feast was to take place, to charitable donations to garner general goodwill for his house throughout the region.17 These bills are revelatory not just of the duke’s staggering financial investment in this marriage and its outward appearance, but of the depth of his dynastic ambitions for his only son and their line. The marriage was a contractual union of paramount importance to his family, and the bride had been hand-selected by her future father-in-law for the task. The duke had visited the Palazzo Carignano several years before to choose from among the prince and princesse de Carignan’s four eligible daughters. For the bride’s parents, this was an astonishingly prestigious match of an éclat that must have exceeded all their expectations—a political triumph for their family. The duke was the third wealthiest man in France, one of the nation’s largest landowners, the grandson of Louis XIV and close to the reigning monarch, Louis XV. For his part, the duke is generally understood to have been nurturing the hope that a deeply Catholic wife would be a chastening influence on his already wayward teenage son, Louis-Alexandre Stanislas de Bourbon, the prince de Lamballe (1747–1768). Maria Teresa had been carefully prepared for this role. Her parents, who prized the Christian qualities of charity and duty above all else, had taken great pains with her early schooling. While seven months pregnant with her daughter, the princesse de Carignan engaged a governess for this future princess and her four elder sisters, settling on the ‘virtuous’ Mademoiselle de Monfalcon de Ste Colombe from Chambéry, whom she described as ‘un vrai exemplaire’, capable of being entrusted with the task of grooming her ‘cheres filles’.18 Echoing his wife the prince de Carignan wrote, Je suis persuadé d’ailleurs que de jeunes Princesses ne sauroient étre sous la conduit d’une personne qui fût mieux en êtat qu’elle de leur former le coëur, et l’esprit, et de les rendre dignes de leur naissance, et de leur rang and to the candidate herself he confided, ‘Je ne pourois confier le soin de leur education a une personne qui fût mieux en état que vous de former de jeunes Princesses’.19 Though raised in a peripheral court, Maria Teresa had an innate understanding of French court culture, Versailles being the paradigm on which all other courts during this period were modelled. Indeed, the Sabaudian royal ‘villa’, the Veneria Reale, was an approximation of the French palace.20 First, and unlike Marie-Antoinette when she

10  From Wife to Widow arrived in France in 1770, the princess spoke French as fluently as she did Italian: the court of Savoy, composed of the French-speaking duchy of Savoy (with Chambéry the former capital) and Italian speaking principality of Piedmont, was completely bilingual.21 This, Robert Oresko was careful to note, ‘is a different phenomenon from the emergence of French as the preferred court language in eighteenth-century Europe; at Turin both French and Italian were, of necessity, interchangeable’.22 Moreover, the court of Turin had earned a reputation thoughout Europe for the quality of its architecture, music and erudition and its manufacture of fine porcelain, silver and tapestries. The princess’s father, the prince de Carignan, was born and raised in Paris and although Maria Teresa had probably never met them before, she had two close blood relatives in the city: her cousin, Victoire de Rohan, the princesse de Guéméné (1743–1807) daughter of Maria Teresa’s paternal aunt, the late princesse de Soubise (1717–1745), to whom she was close in age; and her elder cousin, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, the prince de Condé (1736–1818), son of her maternal aunt, Caroline de Hesse-Rheinfels-Rotenburg (1714–1741), the late princesse de Condé. In any case, through blood or through marriage, the princess was related to many of France’s first families and possessed a seemingly endless multitude of ‘cousins’. With the permission of the King of Sardinia in place, the marriage contract was signed and the princess married by procuration in Turin on the 17th of January 1767. 23 The very same day she left for France, bringing with her a dowry of 180,000 livres, and arriving in Nangis on the 30th where the following day the wedding with her bridegroom took place. Some time shortly after this, the duke commissioned from his official painter, Jean-Baptiste Charpentier (1728–1806), three full-length and for the time, unorthodox, portraits of his immediate family. This was probably the first time the princess had been the subject of such a large and complicated pictorial scheme and that it was once again at the dictates of her father-in-law tells us much about his vision for his house and the princess’s intended role within it.

1.2  Picturing the Ideal Family To date very little scholarly attention has been paid to Charpentier, and it is not known how the duc de Penthièvre came to select him as his official painter.24 Philippe Bordes perceives a general trend among the French princes of the blood and elite noble houses generally, for appointing ‘minor’ artists to the role of official portrait painter which he interprets as an act of ‘overt defiance of the cultural politics promoted by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture’.25 Margot Bécard has argued these artists may have been more pliable as they were not subject to the criticism of the Louvre salons,26 but in fact many of these artists did exhibit their work widely at alternative salons and exposed their work to critique, but in any case there was of course no obligation to exhibit private portrait commissions. Bordes rightly calls for a reappraisal [. . .] of the Parisian art scene during the second half of the eighteenth century that makes room for a group of important patrons who resisted the dictates of the connoisseurs and professionals and for a group of artists estranged from the Academy.27 It is important to remember that the vast majority of eighteenth-century portrait painters plying their trade in Paris during the eighteenth century were not members of the

From Wife to Widow 11 Academy—for the simple reason that the Academy purposely limited their numbers. This was the norm and it did not necessarily make these painters outsiders. Moreover, the so-called ‘minor’ status of most of these artists—and both the princesse de Lamballe and Marie-Antoinette went on to commission works from non-academicians who are little-known today, but were evidently esteemed in their time or they would not have come to their notice, nor would their royal patrons have paid them this distinction—is often due to a historical absence of documentation that has precluded the recovery of their œuvres and reputations, rather than an inferior status or mediocrity of talent. Research is, afterall, led by what evidence survives, both the objects themselves and the primary or secondary sources that expound them. The canon is notoriously unrepresentative and unreliable because it is shaped by exactly these factors. It scarcely seems credible that an affluent and influential princely society should choose to associate themselves with an outlier. Perhaps it is possible that their nonacademic status (although many of these artists, like Charpentier, were members of other academies) made them more affordable and more easily dominated candidates, though again with such patrons, this seems redundant. If anything these choices show that the network of late eighteenth-century portrait painters extends far beyond the few famous names that have been passed down through the annals and suggests that scholars have presently only half the picture. Significantly, it also proves, contrary to the assertion of some scholars, that exhibition in the Academy salon was not the only guarantee of success; there were other ways an artist came to the attention of a noble patron.28 One must entertain the very real and practical possibility that Grandees were not motivated by purely academic values of art, particularly when it came to their own portraits; instead it really came down to a question of style, personal taste, competency and probably, the choice of an artist who didn’t already have too stong an association with another family or individual. To be sure, Charpentier would not have been classed a minor artist in his own time. Born and raised in Paris he was a pupil, friend and, later, rival of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. He is first recorded as exhibiting at the Salon de la Jeunesse in 1760 and the following year was singled out with a handful of others as one of the most distinguished artists in the exhibition which was designed ‘en faveur de jeunes artistes qui ne sont d’aucunes académies’.29 In 1762 and 1764 he exhibited at the Académie de Saint-Luc, where in the latter year he was made a conseiller and by 1774 had been elected a professor.30 Charpentier worked, and was recorded as such, as both a genre painter and a portrait painter and was a frequent exhibitor in both genres, almost annually from 1760 to 1799, and it must have been in this way that he attracted the attention of the duc de Penthièvre, for whom he worked from about 1762. The only apparent hiatus in the exhibition of his work occurred in 1764–1774, coinciding with his work for the duke. Part of the difficulty in resurrecting the extent of his portraiture comes from the fact that sitters were rarely identified in the salon literature: in 1762 at the Hôtel d’Aligre on the rue Saint-Honoré he exhibited, among other works, ‘Quatre Portraits’ and ‘Trois Têtes d’Études, peintes à l’huile’.31 In 1764, along with ‘Une bouquetière’ and a ‘Jeune garçon donnant à manger à des oiseaux’ he presented two head studies.32 The only named portraits amongst his exhibited work were a 1781 portrait of Mademoiselle de Neuville, a dancer for the Paris Opera, a 1783 portrait of Pierre Royer ‘peintre de l’Académie des arts de Londres’ (no such artist appears in the RA’s list of academicians) and a portrait of unknown date of a Madame de Reignac.33 Portraits that have surfaced on the market show the talent he was capable of. High profile

12  From Wife to Widow portraits included a copy of Ducreux’s celebrated 1769 betrothal portrait of the young Marie-Antoinette while still archduchess of Austria, a portrait thought to be of Madame Victoire and an allegorical portrait of the prince de Condé that has only recently come to light. Though his less accomplished genre paintings do indeed resemble the sentimental offerings of Greuze, the more sophisticated anticipate Louis-Léopold Boilly and it is rather to François-Hubert Drouais, Jean Louis Tocqué and even JeanMarc Nattier that he is indebted in his portraits, with their pale faces, rounded chins, pink cheeks and large eyes, which appear to have been the hallmark of his style. The artist’s great-grandson claimed the painter was required to produce a new portrait of the duke every year34 and certainly his paintings of the Bourbon-Penthièvre family, already the largest in scale of his œuvre, were probably also the most important pictures he ever produced. Some of his portraits of the duke were destined for public places with the function of maintaining a visible presence of the duke in domains from which he was absent: as was the case with two commissions in February 1780 for the town of Crécy.35 It was unquestionably his dual roles as genre painter and portrait painter that won him the duke’s favour for it was his mastery of both genres that enabled Charpentier to combine with such skill the finer points of each, seen in the skilful modelling of figures and appealing intimacy of the portraits he produced. Of the group of portraits executed of the duke’s family, the first two were both completed by 1768. They are unusual because it is rare to find in French family portraits from this period parents portrayed alongside adult children; this was more common in contemporary English and Dutch portraiture.36 The first portrait shows the family seated around a table in a salon taking chocolate, and for this reason is popularly known as ‘La tasse de chocolat’ (see Figure 1.2; Plate 1). The duke, on the far left, and

Figure 1.2 Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, portrait of the family of the duc de Penthièvre, 1768, oil on canvas, 177 × 255.5 cm (Versailles: musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot

From Wife to Widow 13 his daughter, who stands toying with a rose, are the only ones who do not partake. Next to his father the prince de Lamballe has poured his chocolate into his saucer to cool it, the princesse de Lamballe, seated at the centre of the composition, holds her cup elegantly in one hand, and to her right the duke’s mother, the comtesse de Toulouse, is about to take a spoonful. The duc de Penthièvre was known to begin his day with a cup of chocolate,37 so one can deduce that the scene depicted purports to show the family’s morning routine and quite possibly these cups are from the duke’s own porcelain manufactory at Sceaux. Although coffee, chocolate and tea were no longer novel products in the late 1760s, having been introduced to France in the seventeenth century, they were still luxury goods whose consumption indicated a refined status and the artist evokes the sophisticated pleasure that came from enacting the theatrical rituals involved in preparing and serving this drink.38 This activity also serves to unite the different members of this group, as Mimi Hellman points out: The presence of matching but differently occupied and handled objects suggests both familial unity and individual differentiation. By the action of serial design, the people themselves are transformed into a kind of set.39 Subtle clues reinforce the noble status of this group: the gilded salon boiserie and chairs; the marble-topped console table; and the blue sashes and insignia of the orders of Saint Esprit and the Golden Fleece worn by both men. At first glance no obvious hierarchy is established within the figures, but the focal point is clearly the princesse de Lamballe. Aged 19, the princess had blue eyes and famously luxuriant fair hair, which is shown here powdered. In an allegorical portrait in verse composed for Lamballe to celebrate her marriage, ‘La Nymphe de la Seine’, the duke’s poet, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, imagined her as Aglaia, one of the Three Graces and the Greek goddess of beauty and magnificence: Vous Algaé, vous aurez pour leur plaire [mortals], un joli front, avec deux grands yeux bleus: Sur votre taille élégante et légère A flots dorés jouerent vos longs cheveux.40 The baronne d’Oberkirch described Lamballe as beautiful and charming.41 ÉlisabethLouise Vigée Le Brun who later painted her portrait a number of times, recalled in her memoirs a woman in possession of fine features, a fresh complexion and an abundance of beautiful blonde hair, noticing that the princess carried herself with great elegance.42 The princess’s adversary, the comtesse de Genlis, conceded that she was ‘extremely pretty’ but countered that her silhouette wanted elegance and she had ‘terrible’ fat, or indecorous, hands, slender hands being a much-admired feature at this time.43 As for her character, almost all were in agreement: she was pleasant and good. ‘Elle était aussi bonne que jolie’, the prince de Ligne commented in his memoirs.44 The baronne d’Oberkirch went further: ‘c’est un modèle de toutes les vertus, surtout de la piété filiale envers le père de son malheureux mari, et d’affection dévouée envers la reine’. and praised the generous nature and social conscience that had earned her the sobriquet of ‘bon ange’ in the duke’s dominions.45 The self-regarding comtesse de Genlis’s account of the princesse de Lamballe, which appeared in the courtier’s memoirs of 1825, is the sole dissenting voice in this

14  From Wife to Widow throng of good opinions and speaks of residual resentment towards events long past. Genlis’s sublimely absurd stories—that the princess fainted at the sight of violets or crustaceans—were patently conceived to draw the mirth of her readers and expose her former peer to ridicule.46 The countess’s vicious character assassination of the princess, with the disparagements it cast on her intellect in particular, has coloured all subsequent, particularly nineteenth-century assessments of the princess’s qualities and intellectual merit.47 Genlis’s main charge was that the princess lacked ‘esprit’, meaning wit, then the principal currency at court and in Paris. The Austrian ambassador, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, whose opinion of the princess waxed and waned dramatically, mentioned this at one point as well, although he also said exactly the same of the duchesse de Polignac.48 This view is echoed in the Mémoires Secrets, with the publication in January 1784 [actual date of publication, 1786], a satirical list of fictitious books dedicated to well-known courtiers, the ‘Bibliothèque des dames de la cour, avec des nouvelles observations’.49 To the queen were dedicated treatises on ‘pleasure’ and ‘friendship for the use of sovereigns’. Meanwhile the comtesses de Provence and d’Artois received dedications pointedly underscoring their unsuccessful marriages and Lamballe’s aunt, the princesse de Conti, a particularly vicious title, ‘the living catafalque’ (a platform that supports a coffin), mocking her husband’s lack of sexual desire for her. Lamballe’s dedication, purportedly from her two friends the ‘marquis de Clermont[-Gallerande]’ and the ‘[marquis de la] Vaupalière’, was entitled ‘matter over mind [esprit]’. The princess may not have had a reputation as a sharp wit, but there can be no doubt that she was far from the fool Mme de Genlis would have us believe, nor was she wantonly naïve. Certainly the princess’s private correspondence reveals that as she matured the princess grew into a worldly, perceptive, occasionally even cynical woman of even temper and good humour, one who valued family and friendship. In 1790, the princess was authorised and given full powers by the duc de Penthièvre to act as agent for their family and negotiate the terms of her sister-in-law’s separation from the duc d’Orléans.50 This was an indication of the faith he placed in her intellectual faculties and the high esteem in which he held her judgement and skills as mediator. Moreover, the letter in which the princess finally broke with the duc d’Orléans completely, is, as a nineteenth-century archivist of the Institut de France observed, an epistolary masterpiece. ‘You have rejected my advice, unfortunately. You have brought things to such a point that we cannot see each other anymore. Farewell! My brother I hope that you can be happy after having created the misfortunes of your entire family’.51 The princess sealed the letter with a red wax seal depicting a raging man. In Charpentier’s portrait, the princess offers a little morsel to her pet dog, who symbolises fidelity but also adds to the domestic ambiance and brings a note of whimsy to the picture; in another work sold at auction, Charpentier painted a young couple, one dressed as a Savoyard, playfully dressing a dog in a commedia dell’arte-esque harlequin costume. This detail allows the artist to suggest the princesss’s affectionate and responsible nature, suggestive of maternal potential, and also introduces a particularly personal note: the princess was devoted to her dogs and remembered them in her will.52 It was also fashionable for aristocratic women at this time to keep such ‘lap-dogs’ and pugs and other small dogs frequently appear in decorative arts, in particular porcelain, of this period. Moreover, the princess shared this interest with Marie-Antoinette and at one point presented her with a little dog, Odin, as a gift.53 It is also possible this is intended to represent one of the duke’s favourite dogs, Scipion.54

From Wife to Widow 15 Lamballe’s position at the centre of the canvas, where she assumes the most arresting and dynamic pose of all the figures, posits her as an integral, even pivotal, member of the family. The portrait appears to record and celebrate her addition to the Bourbon-Penthièvre House, as one whose importance derived from the fact that she could provide this much depleted line with an urgently needed heir. The princesse de Lamballe is reigning mistress of this house and in deference to this, her unmarried sister-in-law assumes a subservient, if tender, pose. This informal family scene attempts to show the princess’s familiarity and ease with her new family, and in particular, one suspects, with her husband, in their sharing of a domestic ritual. But all was not as it seems. The duke’s mother, the comtesse de Toulouse, had died over a year before she appears in this portrait. Although they are seated next to each other, she and the princesse de Lamballe had never met. In the summer of 1766, both the comtesse and the prince de Lamballe contracted smallpox, but while the young man pulled through, his grandmother’s case proved to be far more serious and she died on the 23rd of September 1766, aged 78.55 This was one in a long spate of tragic deaths that befell the family. The duc and duchesse de Penthièvre had had four other sons and one daughter, all of whom died in infancy or childbirth. The duchess herself56 died during the delivery of this last child at Rambouillet in 1754. She too is referenced in the picture through the medallion the duke holds in his hand although we cannot see the portrait contained within it.57 It is highly unusual to find portraits in which a dead member of the family is represented as still living; it was far more common to refer to the departed individual through the use of an inanimate prop: a bust or a portrait.58 The flowers at the comtesse’s feet and her distance from the central group, in compositional limbo, are the only indications that this is a posthumous depiction. It was surely a response to so many deaths in his immediate family and the recent narrow escape of his sole son and heir that prompted the duke to commission this portrait and two others of his family members all around the same period. The duke’s decision to include his late mother in the composition may not have been driven purely by sentiment, but by a desire to show a balanced family group, with all generations represented and his mother as the matriarch: she was known in Paris society for her dignity and self-assurance.59 With her inclusion, however impossible, the family is more complete. Around this period Samuel Johnson observed portraiture’s role in ‘continuing the presence of the dead’ and the duke’s choice here is verily a ‘visual strategy of revivification’.60 But this is not the only deception that the duke and his artist undertake. As for the depiction of a happily wedded young couple whose successful marriage would bring forth heirs, the truth could not have been further from the case. At this stage the prince had already proved himself to be irredeemably dissolute. Five months after the wedding he returned to his old promiscuous ways conducting a series of well-publicised affairs with actresses and courtesans, at least one of which is thought to have resulted in an illegitimate child, and countless times his father had to step in to rectify and cloak his indiscretions. In September the same year the prince and his latest mistress absconded with his wife’s diamonds (which, as they had been given to her by the duke, could be regarded as his father’s diamonds). By the end of the month it had become public knowledge that the prince had contracted syphilis.61 In contrast to the vibrant figure of his new wife and her central position in this portrait, the prince de Lamballe appears almost emasculated by his peripheral positioning behind the table. In fact, the prince and his grandmother are the only two figures of the group who do not directly

16  From Wife to Widow meet our gaze. The prince looks off into the middle distance; his grandmother’s gaze seems ever so slightly off. It seems highly likely that the prince must already by this stage have been fatally ill (he contracted the disease in September 1767 and expired on the 6th of May 1768 and the canvas is dated 1768). Two preparatory/presentation esquisses exist for this portrait, which the artist must have undertaken to submit to the duke for his approval for what was to be a particularly large, complex and therefore costly canvas (Sceaux: musée du Domaine départemental de Sceaux and Chantilly: musée Condé). One of these shows a very different composition from that of the finished portrait and was presumably an earlier incarnation. In this oil sketch both the prince and his grandmother are far more central. Her arm is outstretched towards him, while he holds a book in one hand and with an affectionate hand on the shoulders of her brother and sister-in-law, Mlle de Penthièvre unites the couple. How to interpret the dramatic alterations that were subsequently effected to this picture during the course of its being painted? It can only have been that it was no longer appropriate to depict the prince as the heart of this little group. It is surely significant that of the four figures positioned directly in front of the mirrored panel only the heads of the princesse de Lamballe and Mlle de Penthièvre are reflected and not those of the ailing prince de Lamballe and the departed comtesse de Toulouse? Crucially, the prince’s repositioning has also placed him closer to his father. All of which leads one to conclude that this portrait, which began as a commission to celebrate a marriage and a successful convalescence, may have ended as a memorial to one of its protagonists. It is this curious blend of truth with outright fabrication that reinforces the fact that this close-knit scene was very much the duke’s own conception, fantasy even, of his family; where a dishonourable womanising son, who even as the portrait was being painted was fast sickening, an individual known to have shunned, even fled, his rightful place with his family is transformed into a domesticated lover of hearth and home; a cataclymiscally miserable marriage into a happy one, and where the dead are resurrected to take chocolate with the living. This was an elaborate confection of a cohesive family unit that never existed. This visual campaign, with Charpentier as its instrument, utterly conforms with what is known of the duke’s deeply traditional and controlling character. The duke was universally described by his contemporaries as a principled man respected by all; devout, modest and devoted to his family. He was, Madame de Créquy wrote, ‘Généreux sans prodigalité; charitable sans imprudence; dévot sans minutie, tendre sans foiblesse; modeste avec dignité; secret et discret sans être mystérieux’.62 Even for the time, his virtue was considered exceptional: ‘Ce prince m’a paru un être si différent des autres hommes’, wrote Mme de Créquy; ‘[une] vertu parfaite’, concurred Mme de Genlis, while the baronne d’Oberkirch described him as ‘certainement l’homme le plus parfait qi’il y ait sur la terre’.63 This was indeed the exemplary conduct one might expect from one determined to absolve his bastard line from the stain of its illegitimacy. The duke was also unfailingly correct: ‘tout est à sa place’, Madame de Créquy noted, ‘paroles, actions, maintien, égards, rien n’est omis, et rien ne paroît coûter’.64 ‘L’observance minutieuse des étiquettes n’est en lui qu’une habitude contractée dès l’enfance, et entretenue à dessein par les gens qui lui sont attachés’, Mme de Genlis remarked.65 Nor was he to be trifled with. In September 1766, the duke asked for four large pier glasses for the cabinet de compagnie in his apartment at Versailles. This was an extravagant request—as the marquis de Marigny pointed out in a letter

From Wife to Widow 17 to the contrôleur général des bâtiments du roi, they would not put that many in even a king’s room. Nevertheless, they sought to meet it, for, as the marquis wrote, it was 'impossible' to refuse the duke anything.66 The duke’s traditional outlook comes across strongly in his own portraits, almost all painted by Charpentier, and uncommonly rigid in terms of representation. From the age of 18 he was almost always depicted in naval guise in deference to his position as Grand Admiral de France and in composition these followed a long-established template seen in the portraits of his naval forebears, including his father, the comte de Toulouse. The portraits of his own children therefore, in the pictures he commissioned, follow long-held attitudes in early modern France towards filial demeanour. And yet the concept of family pictured was one that also responded to enlightened thought, for Charpentier’s portrait could not be a further departure from the allegorical compositions favoured by the duke’s own parents, the comte and comtesse de Toulouse, and forebears, the duc and duchesse du Maine.67 The comparative informality of the portrait therefore also conforms to the duke’s sense of humility. Notoriously reclusive, he rarely appeared at court and preferred to reside in privacy and comfort at his country retreats, in particular his birthplace, the château de Rambouillet. The choice of setting, a domestic interior, and one with a particularly cloistered appearance—the figures are all concentrated in a corner of the room—therefore befitted a family-oriented, reserved and domiciliary man. All of this comparative humility is nonetheless tempered by two factors: the discrete signs of prestige already mentioned and secondly, and most strikingly, in the monumental scale of the painting—the figures are so very large as to be approaching life-size.68 While the portrait is distinctly informal it has, by virtue of its generous proportions, a considerable presence and impact. It is in this detail alone, perhaps a practical consideration—the picture was afterall destined for a large château interior—though more likely, given the motivations outlined above, one dictated by the importance placed on the composition as a form of dynastic representation—that the portrait departs from the conventional format of genre painting and the English conversation piece, two genres to which the work has been compared and part of the French family portrait’s general movement towards greater ‘verisimilitude and naturalness’.69 Margot Bécard sees this representation as close to the ‘saynètes narratives de JeanFrancois de Troy’, or to those of Boucher’s tableau de mode, concluding that Charpentier has created his own style mid-way between a portrait and a conversation piece.70 In its depiction of a morning routine the portrait participates in the vogue for genre paintings by Pater, Boucher and others showing the different times of the day. It is also clearly an example of one of the eight categories of conversation piece defined by Mario Praz: ‘The conversation round a table’, used as ‘a means of establishing a natural relationship amongst [the figures]’.71 Adding to the general appearance of a genre painting or conversation piece is the fact that the interior is non-specific and unidentifiable. Despite the musical trophy on the wall and the grounds glimpsed from the window, the scene could be unfolding anywhere, particularly as the duke was known to ‘collect’ castles. His most recent acquisition was the château d’Amboise in 1786 so it was possible this was the intended setting.72 However, there is no attempt here, as there often was in other family portraits of the period, to show a glimpse of a famous house or collection, the better to reinforce affluence and position, or to embed a moral or allegorical narrative.

18  From Wife to Widow The philosophy behind the English conversation piece was doubtless appealing to the duke as both he and his contemporaries became receptive to English mores and customs with France’s burgeoning anglomania, a movement (and the duke’s and Lamballe’s participation in it) discussed in Chapter 3. In England, Roy Porter observed, ‘The nuclear family was prized by the enlightened as a natural institution, particularly in its progressive form, with stiff patriarchal authoritarianism being replaced by close and friendly links between husband and wife’.73 One might make many reasonable comparisons with earlier English pictures showing similar cordial groupings, such as Joseph Highmore’s (1692–1780) portrait of Jane Vigor, her third husband, his brother and their friends (the artist had visited Paris in the 1730s; see Figure 1.3). Hogarth’s work in this genre was also reasonably well known in France. Appropriately, one of the closest comparisons can be found in the work of Frenchborn, English-based Hubert-François Gravelot’s ‘A Game of Quadrille’, ca. 1740, in its convival depiction of a family seated around a table next to a window in an elegantly panelled room, playing cards and taking tea (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art). English conversation pieces themselves were derived from an earlier seventeenthcentury Dutch and Flemish tradition, in particular the family portraits of Gonzales Cocques, an artist for whom, incidentally, the princesse de Lamballe had a particular enthusiasm, displaying a portrait by him in her collection at the Hôtel de Toulouse.74 Charpentier’s use of the mirror in his portrait also looks to Dutch/Flemish antecedents. An unusual device, perhaps also informed by Boucher’s portrait of Madame de

Figure 1.3 Joseph Highmore, portrait of Jane Vigor with family and friends, 1744, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 99.1 cm (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

From Wife to Widow 19 Pompadour in an alcove, where the mirror plays a pivotal role, reflecting the evidence of the mistress’s cultivated pursuits. The prince de Lamballe’s short life came to an end on the 6th of May 1768. He was 20 years old. This must have come as a relief for the young man having endured an agonising period of treatment and ravaging decline: the only ‘remedy’ for syphilis, whose symptoms of abscesses and sores were already very painful, was the ingestion by suffumigation and topical application of mercury, which often led to the patient’s protracted and excruciating death by mercury poisoning.75 As he had lain on his deathbed, between the 20th of April and the 2nd of May 1768, the prince had dictated a brief testamentary disposition.76 The document begins by listing his outstanding debts to various merchants and jewellers of just over 50,000 livres. The prince then made some small bequests to his family. Having squandered his own income and possessions he had very little to bequeath. To his sister he left four jewels from his cassette, a double portrait of his parents and a ring bearing a portrait of the princesse de Lamballe. To his soon-to-be widow he left her own portrait and a ring set with her hair.77 In a second family portrait by Charpentier, painted the same year, it is the duke’s relationship with his daughter that forms the focus (portrait of the duc de Penthièvre with his daughter Mlle de Penthièvre, 1768, Versailles: musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon). Once again there is not sufficient detail to enable identification of the setting though one must of course suppose it was one of the duke’s select group of favourite residences. The duke is seated on a garden bench reading from a book whose title has been deliberately left illegible. His daughter arranges in a small basket the flowers she has picked. Once more, the artist makes subtle reference to their status and wealth: the expansive ancestral grounds in which they pose and their dress and diamond shoe buckles. This was another unorthodox family portrait for the time. Double portraits were usually marriage portraits; possibly a father and son or mother and daughter, but almost never a father with his adult daughter. Some very little time after the portrait was finished, on the 4th of January 1769, the duc de Chartres and Mlle de Penthièvre announced their engagement, after protracted negotiations that would have been underway when this portrait was painted. It would appear that the duke’s motivation for commissioning this portrait was to commemorate the bond between father and daughter before it changed forever. The artist has scattered pink and white roses and petals at their feet that might suggest the daughter’s transition from innocence to maturity with her impending marriage. The act of picking flowers had long been symbolic of embarking on new discoveries and sensations analagous to nascent sexuality in a woman.78 The relationship was significant enough that it deserved its own rendering, one separate from the earlier family group and the reason for that may well have been that the prince de Lamballe was now dead and Mlle de Penthièvre was the duke’s sole remaining child; with her, his line ended. It seems probable then, that this work was created in response to that event and Mlle de Penthièvre appears here not only as her father’s comfort and companion, but as the most dynamic of the two, also as his heir, and an immensely wealthy one at that. There was a precedent for this. Rigaud’s portrait of the count Jan-Andrezj Morszstyn with his daughter and heir, Isabelle Morzstyn-Czartoryski, for example, so unusual that the pair has frequently been mistaken for husband and wife, shows the daughter picking fruit as her father symbolically takes her hand (1693, Cherbourg: musée d’Art Thomas Henry). Michael Dahl’s portrait of the 2nd Earl of Warrington and his only child and heir, Lady Mary Booth, also serves to record this unusual dynamic (c.

20  From Wife to Widow 1720–1730, Cheshire: Dunham Massey). Zoffany’s portrait of John Wilkes and his sole child, his daughter Mary, shows the daughter, who stood to inherit a fortune from her mother, assuming the dominant position (c. 1782, London: NPG).

1.3  The Grieving Widow The prince’s obituary in the Gazette de France, undoubtedly finessed by his father, stressed the piety, resignation and courage with which he had faced his death.79 The court entered mourning for ten days and after a spell in a convent the princesse de Lamballe withdrew to Rambouillet where she was to remain quasi-reclusive for the next eighteen months, until the arrival of Marie-Antoinette. Her husband’s death caused an about turn in Lamballe’s representation. Her next portrait was executed by another family painter, this time to the Orléans household of her brother-in-law, the duc de Chartres. The artist, Louis Carrogis Carmontelle (1717–1806), was known for capturing the essential character of his sitters (Plate 2).80 In 1763 Grimm commented, ‘Il a le talent de saisir singulièrement l’air, le maintien, l’esprit de la figure’.81 The duc de Penthièvre was the first of his immediate family to be painted by the artist, in 1765, appropriately with a church spire visible in the distance, and it was probably at his behest that his daughter and daughter-in-law also sat for Carmontelle (both portraits, Chantilly: Musée Condé). The duchesse de Chartres’s portrait is dated 1770 and as it seems reasonable to suppose the two women sat for their portraits around the same time, and as no portrait was produced of the prince de Lamballe, it is fair to surmise that the princesse de Lamballe’s portrait shows her after rather than before his death.82 Although the princess has completed the mourning period and no longer wears black, gone is the playful almost coquettish wife of Charpentier’s picture; in her place is a quiet solitary figure. She is shown in a richly furnished interior, seated by a door framing a beautiful formal garden. With her cloth-covered workbox and a length of linen in her lap, the princess is painted industriously engaged in needlework. Her gloved hands meet, presumably threading a needle. Embroidery, tatting or some other handiwork was a well-established motif in portraits of the time symbolising virtuous conduct and Carmontelle produced numerous portraits of women engaged in these activities. Like St Jerome in his study, Lamballe is absorbed in her work, beyond her a beautiful garden is calling but she is resolute in her work, ignoring distraction or temptation. In contrast, the duchesse de Chartres in her portrait is the perfect fashion plate, posing with the confidence and panache of a newly married woman who had made her court debut. Artists across this period grappled with conveying the uneasy and often troubling identity of the widow, and art historians have identified various mechanisms that were adopted to overcome this, and with them, stock categories of representation.83 It was not uncommon for many royal and noble widows, often older women like Empress Maria Theresa, to be defined by this state in their portraits for the rest of their lives. Carmontelle’s rather sombre portrait of the mature widow Mme de Reysfeltz is symptomatic of this (Chantilly: Musée Condé). Younger widows too might be shown as if in a perpetual state of grief, withdrawn from normal life and inconsolable, but on the whole, portraits of young bereaved women from the late 1770s–1780s were less bleak than those from the first half of the century, and certainly less ornate: the princesse de Lamballe’s ancestor, the duchesse de Bourbon-Condé, had been painted full-length in sumptuous black and white mourning and full veil by Pierre Gobert (first quarter

From Wife to Widow 21 eighteenth century, Tours: musée des beaux-arts). Augustin’s miniature of a young widow who is shown in mourning against a scene of antiquity, to suggest her eternal sorrow, is an attractive cosmopolitan figure, one typical of the evolution of this genre (Paris: Louvre). But the princess had a second and far more difficult issue of representation to contend with. The prince de Lamballe’s rampant promiscuity, devastating illness and agonising death were an open secret to the court and all of Paris and continual fodder for gossip.84 Indeed, this may hold the answer to the reason the princess never remarried.85 There is no question of the couple’s marriage going unconsummated and it is very possible that the princess’s own well-documented illness, which she suffered from intermittently for the rest of her life, was a milder form of syphilis the young bride had contracted from her husband.86 If she was infected, then the difficulty lay in keeping this information secret. More cruelly, she could not seek help from physicians for her condition without drawing attention to it and broadcasting its existence to her circle, at a time when venereal disease was an almost obsessive preoccupation both in and outside the medical profession.87 But the stigma of her husband’s case alone was of course already overwhelming. Privately, society was sympathetic to the plight of innocent wives kept in ignorance and then infected by philandering husbands, a not uncommon occurrence,88 but it was nonetheless true that the disease and all those touched by it were looked on with abject horror and revulsion. It was now absolutely critical that the princess project an image of the utmost propriety, delicacy and faultless modesty. A third painting by the duke’s painter, Charpentier, generally assumed to be of the princesse de Lamballe, was perhaps an example of this strategem. It shows the princess reading in a garden, thereby continuing the theme of the quietly sheltered widow (Plate 3). Though again her dress indicates that she is out of mourning, which for widowed female courtiers was expected to last one year and six weeks,89 the princess is the model of decorum. The garden setting is used not to suggest pleasure, but quiet retreat, a space for reflection or poignant contemplation. The shadow cast by the princess’s parasol, and the scattered flowers it is shading, are a subtle vanitas reference to her widowed state. An unusual though significant addition is her simple net veil, not found in other portraits of this time, particularly as such coverings would appear to undermine the very purpose of a portrait: to show the sitter’s face. It is neither a mourning nor a church veil, and its use here must be understood to symbolise chastity.90 This is further emphasised by the princess’s noticeable display of French needle and bobbin lace. She wears a lilac silk dress with a lace overlay and deep lace flounce.91 This is paired with lace sleeve ruffles and trimming; even her parasol is edged in lace. This was lace of the highest quality and expense, possibly Alençon, the very apex of production, or from the duke’s own domain of Eu in Normandy, known for its fine lace production.92 The princess was partial to Alençon lace: she purchased two lots of blonde lace from this area, from Mme Éloffe in 1787, along with several fichus anglais, gauze and silk taffeta sleeves and gauze lappets.93 The lace is in a quantity usually only seen in portraits of royal or elite sitters. Nattier’s portrait of Princess Maria Isabella de Bourbon, for instance, shows the Infanta of Parma with an apron of French needle lace, albeit layered over gold metal lace (1749, Versailles: CVT). Madame de Pompadour chose to be painted with a rather more modest lace flounce in her portrait by Drouais, paired with lace cap and sleeve ruffles (1763–4, London: NG). Comparable to Lamballe’s in its extravagance is that worn by Maria Theresa in one of her official portraits (Vienna: Kunsthistorischesmuseum).94

22  From Wife to Widow Lace presented an inherent paradox as although it was worked from linen, a relatively humble fibre used by all classes, the sheer labour and painstaking skill required to transform it into an elaborate cloth made it the most costly of all fabrics, a luxury product. The absorbency of the fibres also meant that it was swift to soil, and laceworkers were known to work with exceptional care to preserve its whiteness and cleanliness. There was also a long tradition of convent lace production. For these reasons, lace became synonymous with purity, and its use here in the princess’s portrait is surely intended to encourage the viewer to associate her with this property. Indeed, the pattern of the lace itself sheds further light on the portrait’s meaning. In addition to its conventional motifs of baskets of flowers and fans, there is, in the lower part of the skirt, a prominent scene of a pelican in her piety (pecking its breast to feed her young with her own blood). This was a biblically derived motif that had been used in lace and other textiles since the renaissance and conveyed the themes of selfsacrifice and charity. Considered as a whole, the princess’s attitude, attire and studious occupation recall Renaissance scenes of a veiled Virgin reading in solitude, one such example being a painting by Vittore Carpaccio (The Virgin reading, 1510, Washington D.C.: NGA). The violets shown scattered on the ground before the princess are a flower known to symbolise the Virgin, and often appear in scenes of The Virgin in her walled garden. In a matter of months Lamballe had gone from being presented as a potentially fecund new wife, to a virginal paradigm. In portraits of widows both fine clothes and facial beauty were often used to suggest ‘exemplary morals’ and a demure character.95 The calm sobriety of these depictions of the princess by Carmontelle and Charpentier attempt to distance her from the licentious reputation and vices of her late spouse. The princess appeared as a widow in one final portrait produced by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty (1745–1783), painted around 1775–1776 (Plate 4). GautierDagoty is another artist often deemed ‘minor’ by art historians, and frequently confused with his father and four brothers, but was named peintre d’histoire to MarieAntoinette. In 1778, while exhibiting in Amiens, Gautier-Dagoty was described by a critic as a ‘peintre célèbre’ but what seems to have been a promising career was abruptly curtailed by his premature death in 1783.96 This complex portrait depicts key members of the Orléans, Bourbon-Penthièvre and Bourbon-Conti families and commemorates the alliance and kinship between them.97 There are nineteen figures in total, sixteen family members and three servants: the black footman,98 a turbanned maid and the governess who has her back to the viewer. At the centre of the canvas are the most important political figures of the group, and miraculously the tallest, the duc and duchesse de Chartres, the former, pretender to the throne. To emphasise this the artist has positioned all the other figures in the canvas (with the exception of the duc de Penthièvre) looking towards or facing them. The couple’s firstborn son, next in line to the throne, is seated on a cushion directly in front of them, playing with a small dog. Immediately to the couple’s left and also prominently situated is an intimate little group comprising the princesse de Lamballe and the duc de Penthièvre with his younger grandson. To the duke especially, given the death of the prince de Lamballe, the importance of these two grandchildren cannot be overstated. The princesse de Lamballe’s right hand rests on her father-in-law’s shoulder, this helps to connect the figures compositionally in a complex multi-figure work, leading the eye across the canvas, but also emotionally, being a gesture of intimacy that suggests, or is intended to suggest, a close paternal-filial relationship. Of the many claims repeated ad infinitum

From Wife to Widow 23 in nineteenth-century biographies of the princess, a close relationship with her fatherin-law is one that seems indisputable and is confirmed by multiple sources. Frequently cited as an example of this bond are their sharing of the duke’s residences, although this in itself is hardly evidence, given that the duke’s residences were so numerous their sojourns need never even have overlapped, moreover, the princess purchased two separate houses of her own, with her father-in-law’s assistance. Nor is the fact that the princess often served as hostess for her father-in-law during official engagements at his Paris residence, the Hôtel de Toulouse, particularly conclusive proof of a close bond, as this may have been a duty she was expected to perform. It is, rather, the testaments of contemporary sources that confirm a certain amount of devotion on both sides. The balance of power in their relationship, however, was more complex. When the prince and princesse de Lamballe’s marriage contract was signed, both sides agreed to various terms. One of these was that the princess, in accepting from her parents a trousseau worth 18,000 livres and a dowry of 180,000 livres (although in reality of course this sum had been negotiated by the duc de Penthièvre and went to him) surrendered any future claims to inheritance, from either her parents, her brothers or their heirs. For his part, the duke promised to clothe, house and feed his son and his new daughter-in-law, and their households, in an appropriate manner and pay them both a separate allowance (the prince de Lamballe also received a salary from the king for his position as Grand Veneur de France). In the event of the prince de Lamballe pre-deceasing his wife, the princess was to continue to be supported by her father-inlaw and receive an allowance (of a similar sum). Ultimately, what this meant was that the duc de Penthièvre alone was financially responsible for the princesse de Lamballe and the princess’s own family was absolved of any obligation to assist her. She was his dependent, and she is listed in the duke’s financial accounts along with his staff, with careful entries made of outgoing payments to her. Each time the princess received a monthly instalment of her annual allowance of 74,000 livres, she signed a receipt to show that the payment had been made. Naturally, this arrangement would cease were the princess to remarry. It is difficult to fully grasp today the extent to which a contractual agreement such as this, and her utter dependency on her father-in-law, may have dictated the choices the princesse de Lamballe made for herself, in both the immediate period following her husband’s death and the many years that followed. To the duke’s left in Gautier-Dagoty’s canvas, is a secondary group including the footman, the governess (who reaches over to take the child from his grandfather), two unidentified women and an unidentified man. To the right of the principal couple sits the duchesse de Chartres’s and Lamballe’s aunt, the princesse de Conti. Famed for her piety, the princess wears a large crucifix suspended from a diamond necklace and some needlework rests in her lap. Bordes sees in the tall gentleman in brown, standing with a cane and shown slightly removed from this princess, the figure of her estranged husband, the prince de Conti.99 Given that the couple were, at the very time the picture was painted, going through an acrimonious separation, and the duc de Penthièvre provided support and assistance to his sister-in-law, this would seem an unusual inclusion.100 Perhaps this is in fact intended to represent the duc de Chartres’s father, the duc d’Orléans, or ‘Le Gros’, as he was known, his usually portly features given a flattering treatment, certainly, but whose addition might make sense given the subject of the picture? This gentleman is shown in conversation with two other unknown figures, one of whom appears to be wearing a blue/green and red livery and the military insignia of possibly a chevalier of the order of saint louis on his left breast, suggesting

24  From Wife to Widow he is a member of the nobleman’s household. The young woman in blue who observes the married couple, holding a fan or shuttle in her hand, is likely the duc de Chartes’s younger sister and a friend of the princesse de Lamballe, the duchesse de Bourbon. Although the scene takes place in a noble domestic interior, a salon with books and a harp visibly laid to one side, it is presented with the greatest theatricality. A gold tasselled velvet cloth is draped across the left-hand side of the canvas, almost as if the curtain is being lifted on a stage. The scene is presided over by two busts: one on the left resembling Henri IV—the first King of the House of Bourbon, from whom all the noble figures present are descended—and on the right, a bust with the heavyset features of, most likely, Louis XV, who died in 1774. All of these factors evoke the clannish pride of this particularly close-knit family and the related Palais Royal circle (also captured in a portrait by Carmontelle), heirs to the throne who often presented themselves in opposition to the royal family and main court. How markedly different is this representation of the princesse de Lamballe with her sister-in-law from that of Charpentier’s first portrait of the two women. Now their positions are reversed; it is the widowed and childless Lamballe who is inferior in status and duly subservient to a sister who is married with children who have the potential to succeed the throne. The most extraordinary aspect of the entire portrait however is a surreal detail within an otherwise conventional tableau. The princess, in her rose-pink gown, is shown with a palette and brushes in hand, standing before a monumental oval commemorative portrait of her late husband, which we are given to understand she has painted (Figure 1.4). In this picture within a picture, the winged figure of Time draws a curtain across the scene, bringing a sense of finality to the proceedings, and places a laurel crown on the grey stone bust of the prince de Lamballe, depicted with proud aquiline features. Next to the bust, the dejected figure of melancholy is seated wiping her tears with her sleeve and handling a sword, which may symbolise constancy.101 It was one matter for a widow to commission a sepulchral monument to her husband, to pose for a painting in widow’s weeds or with a portrait of her dead husband, the two most common categories of widow portraits, but quite another for the widow to be shown in the act of creating a posthumous portrait of her spouse herself. In part this alluded to the princess’s considerable artistic gifts, which will be discussed in greater detail in the chapter that follows, but the intention here was to go beyond the mere impression of a dutiful widow and suggest one who takes a highly active role in fulfilling her duties as custodian of her husband’s memory. She is not the only family member displaying these talents however. In a curious detail, a porte-crayon is just visible in the duchesse de Chartres's hand. Perhaps the inference is that she assisted her sister-in-law with the preparatory aspects of her late brother’s portrait. If not actually commissioned by the duc de Penthièvre, and the circumstances of the portrait’s execution are unknown, then he certainly had a major hand in its design for of the three families represented it is his that is given the greatest prominence and he is singled out as the patriarch among them. The princesse de Conti, compositionally his direct counterpart in this picture, was his late wife’s sister and his dependant; he supported her financially and gave her an apartment at Sceaux. Reserving the whitest pigments for their faces alone, the artist has deliberately highlighted the duke’s three closest female relatives: his daughter, daughter-in-law and sister-in-law. Seven years had passed since the princesse de Lamballe had lost the husband she had been married to for all of fifteen months. Yet the only identity accorded to her in this picture

Figure 1.4 Detail of Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, portrait of the duc and duchesse de Chartres with their families, showing the princesse de Lamballe with paint brushes and a palette, c. 1775–1776, oil on canvas, 130 × 194 cm (Paris: musée Nissim de Camondo) © MAD, Paris/Laurent Sully Jaulmes

26  From Wife to Widow is that of author of a grandiloquent shrine to the husband from whom she received such abominable treatment. As Alison Levy has pointed out, ‘As primary mourner, the widow plays a critical cultural role in maintaining her absent husband’s memory’.102 The duke never fully recovered from the death of his son: ‘C’est une douleur que rien ne peut ni rendre ni effacer’, the baronne d’Oberkirch commented.103 It was as if the father was determined to perpetuate and to honour the legacy of a thoroughly dishonourable son through the visual martyrdom of the wife he left behind. This seems, significantly, to have been the last time the princesse de Lamballe was ever painted with her family, despite the catalogue of portraits that followed. The same year, the princess was nominated to the position of Marie-Antoinette’s Surintendante and with her court appointment the princess grew in prominence and purpose, divesting herself of the identity conceived for her by her father-in-law and turning instead to an alternative seam of iconography that better suited the independent worldly courtier she had become.

1.4 Conclusion The portraits produced of the princesse de Lamballe after her arrival in France positioned her firmly within the bosom of her new family, depicting her first as a dutiful and attractive wife, with maternal inclinations, then as a grieving and docile widow. Crucially, all of the artists who painted her during this period worked for the Bourbon-Penthièvre/Orléans family and these representations can only have been dictated by their patriarch, the duc de Penthièvre. The duke’s own conservative character and attitudes towards family dynamics were instrumental to the conception and portrayal of the princess in these portraits. It seems highly likely that it was surely the narrow escape of his sole son and heir, coupled with so many other losses sustained, that prompted the duke to commission a major portrait of his family, although his son’s second, fatal illness, which became apparent during the course of the painting’s execution, resulted in significant changes. Other works commissioned, instigated or supported by the duke around the same period were created in response to his son’s death: his double portrait with his daughter which posits her as his successor and three portraits of the princesse de Lamballe as a widow, whose signalled chastity and purity were an attempt to distance her from the sins of her husband and restore his reputation. This was an identity by which she continued to be understood in the context of ongoing family portraits, but which the princess herself subsequently discarded in her independent, mature portraits once she assumed a professional role at court. In effect, it was the princess’s nomination to the queen’s Surintendante and the many duties that subsequently occupied her that released her from this limiting imagery, and would be her making.

Notes 1 The princess had five sisters, four of whom survived to adulthood. Of these, the eldest and firstborn became a nun: Princess Carlotta di Savoia-Carignano (1742–1794). 2 See S. Pinto, Arte di corte a Torino da Carlo Emanuele III a Carlo Felice (Turin, 1987) and E. Castelnuovo and M. Rosci, Cultura Figurativa e architettonica negli Stati del Re di Sardegna, 1773–1861 (3 vols, Turin, 1980). 3 Charles Emmanuel was brother to Lamballe’s paternal grandmother, the princesse de Carignan. His second wife, Polyxena of Hesse-Rotenburg, was Lamballe’s maternal aunt.

From Wife to Widow 27 4 H. J. Costa, Marquis de Saint Genis de Beauregard, Mémoires historiques sur la maison royale de Savoie et sur les pays soumis à domination depuis le commencement du onzième siècle jusqu’à l’année 1796 (4 vols, Turin, 1816), iii, p. 270. 5 R. Oresko, ‘The Duchy of Savoy and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Sabaudian Court 1563–c. 1750’, in J. Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe (London, 1998), pp. 230–253, 236. 6 Ibid., p. 240. 7 Ibid. 8 For the portraits that do survive see Palazzo Reale, Ritratti dei principi di Carignano al Castello di Racconigi (Turin, 1991). 9 There is some confusion as to the presence and physical appearance of this portrait in the collections of the Palazzo Reale, Turin. Its existence was confirmed in 2011 and then rejected in 2017. At one point it has also been confused with another pastel showing, possibly, the comtesse d’Artois. There is also, apparently, a posthumous miniature of the princess commissioned by King Carlo Roberto. I thank Roberto Medico for this information. 10 Lescure, La princesse de Lamballe, p. 465. The portrait was also mentioned by J. Shapley, ‘A Portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe’, The Art Bulletin, 3/2 (1920), pp. 92–97, p. 93. 11 With the exception of a print after the princess’s portrait by Anton Hickel. I thank Edith Gabrielli for her kind assistance. 12 These and other portraits of Savoy child princes and princesses formed an exhibition at the Palazzina di Caccia Stupinigi in Turin: ‘Piccoli Principi’, 19 June–30 December 2014. 13 Three of these were the focus of an exhibition at the Museo di Arti Decorative AccorsiOmetto, Turin: ‘Le Tre principessine di Casa Savoia’, 11 November 2014–11 January 2015. 14 Etat des bijoux donnés a l’occasion du Mariage de Monseigneur le Prince de Lamballe tant en Savoye qu’en France, en Janvier et Fevrier 1767. AN 300 AP I 475. 15 On the noble families who served the duc de Penthièvre see J. Duma, Les Bourbon-Penthièvre (1678–1793): une nébuleuse aristocratique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1995), pp. 280–281. 16 Achat de Diamants à l’occasion du mariage de Madame la Pricesse de Lamballe 21 August 1767. AN 300 AP I 475. 17 Etat général des dépenses faittes à l’occasion du mariage de monseigneur le prince de Lamballe, Ibid. 18 Letter from Christine Hesse Rheinfels, princesse de Carignan to the Chevalier de Monfalcon de Ste Colombe, Turin, 5 July 1749. AST, mazzo 63. 19 Letter from Louis de Savoie-Carignan, prince de Carignan to the Chevalier de Monfalcon de Ste Colombe, Turin, 9 July 1749; Letter from Louis de Savoie-Carignan, prince de Carignan to Mademoiselle de Monfalcon de Ste Colombe, Turin, 9 July 1749. Ibid. 20 E. B. MacDougall, ‘Venaria Reale: Ambition and Imitation in a Seventeenth-Century Villa’, in M. Beneš and D. Harris (eds.), Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 138–177. 21 Oresko, ‘The Duchy of Savoy’, p. 23. 22 Ibid. 23 The original contract is in the Turin archives, a contemporary copy is in Paris: AN 300 AP I 475 and another copy recently came on the market: Livres Anciens, Hôtel des Ventes de Chatou, Chatou France, 10 December 2017, lot 94. 24 In addition to the artist’s brief biography in the usual art dictionaries: U. Thieme & F. Becker, ‘Charpentier’, Allgemeines Lexicon der Bildenden Künstler (37 vols., Leipzig, 1938) vi, p. 408, see S. Fourny-Dargère, Louis Jean-Marie de Bourbon, duc de Penthièvre (1725– 1793) (Vernon, 1990). 25 Bordes, ‘Portraiture in the Mode’, p. 257. 26 Bécard, ‘Le tableau de mode’, fiche 494 B. 27 Ibid. 28 Some scholars have argued that portrait painters could not succeed without exposure in the Salon, see T. Halliday, Facing the Public: Portraiture in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Manchester and New York, 1999), p. 3. 29 Salon literature reproduced in P. Sanchez, Dictionnaire des artistes exposant dans les salons des XVII et XVIIIe siècle à Paris et en province, 1673–1800 (3 vols, Dijon, 2004) i, p. 348. 30 This is the first year he is described as a ‘Professeur’ in the salon literature. 31 1762 salon pamphlet published in J. Guiffrey, Livrets des expositions de l’Académie de Saint-Luc à Paris (Paris, 1872), p. 110.

28  From Wife to Widow 32 Sanchez, Dictionnaire, i, p. 348. 33 E. Bellier de la Chavignerie, Les Artistes Français du XVIIIe Siècle Oubliés ou Dédaignés (Paris, 1865), p. 43; E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, 2nd edn (8 vols, Paris, 1955) ii, p. 450. 34 F. Lorin, ‘Portraits du comte, de la comtesse de Toulouse et du duc de Penthièvre à Rambouillet. Iconographie des mêmes’, in Réunion de Sociétés des Beaux-Arts Des Départements, 31 (1907), pp. 311–323, p. 319. 35 Duma, Les Bourbon-Penthièvre, p. 538. 36 See the portraits of Johan Zoffany or Adriaan de Lelie: J. de Fouw, Adriaan de Lelie 1755– 1820 het achttiende-eeuwse familiportret (Zwolle, 2014). 37 F. Lorin, ‘Florian chez le Duc de Penthièvre A Rambouillet: Sa Vie, Ses Oeuvres’, Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Rambouillet, x, (1895), pp. 180–306, p. 207; H. Bonhomme, Le duc de Penthièvre (Paris, 1869), p. 105. 38 Musée Cognacq-Jay, Thé, Café ou Chocolat? Les Boissons Exotiques à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2015). 39 M. Hellman, ‘The Joy of Sets: The Uses of Seriality in the French Interior’, in D. Goodman and K. Norberg (eds.), Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: what furniture can tell us about the European and American Past (New York, 2007), pp. 129–154, 146. 40 J-P. C. de Florian, La Nymphe de la Seine (Paris, 1767), reproduced in Guénard, 1801, vol. iii, p. 96. 41 H. L. von Waldner, baronne d’Oberkirch, Mémoires de la Baronne d’Oberkirch sur la cour de Louis XVI et la société française avant 1789 (2 vols, Brussels, 1834), i, p. 218. 42 E.-L. Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs de Madame Vigée Le Brun (2 vols, Paris, 1869), i, p. 53. 43 S. F. Ducrest de Saint Aubin, comtesse de Genlis, Mémoires inédits de Madame la Comtesse de Genlis sur le dix-huitième siècle (10 vols, Paris, 1825), ii, pp. 283–285. 44 C. Joseph, prince de Ligne and A. Lacroix, Mémoires du Prince de Ligne (Paris and Brussels, 1860), p. 76. 45 Oberkirch, Mémoires, i, p. 218; ii, p. 116. 46 Genlis, Mémoires inédits, ii, p. 285. 47 Few scholars have thought to question the nature and motives of the source herself; the comtesse de Genlis, formerly the duchesse’s lady-in-waiting, became the duc d’Orléans’s mistress and instrument—an open secret to all of Paris. Though the affair eventually ran its course, it contributed directly to the couple’s separation and Mme de Genlis abetted the duke in forcing the estrangement of the duchesse d’Orléans from her children. Nor was little love lost between Mme de Genlis and Marie-Antoinette, the latter, according to Mme Campan, disdaining the former’s arrogance. J. L. H. Campan, The Private Life of Marie Antoinette (Stroud, 2008), p. 173, note 9. 48 On Lamballe: Letter from Mercy to Maria Theresa, Paris, 29 May 1778; On Polignac: Letters from Mercy to Maria Theresa, Fontainebleau, 19 October 1775; Paris 17 September 1776 in A. R. von Arneth and A. Geffroy, Marie-Antoinette, Correspondance Secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le Cte de Mercy-Argenteau (3 vols., Paris: Firmin Didot, 1874) iii, p. 208; ii pp. 391,490. 49 Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, xxv, pp. 40–41. 50 Correspondence of the duc d’Orléans and the princesse de Lamballe, dated 1790. Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Fonds Orléans, MS 2048, tome I, pièce 19. 51 Ibid., pièce 184. 52 I refer to the will throughout this book. Two eighteenth-century copies are today in the Archivio di Stato, Turin (AST, Cat. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 2) and another in the Archives Nationales (AN, 300 AP I 475). A copy in private hands (from the collection of nineteenthcentury historian Otto Friedrichs) was published in Lescure, La Princesse de Lamballe, pp. 432–436 and the will was reproduced again in Cabanès: La Princesse de Lamballe, pp. 479–483. 53 G.-A.-H. de Reiset, Modes et Usages au temps de Marie-Antoinette: livre-journal de Madame Eloffe (Paris, 1885), p. 473. 54 Duma notes the duke’s love of animals in Duma, Les Bourbon-Penthièvre, p. 538. 55 W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (48 vols., New Haven, 1937–1983) Letters from Mme du Deffand to Horace Walpole: Paris 12 [18] &19 August and 4 & 21 September 1766 (iii, pp. 112, 114, 118, 124, 136.

From Wife to Widow 29 56 Marie Thérèse Félicité, princess of Modena and duchesse de Penthièvre (1726–1754). The duchess and her husband were cousins. 57 Musée de Versailles, Le Chateau de Versailles en 100 chefs-d’oeuvre (Versailles, 2014), p. 66. 58 ‘Mourning Pictures and Portraits with a Bust’, in M. Praz, Conversation Pieces (London, 1971). K. Retford, ‘A Death in the Family: Posthumous Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England’, Art History, 33(1) (2010), pp. 74–97. 59 Lorin, ‘Portraits. Du Comte’, p. 312. 60 Johnson quoted in Retford, ‘A Death’, p. 75; p. 89. 61 The news was reported in the Mémoires Secrets: 26 September, 1767. Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, ii, p. 182. 62 Mme de Créquy cited in Fortaire, Mémoires, p. 332. 63 Ibid., p. 333; Genlis, Mémoires inédits; Oberkirch, Mémoires, i, p. 200. 64 Mme de Créquy cited in Fortaire, Mémoires, p. 333. 65 Genlis, Mémoires inédits, p. 19. 66 The letter is reproduced in W. Ritchey Newton, L'espace du Roi: la cour de France au Château de Versailles, 1682–1789 (Paris, 2000), p. 255. 67 On French family portraiture generally see L. Hautecœur, Les peintres de la vie familiale (Paris, 1945) and on French noble and royal family portraits in this period: Bordes, ‘Portraiture’ and S. Schama ‘The Domestication of Majesty: Royal Family Portraiture’, in Art and History: Images and Their Meaning, 1500–1800 (Cambridge and New York, 1986), pp. 155–183. For a recent overview of the eighteenth-century family portrait in Europe, see M. Postle, ‘The Family Portrait’ in Royal Academy, Citizens and Kings, pp. 180–209. 68 Though notes in the painting’s object file in the Centre de Documentation, Versailles, show at some point the canvas was enlarged by a few centimetres to its current dimensions. Letter from J. Dollfus to Georges Salles, dated 28 March 1949. 69 Bordes, ‘Portraiture in the Mode’, p. 266, Bécard, ‘Le tableau de mode’, fiche 494 B. 70 Bécard, ‘Le tableau de mode’, fiche 494 B. 71 Praz, Conversation Pieces, p. 95. 72 J-P.Babelon, Le Château d’Amboise (Arles: Actes Sud), p. 140. 73 R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2001), fig. 10. 74 AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581. 75 J. Frith, ‘Syphilis—Its Early History and Treatment until Penicillin and the Debate on its Origins’, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, 20 (4). 76 AN 300 AP I 475. 77 Curiously, the prince later requested an amendment giving three of the jewels to his wife. 78 E. Micke-Broniarek and M. Ochnio, The Child in the Painting from the 16th to the Late 19th Century in the Collections of Polish Museums (Warsaw, 2004), p. 45. 79 Bertin, Madame de Lamballe, p. 29. 80 F.-A. Gruyer, Les Portraits de Carmontelle (Paris, 1902). See also L. Chatel de Brancion, Carmontelle au jardin des illusions (Château de Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau, 2003). 81 Ibid, p. ii. 82 Here I disagree with Gruyer who proposes it was executed between marriage and widowhood. Ibid., p. 14. 83 See for example ‘The Widow’s Gift’ in M. Yonan, Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (University Park, PA., 2011); A. Levy (ed.), Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2003); A. Levy, RememberingMasculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture (Aldershot, 2006); Lawrence, Women and Art in Early Modern Europe; K. A. McIver (ed.), Wives, Widows, Mistresses and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible (Farnham, 2012). For a social history on early modern French widows see J. M. Lanza (ed.), From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy and Law (Aldershot, 2007). 84 R. C., de Froulay Créquy, Souvenirs de la marquise de Créquy, 1710 à 1802 (7 vols, Paris, 1834–1836), iv, p. 322. The matter was also discussed by Mme du Deffand in her correspondence to Horace Walpole and of course in the Mémoires Secrets. 85 Though the difficulty of finding an eligible candidate of appropriate rank is an alternative explanation or contributing factor.

30  From Wife to Widow 86 Mercy mentions the princess’s health a number of times particularly when her condition occasioned absences from court. Marie-Antoinette, Correspondance Secrète, ii, p. 320, 436. Lamballe frequently took the waters and and saw a number of different physicians. Doctor Saiffert is recorded in her accounts with other staff who were to receive a pension and a monsieur Geoffroy was named by one of her valets de chambre as her doctor in 1783: Bibliothèque de l’Académie Nationale de Médecine (Paris, SRM 100dossier 27, no. 2). A letter to her lady-in-waiting in February 1786 mentions her suffering from haemorrhoids: Livres, Pierre Bergé & Associés, Paris, 16 December 2008, lot 60. 87 S. P. Conner, ‘The Pox in Eighteenth-Century France’, in L. E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady. Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Lexington, 1996), pp. 15–33, p. 16. 88 See M. M. Stewart, “And Blights with Plagues the Marriage Hearse”: Syphilis and Wives’, in Merians, The Secret Malady, pp. 103–113. 89 M. Delpierre, trans. C. Beamish, Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London), 1998, p. 80. 90 Widows who chose to be depicted in mourning were shown either with a full, black veil or a large, white handkerchief. 91 I thank Clare Browne for her observations on the lace in this portrait. 92 F. B. Palliser, History of Lace (London, 1865), p. 197. 93 Reiset, comte de, Livre-Journal de Madame Éloffe, Marchande de modes, couturière Lingère Ordinaire de La Reine et des Dames de Sa Cour (Paris, 1885), 2 vols, ii, pp. 21, 28, 29. 94 S. Levey, Lace: A History (London, 1983), fig. 329. Yonan also discusses this portrait in detail in Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa, pp. 39–43. 95 A. B. Williams, ‘Rewriting Lucrezia Borgia: Propriety, Magnificence and Piety in Portraits of a Renaissance Duchess’ in McIver, Wives, Widows, Mistresses, pp. 77–98, 86. 96 Sanchez, Dictionnaire, i, p. 738. 97 Bordes, ‘Portraiture in the Mode’, p. 260. 98 Probably the duchesse de Chartres’s servant, Auguste, whose portrait by Carmontelle is at Chantilly. 99 Identified by Bordes, ‘Portraiture in the Mode’, p. 260. 100 See P. Houdion, La dernière princesse de Conti: Fortunée-Marie d’Este, 1731–1803 (l’Harmattan, 2007). On the princesse de Conti’s household see A. Chatenet-Calyste, Une Consommation aristocratique, fin de siècle: Marie-Fortunée d’Este, princesse de Conti 1731–1803 (Limoges, 2013). In support of Bordes’s identification, the male figure does bear a resemblance to a miniature of the prince de Conti painted by Pierre Adolphe Hall (location unknown). 101 J. Hall, Dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art (London, 1987), p. 295. 102 Levy, ‘Remembering Masculinity’, p. 59. 103 Oberkirch, Mémoires, i, p. 200.

2 Paying Court Careerism, Sentiment and Sorority in Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe

2.1 Introduction Not long after Marie-Antoinette’s arrival at court in 1770, the young dauphine singled out the princesse de Lamballe for her friendship. In the summer of 1774, Maria Theresa’s ambassador, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, wrote to the empress, S. M. voit souvent dans ses cabinets la princesse de Lamballe [. . .] elle joint à beaucoup de douceur et d’agrément un caractère fort honnête, éloigné de l’intrigue et de tout inconvénient. La reine a conçu depuis assez longtemps une vraie amitié pour cette jeune princesse, et ce choix est excellent.1 Lamballe was the elder of the two women by six years, but they shared a common German ancestry, a love of cards and music and with their fair hair and blue eyes even resembled each other. Moreover, thanks to the multiple matrimonial alliances of their respective noble houses they were also connected by marriage—the prince de Lamballe’s maternal cousin, Maria Beatrice d’Este (1750–1829), married MarieAntoinette’s elder brother, Archduke Ferdinand (1754–1806) in 1771. That the demure visual campaign of Lamballe’s earlier French portraits, discussed in Chapter 1, was, to a degree, successful is indicated by two matches that were now proposed for her. In 1771, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau informed the prince de Kaunitz of the comtesse de Brionne’s designs to marry Lamballe to her son, the prince de Lambesc, for which she sought the support of the dauphine.2 This the count did not support and having successfully dissuaded Marie-Antoinette from involving herself, and pointing out that Lamballe would lose her existing privileges as a princess of the blood were she to marry a rank beneath her, Mercy was pleased to see these plans fall through. Some months after Mercy’s letter, an attempt was made to propose Lamballe as a suitable consort to the widowed Louis XV, a move for which the king’s own daughters lobbied. Writing to George III’s Secretary of State, the British Ambassador in Paris observed wryly, Besides the Reconciliation of the King and D. of Orleans which Madame Louise has in Hand, she has another affair of a more Arduous Nature, no less than an Attempt to induce the King to marry the Princess of Lamballe. In this bold undertaking, she is assisted by her Sisters, the Chancellor, and some other Persons. The Success of this Intrigue is very doubt-full, as it is opposed by every Artifice that Interest or Ambition care devise.3

32  Paying Court Once again these efforts would not bear fruit. The king’s mistress, Madame du Barry, very likely put an end to this and henceforth there was no further talk of marriage for the princesse de Lamballe. As neither one of the proposed matches was instigated by the princess herself, it is entirely possible that she did not wish to remarry. There was also the matter of finding an appropriate suitor: being of royal blood, etiquette dictated that she must marry a prince or sacrifice her own rank and position, although the greatest obstacle may still have been the unsavoury manner of her first husband’s death. As a mark of their friendship Marie-Antoinette asked Louis XVI to appoint Lamballe Surintendante de la Maison de la Reine on the 19th of May 1775. In so doing, the queen revived an archaic position that carried significant financial as well as social rewards, a display of the most overt favouritism that engendered the indignant fury of her other ladies in waiting. The queen’s nomination was a resounding public demonstration of the two women’s attachment: the superintendency had not been active for over thirty years.4 It was also a position that had originally been dissolved precisely because of the discord it created amongst courtiers who feared the superintendent’s almost limitless authority over them. Its holders had all been forceful personalities of previous reigns. From this point on, through her attachment to the queen and the length of time she spent in her company and service, the renown of the princesse de Lamballe grew across France, Europe and Britain. Her character and activities were documented and closely scrutinised giving the princess a veritable ‘celebrity’ status; the people of Paris knew her by sight and when travelling outside the capital she went incognito. It was this celebrity that would make Lamballe one of the key sitters of Marie-Antoinette’s court and an important patron. As Surintendante, Lamballe presided over all other courtiers answering only to the royal family. While she held this very public role the princess had, and was expected to have, her portrait painted. The output was considerable: of the approximately forty uncontested drawn and painted portraits produced of the princess during her lifetime, the vast majority were executed between the year of her appointment in 1775 and her death in 1792. An examination of the office of Surintendante is therefore pivotal to any understanding of the princess’s portraits, and this chapter addresses portraits executed of Lamballe during the height of her favour at the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette and her tenure of this role. These signal a transition from the earlier representations discussed in Chapter 1, which positioned her within the bosom of her family, as increasingly Lamballe ceded the roles of dutiful daughter, wife and widow for that of professional courtier, now under the dominion of her mistress rather than her father-in-law. Had Lamballe’s early life not gone completely awry—had she never been widowed and continued on her charted course, producing heirs to the house of Bourbon-Penthièvre, it is highly unlikely that she would have assumed such a dominant role at court and the resulting body of portraits produced of this sitter would have been noticeably different and far smaller. Her decisions not to return to Turin or to remarry were additional contributing factors. With a significant portion of the prevailing iconography closed to her—she was a widow and childless—the princesse de Lamballe chose to emphasise other qualities and interests. As the princess gained further political territory, the social and financial rewards climbed. In addition to enjoying the ear of the queen, and thereby arguably that of the king as well, her office conferred on her immense rights and privileges, offered enormous scope for personal enrichment and gave the princess considerable powers

Paying Court 33 over both her male and female peers, for which she was bitterly resented. The queen’s intermittent inconstancy towards Lamballe made her position even more precarious. These difficulties and her rivalry with the duchesse de Polignac were played out in public and the princess’s image also circulated in ways she hadn’t expected and could not control, in caricatures and satirical prints attempting to savage her good name. The portraits produced of Lamballe during this period represent the final apogée of eighteenth-century French court portraiture, running the breadth of late rococo to high neoclassicism. Among those artists she sat for were both established and official portrait painters, a comparatively high number of women artists and other once prominent practitioners who are little-known today. While Lamballe’s portraits were ultimately designed as pleasing representations created in the service of her political and social ambitions, her artistic programme from this period of maturity was also shaped by an uneasily shifting cultural and political landscape that gave rise to a new informality and intimacy in the French school of portraiture and to the advance of neoclassical ideals foreshadowing an era that would extinguish her.

2.2  Overview of the Princesse de Lamballe’s Portraits Not only was the princesse de Lamballe very active as sitter and patron—the high volume of portraits executed of her is on a par with that of her cousins once removed and next in line to the throne, the comtesses d’Artois and de Provence, a telling fact in itself—but her choice of artist and mode of representation was decidedly diverse. This wide-ranging approach ultimately produced somewhat uneven results—there is a dissonance both of tone and aesthetics in this corpus and one would be hard pressed to find any two portraits alike. The absence of a consistent likeness has proved enormously confusing for art historians. The matter was no less puzzling for Lamballe’s contemporaries: on seeing Marie-Victoire Lemoine’s (1754–1820) portrait of the princess in the 1779 Salon de la Correspondance, the critic, Mammès-Claude-Catherine Pahin de la Blancherie (1752–1811) remarked, ‘On sçait combien la phisionomie pleine d’esprit & de graces de Madame la princesse de Lamballe, est difficile à saisir. L’Auteur de cet ouvrage a vaincu ces difficultés autant qu’il est possible’ (Plate 5).5 Pahin de la Blancherie’s use of the term physiognomy here encompasses the sitter’s inner qualities, but unlike the century before, a strong physical resemblance was now also considered critical to the success of a portrait; Maria Theresa often lamented in her letters to Marie-Antoinette that the portraits her daughter sent back to Vienna did not capture a true likeness. Similarly, the marquise du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that on meeting a new acquaintance for the first time she expected they would know her from her portrait.6 From this spasmodic pattern of patronage one concludes that Lamballe was reluctant to commit to one artist or one mode of picturing herself. It may be that in her quest to find a serviceable paradigm she could not be satisfied, or more likely, that this changing programme charts a constant desire for novelty and of being seen to keep pace with the latest vogue in portraiture. Some of the artists she chose were from within the royally sanctioned ranks of the Academy, but by no means all: Richard Cosway, Anton Hickel and Lemoine were all choices made outside the confines of this institution. As shall be seen, the princess was an accomplished amateur artist and would have had a keen, trained eye and artistic sense for composition. Indeed, all evidence points to the princess being an informed and considered sitter. But while

34  Paying Court

Figure 2.1 Miniature of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1780, watercolour on ivory (?), 5.8 × 4.3 cm (Rome: Palazzo Colonna) © Palazzo Colonna, Rome

she was a patron of more enlightened taste than is previously supposed to have been found among the women of Marie-Antoinette’s circle, the princesse de Lamballe was nonetheless bound by the conventions of her age. The artists selected by Lamballe, particularly the small group of professional women artists, were fashionable choices and demonstrated to her audience a visual alignment with the taste of her mistress and friend, Marie-Antoinette. This is underscored by the fact that the sole painters to have portrayed Lamballe who did not also portray Marie-Antoinette were JeanBaptiste Charpentier, her father-in-law’s official painter, and Cosway, whose talents

Paying Court 35 the princess engaged during her four-month sojourn away from the French court, in England. The opportunity to portray a senior courtier and princess of the blood with close personal ties to the royal family was a highly coveted honour for the artists Lamballe chose. The painter could be sure of publicity and if the composition met with success they could expect further patronage from the princess and her circle. And yet, only two portraits of the princess were ever exhibited, suggesting the principal audience for Lamballe’s portraits was always intended to be the circle of courtiers who would have encountered the works in her salon, her official apartments at Versailles, in her private residences and in those of her family and friends. This reflects the preference shown by the royal family for commissioning private portraits to be circulated among their intimates.7 The princess made frequent use of copyists, employing them to create replicas of favourite portraits to dispense to members of her entourage and to divide between her many residences. Chief among these, and her most salient audience, was Marie-Antoinette, with whom she frequently exchanged portraits and gifts, in particular, miniatures. The high number of examples that survive of the princesse de Lamballe, presumably only a portion of those that were actually executed, indicates this was a medium and mode of portraiture that suited the princess’s agenda and interests (see Figure 2.1).8 For her part, the princess signalled her special relationship with the queen to all who visited the Hôtel de Toulouse, the Paris residence she shared with her father-in-law, the duc de Penthièvre. On the doors that led from her bedroom to her salon, she displayed two medallion portraits in marble of the queen and Louis XVI.9

2.3 Picturing the Favourite. Portraits of the Surintendante as Flora, Noble Amateur and Femme Savante The appointment of the princesse de Lamballe to Surintendante was seen by many outside the court as further evidence of an entrenched system of sinecures and offices, one that propagated corruption and abuses. Mary Wollstonecraft, who observed this elite network first-hand during her time in Paris wrote in 1794, ‘All lived by plunder; and it’s [sic] universality gave it a sanction, that took off the odium, though nothing could varnish the injustice’.10 Louis-Sébastien Mercier described the Almanach Royal that listed all these offices, as ‘le catalogue des Vampires’.11 It cannot be denied that the duc de Penthièvre, who had already been so instrumental in dictating the course of his daughter-in-law’s life, also played a pivotal role in Lamballe’s new career, making her the focus of his ambitions. It was he who first encouraged the young widow to participate in social life at court where she would attend the suppers held by Madame Adélaïde and the suggestion of reviving the role of Surintendante may well have come from him, as it was his cousin, Mademoiselle Clermont, who had last held the position.12 The duke’s goal was to expand and consolidate his family’s sphere of influence at court. On writing to George III in 1766 to inform him of the death of his mother, the comtesse de Toulouse, and receiving no reply, the duke pressed the British ambassador to elicit a response for him from the monarch. Did the king know, he enquired of the diplomat, that the Bourbon-Penthièvre branch had been legitimated in 1714, evidently anxious that the illegitimacy of his line might account for George III’s silence.13 Now, with the zeal of one whose house had until comparatively recently been of uncertain status, he became a true martinet, agitating to ensure his daughter-in-law was given the role appropriate to her rank in the

36  Paying Court procession at Marie Leszczyńska’s funeral and then insisting Lamballe press for the same rights and privileges to be accorded her as Surintendante as had been enjoyed by her predecessor, a stipulation even incorporated into the royal charter.14 In the princess’s will the duke is the third party to be named (after her principal heir and MarieAntoinette) and, significantly, bequeathed him her enamel portrait of the queen along with a turquoise and diamond ring with the request he wear it often ‘pour luy rappeler mon union dans sa famille et ma tendresse filiale’. The duke doubtless saw Lamballe’s position at the queen’s side as a continuation of the gratifyingly close bonds his family had always enjoyed with the reigning monarch. Early on in her appointment the duke commissioned a Gobelins tapestry portrait of the queen as a gift for Lamballe which reinforces the extent to which he encouraged her court triumphs.15 To become a favourite at the most glittering court in all of Europe was to bask in the light of a brilliant if capricious sun. As the duchesse de Polignac’s own sister-in-law would remark, ‘Un instant fait la fortune d’un favori, un autre instant la détruit’.16 Royal approval catapulted the individual into the limelight—favourites shadowed their benefactor whose every move was observed and recorded in journals and other publications of the day. Despite the private context in which most portraits of the princess were viewed, the French people came to know her image well through both portrait and commemorative prints which circulated in the thousands. An early example of one of these, from a series that illustrated key figures of the court, depicts the princess as a young, fashionable and attractive woman, the lettering also identifying her as both a widow from a great family and daughter-in-law to the duc de Penthièvre (see Figure 2.2). Another portrait from around this period, possibly by Cochin, and very similar to the artist’s recueil de portraits, which he drew and etched himself, was very likely also intended to be reproduced and disseminated as a print (see Figure 2.3). For the reading public, the princesse de Lamballe, and later the duchesse de Polignac, would become inextricable from the person of the queen. Group portraits and commemorative prints provided visual confirmation of this. Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-d’Agoty’s portrait of Marie-Antoinette shows the queen sitting for the artist in her chamber at Versailles, surrounded by a retinue of her courtiers (c. 1774–1777, Versailles: MNCVT). In this early portrait of the new queen, still an unknown quantity to her subjects, the entire thrust of the picture turns on the presence of these courtiers. It is they, in their numbers and subjugation, who give her queenly identity. To a contemporary, the reading would have been more nuanced still. The two women on the left of the canvas who lean in to their monarch have the droit de tabouret—a highly coveted prerogative that afforded a courtier the privilege of being seated in the queen’s presence. We can therefore deduce that these are no ordinary members of Marie-Antoinette’s court. The woman nearest us, who holds a letter from the artist to the queen asking to be made her official painter,17 is most likely the princesse de Lamballe, the newly appointed Surintendante. It would be her responsibility to co-ordinate all the activity we see around the queen. She listens as Marie-Antoinette idly plucks a few strings; the princess herself was an accomplished harpist, and the two women often played duets together. The role of the Surintendante can therefore be seen to have greatly increased the visibility of its holder, and the title itself entered common parlance to the extent that a definition was included in the 1694, 1762 and 1798 editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française.18 It was a grand office, the highest position a female courtier could aspire to obtain and was created in the seventeenth century for Olympe Mancini

Figure 2.2 Marie-Louise Adélaïde Boizot after an untraced sculpted portrait medallion by Louis Simon Boizot (probably), ‘Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Savoie-Carignan, Pr.e Douairière de Lamballe, Bru de M. le D. de Penthievre’, c. 1775, etching, published by André Basset, Paris, 12.5 × 9 cm (Paris: BN) © Bibliothèque nationale de France

38  Paying Court

Figure 2.3 Charles-Nicolas Cochin (probably), portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1770s, black chalk with touches of blue watercolour (hair ribbon and eyes) within a pen and ink circle, 17 cm (diameter) (private collection) © Heritage Images

de Savoie, comtesse de Soissons (1637–1708), a distant relative of the princesse de Lamballe’s by marriage, but its most famous holders were Madame de Montespan, the duc de Penthièvre’s grandmother, and his cousin, Mademoiselle de Clermont, the latter holding it until her death. The Surintendante was the female version of the king’s Grand maître de France but more comparable in position to the chevalier d’honneur in the king’s household and both supervised all the staff under them.19 For Lamballe this included the three other senior female officers: the Gouvernante des enfants de France—the role the duchesse de Polignac was to occupy—the première dame d’honneur and the dame d’atour. This authority over all other officers also gave Lamballe the power to receive their oath of loyalty (part of the appointment ceremony) and, crucially, to ‘admonish’ them for their faults.20 While the final decision rested with Marie-Antoinette it was the Surintendante who would present candidates for vacant positions within the queen’s household, meaning there was the potential for her to surround herself with her own intimates, and it was also on her authority

Paying Court 39 that the treasurer would pay the wages of the other office-holders, which obviously encouraged a degree of subservient compliance. The princess was also responsible for maintaining the list of persons who were granted an audience with the queen, thus increasing her control of other courtiers’ contact with the royal consort.21 The role of Surintendante was particularly distinguished by the various ceremonial functions the princess would perform that spoke unequivocally of the princess’s senior standing, and moreover of her intimacy with and unrivalled access to the queen. During the queen’s toilette, the princesse de Lamballe was charged with passing the queen her chemise, gloves, fan, handkerchief and jewellery. If the queen chose to dine in her room, the Surintendante would serve her and if the queen gave an audience Lamballe was to instruct all the officers in the preparations including the all-important seating arrangements.22 She held the queen’s ball of wool or silk thread for her during needlework and passed Marie-Antoinette her napkin when taking Communion. At the birth of royal children the Surintendante again assumed a prominent role. During her mistress’s confinement she was charged with inviting and receiving any guests fortunate enough to be admitted to see the queen. Custom dictated that the Surintendante sleep in the queen’s room towards the end of her lying in and, during the early stages of labour, summon the royal family and other high-ranking princes and princesses who were expected to be present at the birth. When Marie-Antoinette experienced the first pangs of labour while expecting her second child, the dauphin, on the 22nd of October 1781 she sent for the princesse de Lamballe who then alerted the royal family.23 She also signalled the sex of the newborn child to Marie-Antoinette, using a pre-established code.24 A print published to commemorate the highly anticipated birth of the dauphin imagines this scene and shows the then Gouvernante, the princesse de Guémené, holding the new baby in her arms as Louis XVI decorates him with the order of the Holy Spirit. The woman at their side is probably the princesse de Lamballe25 (see Figure 2.4). A second print of the same subject, Naissance de Louis-XavierFrançois Dauphin de France Né le 22 October 1781, shows the governess seated with the dauphin, assisted by a sous-gouvernante while behind them a second figure, again most likely the princesse de Lamballe, attends to the queen (Paris: BN). Ceremonial and social duties aside, contemporary records and correspondence show that the role of Surintendante was no mere sinecure as many historians have supposed and that not only did Lamballe apply herself assiduously to her other, administrative duties (Madame Campan remembered that the princess ‘put great importance on the faithful execution of all her duties of her office’)26, but she attempted to expand her remit, eliciting protestations from her colleagues. Historically united with the superintendency was the role of Chef du Conseil, head of the council established to manage the queen’s household accounts, maintain economies and rectify any abuses.27 The role was assumed by many to be honorific and it was expected that the Surintendante would be confined to accompanying the queen to the council meetings and sitting beside her while meetings were in session. This Lamballe did not intend to do, and early on in her appointment, the abbé de Vermond led a faction seeking to diminish the princess’s powers and drafted a regulation to this effect, which Lamballe, with her father-in-law’s assistance, managed to rebuff, but the affair was reported in the press and the damage to her reputation had been done.28 In addition to a new status, purpose and prominence, the role of Surintendante afforded Lamballe a degree of financial independence and security and enabled her to emerge from under her father-in-law’s wing. To the duc de Penthièvre’s annual

40  Paying Court

Figure 2.4 Boulogne, Les vœux accomplis par l’heureux accouchement de la Reine, et la naissance de monseigneur le Dauphin, le désiré de la nation, né à Versailles le 22 octobre 1781, Paris: BN © Bibliothèque nationale de France

allowance of 74,000 livres, a life annuity which was paid in monthly instalments,29 Lamballe could now add her court salary of 100,000 livres.30 In time, this enabled her to establish her own household and maintain a life independent from the duke, though she was nevertheless financially wedded to him and there were unusually close emotional ties on both sides. Probably the princesse de Lamballe’s very first tactic after her election to Surintendante and certainly the most pronounced was to emulate the image of her mistress, and be guided by the queen in her choice of artist and composition. Ignace Jean Victor Campana (1744–1786) is known to have been Marie-Antoinette’s favourite miniaturist and as both an extremely prolific practitioner of this medium and, hailing from the Piedmont region, where he had painted several miniatures of her family in Turin, it is not surprising to find the princesse de Lamballe painted several times by this artist. An example now in the Louvre shows the princess with a halo of powdered hair seated in a garden. Campana is today notorious for his formulaic approach and the pose assumed here by the princess, one devised to show both the sitter’s neat silhouette and graceful arms and neck to their best advantage, is a pose the artist replicates in many of his portraits. Even so, the composition is particularly close to a miniature he executed of Marie-Antoinette.31 We see the same diaphanous muslin dress, fichu, floral

Paying Court 41 corsage, the same leafy garden setting, even the same positioning of three ringlets of hair. It was in the princess’s interest to mirror the queen thus. While it was natural to follow the queen’s taste, and artistic choices were often dictated by reigning fashions the queen was arguably her most critical audience, one she would have prioritised above all others. Just as consorts endeavoured to exhibit all the characteristics of a fitting and complementary partner to the monarch in their portraits, and royal mistresses demonstrated the charms that ‘made them worthy of the king’s attentions’,32 favourites might show the qualities that made them a suitable friend and companion. By choosing the same artist, style and mode of composition in her portraits as MarieAntoinette, the princesse de Lamballe was paying court to her in visual form: singling herself out as a habitué of the queen’s circle and endorsing her mistress’s good taste. That the court and city absorbed this message is shown by an ‘allegorical picture’ in verse composed in Lamballe’s honour to mark the exhibition of her portrait by Lemoine and published in the Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des arts. The author, Michel de Cubières, styles Lamballe as a goddess who, uniting the gifts of Juno, Venus and Pallas, descends to the sanctuary of the arts, where her power extends ‘over all who take breath’. In his verse Cubières made explicit her favour with the queen, from whom he said the princess drew her authority and, through his choice of words, suggested Lamballe enjoyed a similar intimacy with the king as well. Cubières exhorted all sculptors, painters and poets to approach with haste and prepare their palettes in order to capture Lamballe’s features. Her connection with the queen was reinforced again when he suggested Lamballe’s image be placed near that of ‘Antoinette’.33 Also foremost in the princess’s mind as she set about devising this visual campaign was the necessity to cement her connection to her new homeland. Like MarieAntoinette, the princess was subject to the xenophobia of the French court. Lamballe dutifully renewed her expressions of attachment and devotion to the King and Queen of Sardinia every year in respectfully composed lettres d’Étrennes,34 but she was astute enough to recognise the political danger of appearing to favour her country of origin over France. These reservations were justified: the comtesse de Provence’s letters were secretly opened by Versailles officials and even the correspondence of the Sardinian Ambassador, the comte de Viry, was intercepted.35 It was therefore with assimilation in mind that Lamballe is portrayed in all her portraits as an agent of the BourbonPenthièvre family and not as a member of her own cadet branch of the House of Savoy. During this time both the French and other Europeans harboured prejudices that the Italian character was inherently secretive and deceitful. Marie-Antionette’s brother, Emperor Joseph II, for instance, observed of Lamballe’s cousin-once-removed, the comtesse de Provence, ‘[Madame] is not a Piedmontese for nothing, she is full of intrigues’.36 To counter such attitudes, both Mercy and Marie-Antoinette were swift to highlight to an anxious Maria Theresa, who feared the establishment of an Italian alliance, that Lamballe was not close to the other Savoy princesses at Versailles.37 The tepid relations between Lamballe and her cousins, which arose from their allegiance to opposing factions of the Turinese court, are further confirmed by the correspondence of the King of Sardinia’s ambassador, the comte de Viry.38 The first portrait that appears to allude to Lamballe’s new status was that completed in 1778 by Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802) (Plate 6). Ducreux was an artist who enjoyed considerable favour with Marie-Antoinette, rising to the rank of her Premier Peintre, making him a natural choice for the Surintendante, and the artist would go on to produce a second portrait of Lamballe, now lost, the following year.39 It seems that

42  Paying Court the 1778 portrait was probably commissioned by the queen’s household, which again reinforces its likelihood as a portrait of Lamballe in her official capacity.40 Evidently the princess was pleased with it for a copy was made (the Versailles canvas is in fact this copy—the original version belonging to the princesse de Lamballe herself is untraced).41 Ducreux was distinguished early on in his career when Louis XV bestowed on him the coveted commission of Marie-Antoinette’s betrothal portrait.42 The portrait of the future dauphine, completed in 1769, was judged very like by her mother,43 and its arrival in France was keenly anticipated by the court, where it created a sensation on its exhibition in the salon du conseil. Ducreux’s subsequent body of work is characterised by an often startling candour seen in his portraits of elderly aristocratic sitters and uncompromising depictions of Louis XVI while the king was imprisoned in the Temple. The artist brings this verisimilitude to his depiction of Lamballe. Her posture is regal, but her face, while pleasant, is rather more plain in Ducreux’s hands than in earlier portraits by Charpentier. This effect is compounded by the artist’s use of matte oil paints that, in the flesh, give the picture a rather dull and leaden appearance. Rarely did Ducreux deviate from a simple head-and-shoulders format, making this three-quarter-length portrait of Lamballe one of his more ambitious compositions. Ducreux suggests the stature and new position of the princess by locating her in a generic palace setting, but rather than have her pose with badges of her office, the artist has painted her presenting a garland of pink and white roses, her head encircled by a wreath of smaller pink roses, à la Flore. The goddess Flora was a common allegorical choice for female portraiture across the eighteenth century, its plasticity—generally flowers of any kind worn or carried could be read as a reference to Flora’s strewing of blossoms—made it popular. Roses in particular were used for their associations with Venus and her handmaidens, The Three Graces.44 As a minor deity and attendant of Venus, Flora’s application was appropriate to a woman of Lamballe’s position and to her role as the queen’s support. Moreover, the ‘coiffure à la Flore’ she adopts was highly fashionable at the time, as a plate illustrating this arrangement in the Galerie des Modes shows.45 A wreath or garland of flowers inserted into the hair was also an element of the popular coeffure à la vestale. So it is perhaps then more in the interests of fashion that Ducreux summons Flora for his portrait of Lamballe. These late eighteenth-century Floras were derived from the earlier tradition expounded by Nattier, a history painter turned portrait painter, who aggrandised the nobility by portraying them in mythological guise.46 Ducreux succeeds in retaining the celestial majesty afforded by an allegorical representation whilst escaping the cloying artificiality of Nattier’s work. His is a simple or modern rendering of Flora and crucially one in which his subject retains both her earthly identity and her dignity. The details of the composition suggest an approximation of humility and restraint. Against a sober grey background Lamballe is seated in a green silk upholstered armchair, her skirts spread over one arm. She wears a robe à la française, conforming to appropriate court attire, in a muted purple, a shade synonymous, even in the eighteenth century, with royalty.47 Her dress is therefore correct and understated but is nevertheless effective in signalling her status. The simplicity and comparative informality of this representation was in such contrast to the rank of the sitter that it proved underwhelming to its later nineteenth-century custodians who had it enlarged to full-length, probably in time for its exhibition in 1838 in the Musée de l’Histoire de France at Versailles, to suggest a grander composition, as a contemporary print records (these additions were removed some time after 1911)48 (insert Figure 2.5). Given the cloud under which

Figure 2.5 François Pigeot after Joseph Ducreux, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe showing nineteenth-century additions from Gavard’s Galeries historiques de Versailles. Steel engraving, 1838–1843, 31 × 22.5 cm Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018

44  Paying Court the princesse de Lamballe was appointed Surintendante she may have intended this portrait to signal a visibly understated departure from the excesses of her predecessor, who was twice depicted in mythological guise by Nattier, first as an imperious river goddess in the 1729 portrait Mademoiselle de Clermont at the Mineral Springs of Chantilly (Chantilly: musée Condé) then with a ‘proud, indolent pose’ as a sultana (London: Wallace Collection).49 These two pictures, which would have been wellknown at court, smack of the grandiose courtly pretences and extravagance that led to the superintendent’s role being wound down in the first place and were ‘bold’ and ‘risky’ experiments in self-presentation.50 Significantly, Mademoiselle de Clermont had also chosen to be depicted with some of Flora’s attributes, in portraits by Pierre Gobert (c. 1710–1730) and Gustaf Lundberg (1695–1786) (London: Royal Collection Trust; 1720, art market). Ducreux’s comparatively simple portrait of Lamballe as Surintendante also distanced the princess from the memory of two other famous holders of the title—the royal mistresses and arch intriguers, the comtesse de Soissons and Madame de Montespan—whose careers were blighted by accusations of chicanery, treason and even murder. Both women were painted in lavish or ostentatious allegorical guises: the comtesse de Soissons as a strident Minerva and Mme de Montespan lounging in a palace in déshabille, both by Pierre Mignard (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum; Paris: BN).51 The straightforward simplicity of Ducreux’s portrait of Lamballe embodied the new school of portraiture that emerged under the auspices of Louis XVI and MarieAntoinette, one pervaded by a ‘new casual elegance, an air of nonchalant good breeding and refinement without any stiffness or pomposity’.52 This shift also saw a reduction in format from full-length to three-quarter- and bust-length depictions and head studies along with a reduction in background detail such as drapery, architectural details and so on, all changes present in Ducreux’s portrait.53 Flowers and Flora appear particularly to have resonated with Lamballe who chose to be wreathed in roses in an earlier full-length pastel portrait ‘en peignoir’ of about 1774–1776, now lost, and thought in the nineteenth century to be the work of François-Hubert Drouais, a copy of which was produced by Louis-Édouard Rioult at Louis-Philippe’s behest, again for the Musée de l’Histoire de France (see Figure 2.6). The ‘Drouais’ original Rioult had used as his template was recorded in Louis-Philippe’s collection at the Palais Royal in 1826.54 If the Drouais attribution is correct then the original could have been painted around the same period as the artist’s portrait of Madame du Barry as Flora, executed in 176955 and displayed at the salon that year (Versailles: Château de Versailles). Significantly, in Ducreux’s portrait flowers are Lamballe’s only adornment—she wears no jewellery, though we know from inventories that her collection was considerable, and with her plain attire it is overwhelmingly her vertiginous coiffure that forms the focal point of the picture.56 This would seem to be a material point. The princesse de Lamballe’s hair was widely regarded as her best asset, her chief beauty, and became linked to her identity in the popular imagination. Immediately following her murder in the September massacres, the mob placed her head on a pike and promenaded it through the streets of Paris. With the intention of displaying these gruesome remains to Marie-Antoinette who was being held in the Temple prison, they took the head to a coiffeur to be dressed, as a final mocking gesture of their contempt. A contemporary source later claimed to have had a wig made from some of these tresses as a trophy.57 After her death, the princesse de Lamballe’s hair was fetishised, the locks she and Marie-Antoinette had exchanged in life assuming reliquary-like properties.

Paying Court 45

Figure 2.6 Louis-Édouard Rioult (after original eighteenth-century portrait by Drouais?), the princesse de Lamballe, 1843, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 55 cm (Versailles: Château de Versailles) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot

The coiffure adopted here by Lamballe reveals her to be a woman with an eye for the latest fashions. It was Lamballe’s sophisticated sense of fashion that had reportedly first attracted the attention of Marie-Antoinette58 when their acquaintance was first formed. The princess patronised the fashion merchant Mme Éloffe59 and was a client of the modiste, Rose Bertin, long before the queen would make her famous with her patronage, also introducing her mistress to Bertin’s competitor, Monsieur Beaulard.60 Aristocratic women’s dress of the 1770s and 1780s revolved around these highly elaborate coiffures. Marie-Antoinette was the most notorious proponent of this fashion, eliciting a strong rebuke from her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, for

46  Paying Court dressing her hair to a reported 36 inches in height.61 Ducreux painted Lamballe’s cousin, the comtesse d’Artois, in about 1775 wearing a similar style (Versailles: Château de Versailles). The extreme hairstyles adopted by the queen and the princesse de Lamballe swiftly became a locus for negative public attention and easy sport for caricaturists in the employ of those who wished to undermine the queen and her circle. Le Triomphe de la coquetterie, an anonymous print lampooning the high coiffures of the 1770–1780s, was almost certainly an attack on the queen and her court, the instigators of this fashion (see Figure 2.7). It shows two women, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Marie-Antoinette, in outsized wigs and scandalously short dresses jousting on the river, for the amusement of their friends who carry on disreputably in the background, the scene presided over by a huge, predatory-looking feather headdress. Nonetheless, fashion became a form of currency at Marie-Antoinette’s court during a period that was itself increasingly fashion conscious. Scholars have noted the increased attention given by artists to details of costume and setting in the second half of the eighteenth century.62 This became especially true of the Louis XVI period, with a young, attractive and fashionable queen on the throne, and it was this veneer of glamour that accounted for the new queen’s initial, though short-lived, popularity. Wigs and false hair of the kind worn by Lamballe therefore came to be associated with ostentatious displays of wealth to the extent that there existed a highly lucrative trade for stolen or second-hand wigs.63 So while Ducreux’s portrait offers what appears at first to be a vision of restraint, Lamballe does not entirely dispense with pretentions to beauty and fashionable influence, in fact quite the reverse. It was again to Flora and qualities befitting a queen’s attendant that Lamballe alluded in a miniature by Pierre Adolphe Hall (1739–1793) (see Figure 2.8). Another favourite artist of Marie-Antoinette, the Swede produced several miniatures of the princess64 including one exhibited at the Salon of 1781 that was listed in the salon livret and mentioned by the Mercure de France.65 Diderot judged the group shown by Hall that year to be ‘beautiful’ but frustratingly gave no further description.66 As a number of miniatures of Lamballe by Hall survive it is impossible to know which it might have been but it is tempting to imagine it might have been this one, the most elaborate and one of the few three-quarter length miniatures executed of the princess, known to us only through its illustration in George C. Williamson’s sumptuous 1908 catalogue of the Morgan miniatures.67 In a composition reminiscent of Boucher’s 1756 portrait of Madame de Pompadour (Munich: Alte Pinakothek), the princess is shown seated on an ottomane in an alcove preparing a wreath of flowers, once again, an attribute of Flora, suggesting similar garlands arranged by the goddess and The Three Graces, and adopted in representations of Vestals. Above all, Lamballe’s miniature is clearly intended as an evocation of her natural courtly milieu—of the salons the princess and her circle gave and attended. One of the credentials that the princess brought to her role as salonnière and as a cultivated member of Marie-Antointte’s court was her status as a noble amateur, an identity showcased in Jean-Laurent Mosnier’s 1780 portrait (Plate 7). Grounded in the tradition of the ‘Grand Siècle’ portrait, the painting, with its high degree of finish and conventional signifiers of regal status—the pose, the evocation of a palace setting and the display of luxurious textiles and dress, somewhat outmoded at the time—is testament to the princess’s growing profile and influence at court. In 1777 she had been initiated into the Masonic Lodge, ‘La Candeur’, and in 1781 was appointed Grande

Figure 2.7 Anonymous, ‘Le Triomphe de la Coquetterie’, c. 1780, etching and engraving, 37.5 × 48.3 cm (NY: Met)

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Figure 2.8 Pierre Adolphe Hall, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, after 1778, 10.4 cm in diameter (reproduction from 1906–1908 catalogue of J. P. Morgan’s miniature collection) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Maitresse of an all-women lodge, a position that once again gave her power, both symbolic and literal, over her fellow courtiers—from whom the lodge’s members were selected. The choice of Mosnier, official miniaturist to Marie-Antoinette from 1776 onwards, was an understandable one and anecdotally, the portrait is thought to have been commissioned by the queen.68 It is supposed that the picture passed from Charles X (the comte d’Artois) to his son the duc de Berry and thence by descent through the Bourbon-Parma line.69 An artist known for his large-format pictures of prominent courtiers, on the scale and grandeur seen in this portrait of Lamballe, his portrait of the baron de Breteuil, which the artist exhibited at the salon of 1787, had been ‘much esteemed by the Connoisseurs’.70 An austere backdrop evokes a generic palace setting:

Paying Court 49 pink roses trail over the balcony and a fountain plays in the distance. Against a pillar draped with a lustrous purple shot silk (Mosnier was universally admired for his rich palette and expressive use of drapery), Lamballe is seated at a table dressed with a heavy blue velvet cloth trimmed with gold tassels, her gilt chair upholstered in the same fabric, a colour and textile synonymous with French royalty. Her dress is magnificent: a gown of white and crimson satin bordered with gold thread embroidery, the sleeves and bodice trimmed with lace.71 Luminous double-stranded pearl bracelets hang from each wrist, perhaps the very same pair of bracelets given to her by the duc de Penthièvre for her wedding thirteen years before.72 The princess holds a portfolio of sketches fastened with blue ribbons, as was the convention, and a gold or brass porte-crayon in one hand containing red and white chalk. Both Kauffmann and Vigée Le Brun posed with a porte-crayon in their self-portraits. The princess is bathed in light from above, as if struck by divine inspiration but her sheet is untouched—she is yet to begin her sketch. Before her on the table is an open wooden box containing the porte-crayon case and a green leather or shagreen nécessaire à parfum with two flasks of scent and a funnel (see Figure 2.9). Draped over the box are a string of pearls and a key threaded on to a pink silk ribbon. Lockable wooden boxes such as this one, effectively a nécessaire or coffret de parfum/toilette à voyage—portable or travelling boxes containing mirrors, brushes, smelling salts, toiletries, scent and other small essentials in costly silver and silver-gilt vessels—were part of every high-born woman’s toilette and also highly personal objects.73 The toilette was an activity that was both essential in a malodorous early-modern world, but also a performative status-enhancing piece of theatre.74 An open jewellery box could symbolise the theme of vanitas,75 but here the inference seems to be one of the sitter’s gentility and femininity. If this was indeed a travelling case then it might also suggest that the princess is not depicted at home, but in one of the many different royal palaces to which she regularly decamped. Arranged beside the box on the table are a vase of flowers and a small putto statuette raising its arms heavenwards, probably the intended focus of her study. Mosnier used a very similar format to more relaxed effect in a highly accomplished miniature of an unidentified woman painted four years previously (1776, art market) and for his portrait of the vicomtesse de Buissy, which pre-dates Lamballe’s portrait by a year (1779) in which the vicomtesse is also shown in the guise of a draughtswoman, seated at a desk, against a backdrop of drapery, chalk holder in one hand and a quantity of fresh sheets in the other.76 Although these statuettes were a common ornament found in this class of ‘desk portrait’ their addition helped to underscore the connoisseurial eye of the sitters depicted sketching them.77 The pose and trappings of Mosnier’s portrait therefore endeavour to show Lamballe’s serious interest in the arts and suggest her own skill as practitioner. The portecrayon and portfolio were unmistakable symbols of the professional artist and for this reason appear constantly in artists’ self-portraits. Their use in eighteenth-century portraits of amateur artists was understood by viewers as evidence of the sitter’s ‘commitment to drawing’.78 In 1787, Lamballe was listed as a patron of the École Royale Gratuite de Dessin. She was in illustrious company; other benefactors included the king, the comte de Provence, the comte d’Artois, Madame Adélaïde, Madame Victoire, the duc d’Orléans, the duchesse d’Orléans, the prince de Condé, the duc de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Condé and the duc de Penthièvre.79 Such altruistic support of artistic institutions and art education during the ancien régime was an expression of the eighteenth-century concept of sociabilité which incorporated bienfaisance and/

50  Paying Court

Figure 2.9 Detail of Plate 7, Jean-Laurent Mosnier, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1780, oil on canvas, 206 × 145 cm (Lamballe: Mairie de Lamballe) Photo: Author

or bienveillance—the demonstration of generosity of spirit and concern for the public good.80 Founded in 1766 by the former artistic director for the Sèvres manufactory, Jean Jacques Bachelier, the École was the first drawing school to provide free admission; the school charged no tuition fees and met its costs through generous grants from its patrons and other donors. In this way, Bachelier hoped to provide a more democratic alternative to the existing system of apprenticeships and to furnish deserving

Paying Court 51 children from poorer families with a vocation. The most talented students were recognised in an annual prize-giving ceremony held in the Tuileries, attended by its patrons, Lamballe among them.81 The princess’s involvement with this philanthropic enterprise confirms not just a well-documented benevolent nature but is also evidence of her desire to demonstrate both a discerning interest in and support of the arts and the munificent largesse befitting a noble patron. This is bolstered by other activities she engaged in, such as personally backing the candidacy of the sculptor Pierre Taveau to become a Royal Academician, which resulted in his successful election.82 Culturally, the princess played an active role too, sponsoring writers, poets and composers, maintaining a salon in Paris and later even in exile in Aix-la-Chapelle. A contemporary source suggests the princess was also an accomplished amateur miniature painter. In 1787, while the princess was visiting England, a London journal reported, Lady Lucan’s fine miniature production, in Lord Spencer’s collection, was particularly noticed by the Princess de Lamballe, who herself excels in this delicate species of painting: nor did that distinguished character omit paying our amiable Queen some very handsome compliments on her Majesty’s drawings at Kew.83 The miniature was a medium in which contemporary French women artists were particularly active and Lamballe may have received instruction from one of the women miniaturists she patronised—Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803), for instance, had a number of female pupils.84 Lamballe’s artistic ability was broadcast to her peers early on in the group portrait with the Penthièvre and Conti families from c. 1775– 1776, discussed in Chapter 1 (Plate 4). Here the princess was shown, palette and paint brushes in hand, having just completed a large commemorative portrait of her late husband, the prince de Lamballe. This conceit could only have been conceivable if the princess was known to her contemporaries as an accomplished artist. Of course some skill in painting and drawing was part of any noblewoman’s education, but rarely were these works seen outside their nearest circle, which makes Lamballe’s evident reputation for a talent in miniature painting all the more exceptional. But it was not until 1788, in a full-length portrait by Anton Hickel, that the princess appeared to make explicit reference to her position as an officer of the queen’s household, during a period when she was attempting to make enlargements and improvements to her official apartments at Versailles (Plate 8). The scene unfolds in a library or study where Lamballe is seated at a Riesener-esque secrétaire in the act of composing a letter, probably in response to the open letter that has fallen to her feet—the seal is broken. Her quill is tipped with black ink, the toe of her blue slipper rests on a footstool as she leans forward in her armchair and the princess turns to look towards the viewer as if we are the cause of the interruption and have just entered the room. She holds our gaze with alert, intelligent and startlingly light blue eyes. Her hair is dressed in the hérisson (hedgehog) style of the late 1780s; she wears a white silk satin gown and fringed blue silk sash fastened with a diamond buckle. Her sleeves and neckline are trimmed with frothy rows of lace and a very fine, translucent foulard covers her decollété. A gold ring is visible on the fourth finger of her right hand. By her elbow rest the instruments of her industry: a panoply of letter-writing tools including an inkwell, sticks of red sealing wax, a seal, a variety of quills and a muslin handkerchief. We know from surviving correspondence and inventories that the princess used heron feathers for her quills, employed personalised novelty seals and that some of her letters

52  Paying Court to the queen were written in gold ink.85 In the secrétaire’s recess she has neatly filed other documents and correspondence in pink and blue folders alongside two books, one with its pages marked. Visible too are lockable compartments for confidential papers. Her personal coat of arms appears in the white and gilded boiserie of the wall behind her, and a bust of either her father or her late husband is also prominently displayed, the fluted column plinth entwined with laurel leaves, dual reminders of the ancestry to which she owed her position. Two books have been placed on top of the desk within arm’s reach. Behind the princess are rows of leather-bound books—a section of the princess’s library, which was substantial and is discussed in depth in Chapter 4. A vase of small white flowers sits on the desk’s gallery—a detail of particular significance. This is a hyacinth and is shown still in bulb form, with its roots trailing down the length of the tall vase, submerged in water.86 The flower was the height of fashion at the French court. The craze began with Louis XV, who collected hyacinths and spent a fortune importing multiple specimens from the Netherlands.87 Like the tulip before them in the seventeenth century, hyacinths were a curiosity eliciting intense fascination and the flower came to symbolise an enlightened interest in botany.88 Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) included them in a number of her floral still lifes. Their addition to Lamballe’s portrait, particularly in bulb form, is intended to show that the princess followed the latest fashions and points to her awareness of and interest in the botanical sciences. The detail also drew on Hickel’s acknowledged talents as a flower painter: the artist is now best known for his still lifes. Many women of Marie-Antoinette’s circle, including the queen herself, appeared in this genre of ‘desk portrait’ and the phenomenon has been discussed by art historians within the context of the new emphasis placed on women’s education and the period’s growing sociability.89 In 1777 François Dumont produced an elaborate miniature of Marie-Antoinette at her desk in which the queen, resplendent in blue silk and lace, poses at her desk, quill in hand (private collection). Madame Adélaïde and the comtesse d’Artois were also both painted at their correspondence. Often such representations showed sitters corresponding with friends, relatives or lovers, intimating close bonds, or suggested literary or epistolary talents; ‘the art of correspondence’ Dena Goodman says, was ‘an indispensable accomplishment for a woman of education, breeding, and intelligence’.90 The princess’s portrait does draw on the latter tradition of portraits of women of letters, shown with serious purpose and intent but in tone and content it showcases the professional, rather than personal, side of the princess. This is suggested by the comparative formality of her surroundings, chosen over the intimacy of a boudoir or private cabinet, and the absence of signs of a sentimental or personal motive (the suggestion of a billet-doux or a miniature of the letter’s intended recipient, for example). The discarded letter with its broken seal serves to explain what has triggered Lamballe’s activity and the immediacy of her response invites us to view her as a woman of resolve. The secrétaire, with its numerous compartments and high back shielding the occupant’s activities from view, was seen as a private and highly personal, yet feminine piece of furniture.91 With it the princess affects the appearance of industry and professionalism whilst still retaining her femininity and projecting a decorative appearance. Viewers who knew the princess would surmise the portrait shows her engaged in court correspondence to do with her superintendency. This was indeed an activity that took up a considerable amount of her time as she was required to deal with the minutiae of the queen’s household and a staff of some several hundred people spawned an unceasing wave of paperwork. Most of

Paying Court 53 this the princess dictated to her secretary and then signed, but it was nevertheless voluminous.92 It can be divided into three categories: responses to verbal orders or instructions she received from the queen, which she then had to act upon and disseminate; her correspondence with the queen’s secrétaire des commandements, Monsieur Beaugeard; and exchanges pertaining to individual members of the household. With a constantly rotating workforce under her command and jurisdiction, the princess was forever replacing officers and fielding constant requests for salary increases and pensions, as well as pleas for financial assistance from former household members (and their relatives) who had fallen on hard times. The contents of these letters reveal not only the demands on her time and judgement, but also the extent to which the princess operated as both intermediary and shield between the queen and her courtiers. By this stage, the princess’s power and influence were widely recognised. A likely protégé of the duc de Penthièvre, the comte de Kergariou-Locmaria, wrote to a friend in 1781, ‘Vous n’ignores pas que tout l’agrément qui peut resulter pour moi d’un établissement à Paris dépend du suffrage de M[adam]e de Lamballe, qui m’asseureroit celui de la reine’.93 Those in her employ traded on her name and their association with her: one enterprising valet de chambre, seeking to obtain an approbation from the Société Royale de Médecine for his recipe for rouge, was careful to identify himself as part of the princess’s household and even to state that the rouge in question was known to the princess’s doctor.94 Further evidence that Hickel’s portrait was intended to show Lamballe in her official capacity as Surintendante comes from the circumstances of its commission. Two eighteenth-century reproductive prints that exist of this portrait and a now lost portrait of Marie-Antoinette, the only prints recording portraits of French courtiers by Hickel and lettered with the text that they were painted from life, seem to suggest they were conceived as a pair (see Figures 2.10–2.11). Lamballe’s portrait is relatively small in dimensions, suggesting it may have been destined for display in a smaller more intimate cabinet or perhaps consistent with a picture conceived as a companion portrait. Malgo’s mezzotint of the queen’s portrait reveals that the portraits share a number of formal similarities—the busts, drapery, etc. The queen is shown in a palace setting, with a bust of Louis XVI behind her, seated on a throne-like armchair embroidered with fleur de lys and surmounted by a coronet. She wears a sash similar to that worn by Lamballe, a plumed headdress and veil, a small posy and an (unidentified) cameo portrait, possibly of the dauphin, on her bodice. A vacant tabouret of the sort Lamballe was permitted to sit on while paying court in the queen’s official apartments is located behind her. The queen reposes, while her Surintendante is active and alert. If hung together side-by-side it would appear from these two paintings that the princess was listening to and receiving instructions from the queen, as in life she was known to do. Hickel was an artist of some standing in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, where he received repeated commissions from the Imperial family but would have been entirely unheard of in France when Lamballe sat for this portrait in 1788. Just two years before, Hickel had been appointed official court painter to Joseph II, and as it was the emperor who secured many of the artist’s commissions for him95 it seems likely it was at his behest that the artist left for Paris in 1786 in order to paint the queen and her friend. An undated yet clearly early portrait of Marie-Antoinette by Hickel now at Gripsholm Castle in Sweden indicates that the artist had painted the young archduchess before she left for France. These were unarguably Hickel’s most

54  Paying Court

Figure 2.10 Simon Malgo after Anton Hickel, portrait of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, published London 1794, mezzotint, 63.6 × 44.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

ambitious compositions to date, up until this point his output consisted of conversations pieces, still lifes and portraits of sitters drawn from minor aristocratic houses or the upper bourgeoisie. It was Anton’s elder brother, Joseph Hickel (1736–1807), who was the better known and visibly more talented (finer) painter and who had

Paying Court 55

Figure 2.11 Simon Malgo after Anton Hickel, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, published London 1793, mezzotint, 63.2 × 44.7 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

painted Empress Maria-Teresa, Emperor Joseph II and Marie-Antoinette, but the younger artist profited from his stay in Paris by painting both women several times and in various extraordinary guises. Nagler records a portrait of the princesse de Lamballe as a shepherdess,96 while the artist’s obituary described portraits of Lamballe ‘as

56  Paying Court a nose-gay-girl, and sometimes as a fortune-teller or nun’.97 If these sources are accurate then it is regrettable indeed that none of these portraits survive as their descriptions promise works of a particularly diverting nature that would put a very different complexion on Lamballe’s iconographic programme. The princess of Hickel and Mosnier’s portraits—the cultivated and intelligent woman in a glamorous sophisticate’s skin—is very much the figure of the femme savante, the beautifully turned out and ‘educated woman accomplished in letters and the arts’.98 Elise Goodman’s research on this trope has shown it developed in response to enlightenment thought on women’s education and social role and drew on earlier precedents, both male and female, of learnt figures.99 An obvious forerunner was the duchesse du Maine, who was, through marriage, a relative of the princess and of whose famously brilliant salons at Sceaux, one of the châteaux where Lamballe now resided, she could not have failed to have been aware. In a portrait by François de Troy (1645–1730) the duchess chose to be shown receiving an astronomy lesson from her tutor (c. 1702–1705, Sceaux: château de Sceaux). With such obvious paradigms in mind we can interpret Lamballe’s donning of a similar identity of femme savante as linked to her enlightened approach to women generally, one expressed particularly by her patronage of women artists.

2.4  The Princess’s Patronage of Women Artists The only portrait in oils of the princesse de Lamballe ever to be exhibited was the work of a woman artist. This was a painting executed in 1778 by Marie-Victoire Lemoine, then little known and aged only 25 (Plate 5). The portrait was shown at the inaugural Salon de la Correspondance the following summer, where Lamballe herself made a special visit to view it.100 The portrait was the first painting Lemoine had ever exhibited.101 Scholars of the artist’s work have remarked that the commission would have been a great coup for her at a stage when her career was in its infancy.102 This adds further credence to the argument that the princesse de Lamballe was eager to support (or being seen to support) emerging artists and, as Cubières’s verses advanced, the arts generally. Lemoine’s picture was a success and addressing the urbane readers of his journal, Pahin de la Blancherie remarked that the artist had succeeded where others had failed in producing a particularly good likeness with the princess’s head especially painted in a very gracious manner.103 Of all the princess’s portraits this is perhaps the most beautiful and executed with great sensitivity. Lamballe poses in neoclassical dress— an ochre-coloured gown with a low neckline, a fine muslin collar and gold tassled fastener—against a plain graduated grey background, with a small spray of lilac and a feather in her hair. Lilac was greatly in fashion at this time—and went on to feature very prominently in the woven silk summer hangings commissioned in 1786 for Marie-Antoinette’s formal bedchamber at Versailles. Lemoine’s characteristic naturalism is in evidence: the princess’s transparent skin glows, her gaze is soft and reflective, her eyes a very clear blue, her lips moistened. Lemoine’s portrait together with a copy were recorded in 1825 in the duc d’Orléans’s (Louis Philippe) collection at the Palais Royal and one can assume that the duke came by the portrait through his mother, Lamballe’s sister-in-law.104 Lemoine was one of several women artists patronised by Lamballe. Of the thirty or so artists who produced original painted portraits of the princess, five, perhaps six,

Paying Court 57 were executed by professional women artists: Marie-Gabrielle Capet (1761–1818); Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837); Adélaïde Labille-Guiard; Marie-Victoire Lemoine; and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.105 Labille-Guiard’s portrait, a pastel whose whereabouts are currently unknown, is fairly conventional (see Figure 2.12). Painted in about 1783, around nine years after the artist’s debut at the Académie de Saint Luc and the same year she exhibited a series of pastel portraits of artists in the Salon de la Correspondance (but before the artist’s major commissions for Mesdames and the comte de Provence several years later) deepens our impression of the princess as a supporter of burgeoning women artists. Seated against a plain background wearing a dress trimmed with lace and a silk bow and a large spray of lilac and a ribbon in her hair it shows the princess at 34 years of age. In its conception it is very similar to the artist’s

Figure 2.12 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, presumed portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1783, pastel, dimensions unknown (current location unknown) repr. in Passez

58  Paying Court later portraits of the duchesse de la Rochefoucault-Liancourt and princesse de Béthune (1784).106 A luminous copy in miniature was then executed by Labille-Guiard’s talented pupil, Marie-Gabrielle Capet.107 Labille-Guiard’s own work in miniature, a purported portrait of Lamballe with Marie-Antoinette’s children, is discussed later in this chapter. Marguerite Gérard’s portrait, recorded in a sale as the ‘Property of the Princess Vaudimont, deceased and Formerly in the Gallery of the Princes of Lorraine’ is yet another portrait of the princess that is still to surface.108 Gérard’s interest in and emulation of the Dutch and Flemish ‘petits maîtres’ no doubt appealed to Lamballe who had a strong interest in seventeenth-century Netherlandish genre painting. The period of court portraiture under examination in this book coincides with the dramatic rise of the professional women artist in France, most of these painters enjoying unprecedented success in the two decades preceding the revolution. This ascendancy was recognised as revolutionary in its own time. In their conquering of numerous social barriers these women have been characterised as initiators of an emancipatory movement, paving the way for successive generations of women artists.109 Painting was one of the few arts in which French women were permitted to distinguish themselves: although four female artists were elected to the Académie Royal de Peinture et Sculpture in the second half of the eighteenth century, women continued to be barred from the three remaining royal academies of Science, Music and Literature.110 The numerous self-portraits of women artists during this period—over sixty were exhibited at the French salons between 1774 and 1808 alone111—show to what degree they themselves were preoccupied with defining their new and exceptional status. These project an image of professional standing and artistic aptitude, within accepted conventions of femininity and boundaries of propriety, but also attempt to bridge the disparity in social status between themselves, talented professional women, and their high-born female sitters. The professional woman artist as depicted in Vestier’s portrait miniature of his daughter Nicole at her easel (Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum) and Dumont’s portrait of Marguerite Gérard (London: Wallace Collection) are indistinguishable in their vision of a refined artistic faculty from Jean Laurent Mosnier’s portrait of Lamballe as a draughtswoman. The most successful women artists came to rely on influential women patrons for protection and promotion. Marie-Antoinette, for example, cultivated the careers of Vigée Le Brun and Vallayer-Coster, and the comtesse d’Angiviller played a similar role for Labille-Guiard.112 Lamballe too, as has been shown, promoted Lemoine’s work at a crucial stage in the artist’s career. On a practical level she may have recognised in them her own artistic aspirations and endeavours. But more pointedly, their ground-breaking advancement mirrored her own unusual success as a powerful female courtier within a patriarchal court society and invoked the same spirit of reflective female community encouraged by her queen. For the princesse de Lamballe, her advocacy of women artists constituted a gesture of the utmost modernity and complemented her involvement in freemasonry and sympathy with the cult of sensibility, in whose dual influences the bonds of sisterhood found expression.

2.5 Sense and Sensibility. The Cult of Sentiment and Freemasonry in Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe The princess was first introduced to freemasonry by her brother-in-law, the duc de Chartres, who was Grand Master of the Loge de la Candeur (founded in March 1775 and later known as the Loge d’Adoption). She joined the duke’s lodge in 1778113 and

Paying Court 59 then in January 1781 was elected Grande Maîtresse de toutes les Loges Ecossaises régulières de France, the first all-women French lodge.114 Lamballe’s involvement in freemasonry was pilloried by her nineteenth-century biographers and continues to be cited by modern-day historians as evidence of a flighty sub-intelligence.115 The masonry historian Janet Burke has published a series of articles overturning this view and challenging mainstream masonic history’s trivialisation of women’s lodges.116 Burke maintains that these were not frivolous spaces but forums in which elite women could ‘develop an incipient feminism’.117 She argues that the duchesse de Bourbon, duchesse de Chartres and the princesse de Lamballe were all drawn to masonry because of its promulgation of female friendship and solidarity ‘the strongest form of Enlightenment thought experienced by these women’.118 Moral improvement was the common goal of most of these societies, but an additional benefit was also increased community and sorority.119 Given that the masonic society was composed of almost all of the key women at court, save the queen and princesses of the blood, it seems likely that it was also a continuation of this sphere (and in this case it was perhaps imprudent not to join), but one, crucially, without the involvement or influence of their male peers. The concept of fraternity/sorority was reinforced through the masonic dogma and the practise of initiation rituals, the principles of which were derived from enlightenment thought, among them, ‘the idea that true friendship was that based on virtue’.120 Burke further explains, ‘In their close relationship to the enlightenment concepts of virtue and Fraternity, and to a lesser degree of Liberty and Equality, women masons could feel the pulse of the age, however feebly’ and points to the enlightenment works in Lamballe’s library to support this view.121 Charity played a key role in the activities of women masons and was also a dominant force in Lamballe’s life. In her last will and testament the princess left 3,000 livres to the Hôtel Dieu, Paris’s largest poor house/hospital, and 2,000 livres to absolve the debts of some of its inhabitants.122 Her visit to view the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes with her sister-in-law, the duchesse de Chartres,123 can be seen against a background of enlightenment discussion about detention conditions and more generally, the call for widespread reform of the penal system. She inherited a vocational concept of duty from her father-in-law and her immediate family. Lamballe’s parents, her maternal aunt, Polyxena von Hesse-Rheinfels Rotenburg (1706–1735), and maternal cousin, Principessa Maria Felicita di Savoia (1730–1801), were all famed for their good deeds, particularly towards their own sex, the two last-named relatives both establishing homes for destitute widows and noblewomen. From the minutes of the Loge Ecossaise régulière’s meetings, discovered in the second half of the nineteenth century by historian Georges Bertin, we learn the emphasis placed by Lamballe and her ‘sisters’ on philanthropy and fostering virtue. Its members made frequent donations to the poor, especially children and young women, and subscribed to surprisingly progressive principles: the verses they read aloud contained references to equality and liberty.124 The certificate awarded by the lodge recognised in its holders their ‘zèle et l’empressement pour parvenir au suprême degré de lumière maçonnique’ as well as their Christian virtues, morals and scrupulous conduct.125 These attitudes denote the general shift in noble opinion at the time from a previously resolute absolutism to a more moderate stance that entertained the possibility of social reform, more accurately reflecting current thinking. It was for these very reasons that Marie-Antoinette disapproved of Lamballe’s participation in masonry, seeing in its egalitarian ideals

60  Paying Court and mild subversion of the emblem of royalty a potential nursery for liberalism. If Lamballe’s lodge was indeed a site for a burgeoning eighteenth-century feminism then certainly the fact that the princess was elected head of this institution indicates the extent to which her peers considered her mistress of its maxims. There can be no doubt that for Lamballe freemasonry provided both a platform from which to express her independence and an outlet for her philanthropy, while the lodge’s encouragement of strong female friendships was compatible with the contemporary tenets of feminine sensibility she exhibited in her daily life and in her portraits. The cult of sentiment became central to the literary and visual arts of the eighteenth century, propagating a set of ideals that ‘stressed those qualities considered feminine in the sexual psychology of the time: intuitive sympathy, susceptibility, emotionalism and passivism’.126 The movement was shaped by novels published in the 1740s60s, including key works such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–1748) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), as well as epistolary novels by the women writers Mme Riccaboni and Mme de Graffigny. Their plots and characters ‘showed people how to behave, how to express themselves in friendship and how to respond decently to life’s experiences’.127 Characterised as an elevated plane of thought, sensibility demonstrated ‘the faculty of feeling, the capacity for extremely refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for suffering’ and came particularly to be associated with aristocratic women, which some scholars believe accounts for its decline in popularity during the century’s later, revolutionary years.128 One reason it may have resonated with this sex was that, ‘If women had far less power in society than men’, then in sentimental imagery at least, ‘they grew great in moral importance’.129 The princesse de Lamballe collected and displayed prints with sentimental subjects, was an enthusiast of the natural English gardens beloved of sentimental writers (discussed in Chapter 3), exhibited in her actions the characteristics of virtue and charity cherished by the cult of sensibility, and had in her library all of the aforementioned publications that first stirred the aesthetics of sentiment: Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (in translation, Amsterdam, 1769); Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse and Adélaïde ou l’amour et le repentir (Amsterdam, 1769); and Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, in translation (Amsterdam, 1784; Geneva, 1785).130 Her absorption of the principles extolled in these works is writ large in the majority of her portraits, particularly those by Louis-Auguste Brun (1758–1815), Labille-Guiard, Lemoine and Vigée Le Brun, which privilege a chaste yet approachable intimacy over regal ostentation and detachment. Brun’s expressive double portrait of the princess with the comtesse de Laval, the duchesse de Luyne’s sister-in-law (the princess is the foremost figure), for example, is a sensitive portrayal of their friendship.131 Greuze was perhaps the artist most associated with high sentiment during this period and he produced two now untraced portraits of the princess,132 one of which could have been the oval companion portraits of Marie-Antoinette and the princesse de Lamballe that surfaced briefly in two sales in 1838 and 1840. In addition, there is a rectangular-format half-length portrait of the princesse de Lamballe thought to be the work of Greuze in the collections of the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen.133 The princess is seated and wearing a fur-trimmed white dress, her powdered hair dressed with a cap and fine veil and her hands buried in a fur muff. The erotic undertones of displays of sentiment and the use of the body and facial expressions as a site for the communication of powerful emotions,134 particularly in

Paying Court 61 evidence in the work of Greuze, also inspired the century’s most fashionable portrait painter, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Together with most of the queen’s circle, the princesse de Lamballe chose to sit for Vigée Le Brun who was six years her junior. Michael Levey has noted it was the artist’s portraits of women that brought her the greatest fame135, and the great scholar of her œuvre, Joseph Baillio, has observed that her treatment by biographers and historians has been more ‘as a social phenomenon than as a serious artist’.136 Perhaps this is because she was, as Baillio classifies her, a courtier artist, and because the image of the artist became so intertwined even in her own time, with the figure of her greatest patron, Marie-Antoinette, of whom she produced over thirty portraits and through whose intervention she succeeded in her appointment to Royal Academician in 1783.137 For her part, Vigée Le Brun recorded having painted three portraits of the princesse de Lamballe, although four, including two pastels, are suggested by surviving illustrations in the literature.138 Of these only two have been traced, one of which resurfaced in 2011 at auction and was acquired by Versailles (Plate 9). The portrait was painted in 1782, by which point Lamballe would have been very familiar with the artist’s work having seen Marie-Antoinette, the comtesse de Provence and the duc and duchesse de Chartres all painted by her. The year of the portrait’s execution coincided with the artist’s visit to the Netherlands where she notably encountered Rubens’s portrait of his wife Susannah in a straw hat. This picture influenced both this portrait of Lamballe and an entire series of the queen and her immediate circle in fashionably informal muslin gowns (en Gaulle), including the comtesse de Provence and the duchesse de Polignac.139 Significantly however, Lamballe’s portrait was probably one of the first in this well-known series (depending on the accuracy of the date of the artist’s portrait of Madame du Barry), for once pre-dating that of the queen which scandalised the salon public on its exhibition in 1783.140 The comtesse de Provence’s 1782 portrait, conceived as a pendant to a portrait of her husband, was also exhibited in the same salon. But where Marie-Antoinette’s portrait was deeply criticised and hastily withdrawn, the comtesse’s portrait received general praise.141 At some point, Lamballe’s portrait entered the collection of Prince Tuffakin where it remained until his death in 1845. The prince, a contemporary of Lamballe’s, almost certainly knew her personally and was perhaps even a friend.142 The canvas’s minutely observed naturalistic details—the thread-like veins about the princess’s temple and the subtle highlights in her eyes—suggest the picture was designed to be viewed in close proximity and in intimate surroundings. And yet, of all the forty or so oil portraits produced of the princess, this is the only picture that, by any standards, appears resoundingly unflattering. The slightly drooping eyelids, an overlong and lined neck, the suggestion of jowls rather than the more usual (and to contemporary taste, pleasing) rounded chin, a bulbous nose and a mouth parted to reveal slightly buck teeth. The princess looks far beyond her 33 years. This last detail of bared teeth, a feature that until very recently in contemporary portraiture had been unthinkable but was employed by the artist elsewhere, is a mannered attempt at naturalism that in part derived from the connection forged since antiquity between healthy teeth and youthful beauty. Bared teeth were also used by Greuze, whose heads Vigée Le Brun claimed in her memoirs to have studied closely, to suggest a state of heightened emotion or the frisson of awakening sexuality. Scholars refer to this as the smile of sensibility.143 In late eighteenth-century Paris, the open ‘white-toothed’ smile had come to symbolise ‘an individual’s innermost and most

62  Paying Court authentic self’ and Vigée Le Brun’s portraits of the queen and her courtiers discarded the more traditional ‘Versailles mask of fixity’ for this new appealing and gentle Paris-led smile.144 This attractive feature was speeded by contemporary improvements in dentistry, an occupation that became increasingly professionalised during this period.145 Lamballe herself embraced these as is indicated by the existence of a porcelain toothpick holder in her inventory and her display of a print of ‘l’arracheur des dents’.146

2.6  Female Court Portraiture During the Reign of Marie-Antoinette To what extent the princesse de Lamballe’s portraits were representative of this period of female court portraiture can be determined through comparisons with the pictures executed of her fellow patrons and friends. What is most revealing in this exercise are the devices employed by her peers that are pointedly lacking from Lamballe’s own corpus. For instance, the princess appears to have eschewed explicit allegory altogether (her allusions to Flora in some works being very subtle), though some of her peers trifled with it briefly—Marie-Antoinette was painted by Gautier d’Agoty in the guise of Minerva (art market) and by Drouais as Hebe, while the comtesse de Provence chose to be represented as Diana (Dijon: Musée Magnin). Similarly, her position as a royal princess, one who over the course of her career faced a dwindling public respect and mounting hostility, meant that she patently avoided the coyly sensual depictions of fellow courtiers. The chaste humility exhibited throughout the princess’s range of portraits is perhaps also indicative of the princess’s faith. Lamballe was devout, but not overtly so. While Nattier painted Marie Leczynska, a woman renowned for her piety, with her bible (1748, Château de Versailles), there is no direct clue to Lamballe’s religious observance in her portraits, despite her upbringing and the character of her parents’ portraits. This was probably because it was not fashionable in MarieAntoinette’s circle to be portrayed in this light but may also reflect the princess’s exposure to deist philosophy in masonic lodges. One would quite naturally expect the princess to have had an eye to the portraits of her own intimates. Her private circle included her sister-in-law—the duchesse de Chartres, the duchess’s own sister-in-law, the duchesse de Bourbon, and her dame d’honneur and dame de compagnie: Stéphanie Béatrix d’Amblimont, marquise de Lâge de Volude, and the comtesse de Ginestous.147 The princess was especially close to Madame de Lâge de Volude, who favoured the same elegant yet unpretentious modes of representation. Her portrait by Carmontelle shows the countess promenading in a beautiful garden with her pet parrot, then a fashionably exotic accessory and a symbol of fidelity (1783, Chantilly: Musée Condé). Another portrait by Alexandre Kucharski (1741–1819) is similarly unaffected, the countess, with her head slightly cocked, gazes directly at the viewer, attired simply in a muslin dress and fichu, her hair wreathed in ribbons.148 Lamballe was painted by Kucharski in a large hat with a feather, though sadly no comparison can be made as the portrait has not surfaced since the midnineteenth century.149 There is no sign in Lamballe’s corpus of portraits of the highly personal and imaginative compositions favoured by her sister-in-law who chose in one exquisite miniature to be shown sleeping, her head resting on a silk cushion and in a truly astonishing full-length portrait by Duplessis, posed supine on a beach in a silk satin dress and sandals (both, Chantilly: musée Condé). The composition, begun in 1777, was altered

Paying Court 63 during its execution to incorporate her husband, the duc de Chartres’s, participation in the naval battle of Ouessant (Ushant) in 1778. We are invited to see the duchess as the devoted wife who anxiously casts her book aside, unable to read another word as the ship visible in the distance, the Saint-Esprit, bears the duke away. But this bizarre confection struck a hollow note with contemporaries and as the Mémoires secrets pointed out, the cold-hearted expressionless duchess does not even turn her head to follow her husband’s departure, her relaxed pose suggesting she is entirely untroubled by his uncertain fate.150 A likely source for the composition was Angelica Kauffman’s painting of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos151 and in addition to the prevailing neoclassical fashion for mythology, and the naval careers of the sitter’s husband and father which made a seascape setting appropriate, the subject may have suggested itself because, in one version of the myth, the abandoned Ariadne is pregnant. As she sat for the portrait in 1777, the duchesse de Chartres was also with child, and gave birth to twin daughters in August later that year. It could be that the duchess thought the similarities between her state and that of Ariadne’s made the allusion a wonderful conceit. But when one considers that the subject infers neglect and betrayal on the part of the duke and the duchess, unlike Ariadne, is not shown pining for her lover, it seems prescient of the couple’s acrimonious separation just over a decade later. Other portraits of the duchess by Carmontelle (1770, Chantilly: Musée Condé) and Lepeintre (1776, known through Rioult’s nineteenth-century copy at Versailles) convey with greater success this identity of a wife, mother and woman of impeccable style and sartorial panache. Unquestionably, the princesse de Lamballe would have looked to the portraits of other prominent widowed or spinster courtiers at Versailles and their choice of representation. Madame Adélaïde, the unmarried daughter of Louis XV and aunt to Louis XVI, was a prominent example. Well-educated and a talented musician she was famed for her political nous and was the architect of many schemes, among them an abortive attempt to subordinate Marie-Antoinette. Jennifer Milam’s interpretation of her portraits reveals a woman ‘increasingly absorbed by her seriousness of purpose, dignity and rank’, who wished to be portrayed as a figure of taste and learning.152 Together with portraits of her sister, ally and fellow spinster, Madame Victoire, these pictures were intended to define femininity ‘in a manner that increasingly diminishes the importance of sexual attractiveness’.153 One can also discern in these large-scale portraits an earnest desire to press for their continued relevance at a court where they did not have an official role and during a period that saw their considerable power ebb away. Unlike the royal aunts, Lamballe did not disdain the depiction of superficial qualities of feminine allure, but then she did not live to reach old age at a court that placed an absolute premium on one’s physical appearance. By the same token, she did not neglect to celebrate her more cerebral talents and tastes—Mosnier’s portrait of Lamballe as a draughtswoman is in the same class of representation as the sisters’ double portrait. There is however more of an affinity in Lamballe’s portraits with those of Madame Élisabeth, Louis XVI’s younger sister, although she was only fractionally closer to her in age than to the royal aunts. Also devout like Lamballe, and a gifted draughtswoman with an interest in mathematics and geography, her portraits show a similar evolution from the sweet-natured child with her dog (Joseph Ducreux, c. 1768, Versailles) to her coming of age portrait by Vigée Le Brun (1782) where the teenaged princess is portrayed as a comely gardener with the same Rubensian influences seen in Lamballe

64  Paying Court and Polignac’s portraits by this artist,154 and finally to the urbane portrait of her in maturity (1787) where she poses with a book, music, compass and globe, symbolising her interests in music, science and geography (pc).155 However, the courtier to whom we must look for the most insightful comparisons with the princesse de Lamballe is the woman who was her fiercest rival and exact contemporary (the two women were born in the same year, on the very same day): the duchesse de Polignac.

2.7  A Rivalry in Portraits: The Duchesse de Polignac The notorious rivalry of the princesse de Lamballe and the duchesse de Polignac has become a diverting footnote in the sensational history of Marie-Antoinette’s reign but should be given greater consideration, particularly insofar as the negative exposure it received impacted on the queen’s own reputation, lending greater potency to the slanders of the pamphleteers. As a princess of the House of Savoy with an illustrious lineage boasting longstanding connections to the kings of France, Lamballe would always enjoy the higher claim to rank and status, but Polignac’s presence at court illustrated the immense transformative powers of royal favour, a single friendship enabling her to transcend and subsequently shed her relatively modest origins, making her Lamballe’s political, if not social, equal; as Gouvernante des Enfants de France, Polignac was responsible for grooming the future king of France. At the height of her powers, the duchesse de Polignac was described by her friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster, as ‘enjoying the highest degree of favour, living in splendor, lov’d & respected, envied even, in her greatness [. . .] surrounded, courted by all ranks’.156 Descended from a minor and somewhat impoverished aristocratic house, Yolande Martine Gabrielle de Polastron’s marriage to the comte Jules de Polignac in 1767 at the age of 17 was a significant social advancement. The single most propitious aspect of the union however was that it brought Gabrielle within range of the comtesse Diane de Polignac (1746–c. 1818), her well-connected sister-in-law, whose appointments at court would provide Gabrielle with an entrée to the queen’s circle. Up until this point she and her husband had passed their existence in the social hinterland having little reason or opportunity to attend court.157 In 1775, Diane de Polignac obtained a position in the household of the comtesse d’Artois, later rising to Lady-inWaiting to Madame Élisabeth. Gabrielle often accompanied her sister-in-law to Versailles and in this way made the acquaintance of Marie-Antoinette. The two women were united in their love of music and dancing—the comtesse was in possession of a fine voice and strong sense of musicality. To these gifts were added a pleasing, some said ravishing, appearance and a gregarious disposition. In order to retain the company of her new-found friend, Marie-Antoinette transferred the role of Premier Ecuyer (First Equerry) to her husband.158 Once thus established at court the comtesse de Polignac swiftly grew in renown and influence and as the princesse de Lamballe had found, her favour with the queen inflamed the resentment of fellow courtiers spawning the perception of an arriviste who had achieved her position in the queen’s intimate circle through avaricious chicanery. It is interesting to note that in the pamphlet years still to come, of the two favourites, Polignac attracted considerably more vitriol than the princesse de Lamballe and while this may partly be explained by the duchess’s more public extractions of favours it was likely also due to their relative disparity in status. Mercy, for his part, believed Polignac to be controlled

Paying Court 65 by the aunt who had raised her, the comtesse d’Andlau. In 1783 the Swedish Ambassador Greve Gustaf Philip Creutz wrote to Gustav III, ‘Je ne parle point de la nécessité de gagner l’amitié de la Duchesse de Polignac, c’est par la Comtesse Diane, sa bellesœur, qui a beaucoup d’esprit, qu’on y parvient le plus sûrement’.160 But whomever controlled the duchess and whatever her true motives, they are seemingly nowhere to be found in the small group of portraits created in her image. Where the princesse de Lamballe’s portraits are stately and serious and attempt to represent industry and artistic accomplishments, the duchesse de Polignac’s portraits can be read as a puff for the ideal companion. The settings are non-specific, her blithe countenance is beguiling yet demure, and her demonstrations of pretty talents are appealing but suitably contained. She is a courtier who knows her place and does not threaten to quit it; in short she is a favourite fit for a queen.161 In these conventional representations there is little to suggest the true nature and disposition of the sitter. In the absence of longstanding royal connections the duchess had no recourse to the patrician iconography employed by her rival. In their place is a focus on her oft-lauded gifts—music and singing— couched in a style consistent with the reigning cult of sensibility. Unlike the princesse de Lamballe who appears to have been reluctant to commit to one artist or one mode of picturing herself, the duchess arrived at a winning formula, enlisting the talents of her mistress’s favourite artist, Vigée Le Brun, as her agent. In a canny demonstration of the uniform ‘branding’ beloved of modern-day politicians, virtually her entire family sat for the painter. Vigée Le Brun painted Polignac four times and each composition shines a light on the duchess’s celebrated beauty, positioning her as an ornament of the queen’s court. The first portrait, executed in 1782, came two years after the duchess’s appointment to Gouvernante, the same year the princesse de Lamballe also sat for the artist (Versailles: Château de Versailles). This is the now famous portrait of Polignac in a straw hat, which the artist modelled on Rubens’s c. 1625 portrait of Susanna Lunden in a plumed hat (London: NG). The duchess leans against what appears to be an empty plinth as if, like a goddess, she has come to life and momentarily descended from her pedestal. The suggestion of a natural, fresh, even divine beauty is underscored by the celestial background of blue skies with drifting clouds. Xavier Salmon imagines the portrait as a reply to the artist’s self-portrait and notes the very specific and topical fashions referenced in the portrait but like other scholars before him he find little else of substance to extract from this representation.162 This is perhaps the crux of the matter and endemic to portraits of the duchesse de Polignac—these are artfully manufactured approximations of ‘natural’ beauty which, though enchanting and certainly testament to the artist’s modelling and sense of colour, in the end amount to no more than flawlessly executed fashion plates. Vigée Le Brun’s next portrait shows the duchess playing the pianoforte (1783, Aylesbury: Waddesdon Manor). Demonstrating all the hallmarks of sensibility, the duchess’s lips are parted, her expression is soft, wistful, inviting—a tone struck again and again in this group of portraits. Once established, Polignac did not deviate from this attitude, which can be seen for example in a pastel by Vigée Le Brun and Augustin Pajou’s bust of about 1780 (1787, Bayonne: Musée Basque).163 The celebrated musical talents brought to the fore in this portrait are in evidence again in a portrait by Carmontelle, where the then comtesse de Polignac is seated in a leafy glade playing her harp (art market). Richard Cosway’s sensitive portrait of the duchess, executed in 1786 on the artist’s visit to Paris with his wife164 once again favoured the evocation of feelings or emotions over the articulation of any more rational or cerebral qualities 159

66  Paying Court of the sitter. The most affecting depiction of the duchess is also the most intimate: a double portrait with the sister-in-law to whom she owed her position. After Polignac’s death, Vigée Le Brun enshrined her forever in a posthumous portrait painted in Vienna, ‘from memory’, though today, the work is known only through a crude reproductive print. As a group, these portraits attempt to assemble a paragon of femininity, proffering the duchess as a great beauty and embellishment to the queen’s court. The artists invoke the visual language of sensibility to cast the sitter as a woman of profound spirit and feeling. The gentle attitudes and displays of her musical talent reinforce this view of a sensitive individual. The duchesse de Polignac of these pictures, all ease and affability, appears to rise above the notorious court intrigues and rivalries in which she played a central part. What is pointedly lacking in these (surviving) portraits, however, is any reference to her seven-year tenure as Gouvernante, which was entirely at odds with convention: almost all of her predecessors chose to be painted in the company of their young charges at one time or another.165 Perhaps, as with Lamballe’s superintendency, this was because Marie-Antoinette went against popular opinion when appointing Polignac in 1782—the public were known to have favoured two considerably more edifying candidates, the princesse de Chimay and the duchesse de Duras.166 The courtly culture of favours and privileges was one that could only breed rivalry and rabid discontent. Feuds between courtiers, particularly senior office-holders, were an inevitable occurrence. In 1661 Louis XIV had been forced to intervene between the reigning Surintendante, the comtesse de Soissons, and the queen’s dame d’honneur, going so far as to issue a decree in which he set out in scrupulous detail the individual rights and duties attached to each role.167 Mercy-Argenteau believed both the princesse de Lamballe and the duchesse de Polignac to be fully cognisant of their opportunities for personal advancement and even prided himself on thwarting some of their ‘schemes’.168 In his correspondence to Marie-Antoinette’s mother and siblings, the ambassador kept up a running narration of the rivalry between the two women and their attempts to unseat each other. On the whole, he considered Lamballe’s threat rather more benign in the face of the thrusting ambition of the Polignac set. The evident differences in the two women’s personalities were clear to all. Where Polignac was said to be animated and entertaining, Lamballe was described by those who knew her, even her detractors, as more serious and virtuous.169 In 1775 Mercy-Argenteau wrote to Maria Theresa, S. M. s’est trouvée et se trouve encore dans l’embarras de concilier la princesse de Lamballe avec la comtesse de Polignac, parce que ces deux favorites, très-jalouses l’une de l’autre, ont hasardé vis-à-vis de la reine des petites plaintes respectueuses, et qui sont présentées sous l’aspect d’une sensibilité la plus tendre.170 The ambassador continued to record this abatement of the queen’s affections the following year and while he felt the princess mishandled her role as Surintendante he was far more concerned about the undue influence of Polignac, for it was ‘dans cette société que se forgent les intrigues en tout genre, et que l’on y favorise tous les moyens de dissipation’.171 Finally, in 1778, the count observed that Lamballe had become ‘a real object of disgust and boredom’ for the queen.172 Lamballe’s friendship with the queen was undoubtedly further tested by the fact that the princess was effectively straddling two rival court factions. She was a key

Paying Court 67 player in the Bourbon royal circle, but she was also, through her close relationships with the duchesse de Chartres and the duchesse de Bourbon, part of the competing Orléanist Palais Royal society.

2.8  Portraits of the Maternal Marie-Antoinettte’s transfer of her affections from Lamballe to Polignac appears to have coincided with her childbearing years. The queen famously adored children and Polignac had four of her own; the widowed Lamballe had none. It is interesting therefore to consider, particularly in the absence of any portraits showing the duchesse de Polignac in her official role as Gouvernante, a now lost miniature by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard which depicts the princesse de Lamballe with Marie-Antoinette’s two eldest children, the dauphin, Louis François, and Marie-Thérèse (see Figure 2.13). This derives from the collection of J. P. Morgan and is known to us through a catalogue where Lamballe is described as dressed in white with a puce sash, holding Madame Royale on one knee with the dauphin standing by her side. We do not know on what basis the adult female sitter was identified as Lamballe, and a number of miniatures purporting to depict the princesse of Lamballe are open to question. Because the miniature is known only through this reproduction it is of course possible that the intended subject might have been the duchesse de Polignac. However, there is much to support it—Lamballe was reported by several sources to have been very close to the queen’s children and greatly affected by the dauphin’s death in 1789. This bond was strengthened during their residence together in the Tuileries palace.173 Could the miniature represent Lamballe’s maternal persuasions to a queen who was then greatly preoccupied with such matters? The majority of paintings exhibited in the eighteenth-century salons in which women appear reinforced popular cultural stereotypes portraying them either as happy mothers, dutiful wives or obedient daughters, their identity defined by their relationship to men.174 The women of Marie-Antoinette’s circle, especially the queen and the comtesse d’Artois, were often painted either proudly displaying or tenderly embracing their progeny. For the queen this reflected her happiness in bearing the children she personally longed for, but also betrays the immense relief she experienced in finally conceiving after years of frustration and humiliation caused by the non-consummation of her marriage and the strain of being subjected to immense public pressure to produce heirs to the throne. Philip Conisbee has observed that in her portraits Marie-Antoinette ‘chose to be seen as a happy mother, albeit a rather superior, bourgeois one’.175 Vigée Le Brun’s famous portrait of her with her children seated in front of her Schwerdfeger jewellery cabinet has been interpreted as a reference to the Roman figure of Cornelia who prized her children above material wealth.176 Genre scenes, especially those by Greuze, helped to popularise the image of the doting mother and close family nucleus at a time when portraiture was increasingly fused with moralising genre painting.177 A portrait of the sitter surrounded by children, even if not their own, was also read as an allusion to their charitable nature.178 ‘Good mothering’ reflected the sitter’s ‘status and modishness’,179 but there was also a strong element of competition at work here— the ‘ability’ to conceive and to do so in profusion was always envied in royal circles, as Marie-Antoinette experienced all too well. It was against this background of ambitious fecundity and a fashionably pervasive atmosphere of maternal domesticity that the princesse de Lamballe found herself alone

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Figure 2.13 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803), miniature of the princesse de Lamballe with the children of Marie-Antoinette, 1780s, formerly in the collection of J. P. Morgan (current location unknown) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

in being the only young, widowed, unmarried and childless member of her circle. It was a troublingly problematic social status. The inconsistent body of representations handed down to us suggest something of the princess’s plight as she cast about her trying to find a mould that would fit. She was not yet of the age to project the image of the sage or elder stateswoman, like the royal aunts. She was youthful and attractive, but her status and position demanded that she maintain the level of decorum that precluded her depiction as a court beauty. She was intelligent but could not afford to appear a bluestocking which might have been misread as code for libertine, or worse, suggest a domineering attendant with political designs on the monarchs she served. She did not wholly belong to the visual realm of her mistress or peers, yet she did not wish to be viewed apart. She unequivocally rejected the role of the melancholy widow or virtuous ‘spinster’. The image of both mother and wife were not only integral to the concept of female identity at this time, they were the principal channel through which the sitter could display the contemporaneously fashionable sentimental traits of kindness, sensitivity, devotion and a capacity for impassioned love. Mindful of the perceived value of these characteristics and their centrality to the evocation of her sex, Lamballe had no remedy but to show with her actions—her collecting of sentimental prints, her good works in her community and her masonic lodge, that she possessed these qualities and was therefore in the eighteenth-century visual idiom, truly a woman of her time.

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2.9  Downfall and Degenerate Imagery Reports suggest the princesse de Lamballe endured a period of mild self-imposed estrangement from the court when Polignac’s favour was at its height from 1775 to 1780. Mercy remarked to Maria Theresa in October 1775 that the princess was rarely at court, but then this also coincided with the period of her brother’s death.180 Lamballe employed several tactics: removing to Rambouillet, busying herself with freemasonry and travelling abroad, and yet she knew the wisdom of never distancing herself completely—continuing to honour her duties, attending important ceremonial events in her official capacity, and as contemporary accounts reveal, maintaining her apartments and entertaining at Versailles. For any courtier it was considered essential to maintain a presence at court or risk losing one’s position.181 Nevertheless, the two courtiers’ mutual dislike became general knowledge and news of the rupture even reached England where it was reported in contemporary newspapers. The rivalry caused untold damage to the queen’s already fragile reputation. This visible discord within her inner circle suggested the queen could not control even her most devoted courtiers. The companions Marie-Antoinette chose and the manner in which she conducted her friendships had always been subject to the greatest scrutiny. It was widely believed that any favourite of the queen had access to the king and could endeavour to influence affairs of state and push their own agenda. The many favours and advantages bestowed on both women enraged an increasingly hostile public. Both women drew a generous salary and their family and friends benefited by their connections. Both women were (wrongfully) implicated in the notorious Diamond Necklace Affair of 1784 that fatally undermined the queen’s credibility, by one of the principal architects of the plot.182 At court, the two women were perceived as monopolising the queen’s time, and this bad feeling soon filtered down to the people in the street.183 The constant verbal thrust and parry enacted on a public stage appeared, to an already ill-disposed audience, more that of two jealous suitors competing for a lover’s hand than two favourites vying for social supremacy, adding cogency to new, baseless accusations of lesbianism explored in a torrent of pamphlets and satirical prints unleashed on the city and court. Marie-Antoinette remarked drily to Maria Theresa, ‘Les gazetiers et nouvellistes en savent plus que moi’.184 These attempts to ‘expose’ such friendships as base, ‘unnatural’ and ‘a corruption of femininity’ were part of a host of discursive and ideological strategies that sought to undermine the growing influence and solidarity of women in the public sphere.185 Through the array of caustic songs, poems, plays, articles and prints levelled at the princesse de Lamballe and duchesse de Polignac, the two favourites saw their celebrity deteriorate into notoriety. As early as 1783 the Mémoires Secrets noted that within a fresh wave of pamphlets the princesse de Lamballe, the duchesse de Polignac and the comtesse Diane de Polignac were among those most defamed.186 Four years later Thomas Jefferson was amazed to find that, Caracatures [sic], placards, bon mots, have been indulged in by all ranks of people, and I know of no well attested instance of a single punishment. [. . .] the carriage of Madame de (I forget the name) in the queen’s livery was stopped by the populace under a belief that it was Madame de Polignac’s whom they would have insulted, the queen going to the theater at Versailles with Madame de Polignac was received with a general hiss.187

70  Paying Court ‘The Royal Dildo’, published in 1789, had Lamballe in the guise of Hebe to MarieAntoinette’s Juno, acting as procuress for her mistress.188 In La Journée amoureuse ou les derniers plaisirs de Marie-Antoinette, the writer imagines the queen seducing her faithful companion in her cell at the Temple prison and together they denigrate the king and hatch counter-revolutionary plots. One of the accompanying plates illustrates a scene where Lamballe performs a sexual act on the queen with a makeshift ivory dildo (see Figure 2.14). In the apoycryphal 1792 pamphlet ‘Le Testament de la ci-devant Princesse Lamballe’, which purported to be a statement of confession written by the princess while imprisoned in La Force, it was tellingly the princess’s ‘pride’ and ‘ambition’ that were cited as the qualities that had led to her innumerable ‘crimes’.189 In countless pamphlets, Lamballe and Polignac were cast as key instigators or participants in perverse activities and the palace of Versailles was transformed into a bordello or menagerie. An anonymous print appears to link all three women in sexual debauchery (see Figure 2.15). A harlequin, symbolising the disobedient servant or commoner,190 engages in a sexual act with a partially nude woman strongly resembling Marie-Antoinette, whom he holds aloft over his head. On either side of the pair, two female ‘acrobats’ assume provocative positions exposing their breasts and genitals while on the wall behind them are two oval medallions, one depicting an obscene putto. An even more direct attack on the duchesse de Polignac can be found in a print bearing her likeness, lettered ‘M. de Polignac/ Ah! ah! voilà mon portrait’, which was included in the satirical publication, Les Fouteries chantantes, ou Les, Récréations priapiques des Aristocrates en vie, in 1791 (see Figure 2.16). This ‘portrait’ deliberately subverts all the familiar imagery of Vigée Le Brun’s depictions of the duchess. What appears at first to be a view of the duchess shown in profile, looking out of the frame as she was so often shown in her official portraits, is on closer inspection an Arcimboldo-esque trompe-l’oeil puzzle. A series of grotesque distortions are discernible: the duchess’s diadem and chin are composed of phalluses, her forehead comprises a nude female backside and legs and her fur-trimmed décolleté is in fact female genitalia. The favourites of these frequently pornographic caricatures are abominations, the queen’s creatures. In these malevolent hands the two women’s image takes on a second life all the more shocking because of the contrast affected with the composure and correctness of their official representations. These prints, distributed in their hundreds, skewered the popular image both women had striven to project and reveal that the image of the favourite was very seldom separated from that of the monarchs they served. This was compounded by the fact that, understandably, Polignac and Lamballe had chosen to align themselves with the visual programme of the queen in their choice of artist and portrayal. The revolution brought an abrupt end to the princesse de Lamballe’s visual campaign. The queen who had once formed the nucleus of the most glittering court in all of Europe suddenly found herself utterly abandoned by the very people whose favours and privileges she had granted at the cost of her own popularity. From the sidelines, the self-serving agitations of her émigré royal family, whose hasty flight had vastly precipitated events, only plunged the wretched queen and her family into greater peril. The monarchs of Europe, the queen’s brother among them, looked on dispassionately at the unfolding disaster. It was at this moment that the princesse de Lamballe, at great personal risk, returned to Paris leaving her safe place of exile in Aix-la-Chapelle (­modern-day Aachen). Historians continue to debate the motivation

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Figure 2.14 Anonymous, plate 2 from La Journée amoureuse, ou les derniers plaisirs de M. . . . Ant. . . . . . . Comédie en trois actes, en prose, représentée pour la première fois au Temple, le 20 août 1792, etching, Paris, 1792 (private collection) © Ader

for this fatal action. Was this out of genuine friendship and concern for the queen or did she have more mercenary designs: some have argued the princess returned to safeguard her court position and its attendant benefits. Had she underestimated the seriousness of the situation in Paris? This is highly unlikely. When he visited Aix-laChapelle in July 1791, where he saw Lamballe, Gustav III wrote of the atmosphere of despair that pervaded the community of émigrés where massacres and confiscated

© Bibliothèque nationale de France

Figure 2.15 Anonymous, satirical print showing a harlequin figure with three women, Paris, 1780s (Paris: BN)

Figure 2.16 Anonymous caricature of the duchesse de Polignac from, Les Fouteries chantantes, ou Les, Récréations priapiques des Aristocrates en vie, published 1791, etching, 9.5 × 6.5 cm (Paris: BN) © Bibliothèque nationale de France

74  Paying Court assets were the only topics of conversation. They were fully cognisant of the terrifying events unfolding in the capital: news from Paris, he reported, arrived daily.191 The princess’s decision to draw up her will in Aix-la-Chapelle before her return to the capital is further evidence that she was conscious of the very real danger that awaited her. Nor could the fear of loss of face or income have been the driving factor: most of her circle was already in exile and she had her father-in-law’s financial support; he himself had refused to emigrate. The princess’s lady-in-waiting, the marquise de Lâge de Volude, described the princess deliberating over her decision. An oft-quoted letter from Marie-Antoinette that urged the princess to stay in Aix appears to conflict with her later recall of her friend. The princess appears to have prepared for the eventuality that she might return to exile at a later stage, as she left behind a trunk containing clothing and linen.192 Some months later, now ensconced in the Tuileries, the princesse de Lamballe closed a letter to the marquise de Lâge de Volude with the words: ‘Adieu, il faut esperer que des tems [sic] plus heureux nous raprocheront’.193 For the princesse de Lamballe, a sense of honour and duty prevailed. It can only have been that the she felt a moral obligation to provide public support to her friend and mistress. This is confirmed by a moving bequest she made to the queen in her will, in which she pledged, once again, and most emphatically, her devotion. She bequeathed the queen her clock-watch to recall to her their hour of separation and all the many hours they had spent together: Je supplie La Reine de recevoir une marque de reconnaissance de celle à qui Elle avait donné le titre de son amie; Titre précieux qui a fait Bonheur de ma vie et dont je n’ay jamais abusé que pour luy donner des témoignages d’attachement et des preuves de mon sentimen pour sa Personne que j’ay toujours aimée et chérie jusqu’à mon dernier soupir. Thus at length the princesse de Lamballe was returned to Marie-Antoinette’s affections and ultimately would triumph over all other rivals, but as victor she would pay with her life. The duchesse de Polignac, set adrift from the world she had known, would end her days wandering peripatetically from one European court to the next, endeavouring to regain something of her former influence before her premature death at the age of 54 in 1793, just a few months after the execution of her mistress.

2.10 Conclusion The portraits of the princesse de Lamballe produced during her period of favour represent the final flowering of ancien régime court portraiture. During her reign as Surintendante, the princesse de Lamballe commissioned a high number of portraits, extending her patronage to all the leading artists of her period, supporting others who were less well-known and fostering an image of herself as a chaste yet fashionable woman of cultivated tastes. An examination of the role of Surintendante is critical to any interpretation of the mature portraits of the princesse de Lamballe. It is particularly instructive as the princess’s status as a childless widow precluded any recourse to the maternal or dynastic representations that dominated the stratagems of her peers. Lamballe is a rare example of a female courtier who came to be defined by her professional station and cultural activities. While many of her peers

Paying Court 75 privileged style over substance the princess chose an elegant, if surprisingly humble, mode of representation that gave expression to her famed integrity and sense of duty. Excluded from the maternal and spousal imagery of the majority of her circle, she focussed on drawing out her other strengths. Some of her portraits appear to allude to her professional role at court, but they also underscore her interest in enlightenment thought and sensibility, her early support of women artists and an enthusiasm for new directions in portraiture. Within the parameters of social and court etiquette she managed to adopt a startlingly infinite number of guises—the fashionable sophisticate, the professional courtier, the woman of letters or femme savante, the cultivated noble amateur, the surrogate mother and the enlightened woman of sensibility. The sum of these parts is surprisingly rich, particularly when compared with the smaller group of portraits that survive of her great rival, the duchesse de Polignac, which served to highlight all the largely superficial qualities in the sitter that had won her the queen’s attention and friendship. However, both women chose their artists from within the pool of talent amassed and approved by Marie-Antoinette and in both groups of works is discernible the reverence for female friendship and community that characterised their queen’s reign. If Lamballe assumed perhaps an erratic, certainly an incohesive, approach to this visual programme, then the sheer number of portraits executed makes one point patently clear—that the princess believed in the power of her own image. The princesse de Lamballe’s visual campaign may have been successful with MarieAntoinette and her allies, but ironically her professional success would rob her of her favour with the public. The princess’s association with Marie-Antoinette tainted her in the eyes of the French people, and she was among the first of the queen’s circle of intimates to incur the wrath of the revolutionaries. Tragically, the queen to whom this favourite owed her social éclat and prosperity involved her in her own disgrace and ruin. An inventory made of Lamballe’s last few possessions in La Force prison following her death reveals that the princess had somehow managed to retain ‘une grande boite d’ecaille avec un portrait’, though we remain ignorant as to the identity of the sitter.194 When the time came for Marie-Antoinette to be removed to the Conciergerie prison in the weeks preceding her execution the following year in 1793, several small items were found on her person and confiscated. These included locks of her children’s hair, a ring, a small mirror and a miniature of the princesse de Lamballe.195 For MarieAntoinette, of all the hundreds of portraits and miniatures that she had given and received in her eighteen-year reign, it was the image of her favourite and confidante, the princesse de Lamballe, which wrought the greatest power.

Notes 1 Letter from the comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, 7 June 1774, Arneth and Geffroy, Marie-Antoinette, ii, 161 (letter XXVIII). 2 Letter from Mercy to the prince de Kaunitz, Paris, 17th of March 1771, in J. Flammeront (ed.), Corréspondance secrète du comte de Mercy-Argenteau avec l’Empereur Joseph II et le prince Kaunitz (Paris, 1891), vol. II, p. 388. 3 1st Earl Harcourt to William Henry Nassau de Zuylestein, 4th Earl of Rochford (who was Harcourt’s predecessor in Paris, 1766–1768). Paris 29 Jan 1772, NA, SP 78/284. 4 P. J.-J. G. Guyot, Traité des Droits, Fonctions, Franchises, Exemptions, Prérogatives et Privilèges Annexés en France à chaque Dignité, à chaque Office & à chaque État, soit Civil, soit Militaire, soit Ecclésiastique (4 vols., Paris, 1787) ii, p. 245.

76  Paying Court 5 M-C.-C. Pahin de la Blancherie, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres et des Arts, VI (1779), p. 63. 6 M. de Vichy Chamrond, marquise du Deffand and H. Walople, Letters of the Marquise Du Deffand to the Hon. Horace Walpole: afterwards Earl of Orford From the Year 1766 to the Year 1780 (London, 1810), iii, p. 205, Letter CCLXVIII, Dimanche, 9 Mars, 1777. 7 L. Hugues, ‘La famille royale et ses portraitistes sous Louis XV et Louis XVI’, in X. Salmon (ed.), De Soie et Poudre: Portraits de cour dans l’Europe des Lumières (Arles, 2003), pp. 135–175, p. 135. 8 On the princess’s deployment of miniatures see S. Grant, ‘Miniatures of the princesse de Lamballe (1749–1792): the portraits, patronage and politics of a royal favourite’, in B. Pappe, J. Schmieglitz-Otten and G. Walczak (eds.), European Portrait Miniatures: Artists, Functions and Collections (Petersberg, 2014), pp. 52–61. 9 C. Davillier, Le cabinet du duc d’Aumont et les amateurs de son temps (Paris, 1870), p. 77, n. 2. 10 M. Wollstonecraft, Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (London, 1794), p. 77. 11 L-S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam, 1782), iv, pp. 11–13, quoted in L. Horowski, ‘ “Such a Great Advantage for My Son”: Office-Holding and Career Mechanisms at the court of France, 1661–1789’, The Court Historian, 8 (2003), pp. 125–175. 12 H. Schlesinger, La Duchesse de Polignac et son temps (Paris, 1889), p. 38–39. 13 NA SP 78/272/23. 14 AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 3. 15 Pierre-François Cozette after François-Hubert Drouais, Gobelins tapestry portrait of MarieAntoinette, [this version] 1773–1774, Versailles Online catalogue record for MV 8210: http://collections.chateauversailles.fr/#48ca7c5c-d2d3-4ba1-85a8-9c0171fa1743, accessed 11 December 2014. 16 D. de Polignac, Mémoires sur la vie et le caractere de Mme. La duchesse de Polignac (London, 1796), p. 10. 17 X. Salmon (ed.), Marie-Antoinette (Paris, 2008), p. 264. 18 ‘Surintendante’, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th edn (Paris, 1762); Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 5th edn (Paris, 1798). 19 J. F. J. Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 94. 20 Guyot, Traité des Droits, ii, p. 245. 21 A surviving list in the AN: série AE/I: Armoire de fer, carton no.8, cote AE/I/6/6, notice AF-02231. 22 Guyot, Traité des Droits, ii, p. 246, note 1. 23 Ibid., p. 295. 24 Campan, Mémoires sur la vie privée, p. 156. 25 Waddesdon Manor, accession number: 4232.3.15.22. 26 Cited in Burke, ‘Freemasonry, friendship and noblewomen’, p. 292, n. 20. 27 Guyot, Traité des Droits, ii, p. 267. 28 Arnaud, La princesse de Lamballe, p. 162. INHA 5861.364bis, fol. 350–351. The affair was reported in the Journal de Politique et de literature, no. 31, 5 November 1775, tome 3 Brussels, p. 278. Janet Burke touches on this affair citing AN. O1 3791 3 in ‘Freemasonry, friendship and noblewomen’, p. 292, n. 24. 29 AN 300 AP I 893. 30 AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 3. 31 Ill. in N. Lemoine-Bouchard, Les peintres en miniature actifs en France, 1650–1850 (Paris, 2008). Lemoine-Bouchard discusses Campana’s formulaic approach. 32 E. Goodman, The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour (Los Angeles, 2000), p. 14. 33 Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des arts, no. VI, 28 December 1779, pp. 63–64. 34 AST, Mazzo 67. 35 Letter from the King of Sardinia to the comte de Viry, dated January 1774, AST, Mazzo 217. 36 Letter from Joseph II to Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 2 May 1777, O. Bernier, Imperial Mother, Royal Daughter: The Correspondence of Marie Antoinette and Maria Theresa (London, 1986), p. 217.

Paying Court 77 37 Letter from Marie-Antoinette to Maria Theresa, 31 August 1775, Arneth and Geffroy, Marie-Antoinette, Correspondance secrète, ii, p. 375 (letter XL). 38 Letter from the comte de viry, Paris, 6 march 1775, AST, Mazzi 214–222. 39 See the artist’s list of all his works in G. Lyon, Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802): Premier Peintre de Marie-Antoinette Sa Vie—Son Oeuvre (Paris, 1958), pp. 1678–169. 40 A note on the painting’s object file in the Centre de Documentation at Versailles, states, ‘semble avoir été une commande de la maison de Marie-Antoinette’. 41 C. Constans, Château de Versailles: les peintures (Paris, 1995), cat. 764. 42 The portrait is now lost, and its appearance survives only in a 1771 reproductive engraving executed by Charles Eugène Duponchel (1748–1780). 43 P. de Nolhac, ‘Trois Portraits Inédits de Marie-Antoinette’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1909), pp. 121–134, p. 124. 44 Hall, Hall’s Dictionary, p. 268. 45 Nicolas Dupin after Claude-Louis Desrais, plate 309 from the Galerie des Modes showing a woman of quality, ‘Coëffee à la Flore’, c. 1780–1787 (London, V&A). 46 M. Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France 1700–1789 (New Haven; London, 1993), p. 188. 47 Delpierre, Dress in France, p. 83. 48 Lescure gave the time of its enlargement as 1840. A photograph of the portrait published in 1911 shows it still in its enlarged state. Larousse Mensuel Illustré 49 (1911), ii. This is discussed in the portrait’s object file at Versailles. 49 D. Wakefield, French Eighteenth-Century Painting (London, 1984), p. 63. 50 K. Nicholson, ‘Practicing Portraiture: Mademoiselle de Clermont and J.-M. Nattier’, in Hyde and Milam (eds), Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eghteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 64–90. 51 See Goodman for a discussion of the portraits of Mme de Montespan: Goodman, The Portraits, p. 60. 52 Wakefield, French Eighteenth-Century Painting, p. 58. 53 Ibid. 54 Described in J. Vatout’s Notices Historiques sur les tableaux de la Galerie de S.A.R. Mr. le Duc d’Orléans (Paris, 1826), simply as a portrait of the princess, 20 × 17 pouces [inches], ‘En peignoir, Au pastel’, with no attribution given. p. 328, No. 240 ter. 55 4 May 2011 Boisgirard sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris. 56 Diamans de la Reine et de la Princesse de Lamballe, inventory of 21 August 1795, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia and inventories in the AST Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No.s 6, 14 & 27. 57 L. G. Stewarton, The Female Revolutionary Plutarch (London, 1808), iii, p. 28. 58 C. Weber, Queen of Fashion: what Marie Antoinette wore to the revolution (London, 2006), p. 115. 59 Reiset, comte de, Livre-Journal de Madame Éloffe, Marchande de modes, couturière Lingère Ordinaire de La Reine et des Dames de Sa Cour (Paris, 1885), 2 vols, ii, p. 21, 28, 29 60 M. Garland, ‘Rose Bertin: Minister of Fashion’, Apollo (1968), pp. 40–45; p. 41; 43. 61 D. Hosford, ‘The Queen’s Hair: Marie-Antoinette, Politics, and DNA’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (1) (2004), pp. 183–200, 189. 62 Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, p. 278. 63 P. McNeil, ‘Coiffures et postiches: extravagances capillaries au XVIIIe siècle’ in Plein Les Yeux! Le spectacle de la mode (Milan, 2012), pp. 60–65, 61. 64 R. D. de Plinval de Guillebon, Pierre Adolphe Hall, 1739–1793: miniaturiste suédois: Peintre du Roi et des Enfants de France (Paris, 2000), p. 168. 65 Mercure de France, 6 October 1781, p. 18. 66 J. Seznec and Adhémar, Diderot Salons (Oxford, 1973–1984), iv, p. 370. 67 G. Williamson, Catalogue of the Collection of Miniatures, the property of J. Pierpont Morgan; compiled at his request by G. C. Williamson, LITT. D. (4 vol.s, London, 1906–1908). 68 Documentation for the portrait on file with the Mairie de Lamballe. 69 The portrait was purchased by the Municipal Council of the town of Lamballe in 1977, from a descendant of Princess Alice of Bourbon-Parma (1849–1935). Ibid. 70 ‘Memoirs of M. Mosnier Peintre du Roi’, The European Magazine, and London Review, Vol. 23, February 1793, p. 83.

78  Paying Court 71 On Mosnier see G. Walczak, ‘Jean-Laurent Mosnier: Fame, revolution and early exile’, Apollo (2002), pp. 3–11, 3–4. Lamballe’s portrait garners a brief mention in G. Marlier, Les séjours à Londres et à Hambourg du portraitiste Jean-Laurent Mosnier Actes du XIXe Congrès international d’histoire de l’art (Paris, 1958), pp. 405–411. 72 Achat de Diamants à l’occasion du mariage de Madame la Pricesse de Lamballe . . . AN 300 AP I 475. 73 See A.Cavanaugh, ‘The Queen’s Nécessaire’, in A. Cavanugh and M. Yonan (eds.), The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2010), pp. 119–139. 74 Domaine du Château de Seneffe, Collection d’orfèvrerie européene Claude et Juliette d’Allemagne: Volume I: Les objets de la séduction (Brussels, 2004), p. 15. 75 Wintermute, The French Portrait, p. 34. 76 Ex. coll. Famille de Buissy comtesse Boubers-Abbevil-Tunc., sold at auction, Galerie Heim 1956, 0.9 × 0.81 metres. 77 G. A. Johnson, ‘In the Hands of the Beholder: Isabella d’Este and the Sensual Allure of Sculpture’, in A. E. Sanger and S. T. Kulbrandstad Walker (eds.), Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practise (Farnham, 2012), pp. 183–197. 78 J. Simon, ‘The Artist’s Porte-Crayon: A Short Introduction to the History of the PorteCrayon’, October 2012, www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/artists-their-materials-andsuppliers/the-artists-porte-crayon, accessed 25 March 2018. 79 Calendrier pour l’année 1787 à l’usage des élèves qui fréquentent l’école gratuite de dessin (Paris, 1787), p. 3. 80 R. Benhamou, ‘Sociabilité and the écoles de dessin’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 6 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 99–125; R. Benhamou, ‘Public and private art education in France 1648–1793’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 308 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 90–112. 81 C. Crowston, ‘From School to Workshop: Pre-training and Apprenticeship in Old Regime France’, in B. de Munck, S. L. Kaplan and H. Soly (eds.), Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship (2007), pp. 46–64, p. 58; Benhamou, ‘Sociabilité’, pp. 112–118 and U. Leben, trans. S. Grevet, Object Design in the Age of Enlightenment: The History of the Royal Free Drawing School in Paris (Los Angeles, 2004). 82 Thieme and Becker, ‘Taveau, Pierre’, Allgemeines Lexicon, xxxii, p. 482. 83 The British Mercury Or Annals of History, Politics, Manners. . ., 19 November 1787, vol. 3, no. 8, p. 253. In Alfred de Vigny’s 1835 novel, Servitude et grandeur militaires (Paris, 1965 [1835]), the princesse de Lamballe’s character is described painting miniatures, pp. 102–103. 84 X. Salmon, Créer au féminin. Femmes artistes du siècle de Madame Vigée Le Brun (Tokyo, 2011), p. 209. 85 The feathers are mentioned in AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 6. Her seals appear on a variety of letters and those in gold ink are in the collections of Houghton Library, Harvard University. 86 I thank Mrs Diane Clement of the Alpine Garden Society for her identification of this flower. 87 E. Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 198. 88 Ibid. 89 See D. Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca and London, 2009). S. Chadenet (ed.), trans. J. Goodman, French furniture from Louis XIII to Art Deco (Boston, New York and London, 2001), p. 87. 90 Ibid., D. Goodman, p. 120. 91 Ibid., p. 241. 92 See AN F/17/263 108 & 118. 93 Letter from Théobald René de Kergariou-Locmaria, comte de Kergariou-Locmaria to Anne Achille Alexandre Blondel, chevalier de Nouainville’, 8 March 1781. Electronic Enlightenment. 94 Bibliothèque de l’Académie Nationale de Médecine (Paris, SRM 100dossier 27, no.s 2–3). 95 J. G. Meusel, Miscellaneen artistischen Innhalts herausgegeben von Johann Georg Meusel (Erfurt, 1786) xxix, p. 315. 96 ‘Hickel’, G. K. Nagler, Neues Allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon (22 vols., Leipzig, 1838), vi, p. 172.

Paying Court 79 97 Obituary published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, London, 1799, vol. 85, p. 441. 98 Goodman, The Portraits, p. 1. 99 Ibid, p. 3. 100 Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des arts, no. 27, 17 August 1779, p. 213. 101 The ‘Royalists to Romantics’ exhibition catalogue notes ‘That the first painting Lemoine exhibited was a portrait (untraced) of the princesse de Lamballe’, the description of the portrait in the salon literature confirms it is this portrait, which recently came on the market. 102 Blanc, Portraits de femmes, p. 198; Royalists to Romantics, p. 95. 103 M.-C.-C. Pahin de la Blancherie, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres et des Arts, VI, Paris, 28 December 1779, p. 64. 104 Cat. no. 240: ‘de la princesse de Lamballe, par Mlle. Victoire Lemoine’, and 240. 30: ‘Idem, Idem’, Galeries des Tableaux De Son Altesse Royale Monseigneur Le Duc D’Orléans, Au Palais-Royal, Manuel de l’amateur des arts de Paris (Paris, 1825), p. 144. 105 Angelica Kauffman may also have painted the princess. 106 The portrait is reproduced in Passez’s catalogue raisonné as a ‘portrait présumé de la Princesse de Lamballe’, cat. 50, plate XXXIX. Cat. 63 is a portrait of a woman with a child on her lap, previously thought to depict the princesse de Lamballe. A M. Passez, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard 1749–1803. Biographie et Catalogue Raisonné de son Œuvre (Paris, 1971). 107 This miniature and its relationship to the painting are discussed in C. Marcheteau de Quinçay (ed.), Marie-Gabrielle Capet (1761–1818): une virtuose de la miniature (Ghent, 2014), no. 8. 108 Recorded in the Getty Provenance Index. 109 M-J. Bonnet, Liberté, égalité, exclusion: Femmes peintres en Révolution 1770–1804 (Paris, 2012), p. 8. 110 Hyde, ‘Women and the Visual Arts in the Age of Marie-Antoinette’, p. 80. 111 Bonnet, Liberté, égalité, Exclusion, p. 11. 112 Ibid. 113 Bertin, Madame de Lamballe, p. 111. She first signed the minutes as soeur princesse de Lamballe in 1778. 114 The 10th of January 1781. Bertin points out that Empress Josephine later held this same post. Ibid., p. 121, p. 124. 115 Bertin, for example, credits her involvement to the princess’s ‘lively imagination’ and as if to excuse it, states, ‘Elle n’avait fait, du reste, en agissant ainsi, que suivre l’exemple donné par presque tout son entourage’. Ibid., p. 114. 116 Burke, ‘Princesses of the Blood and Sisters in Masonry’, p. 3. 117 Ibid. 118 Burke, ‘Freemasonry, Friendship and Noblewomen’, p. 284. 119 M. C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991); Ibid. 120 Burke, ‘Freemasonry, Friendship and Noblewomen’, p. 290. 121 Ibid., p. 291, n. 18. 122 On the Hôtel-Dieu see R. Bigo, ‘Aux Origines du Mont-de-Piété parisien: bienfaisance et crédit (1777–1789), annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 4 (14) (1932), pp. 113–126, 114. 123 Gazette anecdotique, littéraire, artistique et bibliographie, 2(15) (1890), p. 85. 124 The verses are published in Bertin, Madame de Lamballe, p. 105, 106. 125 Ibid., p. 118. 126 J. Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York, 1986), p. 110. 127 Ibid., p. 4. 128 C. L. Johnson, Rev. ‘Sensibility: An Introduction. by Janet Todd’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22 (1) (1988), pp. 111–113, 112. 129 Todd, Sensibility, p. 18. 130 Etat Des Livres qui Composent La Bibliotheque De S.A.S. Madame La Princesse de Lamballe Dans Son Appartement A Paris Fait en Aoust 1785’, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, Ms 4258, p. 141. 131 Ill. A. de Herdt and L. de La Rochefoucauld, Louis-Auguste Brun, 1758–1815: Catalogue des peintures et dessins (Geneva, 1986), no. 68.

80  Paying Court 132 J. Martin, Œuvre de J.-B. Greuze Catalogue raisonné (Paris, 1908), cat. 1189, 1202. 133 Inv no. GK 918. My thanks to Sylvia Böhmer, Kuratorin Gemäldesammlung, SuermondtLudwig-Museum, Aachen. 134 T. Potter (ed.), Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century (Toronto, 2014), p. 153. 135 Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, p. 282. 136 J. Baillio, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun 1755–1842 (Fort Worth, 1982), p. 6. 137 E. Zafran (ed.), Renaissance to Rococo: Masterpieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 150. 138 Recorded under the year 1781: ’3 Princess Lamballe’, E. Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth VigéeLebrun, Memoirs of a Painter: An extraordinary life before, during and after the French Revolution (Coventry, 2009), p. 219. 139 This series and the salon incident have been much discussed by art historians, most recently in P. Gorguet Ballesteros, ‘Entre réalité et fiction, les choix vestimentaires de Mme Vigée Le Brun’, and Baillio and Salmon, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, pp. 47–52. 140 Juliette Trey’s commentary on the painting in her 2011 acquisition proposal, object file, Versailles Centre de Documentation; ‘The Portraits of Marie Louise Josephine de Savoie, Comtesse de Provence (1753–1810), entry prepared by P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. Ltd., London, January, 1999 for N. Jeffares, ‘The Art of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun 1755–1842’ www.batguano.com/cdeprovence.html consulted 21 September 2014. 141 Ibid. (P. & D. Colnaghi, 1999). 142 The picture was sold with the prince’s other effects in a sale held in Paris, 2–7 April 1845, lot no. 40, Ibid. 143 Baillio, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, p. 46; C. Jones, The Smile Revolution in EighteenthCentury Paris (Oxford, 2014), p. 2. 144 Ibid., Jones, p. 2; p. 11. 145 Ibid. 146 AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581. 147 The two women are listed as her sole ladies-in-waiting in a list of her salaried staff dated 1792. In return for their service the two women were paid 750 livres a month. AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1. 148 Ill. in H. de Reinach-Foussemagne, Une Fidèle: la Marquise de Lage de Volude, 1764– 1842 (Paris, 1908). 149 F. del Tal, ‘Alexandre Couaski’, Gazette des beaux-arts, XIX, 1865, p. 284, quoted in N. Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online edition, ‘Kucharski, Alexandre’, accessed 12 December 2014. 150 J. Belleudy, J.-S. Duplessis: peintre du roi, 1725–1802 (Chartres, 1913), p. 84. 151 See Chapter 3 for discussion of an English source for this work. 152 J. Milam, ‘Matronage and the Direction of Sisterhood: Portraits of Madame Adélaïde, in Hyde and Milam, Women, Art and the Politics, pp. 115–138. 153 Ibid, p. 115. 154 Trey, Madame Élisabeth, p. 42. 155 Ibid., p. 46. 156 Journal of Elizabeth, Lady Foster, British Library, Add Mss, 41.579. Entries for 1788– 1789, p. 25. 157 Poliganc, Mémoires sur la vie, p. 5. 158 Ibid., p. 8. 159 Letter from the comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, 17 September 1776, Arneth and Geffroy, Marie-Antoinette, Correspondance Secrète, ii, p. 490 (letter XL). 160 Letter from Greve Gustaf Filip Creutz to Gustav III of Sweden, Stockholm, Sunday 30 November 1783. Electronic Enlightenment. 161 In her history of the Paris Salons, the duchesse d’Abrantès put it best when she concluded, ‘Mme la comtesse, depuis duchesse de Polignac, était une personne parfaitement faite pour plaire à Marie-Antoinette’, L. P. Junot, duchesse d’ Abrantès, Histoire des salons de Paris Tableaux et Portraits du Grand Monde (Paris, 1837), ii, p. 206. 162 X. Salmon, Un chef-d’oeuvre d’Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun entre en dation au château de Versailles: La duchesse de Polignac au chapeau de paille, La Revue du Louvre et des Musees de France, 48 (3) (1998), pp. 13–14; Salmon, Marie-Antoinette, cat. 212.

Paying Court 81 63 The bust ill. in Blanc, Portraits de femmes, p. 247. 1 164 S. Lloyd, The Life and Art of Richard Cosway R.A. (1742–1821) and Maria Cosway (1760–1838), DPhil thesis, Oxford, University of Oxford, 1995, vol. 1, p. 156. 165 There exists however an anonymous eighteenth-century French print in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., (unphotographed) catalogued as ‘The Royal Children and Duchesse de Polignac?’, hand-coloured stipple engraving with gold leaf on satin, Wiedener Collection 1942.9.1684. 166 L.-H., Campan, Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette, reine de France et de Navarre, 2nd edn (3 vols., Paris, 1823), p. 165. 167 Guyot, Traité des Droits, ii, p. 245. 168 Letter from Mercy to Maria Theresa, 17 December 1775, Arneth and Geffroy, MarieAntoinette, Corréspondance secrète, ii, p. 407 (letter LIII). 169 See Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs, pp. 318–319 and Genlis, Mémoires inédits, pp. 283–285 and P. M. J. Courchamps, Souvenirs de la marquise de Créquy (Paris, 1840), p. 234 on Polignac and Lamballe respectively. 170 Letter from Mercy to Maria Theresa, 15 November 1775, Arneth and Geffroy, MarieAntoinette, Corréspondance secrète, ii, p. 397 (letter XLIX). 171 Letter from the comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, 16 May 1776, ibid., p. 445 (letter XVI). 172 Letter from the comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, 17 January 1778, ibid., iii, p. 156 (letter IV). 173 J. Adolphus, Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (London, 1799), i, p. 104. 174 V. Cameron, ‘Gender and Power: Images of Women in Late 18th-century France’, History of European Ideas, 10 (3) (1989), pp. 309–332. 175 P. Conisbee, Painting in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981), p. 138. 176 J. Baillio, ‘Marie-Antoinette et ses enfants par Mme Vigee-Lebrun’, L’Oeil, 308 (1981), pp. 34–41; 74–75 and L’Oeil, 310 (1981), pp. 53–60; 90–91. 177 S. Siegfried, ‘Femininity and the Hybridity of Genre Painting’, in P. Conisbee (ed.), French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century (Washington, DC, 2007), pp. 14–37. See also C. Duncan, “Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth Century’, Art Bulletin, 55 (4) (1973), pp. 570–583; E. Lajer-Burcharth, ‘Genre and Sex’, Studies in the History of Art, Symposium Papers XLIX: French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century, 72 (2007), pp. 200–219. 178 De Vichy Chamrond, Letters of the Marquise Du Deffand, iii, p. 236. 179 M. D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 44. 180 Arneth and Geffroy, Marie-Antoinette, Correspondance Secrète, iii, p. 475. 181 W. R. Newton, Vivre à Versailles: Derrière la façade, la vie quotidienne au château (Paris, 2014), p. 12. 182 J. de Saint-Rémy de Valois, comtesse de La Motte, Second mémoire justificatif de la comtesse de Valois de la Motte; écrit par elle-même (London, 1789), p. 50. 183 Schlesinger, La Duchesse de Polignac, p. 133. 184 Letter from Marie-Antoinette to Maria Theresa, 13 April 1780, Arneth and Geffroy, Marie-Antoinette, Correspondance Secrète, iii, p. 418 (letter XXX). 185 C. Roulston, ‘Separating the Inseparables: Female Friendship and Its Discontents in EighteenthCentury France’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (2) (1998–1999), pp. 215–231, p. 216. 186 Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, xx, p. 192. 187 Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, Paris, 30 August 1787, http://founders. archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0075 188 Le Godmiché Royal, Paris, 1789, reproduced in Thomas, The Wicked Queen, pp. 191–201. 189 Anonymous, Le Testament De La Ci-Devant Princesse Lamballe, écrit De Sa Main, Pendant Son séjour Dans La Prison De La Force (Paris, 1792). 190 L. Lawner, Harlequin on the moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts (New York, 1998), p. 70. 191 Letter from Gustav III, King of Sweden, to Charles XIII, King of Sweden. Aix-la-Chapelle, Thursday 14 July 1791. Electronic Enlightenment. 192 AST, Categ. 107, mazzo 1, No. 2.

82  Paying Court 193 Letter from the princesse de Lamballe to the marquise de Lâge de Volude, Paris, 29 December 1791, Livres, Pierre Bergé & Associés, Paris, 16 December 2008, lot 61. 194 ‘État de la Garderobe des Bijoux, et effets appartenant à Madame la Princesse de Lamballe restés aux Thuilleries—à la Prison de la Force—à Aix la Chapelle’. AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo I, No. 14. 195 Procès criminel de Marie-Antoinettte de Lorraine, Archiduchesse d’Autriche (Paris, 1794), pp. 73–74.

3 The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe Portraits, Prints, Gardens and Anglomania at the Court of Marie-Antoinette 3.1 Introduction The reign of Marie-Antoinette witnessed a social, cultural and artistic rapprochement between France and Britain that was entirely without precedent. These were two nations divided by more than just a body of water; diametrically and defiantly opposed to each other they diverged in landscape, population, government, temperament and in their schools of painting and portraiture. Though the two countries were at war intermittently throughout the century, a series of complex factors that included the spread of enlightenment thought, the rise of correspondence caused by higher rates of literacy and developments in the postal system,1 and improvements in travel networks all converged in the second half of the century to produce optimum conditions for the English and the French to cross the Channel and experience one another’s worlds. For Britons, who could not reach the continent without first passing through France, this was admittedly inevitable, but for the French, possessed of no obvious motivation to travel North in times of peace, this was more exceptional. The answer lies, as Philip Mansel explains, in the cosmopolitan commonality of their two great capitals: London and Paris were the only cities in western Europe which shared proximity, a wealthy and cultivated nobility and commercial class, and status as royal capitals. They were bound to attract each other. Each became the natural model for, alternative to and refuge from the other.2 Still more extraordinary was the sympathetic elite community that sprang up between the travelling members of the English ‘Ton’ and key members of the French court. Neither Marie-Antoinette nor Queen Charlotte would set foot outside their kingdoms from the moment of their respective marriages, but their courtiers and subjects did. In England, these foreign visitors elicited an intense fascination. Not only was this a time when the French were still received in England as something of an exotic curiosity, but the size and spectacle of these travelling court entourages and the showy receptions they prompted from the resident royal family and aristocracy brought all the gilded grandeur of the French court to British shores. The princesse de Lamballe, as head of the queen’s household, was, with the exception of the duc d’Orléans, the highest ranking French courtier of Louis XVI’s court ever to have visited England. As one of Marie-Antoinette’s closest friends and arguably her personal emissary and agent, her arrival could be, and very likely was, interpreted as the closest approximation to a state visit from the Queen of France herself.

84  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe The princess made two visits to England, in 1787 and 1791, the first lasting three months. These two journeys, when French Anglomania was at its height, cast an entirely new and significant light on the princess’s previously unknown anglophile interests, which can be seen to have formed an important aspect of her patronage and collecting. Her first visit in particular reinforced and influenced her already substantive taste for English culture. The English gardens she had landscaped at Rambouillet and Passy, her adoption of English fashions and her acquisition and display of English prints were all interests that, as will be shown, she shared with MarieAntoinette. Moreover, the princess’s reception in England and the overwhelming fascination in her person, help us to more fully understand her exceptional status and international reputation as a social phenomenon. These travels also document her concerted efforts to enlarge her society and forge new connections and contacts within the apex of the Georgian Beau Monde, relationships she hoped would bring her significant political and social gains, and as such are continued evidence of the patent ambition documented in preceding chapters. Moreover, the artistic legacy that resulted from these voyages—and within a broader context the portraits commissioned by both sides of this short-lived yet select Anglo-French society—reveal that despite obvious political tensions, a growing mutual appreciation and a closer conflation of ideologies or shared principles existed between the two schools of painting that served these nations more than has previously been supposed. This was eased by the period’s gradual relaxation in portraiture conventions and not only stimulated but greatly facilitated by the flourishing trade, on both sides of the Channel, in French and English portrait prints.

3.2  The 1787 ‘Grand Tour’ of the Princesse de Lamballe The 1780s was a decade that saw a marked increase in cross-Channel travel. For the first time, the French aristocracy began to travel to England in considerable numbers, driven by a curiosity to visit the largest and most modern city in all of Europe, its geographical location also providing welcome distance and respite from the formalities and constraints of their own court.3 For women courtiers especially, admission to English society brought a refreshing relaxation of etiquette and not a little freedom; in Europe, English women were famed for their public independence.4 Language was no barrier to high-born and well-educated English women and men who spoke French and increasingly, the French aristocracy demonstrated their elevated status by learning English. The duc de Liancourt, Louis XVI’s master of the wardrobe, dispatched his son, François de la Rochefoucauld, later a friend of the princesse de Lamballe’s,5 on a ‘Grand Tour’ of England in 1785 ‘to learn the language and to complete his general education’.6 The young Frenchman recorded the many curiosities he encountered in his journal, but he was also surprised to find how much the two nations had in common. During his visit to England in 1790, the baron de Grimm (1723–1807), the duc d’Orléans’s private secretary and a friend of Diderot’s, discovered to his astonishment that the two warring nations shared ‘deux peuples dont les intérêts et les goûts paraissent aujourd’hui si disposés à se conflater’.7 Throughout this period there existed a mutual appreciation of each country’s great scientists, writers and philosophers—Isaac Newton, John Locke, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Lawrence Sterne and Samuel Richardson in France; Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot in England. In France the enthusiasm for all things Anglo was even displayed by the monarch himself: Louis XVI spoke

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 85 good English and his favourite book was David Hume’s magnum opus, The History of England, (1754–1761), which Marie-Antoinette also read.8 The first prominent member of Marie-Antoinette’s court to make the journey was the committed Anglophile and brother-in-law to the princesse de Lamballe, the duc de Chartres, in 1783, but it was the duchesse de Polignac who was the first of the queen’s close friends to cross the Channel, in the spring of 1787. Having resigned from her post as Gouvernante des Enfants de France ostensibly due to illness,9 she came to England with her daughter to take the waters as a cure and her visit was eagerly anticipated by London society. She was entertained by the Duchess of Devonshire and attended a splendid reception given in her honour by George III and Queen Charlotte at Windsor.10 It was also on the grounds of taking the waters that the duchess’s rival, the princesse de Lamballe, also made her first visit to England that summer, though we know that she did in fact have an established and longstanding medical condition and cures were in any case a fashionable and diverting entertainment.11 Her arrival caused a sensation, sending the English press into a frenzy and setting all the ‘Ton’ a-chatter. Every activity she engaged in was scrutinised and her progress from city to city followed by the journals of the day. For like the duc d’Orléans and the duchesse de Polignac before her, whose scandals preceded them, the princesse de Lamballe was already well known to the English aristocracy and the general public. From the first mention of the princess in the English press in 1766 reporting her forthcoming marriage to the prince de Lamballe12 the public was kept systematically apprised of all her social conquests and misfortunes: details of the proxy wedding ceremony; the princess’s arrival in France; the shocking death of her new husband; her participation in court ceremonies; and more generally her growing stature at court and blossoming friendship with Marie-Antoinette were all faithfully chronicled. The princess’s exploits reached a wide readership in Britain: the English were known throughout Europe for their high levels of literacy and by the 1770s there existed nine daily newspapers in the capital and fifty provincial papers, in all totalling over 12 million sales per annum.13 Having survived the Channel crossing from Calais, a notoriously unpredictable, occasionally treacherous journey of ten to twelve hours, the princess landed at Dover in great style, flanked by a forty-strong retinue of ladies-in-waiting and attendants.14 From here the princess went on by coach, finally arriving in London on the 10th of July 1787 where she took up residence in the very heart of the city at Grenier’s Hotel on Jermyn Street.15 The New London Magazine took advantage of this maiden visit to publish a profile in its pages entitled the ‘Character of the Princess De Lamballe’. Readers were reminded of the princess’s prominence and influence at the French court and her coveted status as ‘bosom friend of the amiable Queen of France’.16 Lamballe’s presence in the city was considered by many to be the event of the season and became the subject of constant comment, leaving those of the Beau Monde who were not admitted to her company feeling slighted. George Montagu announced in a letter to Horace Walpole that the Princesse de Lamballe had arrived in London ‘with her suite’. Walpole had observed the princess at a ball at Versailles in 1775 but he feigned little interest in this news and then remarked sourly to Henry Seymour Conway, ‘The Princess de Lamballe is arrived, dont je me soucie aussi peu que de Madame la Duchesse de Polignac—unless she wants to come and see my house, and for that I shall soucie myself most unwillingly’. He repeated this sentiment to the

86  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe Earl of Strafford and then again to Lady Ossory: ‘I have seen none of the French, Savoyard or Lorrain princes and princesses, sterling or pinchbeck [pinchbeck being imitation gold]’.17 A few days after the princess’s arrival in London, a grand rout was held for her by Sir Peter Burrell (1754–1820), the Lord Chamberlain and Member of Parliament, at his house in Whitehall.18 Burrell’s wife was a very wealthy heiress in her own right, enabling him to keep ‘the best table in town’19 and the rout would have been an opportunity for elite Georgian society to observe the French princess at close proximity in a convivial context with much dancing and gambling. On the 21st of July the Gentleman’s Magazine noted in its ‘Domestic Occurrences’ pages that, The Princess of Lambelle [sic], with her Suite, accompanied by the Dutchess of Devonshire, Lady Duncannon, and other ladies of distinction, conducted by his Grace the Duke of Richmond, the principal officers of artillery, and others of high rank; and attended by Sir Peter Burrel, and other gentlemen of fortune, known to her Highness abroad, visited the Royal Academy, and was present at a field-day of the royal artillery at Woolwich [. . .] and from thence went to the dock-yard, where the Prince man of war, a new ship of 90 guns, just ready to launch, was honoured with their company. Her Highness expressed the highest admiration at everything shewed her in that magnificent ship.20 Following this outing clearly devised by the hosts to signal to their French guests the superiority of the British Navy, and in recognition of her father-in-law’s position as Grand Admiral of France, the party adjourned to Burrell’s house for a dinner ‘with most of the nobility in town’.21 That Wednesday the princess, ‘Supped with their Majesties at Kew’, her introduction to George III and Queen Charlotte made by Mary Panton, the Duchess Dowager of Ancaster, who was the queen’s Mistress of the Robes and thus Lamballe’s English counterpart.22 The royal couple knew the princess’s history and were in contact with the princess’s father-in-law, the duc de Penthièvre, who had written to George III, as was the convention, on both the occasion of his mother’s death and the marriage of the prince de Lamballe.23 On Saturday of the same week, the Duke of Queensberry gave ‘a sumptuous dinner to the Princesse de Lamballe’,24 whereafter she departed London for Tunbridge Wells25 and Brighton26 where she joined her sister-in-law, the princesse de Carignan (Marie Joséphine Thérèse de Lorraine, princesse de Carignan, 1753–1797), to whom the princess was very close (she remembered her prominently in her will).27 Brighton being the unofficial seat of the Prince of Wales, there was of course a reception planned for Lamballe but the sudden return of the prince’s brother after a long absence abroad halted proceedings.28 From Brighton the princess wrote to her friend and lady-in-waiting, the marquise de Lâge de Volude, informing her of the hectic pace she was maintaining and her plans to visit Blenheim Palace and stop in the cities of Oxford and Bath, all the while viewing country houses along the way. Mes bains me font un bien extrême, ma chère petite. Je partirai d’ici dimanche prochain pour Blenheim, Oxford, Bath et différentes maisons de campagne que je verrai sur ma route. Si vous m’écrivez, vous adresserez vos lettres à Londres, où je ne serai que le deux ou trois mois prochain. Comme je courrai beaucoup d’ici là, vos lettres pourroient se perdre. Je vous manderai de Londres le jour de

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 87 mon retour, attendu que je serai enchantée, ma petite, de vous revoir et de vous embrasser.29 The princess’s reference to visiting country houses is a significant one, for this was a time when domestic tourism of stately homes was at its peak, and this casual statement confirms that these were sites of interest for French tourists also. What began in the 1720s as a pleasant diversion driven by mere curiosity had in the 1780s assumed a far more academic purpose—such visits had become a demonstration of ‘a desire to participate in the critical appraisal of the country house and its contents as a means of expressing status’.30 For the princess this would have been an enjoyable pursuit, particularly given her interest in collectors’ cabinets, pictures and objets d’art. England’s stately homes were arguably the nation’s finest treasure houses, ‘a benchmark of architectural production and an emblem of a distinctive social system’, as well as highly individual dynastic showcases.31 At once a backdrop to and purveyor of English identity, they attracted the best society from London and across the country, functioning as satellite courts with their own ‘political, economic and cultural milieu’.32 Through her tours of these houses the princess would have both expressed and consolidated her interest in English art and culture. In their expansive parklands she strolled the very same English gardens she had tried to imitate at Rambouillet and went on to recreate a second time at her house in Passy four years later. Here too she would have encountered a wealth of English portraits, the focal point of any country house where a hall, gallery or other form of reception room was given over to this sequential display of dynastic power and continuity. Blenheim Palace was considered one of the highlights of this circuit (along with Houghton, Holkham and Stowe); the year before Lamballe’s visit Sir Joshua Reynolds described Blenheim and Sir John Vanbrugh’s other masterpiece, Castle Howard, as ‘some of the fairest ornaments which to this day decorate [England]’.33 That the French elite visited in significant numbers is indicated by the publication of a French edition of William Mavor’s New Description of Blenheim, from about 1789.34 Lamballe would undoubtedly have been curious to see the Duke of Marlborough’s famous landscape garden, created by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783). This discovery of English country houses occasioned in the French a revival of interest in their own stately homes. Writing in 1787 in his ‘Travels in France’, Arthur Young remarked, The present fashion in France, of passing some time in the country, is new . . . Everybody that have country seats are at them; and those who have none visit others who have. This remarkable revolution in the French manner is certainly one of the best customs they have taken from England; and its introduction was effected the easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau’s writings.35 Rousseau’s enormously popular epistolary novel, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a tale of virtuous yet frustrated love couched in the language of high sentiment won French readers over to the activities of its protagonists who promenaded gardens, verdant bowers, mountains and woods.36 Lamballe was very likely also interested in these English estates as the ritual sites of aristocratic hunts. Her own native House of Savoy was synonymous with hunting, the Piedmont region being rich in suitable terrain and prey. Royal hunting parties were a key tool in the arsenal of propaganda employed by Lamballe’s family who saw in

88  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe these spectacles an opportunity to press their political advantage through the display of sporting prowess.37 Their many ornate country palaces were specifically designed to host these events. At Stupinigi, just outside Turin, where Lamballe would have spent many months of her childhood, visitors were greeted by the bronze statue of an enormous stag and the theme and iconography of hunting, so central to the decoration this palace, continue in each richly painted interior. Lamballe’s father, the prince de Carignan, was so earnest in his mastery of this pursuit that he had his horse and hounds sent over to Turin from England.38 In France this royal tradition continued to bear significance for the princess it being Louis XVI’s favourite pursuit and both her late husband and father-in-law having been distinguished with the position of the king’s Grand Veneur. No tour of England was considered complete without a visit to either Oxford or Cambridge. In 1785 François de la Rochefoucauld journeyed to Cambridge to view ‘the colleges and beautiful buildings’.39 Travelling the decade before, the American Quaker Jabez Maud Fisher described Oxford as the ‘Most magnificent Town in England. The great Number of superb Buildings, elegant and Beautiful Houses contribute to make its appearance particularly grand and majestic’.40 Fisher was overcome by the majesty of Blenheim’s prospect proclaiming, Here is the most magnificent Palace in Great Britain, belonging to the Duke of Marlborough. The Park is quite an Elysium, finely watered, a noble Bridge across it and a number of Boats plying to and fro, full of Swans and Duck. A fine extensive View with beautiful Verdure, clusters of Trees, a multitude of Deer, a fine Column with a beautiful Image on the Top; in Short the whole Scene is amazingly fine.41 In early September the princess returned to Brighton where on the 9th she paraded the Steine with the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and Mrs Fitzherbert.42 Later in the month she arrived at Bath, travelling incognito as the comtesse d’Amboise and still trailed by her large retinue including her ladies-in-waiting the comtesse de Ginestous and the marquise de Las-Cases, to which the company of the duc d’Orléans (the duc de Chartres had now succeeded to his father’s title) would soon be added.43 In Hampshire the princess visited Broadlands,44 Lord Palmerston’s seat near Romsey where Capability Brown had refaced the house in the Palladian style and completely redesigned the surrounding parkland ‘evoking a Claudian setting’.45 In October Lamballe was reported as having viewed ‘Lord Spencer’s collection’. This could either have been at Spencer House, the relatively new addition to London’s assemblage of great houses and childhood residence of the Duchess of Devonshire, or Althorp, famed for its holdings of over 400 paintings with the greatest European masters from Rembrandt to Rubens all represented along with a fine collection of drawings and sculpture.46 These lavish interiors were the site of many elegant entertainments during The Season and the Spencers received the country’s most eminent artists, politicians, scholars and other figures of repute.47 At one of these residences, ‘Lady Lucan’s fine miniature production [. . .] was particularly noticed by the Princess de Lamballe, who herself excels in this delicate species of painting’.48 The 2nd Earl Spencer was the Duchess of Devonshire’s brother, and Lady Spencer (sister to the same Margaret Bingham, Lady Lucan) was well known to the princess from her visits to Paris and Versailles. While visiting Cambridge where she toured the university, the princess, who had reportedly told her British friends that she intended to remain in the country until Christmas,

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 89 ‘received letters of recall’ and so returned to London to prepare for her departure.49 In the capital Lamballe paid a final visit to George III and Queen Charlotte at Kew Palace. A London journal observed, ‘nor did that distinguished character omit paying our amiable Queen some very handsome compliments on her Majesty’s drawings at Kew’.50 Finally, on the 11th of October after a three-month sojourn and exhaustive Anglo ‘Grand Tour’, the princess and her suite left their rooms at the Royal Hotel in Jermyn Street and embarked on their journey home.51

3.3  English Portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe Towards the beginning of her stay, on the 30th of July, it was reported in The Times that, ‘The Princess de Lamballe sat to Mr. Cosway, the day previous to her departure for Tunbridge:—The picture, it is said, is intended for the Prince of Wales’.52 Richard Cosway and his wife, Maria, were then the most fashionable portrait painters in London; not only was Cosway official painter to the Prince of Wales but he was also a noted favourite of the influential Duchess of Devonshire, who had been his first important patron. The couple cultivated a French clientele and Maria Cosway counted the painter Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) and antiquarian baron d’Hancarville (1719–1805) among her friends, the latter playing a pivotal role in promoting the couple’s reputation among the Paris elite.53 Their well-appointed house in London was the setting for a series of stylish soirées attended by many of the French who passed through the city. The year before Lamballe sat for her portrait, Cosway had been invited to Paris to execute a portrait of the children of the duc d’Orléans (Musée Condé, Chantilly).54 The duke himself was also portrayed by Cosway in a fulllength portrait in 1788 in which he appeared attired fancifully in renaissance dress. The picture is now lost but known through a reproductive stipple etching published the same year (London: British Museum). Other famous French sitters captured by Cosway during this period included the comtesse de Pérégord and her daughter; Madame du Barry; Madame de Polès; Madame de la Salle; members of the queen’s circle such as the comtesse de Vaudreuil; and perhaps most significantly, two of the queen’s closest friends, the princesse de Tarente and the duchesse de Polignac.55 Cosway’s 1786 portrait of the duchesse de Polignac shows the sitter seated in an armchair next to a vase of flowers rendered with all the virtues of the artist’s romantic style and light touch.56 One might venture that in his ability to beautify his female sitters, casting over them a veil of soft and understated gentility, Cosway was an English approximation of the duchess’s favourite French artist, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; both painters professed an admiration for Rubens. A second portrait of the duchess,57 which might have been executed in either Paris or London, again conforms to the wispy, romantic format of the artist’s works in pencil. The sitter is shown demurely dressed in a fichu, lace cap and hoop earrings. There is not, however, a great resemblance between the two portraits, and the figure in the smaller portrait is far from the elegant beauty shown in the first. One’s inclination is therefore to propose that the smaller of the two is in fact a portrait of the duchess’s sister-in-law, the comtesse Diane de Polignac (1746–c. 1818), who was once cruelly described by a contemporary as ‘laide comme une singe, dont elle avait la physionomie vive et maligne’.58 It is to miniatures of an equivalent date, however, such as those of the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Foster and Madame du Barry, that we must look for guidance

90  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe on the composition of Lamballe’s portrait which, like so many other pictures of the princess, has unhappily disappeared. Gerald Barnett noted in his biography on Richard and Maria Cosway the presence of an unfinished miniature of the princess in a 1953 Christie’s sale catalogue,59 but this is the sole mention of this portrait in the literature on both artists. The lot was described in the sale catalogue as ‘Portrait of Princesse de Lamballe, by R. Cosway, nearly full-face, her head inclined to her left shoulder—unfinished—oval, 21/4 in. high’. 60 The auction house’s original annotated copy of this catalogue discloses the identity of the consignor as Kay & Foley Ltd., a commercial printing firm.61 The miniature was bought in and so consequently re-entered into a second sale a few months later where it sold for 17 guineas to a Mrs Griffiths, an unidentified collector who purchased a number of other miniatures at the same sale.62 One might well ask why the princess, and other visiting French dignitaries, chose to commission portraits from British artists during their stay when there existed such a distinguished tradition of portraiture in their native country. British painters, on the whole, did not enjoy a reputation for talent or genius in France and there was afterall, widespread if resigned acceptance in Britain at this time of the cultural ascendancy of the French School. The Académie Royale was founded in 1648, but British artists would have to wait an extraordinary 120 years before its counterpart, the Royal Academy, was established in 1768. French artists had for many years derived significant advantages from their academy system, not least the visible support and patronage of the king, but also a consistent curriculum enabling them to refine their technique with the opportunity to exhibit in the famous salons where they could expect to win patrons. From 1737 the salons were held at regular intervals, usually every two years. The vein of art criticism that developed in response to these gave cogency and force to the Parisian public’s engagement with art that was scarcely conceivable in England where art criticism was still in its infancy. It must be remembered, however, that although in Britain ‘the native school of art was distinguished for its technical failings’,63 throughout the eighteenth century there was a rapidly mounting mania for portraiture and by the 1780s the French had come to see this genre along with that of the landscape as quintessentially English. The motivations driving these commissions by French visitors, including the princesse de Lamballe, can therefore be determined to have been three-fold: first, to procure a souvenir commemorating their visit, one that not only documented their physical presence in that country, but, being painted by a native artist, would contain an element of novelty to amuse the French court with on their return; second, to be seen demonstrating both their connoisseurship and general largesse by extending their patronage to an artist judged of fashionable standing; and third, to create for the benefit of their new circle, and expressed in that country’s visual idiom, a representation that would all the better assume currency and weight for its stylistic resemblance to their own. All members of the princesse de Lamballe’s English circle had their portraits painted by Cosway several times over; indeed the Duchess of Devonshire, his earliest patron, sat for him nine times and the artist later became official painter to the Prince of Wales. The princesse de Lamballe’s commission enabled her to make a gift of her own image to a prince renowned in England for his artistic patronage, by an artist with whom he had a strong association. There was among Lamballe’s circle a general curiosity in English painters; the duc d’Orléans for example, at the Prince of Wales’s invitation, dined with the members of the Royal Academy on one of his visits to London.64

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 91 A second portrait was produced of the princesse de Lamballe during her visit to England, though entirely without her involvement. While the nation focussed its attentions on Lamballe’s comings and goings, in ‘Etruria’ Josiah Wedgwood was planning a jasperware cameo portrait medallion of the princess to add to his corpus of likenesses of famous modern and historical figures (see Figure 3.1). The princess’s visit coincided with the climax in the fashion for Wedgwood’s portrait cameos, in particular his

Figure 3.1 Wedgwood basalt ware medallion, black with white relief figure of the princesse de Lamballe; late eighteenth/early nineteenth century (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

92  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe famous ‘heads’ of well-known figures, a craze driven by the period’s ‘feeling for the importance of the individual, a celebration of the family, and a reverence for history’.65 Wedgwood was swift to capitalise on the princesse de Lamballe’s vogue and his correspondence reveals an impatience for the jasperware mould of her head to be finished as soon as possible.66 There were over 600 of these portrait cameos in his ‘Illustrious Moderns’ series and the merchant astutely observed, ‘People will give more for their own Heads, or Heads in Fashion, than for any other subject, & buy abundantly more of them’.67 In addition to the ‘heads’ of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Wedgwood produced medallions of numerous other famous French sitters, from royalty to philosophers and he did not shrink from including figures whose notoriety had made them well known to the British public, such as the royal mistresses Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry. Already in his catalogue were the princesse de Lamballe’s friends, the Prince of Wales (c. 1787) and the Duchess of Devonshire (1782). Lamballe’s portrait in profile was first produced as a solid blue and white jasper medallion, modelled that same year by John Charles Lochée, who also created a series of portraits of the British Royal Family between 1786 and 1790 and was known for the flair and elegance, if not the precision, of his technique.68 It shows the princess in profile, facing the left, in a low décolleté gown, her shoulders half enfolded in a length of drapery. Her hair is dressed in the fashion started by Marie-Antoinette: à l’enfant—with high volume on the scalp, short frizzy curls cut to cover the ears and long loose curls of hair covering the nape, a solitary curl escaping. The legend beneath the portrait reads ‘Princesse de Lamballe’. Although cameos of Wedgwood’s paying clients were usually done from life, his famous heads were adapted or remodelled chiefly from existing medals, medallions, ivory, wax, horn or glass paste reliefs, or else copied from other portraits in painted, drawn, engraved or sculpted form.69 For his French portraits in particular, Wedgwood relied on medals, commissioning cast copies from the Dassier family.70 Both Louis XVI’s (1778) and Marie-Antoinette’s (c. 1784) Wedgwood cameos were modelled from earlier French medals—by Jean Martin Renaud (1746–1821) and Jean-Baptiste Nini (1717–1786), respectively.71 The source for Lamballe’s portrait was likely also a medal: the obverse of a medal matching Wedgwood’s composition exactly was reproduced in Augustin Cabanès’s 1922 biography of the princess where it was listed in the private collection of Otto Friedrichs.72 This medal is now so rare that no example survives in the prominent numismatic collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Louvre’s Cabinet de Médailles.73 Regrettably, Cabanès did not give the medallist’s name, nor can it be discerned from the poor quality of the illustration. A number of posthumous medals of the princess are in the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale and the musée Carnavalet but very little is known of compositions executed during her lifetime. Jean-Baptiste Nini and Benjamin Duvivier (1730–1819) were probably the two most popular medallists of Louis XVI’s reign and both produced numerous medals of the Royal Family and yet the princess is not mentioned as a sitter in either of the artists’ catalogues raisonné, nor does Lamballe’s medal at all resemble Nini’s other work.74 Medals were struck for commemorative or laudatory reasons, sometimes several years after the event they commemorated75 so it is possible that Lamballe’s medal, which, on the basis of the hairstyle can only have been executed sometime between 1780 and 1787, was a belated celebration of her promotion to Surintendante in 1775. The princess herself collected medals and medallions including porcelain, terracotta and hardstone cameo portraits—the inventory of her private apartments at the Hôtel de Toulouse records

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 93 three different receptacles she had for displaying these: a ‘Médailler en bois d’acajou renfermant 63 portraits des Rois de France en porcelaine blanche’; a ‘médailler Composé de 3 Tiroirs renfermant 36. Médaillons en terre brune’ and a ‘Boete a 3 Compartimens renfermant 199. médaillons imprimés en Soufre d’après l’Antique’, as well as numerous other framed and glazed individual examples of cameos.76 Wedgwood did not record the source for the princess’s medal in his ledgers or correspondence. French medals were frequently reproduced in prints (often by the medallists themselves who were trained in intaglio techniques) for collectors or the compositions used in frontispieces, culs-de-lampe in dedications in books,77 so it is not impossible that Wedgwood may have happened upon the composition in this way. A letter from Josiah Wedgwood Jr to his father written in April 1788, suggests the merchant trialled two different compositions: In a paper recd. a day or two ago it is said that Mrs. Sykes recommends the head of the Duc d’Orleans & P Wales—I do not find that we have any head of the Duc—she also recommends the head of the Princesse de Lamballe but does not mention any reverse—the small head of the princess I think too small & the features of the larger one would be quite lost in sinking. All she has recommended are for New years tide & I shall let them alone untill you return.78 The evident popularity of the resulting portrait of Lamballe is signalled by its manufacture in a second, larger variation in black basalt and a third in creamware.79 Though Wedgwood’s cameos had innumerable applications and could be displayed on tables, hung on the wall with other miniatures or small works, or mounted in furniture or jewellery, the heads of illustrious or famous personages were generally intended to form the basis of a collection of modern and historical portraits designed to be shown in a kunstkammer or antique gem cabinet, of the type the princess herself kept. Wedgwood’s rival, James Tassie, for example, constructed a cabinet for Catherine the Great in 1782 to accommodate her collection of 18,076 such intaglios and impressions (some of which came from Wedgwood).80 The addition of an impressed legend with the sitter’s name on the recto or verso facilitated this and both Lamballe’s medallions bear this feature. Lamballe’s portrait is not listed in Wedgwood’s English promotional catalogues but that it enjoyed immediate collectability can be deduced from its inclusion in Tassie’s famous ‘Catalogue of a General Collection of Ancient and modern engraved gems, cameos as well as intaglios, taken from the most celebrated cabinets in Europe’, in which the entry reads, ‘Princess be [sic] Lamballe. Modelled by Lochée’.81 Tassie also manufactured his own version of the portrait using a mould sold to him by Lochée, and was still producing it in 1791.82 The model was advertised by Wedgwood in a French edition of his catalogue of cameos, published in 1788, intended to market these objects to the French consumer.83 The composition became well enough known that it was used as the basis for a posthumous royalist print of the princess (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale). Historians have generally attributed the purpose of the princesse de Lamballe’s 1787 visit to an attempt to address her poor health with a period of convalescence and we do indeed have confirmation in the princess’s own words that she took the waters in English spa towns. There was also speculation at the time, according to Bachaumont, that the princess intended to open secret negotiations with the exiled finance minister, Calonne, at the queen’s request.84 This presupposes however that the princess followed the minister to England when in fact the sequence of events reveals quite the reverse:

94  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe he did not arrive until a full month after the princess had already been installed.85 Were the journey’s true purpose to restore her health, the princess might far more easily and comfortably have travelled to a European spa town—as she is known to have done,86 and her time in England would not have been charged with such a relentless programme of social entertainments. What has previously gone unnoticed, and would seem to be the most obvious motive for this visit, are the princess’s developed anglophile interests. This inclination, already firmly established before she travelled to England, and which she shared with the queen, must be given greater consideration with regard to its impact on her portrait commissions and patronage. The princess’s visit to the Netherlands, which will be discussed in Chapter 4, evidently stimulated her purchases of Dutch and Flemish art and it follows that her 1787 journey to England had ramifications for her general taste and subsequent collecting practises. It is likely that the duc de Chartres went some way towards inspiring the initial flowering of this penchant, but even before this Lamballe’s father-in-law had exhibited early anglophile tendencies when he commissioned Charpentier to create a family portrait in the style of an English conversation piece in 1768, as detailed in Chapter 1. Of course the princess was keen to exploit the social advantages of her time in England but her itinerary betrays the extent of her desire to discover its rural landscape, country houses, private collections and of course gardens. In the latter we find the princess’s most palpable and public endorsement of Anglomania and perhaps her most extensive scheme as patron.

3.4  The Princesse de Lamballe’s English Garden John Leigh has observed that for the French, Anglomania was a means of trying ‘new ways of feeling as well as thinking’ and that in this spirit, ‘English gardens were ultimately as influential as the English Philosophers who walked in them’.87 In their radical departure from the traditional French garden—large terraces and manicured formal parterres en broderie that were rigidly ordered by a central axis and whose effect was chiefly designed to be appreciated from a static, elevated and removed position, i.e. from palace or château windows, English gardens constituted a substitution of pleasure ground for formal parade, private amusement for public spectacle. The extraordinary enthusiasm for them amongst Marie-Antoinette’s court echoed the relaxation of etiquette and earnest pursuit of privacy espoused by the queen herself as well as the century’s ongoing desire for novelty and exoticism. The prince de Ligne wrote that in the queen’s English garden at the Petit Trianon, ‘one breathes the air of liberty and happiness’.88 Voltaire’s reflection on the lifestyle he had enjoyed in England in 1726–1729 was that it had been a ‘model of freedom’.89 The jardin anglais was therefore not merely an aesthetic impulse and reaction to or evolution from the existing paradigm, but ‘an affirmation of the enlightenment’,90 one whose many perspectives and momuments contrived to ‘inspire the proper emotions’.91 In England these gardens were first developed in the 1720s for Georgian noblemen returning from their Grand Tour, who wished to recreate at their country seat all the classical beauty, gravitas and pedigree of the ruins and sites of antiquity they had admired on the continent. Large expanses of parkland were carefully modelled to afford picturesque vistas and thoroughfares, studded throughout with follies and other small arresting architectural structures: arches, bridges, cascades, pavilions, pyramids, obelisks, hermitages, grottoes and so on. It was the perceived ‘English’ eccentricity of these spaces that appealed to the French and the erroneous belief that the English garden had its origins in Chinese painting that led to the hybrid Anglo-Chinois

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 95 garden, though at the time these classifications were fluid at best. Carmontelle, painter of Lamballe’s portrait with her needlework, and designer of the duc de Chartres’s English-style garden at Monceau, stubbornly resisted the label ‘Jardin Anglais’ yet spoke tellingly of the relief he experienced in being freed from the constraints of the French Baroque model: ‘If we had the desire to imitate English gardens, it was only to break out of the monotony of our own [. . .] We love this happy liberty which produces new and piquant effects’.92 It was altogether the abundance of trees providing cover and seclusion; the meandering paths without a fixed itinerary, which encouraged spontaneity and introduced an element of surprise and discovery, together with the ‘naturalness’ of these deceptively calculated landscapes that the French associated with the English garden and countryside. On his tour of England, François de la Rochefoucauld observed ‘one might well attribute the layout of the English parks to Nature’.93 He remarked that the grounds or park of the English country house, Are all vast and they all consist of turf, the grass being usually of fine quality; above this stretch of grass, which follows the slope of the hills, are large trees, distributed in groups and grouped in relation to the view, so that a picturesque clock-tower or a pleasant village is clearly seen and anything that may be displeasing to the eye in an unattractive countryside is concealed. A bridge or a little pavilion or temple may be built at a point where a good view may be obtained: when the slopes of the hills are not gentle enough they are joined together to suit the owner’s caprice—in fact a whole mountain may be removed. Above all, no pains are spared to bring together the streams and waters and to make them into a single river which is provided with such a natural course as to give the impression that it has always been there; similarly it is contrived to produce islands and pleasant scenery—nothing, in fact, is overlooked.94 The English garden, he went on, is a small pleasure-ground, extremely well-tended. with little well-rolled gravel paths; the grass is cut every week and the trees, which are of rare kinds, grow there naturally, though great care is taken to prevent moss and ivy growing upon them. In a thousand other ways, too, which one does not notice, care is taken to make these gardens attractive. Flowers are planted in them and they are always divided from the park by a remarkably well-made fence.95 The duc de Penthièvre commissioned just such a jardin anglais for the princesse de Lamballe in the grounds of his château at Rambouillet, his birthplace and favourite residence, at an easy distance from Paris where Lamballe frequently joined him when released from her duties in the city or at court. The work was carried out between 1779 and 1781,96 and this new endeavour took its cue from, and overlapped with, the planning of her mistress and friend Marie-Antoinette’s jardin anglo-chinois in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, which quite consumed the queen: the comte de MercyArgenteau wrote to Maria Theresa in the summer of 1774 that ‘La reine est maintenant tout occupée d’un jardin à l’anglaise qu’elle veut faire établir à Trianon’.97 MarieAntoinette appointed the comte de Caraman, whose own English garden in Paris was a model of this style, Directeur des Jardins de la Reine98 and placed him in charge of the design of the gardens together with architect Richard Mique and architectpainter Hubert Robert.99 Completed between 1777 and 1781, the finished garden

96  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe was an elaborate confection featuring a cascade flowing from a grotto to an irregularly shaped lake overlooked by a neoclassical pavilion, ‘The Belvedere’. Meandering through the grounds was a stream with an island surmounted by Mique’s Temple d’Amour. To all this was later added in 1783–1785 the infamous Hameau, a country village in miniature with an English-inspired Tour de Marlborough. Both women must have taken inspiration from Lamballe’s brother-in-law, who commissioned the Scottish landscape gardener Thomas Blaikie to create one of France’s first jardins anglais (following the example laid out by Hubert Robert in 1765 at Ermenonville for the marquis de Girardin)100 at the château de Raincy sometime after 1769. This boasted numerous follies including a hermitage, as the princess’s later would. Lamballe’s cousin too, the prince de Condé (1736–1818), who converted the formal French gardens of his country seat, Chantilly, into a jardin anglais in 1773, was another pioneer of this fashion.101 Contributing to the continuation of the craze were Louis XVI’s aunts, Adélaïde and Victoire, with their English garden at the Château de Bellevue (destroyed) executed sometime after 1774.102 Still more examples from within the queen’s circle included the comte d’Artois’s Anglo-Chinois garden at Bagatelle, designed by Blaikie in 1775, which combined cascades, grottoes, a pagoda and a pavillon de l’amour. The models for these landscapes were undoubtedly culled from a proliferation of English prints recording views of country houses which gave detailed plans of their gardens, a thriving branch of print publishing in the eighteenth century.103 The lettered titles and descriptions were very often given in French as well as English, an indication of their intended market. In 1786 the queen acquired a volume ‘de petites vuës de maisons de Campagne d’Angleterre relié’ for her library.104 Both women would have been familiar with influential treatises on the garden such as Watelet’s Essai sur les jardins (1774), and later the prince de Ligne’s Coup d’oeil sur Beloeil et la plus grande partie des jardins de l’Europe (1781), which further augmented enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon prototypes.105 Lamballe’s English garden was certainly extensive, located directly to the right of the chateau (when facing the central parterre and canal) its boundaries extended from north of the chateau’s tapis vert to the Paris road leading to Chartres.106 Its chief designer, the landscape artist Jean-Baptiste Paindebled, introduced a quaint man-made island to the small river already running through the estate, linking this to the rest of the park with two ornamental bridges. Of the original garden, the little river with a small cascade, the rocky base of the Chinese kiosk (now called the ‘Grotte des Deux Amants’),107 the bridges and two of the three follies remain today,108 but virtually the full effect can be gained from numerous etched views of it published in 1784 in surveyor Georges-Louis Le Rouge’s Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode. This nowfamous publication, issued periodically between 1775 and 1789, effectively encompassing the last efflorescence of Lamballe’s circle, comprised suites of highly detailed etched plates, recording the perspectives and plans of the most acclaimed and fashionable gardens to be found in England and France. It is today a roll call of some of the most famous houses and estates of the eighteenth century and their patrons. Thus the inclusion of Lamballe’s garden at Rambouillet, and its illustration across multiple plates, is testament to the garden (and the princess’s) contemporary renown and the considerable approbation with which the final arrangement was greeted. The garden contained a rich complex of architectural structures and scenic views. One plate shows the Chinese kiosk elevated on a rocky outcrop above a cascade, a pagoda-style folly with a dragon and bell-ornamented roof, similar to that erected at Kew in 1763 (see Figure 3.2). In an inventory dating from 1787, by which point the title of Rambouillet

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 3.2 Jean-Baptiste Pillement after Francesco Bettini, ‘Vue du Kiosque de Rembouillet [sic]’, title plate of the 11th cahier from ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’ published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A)

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The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe

had been transferred to Louis XVI, the kiosk contained eight ‘Chinese’ chairs covered in gold embroidered leather.109 Two other plates show two swings in the garden, one a large romantic swing in the style of those seen in Fragonard’s popular paintings of the same title, The Swing (London: Wallace Collection and Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art), the other more modest (see Figures 3.3–3.4). Most of the plates were etched by Pillement after drawings from life by Italian artist Francesco Bettini (c. 1737–c. 1815). A dated inscription by Bettini on his original drawing for the ‘Balancoire à Rambouillet’ plate showing the large swing at Rambouillet, discovered by scholar David Hays, indicates the artist drew it at Rambouillet in 1782 and identifies the woman on the swing as the princesse de Lamballe (Bettini had also produced small

Figure 3.3 Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Balancoire a Rambouillet’, detail from a plate in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe

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Figure 3.4 Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Balancoire à Rambouillet’, detail from a plate in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

sketches of Marie-Antoinette in the gardens of the Petit Trianon) (see Figure 3.5).110 It is presumably therefore also the princess who appears in the plate showing the second swing and in a third on a see-saw, observed by her little dog. These ‘secret’ portraits appear to posit the princess as a feature of or ornament to her own garden, but are also a deliberate proprietary gesture; contemporaries who saw the prints would

100

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe

Figure 3.5 Detail from Figure 3.3, ‘Balancoire a Rambouillet’, detail from a plate in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

at once have recognised this figure as Lamballe and understood her addition to signify her role as creator of this wondrous landscape and status as mistress of her own domain. Representations of swinging woman in eighteenth-century fêtes galantes, as Donald Posner first revealed and later art historians have confirmed, rapidly became an established motif of ‘the leisurely life’ as well as a general evocation of romantic or erotic feeling.111 Notably absent from two of the three depictions of our swinging and see-sawing princess, however, is the stock figure of the admiring or lascivious male companion, who is usually employed in operating the swing and on which the entire metaphorical premise of lust, love and courtship rests. In one view the princess swings herself, while on the see-saw the princess is miraculously held aloft by some apparently unseen force as the second seat and thus all-important counter-weight is conspicuously empty. The exception is the plate showing the large swing, but here the princess is aided in her efforts by a rustic swain—clearly not an amorous companion, but someone in her employ. These views of a solitary and independent-minded princess emphasise her autonomy over this dominion and favour the liberating and

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe

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rejuvenating properties of the swing—the pleasures of its sensations and the thrill of becoming part of a visual tableau of the landscape created under her direction. Further details of the garden’s arrangement can be gleaned from plates showing four different aspects. One shows a rocky bridge and cascade set against a grove of trees, another a grotto with cascading water, a third a design for a hermitage near two tall oaks, which is still there today (Figures 3.6–3.8). Though hermitages became a stock motif in many of the gardens of this period, they were originally symbolic allusions to wisdom and freemasonry; Monique Mosser has made the connection between the large number of English gardens conceived by eighteenth-century French patrons

Figure 3.6 Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Vue d’un Pont à Rambouillet’ and ‘Pont prés la Chaumière à Rambouillet’, detail of plate 15 from the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins AngloChinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

102

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe

Figure 3.7 Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Grotte dans les Jardins de Rambouillet’, detail of plate 17 in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

who were also members of masonic lodges.112 The princess’s hermitage would have had particular relevance for her visitors because of her prominent involvement with masonic lodges: when the garden was developed she was a member of the Loge de La Candeur and a year after its completion she was named Grande Maitresse of an allwomen lodge. The same plate shows the bridge leading to the island and its chaumière, also still standing. Bettini’s views, if they can be relied upon and were not embellished for picturesque purposes, show tantalising, long-vanished details. According to his designs, the garden was interspersed with benches and the stone bridges originally had wooden chinoiserie-style additions and fences. Another view shows the artist himself sketching the chaumière, complete with vegetable garden and encircled by water, with a small sailboat visible on the river. The cottage was designed by the duke’s personal architect and landscape painter, Claude-Martin Goupy (c. 1720–1793), and Bettini’s print shows two other smaller huts or cabanes that may originally have flanked it and given it more context. The Encyclopédie’s definition of a chaumière was a ‘cabane à l’usage des paysans, des charbonniers, des chaufourniers, &c. c’est—là qu’ils se retirent, qu’ils vivent’.113 Accordingly, the exterior of Lamballe’s structure resembled a traditional, if immaculate, French country cottage, complete with ox bones which, according to Breton custom, were supposed to help control the humidity of the interior and support climbing vines (Plate 10).114 On entering, however, the visitor would have been at first surprised then enchanted by the ornate interior concealed within. An octagonal room is lined with thousands of different shells, pebbles and pâte de verre (shaped coloured glass) pinned or embedded in blue, white or pink mortar, forming ornate neoclassical patterns (Plate 11). This technique was used to create trompe l’œil

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 3.8 Francesco Bettini (after), ‘Chaumiere á Rambouillet; Projet d’un Hermitage á Rambouillet; Bascule á Rambouillet’ plate 18 in the 11th cahier of ‘Des Jardins Anglo-Chinois à la Mode’, published by George Louis Le Rouge, Paris, 1784, etching (London: V&A)

104  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe Ionic pilasters, columns, festoons, oak leaf capitals and pedimented niches enclosing Delafosse-style Medici vases, perfume burners and baskets of fruit and flowers, all composed entirely of shells. The illusion was extended to the domed ceiling and large over mantel looking glass, both created from a glittering mosaic of mother-of-pearl. All these shells, save the large pink conches, were sourced from Breton and Normandy beaches and were painstakingly sorted, filed and sculpted to create crisper lines and a more perfect deception.115 A specially commissioned suite of furniture by the menuisier Toussaint-François Foliot (1748–c. 1808), who also worked for Marie-Antoinette, comprising eight chairs, four canapés and a fire screen, completed the effect of a mermaid’s grotto. The bases of the chair seats were carved to resemble scallop shells and the legs to simulate bulrushes and red coral branches, evoking watery habitats.116 The woven pattern of the suite’s moss-green upholstery silk is adorned with silver stars and swirling marine vegetation, in what may have been an allusion to the ‘stella maris’, the Star of the Sea or Virgin Mary, the namesake of both the princess and MarieAntoinette.117 Or perhaps this referenced the eight-pointed star that adorns the façade of the princess’s childhood residence, the Palazzo Carignano (see Figure 3.9). The two sets of large French doors gave on to the garden and river beyond. An inventory dating from 1787, by which point the title of Rambouillet had been transferred to Louis XVI, gives us further details of the furnishings.118 There were three false curtains in the same green silk as the chairs along with six white silk taffeta curtains, two silk bell pulls, six cane chairs, a marble-topped table and a four-branch chandelier. Adjoining the central room, and accessed via a concealed door, was the princess’s neat little oblong sea-green boudoir, painted with Pompeian-style arabesques composed of ribbons, flowers, birds and trophies. The different trophies of gardening implements, musical instruments, military weapons and arms (a flaming canon ball), and fishing tools were obviously intended to symbolise the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Stylistically, these are similar to those in Marie-Antoinette’s octagonal Belvedere in the Petit Trianon, painted the year before.119 At the touch of a mechanism two little black dolls were conjured forth from a small cupboard proffering jars of powder and scent.120 Over the visitor’s head a presenting peacock fans out its feathers, in part symbolising the room’s function—which as Marie-France Boyer has pointed out was ‘preening’,121 but as the attribute of Juno and therefore part of the iconographic repertoire of queenship no doubt a sly reference to She who would visit and be entertained by the princess in this space. Tellingly, Marie-Antoinette had the same motif in the gilded boiserie mouldings ornamenting her cabinet de la Méridienne, part of the private suite of rooms situated behind her official apartment in the main palace at Versailles, also an octagonal and intimate space designed as a retreat for the queen in 1781. Here in the boudoir was another chair upholstered in the green Gros de Tours silk, a quantity of other chairs, more white silk taffeta curtains and in a nod to the room’s function, a bidet and a chaise d’affaire (a chair fitted with a chamberpot).122 Monique Mosser has shown that rural follies like the princess’s cottage were indispensable to the iconography of French interpretations of the picturesque (or English) garden and frequently a site for architectural experimentation.123 Mosser has underscored the importance of the rustic materials employed: the contrast of the surface effects of stone, wood, thatched roofs and their tactility—and refers to these fabriques as a ‘mise en scéne de l’organique’.124 Their popularity in the eighteenth-century French garden points not only to the influence of English models but also fashionable French enlightenment attitudes towards nature and rusticity, in particular Rousseau’s

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 105

Figure 3.9 Detail of the courtyard façade of the Palazzo Carignano in Turin, designed by architect Guarino Guarini in 1679, showing the eight-pointed star Photo: Author

advocacy of nature over artifice. They are also indicative of the French aristocracy’s new appreciation for sanitised and highly idealised representations of their nation’s folk or peasant culture. As a country with an agrarian economy this was essentially a self-serving endorsement of the feudalist principles that had led to the vast domains and estates that were the source of their wealth. Lamballe’s chaumière exhibits an entirely contrived rusticity and everything contained within it is a product of the latest technology and the most supreme luxury: the costly shell-lined interior, the luxurious textiles and elaborate parquet floor, the modern comforts—chandeliers provided illumination and a fireplace, warmth. The unexpected contrast between the humble exterior and lavish interior was a conceit designed to appeal to the visitor’s sense

106  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe of whimsy. Le-Rouge’s ‘suggestions’ for English-style pavilions and grottoes included other examples of structures in this vein, where rustic façades belie sumptuous interiors. This approach may have been suggested by contemporary theatrical and operatic stage sets.125 In Lamballe’s chaumière, nature was carefully controlled and moulded— the shells filed for greater aesthetic precision, the garden outside (which was in itself, artificial) viewed from glazed doors framed by curtains in the most luxurious silk and every aspect of the construction realised, including the natural materials, at great expense. The seasons themselves were subdued: this was a space made fit for all times of the year and all species of weather. Although merely a garden structure, it was designed by the duke’s own architect with the level of care more commonly lavished on larger and grander projects. The evocation of the sensations of discovery and secrecy, which were stimulated by the concealed boudoir door and the automaton dolls hidden in the cupboard, were both part of the experience and yet also evidence of its artifice. A highly personal symbolism is employed throughout the cottage that conveys to all who enter, the full force of the Bourbon-Penthièvre abundant wealth and power, contradicting the more unassuming philosophies its modest exterior appears to subscribe to. The use of shells and ox bones from Normandy and Brittany, for example, were a reference to the duc de Penthièvre’s domaines; the connections to water and the sea recalled the duc de Penthièvre’s position as Grand Admiral of the French navy; the hunting trophies signalled both father and departed son’s role as the king’s Grand Veneur de France; the shell grotto, while inspired by the English rococo example, had its roots in sixteenth-century Italy and was thus probably also a nod to the princess’s Piedmontese heritage. Eleanor DeLorme has speculated that the idea for the shells may even have been suggested by the wunderkammer at Sceaux (another of the duke’s residences), which housed Louis XIV’s old shell collection.126 Lamballe’s new English garden transformed the atmosphere at Rambouillet. In his Voyage Pittoresque Des Environs de Paris, Antoine-Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville (1723–1796), described the château as it appeared before these works were undertaken: ‘environné d’eau & de bois, ce qui en rend la situation triste’.127 The only gardens the author encountered were ‘un quinconce de tilleuls, & à gauche un parterre de fleurs avec une pièce d’eau’.128 These were also a dramatic change from the formal gardens at the family’s other residences and those the princess had been accustomed to during her childhood in Turin, with its André Le Nôtre-designed giardini reale. A painting by Fragonard, ‘L’île d’Amour’ (1768–1770), may show part of the completed garden and its cascade (Lisbon: Museu Calouste Gulbenkian). The picture’s title dates from 1795 (the original title is not documented), but at some point during the nineteenth century it became known as ‘Fête à Rambouillet’, perhaps when a gouache version by the artist of the same composition (New York: pc) was sold in 1868 and described in the accompanying catalogue as the ‘celebration given for the royal family by the Duc de Penthièvre in the park at Rambouillet’.129 The oil was included in a 1937 exhibition where it was recorded instead as a view of the celebrations given at Chantilly by the Prince de Condé and the two prominent female figures seated at the ships bow identified as the princesse de Lamballe and her sister-in-law the duchesse de Chartres.130 Scholars today are still divided as to whether there may be some truth in this association or whether the painting was simply a construct of Fragonard’s imagination.131 Painted the year before the duke sold Rambouillet to Louis XVI, the work was well known and much admired in its day.132 It appeared in two sales in 1784 and 1795 where no mention of any association with Rambouillet was made.133 Both anticipating

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 107 the sublime landscapes of romantic painters and looking back to Dutch Golden Age landscape artists like Jacob van Ruisdael,134 Fragonard shows a pleasure craft making its way down a particularly choppy stretch of river overhung with abundant trees and foliage. A small party watches the proceedings from the shadows and classical garden statues are visible in the distance. Even if the landscape depicted is not Rambouillet, and this cannot be discounted completely for the duc de Penthièvre is reputed to have commissioned a very similar work from the artist to hang in the Hôtel de Toulouse, ‘La fête de Saint Cloud’ (Paris: Banque de France/Hôtel de Toulouse),135 the painting captures for the spectator something of the atmosphere and nature of the diversions offered by these removed little worlds. And it is tempting to see in the two precisely rendered fair-haired women in pale blue and white dresses who are elevated above the rest of the group, the figures of the princesse de Lamballe and Marie-Antoinette. Adélaïde Hall, the wife of the famous miniaturist who painted the princesse de Lamballe, offers another perspective on the pleasures of being entertained in these hyper-refined landscapes. In September 1781 she wrote to her daughter with details of a new jardin anglais at Nogent she had lately visited: M Aubert a fait faire un jardin anglais charmant. La rivière y circule partout. Il y a une jolie chaumière, où nous allons quand il fait beau déjeuner ou diner. Du côté des jolis bosquets où tu sais qu’il y avait tant de fleurs, on a fait un pavillon où il y a un joli salon devant lequel il y a un rocher, qui jette beaucoup d’eau qui forme une petite pièce d’eau et un joli ruisseau, qui serpent agréablement.136 Follies like Aubert’s and Lamballe’s chaumières brought novelty but also a seclusion to their patron’s social interactions enabling both host and visitor to affect the semblance of living within nature, in sympathy with the principles of the philosophes, but without having to sacrifice the trappings of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. The incorporation of a shell-lined interior to Lamballe’s chaumière was atypical of structures in other French gardens at the time and could be interpreted as a particularly English addition. Although they had their roots in antiquity and later sixteenthcentury Italian architecture,137 shell and rockwork grottoes underwent a strong revival of interest in England with the rise of the rococo. Famous examples included William Kent’s grotto at Esher Place, Surrey (1740s); Alexander Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, Middlesex (c. 1720–1744) and related structures at Stowe, Buckinghamshire (1740s); Stourhead, Wiltshire (1748) and Goldney, Bristol (begun in 1737). Very quickly they developed a strong association with aristocratic women due to the fact that the shell patterns were often designed, sometimes even executed, by the women of the house.138 The amateur artist Mary Delaney was one famous exponent, taking on the decoration of shell rooms at several country houses in Ireland. Together with her daughters, the Duchess of Richmond executed the exquisite shell house at Goodwood in the 1740s. The architectural historian Dana Arnold has examined the active part women played in determining the construction and decoration of shell rooms and houses, concluding that the fruits of these labours conveyed a cultivated and dynamic brand of femininity. At a time when women are thought to have had little say or influence over their physical environment, these structures, Arnold asserts, indicate that ‘women were an active part of this class [the ruling elite] and their interventions in the decoration and fabric of the country house and its estate are essential to the definition of the country house’.139 Grottoes too, Meredith Martin has argued, were part of a gendered

108  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe aesthetic, and like other forms of faux pastoral architecture commissioned by women, can be interpreted as evoking wombs or sites of nurturing.140 Martin highlights the series of ‘hermitages’ erected by Madame de Pompadour between 1748 and 1754 (in fact, elegant pavilions inside and out, with little resemblance to the hermitage follies of the 1780s) as an architectural expression of the royal mistress’s desire to embrace a simpler or more virtuous existence and in so doing, attempt to rehabilitate her general perception as a manipulative and overbearing royal mistress.141 Lamballe’s English garden proved influential, and many of her peers took a similar course, the fashion for English gardens growing all pervasive in the 1780s. In 1784 the comte d’Harcourt (1726–1802) imitated Rambouillet when he created a chaumière and Chinese folly within an English garden at Chaillot. The same year, the princess’s cousin-once-removed, the comtesse de Provence, had an English garden and pavilion created as a retreat at Montreuil, near Versailles.142 Meanwhile in Turin, in 1788, Lamballe’s sister-in-law, the princesse de Carignan, commissioned English gardens at Lamballe’s family’s piedmont country retreat, the Castello Racconigi. Concurrently, the duc de Chartres’s Parc Monceau, created in the English Gout Pittoresque, was completed by Carmontelle with the help once more of Blaikie. Later at his Paris residence, the Palais Royal, the duke had the formal gardens transformed into a jardin anglais. The duc de Penthièvre had a number of follies and other gardens structures built at the château of Armainvilliers, which he acquired in 1775 (destroyed and replaced in 1877). These were designed by the architect Jean-Augustin Renard and included a Turkish pavilion containing a bath decorated with coarsely hewn rockwork.143 Ten years after Lamballe’s English garden was created at Rambouillet and the year the revolution began, the duke refurbished his newly purchased Château d’Amboise and created still another English garden, again with a strong resemblance to Lamballe’s, from its rambling paths, expanses of ‘English’ lawn, wooded groves to its octagonal Chinese folly, the interior handsomely ornamented with painted boiseries.144 With such vast sums of money expended on these landscapes and their small, often temporary structures, it is not surprising to learn that the English garden in France would later become yet another incendiary symbol of ancien régime excess, one revolutionary pamphlet decrying ‘des constructions aussi folles que ridicules’ and their owners who affected ‘le luxe insolent d’un jardin anglais, dont chaque brouettée de terre coûte peut-être deux écus à l’état’.145

3.5 English Prints in the Collections of the Princesse de Lamballe and Marie-Antoinette So misjudged and underestimated has the princesse de Lamballe been as an individual, sitter and patron of the late eighteenth-century French court that her potential as a collector has never even been entertained by art historians. Scholars have dismissed the patronage of Marie-Antoinette and her circle as the lowbrow dabblings of an ignorant clique. By reducing their interpretation of the activities of this group to crude, shallow expressions of mere wealth and sartorial nous, scholars have neglected to acknowledge that both Marie-Antoinette and the women of her circle, in particular the princesse de Lamballe, were cultivated and for the most part, well-read.146 All grew up in close proximity to outstanding dynastic collections of art and counted formidable patrons and collectors among their relatives (in Marie-Antoinette’s case—Rudolf II and Maria Theresa; in Lamballe’s—the comtesse de Verrue, the comte and comtesse

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 109 de Toulouse and Prince Eugene of Savoy). Despite much evidence to the contrary, not least the phenomenal and, as we shall see, trans-national influence exerted by these female patrons, a general snobbery amongst scholars has prevailed. This attitude, clouded by subjective judgements of what constituted ‘good taste’ during this period fails to bring other mitigating factors to bear on the issue. This gaping oversight and the subsequent lacunes that have ensued are addressed in Chapter 4, however the particular subtleties of Lamballe’s interests as a collector can here be stressed with an examination of her developed taste for English prints. In the eighteenth century, the collecting of prints was generally interpreted as evidence of a refined connoisseurship. Among the many classes of prints available in the 1780s it was those by English practitioners, and portrait prints in particular, that began to be among the most prized.147 The 1793 inventory made by the revolutionary committee of the contents of Lamballe’s house in Passy, which she had occupied for ten years, shows that the walls of her rooms were adorned with numerous English prints.148 Archival documents throw further light on these previously unknown activities and provide supporting evidence of this taste. An inventory of the princess’s apartments at her father-in-law’s official Paris residence, the Hôtel de Toulouse, shows that of the forty prints framed and displayed, twenty-six were English. In the Cabinet de Toilette there were various round and oval prints and one print of a family scene, while in the Cabinet de Bains and a small room leading off from the library there were six hand-coloured English prints of different subjects.149 The frames in which the prints were displayed are described as ebonised and gilded with simply carved or moulded ornament, such as beading. These were exactly the sort of frames used for prints in England at this time as well, known as Hogarth frames, and the prints were probably framed up for the princess by the print seller on his premises. The oval and round formats described by the clerk indicate unequivocally that these were stipple etchings, a technique developed in England by William Wynne Ryland (1733–1783) in the early 1770s and employed by him, Francesco Bartolozzi and Thomas Watson with great success (the technique was originally developed by Ryland to reproduce the paintings of Angelica Kauffman).150 These became particularly fashionable in England over the next two decades. Stipple etchings (known in France as gravures au pointillé or prints executed in la manière pointillé anglais) were virtually always of sentimental or allegorical subjects, printed in red, sepia or grey ink, their stippled, soft pastel/crayon-like appearance complementary to these sort of subjects and reminiscent of the effects of the paintings they often reproduced. They were sometimes referred to as ‘furniture prints’ in that they were designed to be hung together creating entire decorative schemes.151 The prints were therefore ideally suited to the rooms in which Lamballe chose to display them. These were all small, private rooms where the princess bathed, prepared her toilette or withdrew to write, work or read and where she would have wished to be surrounded by her most personal works of art, objects particularly selected by her. We can be absolutely certain that these prints were displayed here because she enjoyed them—the same cannot be assumed of her more formal rooms, which she had inherited from former occupants. The princess could be more flexible in the decoration of her much-used private rooms, where she spent the majority of her time, and these were much more readily capable of being altered to reflect changing fashions than the house’s formal reception rooms, such as the chambre de Parade, galerie or grand cabinet (and at the Hôtel de Toulouse these were particularly ornate), and as such

110  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe reflect the princess’s taste at its most current. The architect Jacques-François Blondel (1705–1744) observed of this necessary contrast between formal rooms and informal small cabinets and boudoirs that Nothing must be neglected to ensure that its decoration is lively and romantic. It is here that imagination can take flight and allow one’s fancy to triumph, while in formal apartments, the strictest rules of decorum and good taste should be adhered to rigidly.152 It is important to stipulate that the presence of prints in these interiors alone would not necessarily signal a particular enthusiasm for print collecting, these objects being afterall a common feature of most affluent bourgeois and aristocratic interiors of their day. But when coupled with the knowledge that numerous other English prints were on display in the princess’s Passy residence, it becomes conclusive. 153 The eighteenth-century Paris trade in English prints has been well documented by Antony Griffiths and Stéphane Roy.154 In the first half of the century, Hogarth’s prints (though in fact executed by French engravers) enjoyed great success, but it was particularly during the late 1770s and throughout the 1780s that interest intensified specifically in English compositions produced by English printmakers with new, English-derived techniques. The extent of the trade in English prints in France during this period was such that it was even thought to have exceeded the trade for English prints in Britain. As these prints were not subject to the heavy duties of their outbound French counterparts their popularity was perceived by those in the industry to have a detrimental impact on the French economy and the work of French engravers.155 One of Paris’s leading print publishers and merchants, Pierre-François Basan (1723–1797), was also one of the city’s principal dealers in English prints and travelled to London to source his stock as well as maintaining accounts with well-known London print publishers and dealers Thomas Burke, Valentine Green, Andrew Pond, W. W. Ryland, J. R. Smith, Robert Strange and J. Young.156 The presence too, of English engravers in Paris throughout the 1780s confirms the demand for these works and if the French held, for the most part, a low opinion of the English School, this did not extend to the medium of the print,157 as a critic’s judgement of the work of one English engraver, William Byrne, who exhibited in the June 1786 Salon de la Correspondance demonstrates: Si les anglais sont inférieurs aux autres nations de l’Europe dans les arts relatifs à la science du dessin, on doit avouer cependant qu’ils l’emportent souvent dans quelques genres de gravure, et principalement dans la gravure du paysage.158 In 1781 there was an exhibition of framed British prints for sale, including portraits, in the square of the Palais Royal, the duc d’Orléans’s Paris residence, and in 1783 the English printmaker and publisher John Haines was operating from premises on the rue Tournon, under the name, ‘Magasin des estampes Anglaises’.159 Of all the compositions for sale, Griffiths has identified full-length portraits by Reynolds and sentimental subjects as among the most popular categories,160 information corroborated by the contents of Marie-Antoinette’s collection, as shall be seen. We know from the trade card of print dealer and merchant Rémy-François Bergny (fl. c. 1777–1788) that he served as official print dealer to the princesse de Lamballe.

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 111 His card reads, ‘Bergny Md d’Estampes de S.A.S. Madame la Princess Lambale’ (see Figure 3.10). Bergny also advertised this special status to all who bought his prints by including the princess’s name in his lettered excudit. This he did from about 1779 onwards.161 It is also clear from Bergny’s card that he sold English prints: ‘Vend et achette toutes sortes d’Estampes Etrangere et Francaise, Maniere noire et autre’. Not only does he state that he sells foreign prints but he also cites as an example prints in the ‘Maniere noire’, i.e. mezzotints, often also described by the French as in ‘la manière anglaise’; in the eighteenth century the English were the undisputed masters of the mezzotint. From the location Bergny gives for his shop the card can be dated to c. 1780–1788,162 meaning that Bergny must have supplied Lamballe with English prints during the height of their popularity and with the very same prints recorded in the Hôtel de Lamballe (see Chapter 4). What is particularly revealing, however, is that once again the princess’s collecting practises carefully paralleled those of her mistress, Marie-Antoinette. The queen’s own collection of English prints is brought to light by a series of bills now in the Archives Nationales, Paris.163 Stéphane Roy has underlined the need for ‘micro studies’ on French collectors of English prints in order that art historians might fully understand ‘the full extent and even the visual impact’ of this period of Anglomania, a fashion which derived much of its impetus from the trade in English prints.164 An affluent French collector proclaimed in a 1787 issue of the Journal de Paris, ‘Parmi ces différens goûts que j’ai dûs à la mode, un, surtout, m’a dominé avec fureur; c’est celui des Estampes angloises’.165 Here then, is the perfect subject for a case study of a French collection of English prints assembled by arguably the most important female patron and collector in the second half of the eighteenth century: the Queen of France.

Figure 3.10 Trade card of Rémy Bergny (fl. c. 1777–1788), ‘Md d’Estampes de S.A.S. Madame la Princeße de Lamballe’, c. 1780–1788, etching (Paris: BN) © Bibliothèque nationale de France

112  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe These documents detail orders of prints and books for Marie-Antoinette’s rooms at Versailles, supplied principally by the aforementioned dealer, Basan, and covering the period April 1784–June 1788, presumably just a portion of the acquisitions she made while in residence. Lengthy lists for all manner of English prints in different states and colours are given,166 as well as a number of books on English culture purchased from the Paris booksellers Buinon, Gonichoy and Moutard for the queen’s library. Her print purchases were often made in duplicate—suggesting some were destined to be given to friends and family, in all totalling thousands of livres across this four-year period—a timeframe that neatly coincides with the princesse de Lamballe’s and duchesse de Polignac’s visit to England in 1787. From this we can only deduce that the two courtiers’ visits and their subsequent reports of their journey helped to strengthen the queen’s already active Anglomania. The prints listed in the bills are described with surprising detail. Compositions are identified by title or artist, and we can therefore gauge from these documents the sort of works Lamballe was also acquiring. The subjects particularly favoured by the queen are of the sentimental genre from a period in English printmaking that print scholar David Alexander classes ‘The Age of Romantic Sensibility’, largely stipple etchings (the two went hand-in-hand) as with those displayed by the princesse de Lamballe.167 Of the allied eighteenth-century concepts of sensibility and sentiment, described by John Mullan as a refined emotional or moral faculty that projected ‘a special, and admirable, susceptibility to feelings that were not physical’ and was frequently associated with ‘a peculiarly feminine quality’, that account for the central role assumed by women in many of these compositions, ‘sentiment’ in particular denoted a heightened state of virtue.168 Recurring themes among the queen’s prints are maternal and romantic love, often derived from elegiac literary sources, and scenes of rural pleasures and domestic bliss. In 1784 for example, her acquisitions included Charles William White’s (1740–1805) ‘Love’ and ‘Rural Felicity’; the melancholy ‘Charlotte’ from Goethe’s ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ (1782); honest fresh-faced country characters such as ‘Patty’ (1782) and ‘The Country Maid’ (1783) after Henry Bunbury (1750–1811); Bartolozzi’s ‘The Birth of Shakespeare’ and its pendant ‘Shakespeare’s Tomb’ (1782, see Figure 3.11) after Angelica Kauffman’s paintings (1782)—more stipple prints were produced after Kauffman’s work than any other artist;169 and ‘Employement Domestique et pendant’, likely two of the mezzotints from Richard Houston’s series ‘Domestick Employment’ executed after the émigré fancy painter Philippe Mercier’s paintings of different domestic activities—needlework, washing and knitting.170 Further purchases in the sentimental vein included Bartolozzi’s ‘Affection and Innocence’ (1785, see Figure 3.12) and ‘Lady Ann Bothwell’s Lament’ (1784), the latter based on a popular lullaby about a young woman who rues the lover who has seduced and abandoned her leaving her to bear their illegitimate child in disgrace. Bartolozzi’s prints were known to enjoy especial popularity with the French.171 When displayed as a group in the queen and princess’s private rooms this visual tableau of domesticised and moralising femininity pitched with high sentiment created a highly gendered space that formed a direct counterpoint to the private petits cabinets and boudoirs of their male relatives commonly known to have contained the popular eroticised ‘boudoir’ prints of Augustin de Saint-Aubin (1736–1806), Philibert-Louis Debucourt (1755–1832) and reproducing titillating works by Pierre-Antoine Baudoin and Fragonard.

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 113

Figure 3.11 Francesco Bartolozzi after Angelica Kauffman, ‘Shakespeare’s Tomb’, 1782, London, published by Antonio Cesare Poggi, stipple etching, 43.5 × 34 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

The contents of these bills also show the queen keeping pace with the latest prints as they were issued. Many purchases were made the same year, or within a few months even, of the print being published in London. Such timeliness was evidently important for French consumers of English prints, and print merchants often boasted of being able to obtain stock from England in as little as two to three weeks from the date of order.172 Marie-Antoinette’s consumption of prints reveals a desire to know and understand English sociability and shows the queen to have been remarkably abreast

114  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe

Figure 3.12 Peltro William Tomkins after Francesco Bartolozzi, ‘Affection and Innocence’, 1785, London, published by James Birchall, stipple etching, 30.5 × 35.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

of current events and topical figures across the Channel. Famous contemporary English figures and feats of female heroism and fortitude evidently appealed to her: this explains her purchase of Pollard’s ‘Lady Harriet Acland[sic]’ (1784, see Figure 3.13). In 1776, in the midst of the American Revolutionary Wars, Lady Harriet (1750–1815) crossed enemy lines to locate her gravely wounded husband who was being held prisoner by American forces, demanding to be allowed to attend to him. Similarly, ‘The Halsewell East Indiaman’ (1786) commemorates the tragic shipwreck off Seacombe in which over 240 passengers and crew perished. As a keen horsewoman the addition of prints depicting horse races addressed both her personal interest in the sport and her desire for singularly ‘English’ subjects.173 Of greater import for this study, however, were the queen’s purchases of portrait prints. These included sitters she knew—George III with his family and a full-length portrait of the Prince of Wales—but also prints of individuals outside her circle of acquaintance which she would have acquired as examples of the work of fashionable English artists or, where critically appraised, paradigms of the British school. One such example is a print described as a portrait of Colonel Banastre Tarleton (1754– 1833), this undoubtedly John Raphael Smith’s mezzotint after Reynolds’s famously

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 115

Figure 3.13 Robert Pollard and Francis Jukes, ‘Lady Harriet Ackland’, 1784, London, published by Robert Pollard, etching and aquatint, 44.4 × 55.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

dashing evocation of the young soldier who commanded British troops in the American War of Independence, painted in 1782 (see Figure 3.14).174 Tarleton would of course have been a figure of curiosity to Marie-Antoinette, but the portrait had also been extremely well received by critics and the queen would no doubt have been eager to see a work by an artist whose work was followed with a great deal of interest in France. Mezzotint portraits in this vein were also large, far larger than some of the stipple furniture prints Marie-Antoinette acquired, and would have made a striking display when framed and hung. Was her acquisition of a ‘portrait of the family of the Duke of Marlborough’ a print after Reynolds’s monumental 1777 portrait of the family painted at Blenheim, which was considered a masterpiece of contemporary portraiture? No corresponding contemporary engraving is recorded (it was later reproduced in the early nineteenth century by Charles Turner). Given our knowledge of the queen’s taste, could the print described in the bill be Bartolozzi’s affecting depiction of the fourth Duke with his wife Lady Caroline and his third-born son, Francis, instead?175 The portraits she purchased of female sitters also bridged these two categories of fashionable sitters or well-known artists. Consider, for example a purchase

Figure 3.14 John Raphael Smith after Joshua Reynolds, ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton’, 1781, London, published by John Raphael Smith, mezzotint, 64.6 × 39.7 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 117 in 1784 described as the ‘Duchess of Richmond [. . .] Lady Turkess’, undoubtedly Ryland’s reproductive print of Angelica Kauffman’s portrait of the Duchess in Turkish dress (see Figure 3.15). Given Marie-Antoinette’s enthusiasm for turquerie this portrait of a doyenne of Georgian society, whom the princesse de Lamballe later met in 1787, by a celebrated woman artist would have been a highly desirable acquisition.

Figure 3.15 William Wynne Ryland after Angelica Kauffman, ‘Her Grace, The Dutchess of Richmond’, the Duchess of Richmond in Turkish dress, 1775, published by Ryland, stipple etching, 37.1 × 27.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

118  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe Similarly, oval portraits by John Keyse Sherwin and other artists of famous actresses and players, Sarah Siddons, Elizabeth Hartley, Elizabeth Sheridan, Frances Abington (1737–1815) and Mary Robinson were testament to the queen’s interest in Georgian theatre and celebrity culture.176 Some of the prints listed in these bills can be found in an album in the Bibliothèque Nationale, long thought to have belonged to the queen, and with her coats of arms, cut from another binding, pasted to the interior.177 These are particularly fine impressions, many of them colour prints, some hand coloured and others a combination of both. There existed a brisk trade in French and English portrait prints in both capitals. In London, collectors were offered M. Watson’s 1765 mezzotint portrait of Madame de Pompadour; portraits of the comte and comtesse de Toulouse by British engravers after L. M. Vanloo and Drouais (many of which were then marketed to the French as well).178 The comtesse d’Artois’s portrait by François Hubert Drouais was engraved by Richard Brookshaw and published by S. Hooper, London, 1774. Her sister, the comtesse de Provence’s portrait was engraved by William Pether after Vigée Le Brun, published by John Boydell in London in 1778. Haines also produced engraved portraits of the comtesse d’Artois in the English manner, a technique the Mercure stated in its advertisement heralding their publication, was ‘beaucoup desiré en France’.179 Countless prints, after famous French portraits of Marie-Antoinette in particular, were engraved and published in London throughout the 1770s–1780s. In Paris, the British engraver Haines produced portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in the English manner (mezzotint) and announced his intention ‘de donner successivement tous les portraits des Prince & Princesses de la Famille Royale’. In 1775, Brookshaw was selling to the French his engraved portraits of their own monarchs, the comte and comtesse de Provence and d’Artois and the duc d’Orleans.180 There are also instances of engraved portraits of the Prince of Wales being sold in Paris in 1784 and 1785.181 But the most compelling evidence of all comes from Marie-Antoinette herself with the discovery that she bought two portrait prints relating to the Duchess of Devonshire in April 1784, one by Bartolozzi and a second entitled ‘Les Enfants de La Duchesse de Devonshire’, at 5 and 24 livres respectively.182 The former work could be that produced by the printmaker in 1782, after a portrait by the noble amateur Diana Beauclerk showing the duchess in profile seated by a window with a book in her hand, but more likely, given the timeframe and its availability, was that it was Bartolozzi’s print after James Nixon, a portrait in oval medallion of the duchess published in London in August 1783 (see Figure 3.16). The portrait of the duchess’s children however is more elusive and the difficulties presented by attempts to identify this are unfortunately testament to the notoriously patchy documentation that survives for the market in reproductive prints. In 1784 the duchess had only one child: her daughter Georgiana or ‘Little G’, who appears with her mother in the celebrated Reynolds portrait painted the same year, which still hangs at Chatsworth. The first print after this portrait however, a mezzotint by George Keating, was not published until May 1787, although an earlier state is described (but not dated) in Edward Hamilton’s 1884 catalogue raisonné of the engraved works of Sir Joshua Reynolds.183 Another possibility therefore is that this was an undocumented print after a Cosway miniature of her with her daughter in the Huntington Art Collections (San Marino, CA), which dates from about 1782. Alternatively, the title of the print in this bill could have been noted in error and the work described was intended to refer to the engraved portrait of the

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 119

Figure 3.16 Francesco Bartolozzi after James Nixon, ‘Georgiana, Dutchess of Devonshire’, 1783, published by William Dickinson, stipple etching, 16.7 × 13 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

Duchess of Devonshire as a young girl (then Georgiana Spencer) with her mother Lady Spencer, painted in 1769, which was so popular it continued to be reissued in various editions as late as 1790. Yet another possibility was that the clerk meant to refer to a print after Zoffany’s portrait of the children of the fourth Duke of Devonshire, painted in 1763–1765. Two less promising candidates that must nevertheless be entertained are an eighteenth-century print after a portrait of the children of the 3rd Duke of Devonshire and Catherine Hoskins, or a satirical print published in 1784 of the Duchess of Devonshire nursing a baby.

120  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe

3.6  An Anglo-French Fellowship With this concrete evidence of Marie-Antoinette’s purchases of English portrait prints and the highly active commercial trade of portrait prints in mind, it becomes clear that the queen and the princesse de Lamballe had a ready familiarity with and interest in English portraiture that complemented their more general Anglophile persuasions. The same can be asserted, with regard to French portraits, for their well-travelled English friends and Francophiles, the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Elizabeth Foster. Together with the duchesse de Polignac, this small fellowship of women poses an ideal subject for examining links between the two schools of female portraiture in France and England at this time. This unprecedented sorority, united by many shared interests and experiences, created a unique forum for cultural and artistic exchange. Under the Hanoverians, the English court was no longer the ‘centre of gravity’ it had been in the previous century and it did not enjoy the influence of the Bourbon monarchy.184 The great cultural leaders of elite British society were now to be found among those with sufficiently abundant personal fortunes and inclinations, to fund and lead a lifestyle that attracted the intense interest of the public and a following within their own class. The Duchess of Devonshire, dubbed the ‘Empress of Fashion’ by Horace Walpole, cut a swathe through Georgian society. As late as 1794, the Bath Chronicle reported that to help the Spitalfield silk weavers, the ‘Duchess of Devonshire will only appear in public [wearing] silk & satin’, evidence of her continuing influence.185 She commanded an intense level of interest, admired and loathed in equal measures. She was, in short, the English Marie-Antoinette. Her own friends remarked on the similarities between the two women. In 1775 Lady Clermont told Marie-Antoinette that she greatly resembled in appearance the Duchess of Devonshire to which the queen responded she was ‘much flattered’.186 Lady Clermont even complained to the Duchess of Devonshire that Marie-Antoinette talked ‘too much English Politicks’.187 They were all women of a similar age—only 18 months separated Marie-Antoinette and Georgiana. The two women first met in 1775 when the Duchess visited Versailles. Over successive visits by the Duchess to Paris and Versailles in 1775, 1779, 1789, 1790 and 1791 the friendship blossomed and she became well known to the queen’s inner circle. It was on Georgiana’s introduction that Lady Foster first met the duchesse de Polignac on her visit to Paris in December 1782. Following another trip to Paris in 1785, Lady Foster wrote in her journal, I left Paris with the tenderest friendship for Madame de Polignac who I have every reason to think has the same for me; with gratitude to the Queen who has loaded me with distinctions; and with the satisfaction of seeing myself regretted by all those I had known.188 The 1787 English sojourns of the princesse de Lamballe and duchesse de Polignac helped to cement these ties. That year, the General Evening Post reported the ‘great intimacy’ that existed between Lamballe, Marie-Antoinette and the Duchess of Devonshire.189 Lamballe and the duchess socialised together in public and a September issue of The Ladies Magazine noted that the Duchesse of Devonshire had composed some verses of poetry in the princess’s honour.190 And yet privately the Duchess of Devonshire, a staunch ally of Polignac’s, accused the princesse de Lamballe of mounting a whispering campaign against her friend.191 She conspired with the British ambassador

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 121 to France, the Duke of Dorset, to plant favourable items of news regarding Polignac, or ‘little Po’ as she affectionately referred to her, in the Anglo-French newspaper, the Courier de l’Europe.192 Of Marie-Antoinette and Georgiana’s genuine regard for each other, however, there can be no doubt and the two women evidently felt a certain kinship. After the queen’s death the duchess would praise her late friend’s stoicism throughout the period of her captivity in a letter to her mother, Lady Spencer, recalling her ‘cleverness and greatness of mind’.193 Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell has uncovered details of some of the gifts this little circle exchanged, which took the form of cultural tokens. In deference to the queen’s love of music and dancing, Georgiana sent Marie-Antoinette some sheet music for English country dances accompanied by a gift for the sickly dauphin. Writing to thank the duchess on the child’s behalf, the duchesse de Polignac enclosed an expanse of French lace with the gracious words: He cannot find a better means of showing his appreciation to her than to decorate my beautiful Georgiana, who herself decorates everything around her. Thus the gift that I send you is political, to give value and éclat to our manufactures.194 Meanwhile in a humorously spirited inventory of Elizabeth Foster’s rooms, possibly compiled by the Duchess of Devonshire, were recorded ‘Miniatures of the Polignac family’, perhaps further souvenirs exchanged between these women.195

3.7  Links Between the French and English Schools of Painting In his short study on connections between eighteenth-century English and French painting, published in 1952, Ellis K Waterhouse observed, ‘English painting has usually been studied either with almost complete insularity, or only in so far as it was affected by the impact on painters of a period of study in Italy’.196 Waterhouse goes on to remark that ‘the field bristles with unexplored topics’. It is lamentable then to find that scarcely much ground has been covered since, though a general influence of the French school on English portrait painters, and vice versa, has continued to be discerned by successive art historians. A number of explicit examples might be cited. Watteau’s charming Figures de Mode, for example, inspired the poses employed by the English portrait painter Bartholomew Dandridge (1691–c. 1755)197 and later, Thomas Gainsborough. Guillaume Glorieux claims the English conversation piece was a genre appropriated from Watteau’s fêtes galantes, and though scholarship shows this class of painting significantly predates the French artist and was introduced to England from Northern Europe at the end of the seventeenth century, it is certainly true that the taste for Watteau’s paintings in eighteenth-century England, together with the fancy pictures of Philip Mercier helped to popularise these comely arrangements of figures and their sugary French rococo palette.198 Waterhouse himself commented on the striking resemblance between some of Gainsborough and Fragonard’s pastoral landscapes, probably due to their loose and sketchy brushwork.199 More recent research confirms that the former emulated Claude, among other old masters, in his landscapes and was influenced by the portraits of French pastellists La Tour and Perroneau, imitating their hatching technique and lively handling.200 Similarly, a French influence has been identified in the palette and pastoral approach of George Romney’s portraits.201 Perhaps the single greatest British artist of the period, Sir Joshua Reynolds, readily acknowledged his country’s debt to the seventeenth-century French school in his Discourses on Art

122  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe and called for the Royal Academy to emulate its French counterpart; the continental influence on Reynolds’s own œuvre has been explored by Robert Rosenblum.202 Further on, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Gérard and Sir Thomas Lawrence were manifestly looking to each other, and the Frenchman is known to have possessed a large quantity of English prints in his collection.203 Gros too, executed work that Paul Joannides describes as ‘close in spirit’ to the portraits of Lawrence and Gainsborough, and the art historian has revealed that Gros copied an engraving after Reynolds’s Ugolino (at Knole) and drew on English literary sources in some of his drawings.204 Olivier Meslay has examined the influence of Hyacinthe Rigaud on Reynolds’s work and the entry and continued presence of eighteenth-century British art in French collections.205 The work of the princesse de Lamballe’s own portrait painter, Mosnier, shows the influence of Romney.206 A 2003 essay by Jo Hedley tentatively explored French influences on English portraiture, attributing the dearth of scholarship on this subject to a historical reluctance on the part of English artists to publicly acknowledge their debt to their French peers, concluding that there is considerably more work to be done on this area.207 More scholarship is also necessary on French émigré artists in England, both itinerant artists seeking new sources of patronage and the wave of artists who sought temporary sanctuary in London during and immediately following the revolution. Scholars have understandably shied away from the problematic task of effecting comparisons between French and British painting, particularly in light of their substantially different apparatus and instruments of artistic instruction and patronage. Nor do art historians generally examine different schools for sweeping parallels, considering this practise foolhardy, frequently inconclusive and fraught with possible pitfalls. Paul Joannides rightly states that ‘the relations between English and French portraiture in the last decade of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century are extremely complex’ yet cannot deny the ‘temperamental affinity’ between the two schools during this period.208 Given the abundant overlap between the elite societies of this age, in particular the circles of the princesse de Lamballe and the Duchess of Devonshire, it seems logical to conclude that something may be learnt from comparing the cross-Channel portraits they commissioned. Stéphane Roy has pointed out that Anglomania was afterall a manifestation of cosmopolitanism, characterises the eighteenth century as ‘a world of soft borders in which cultural connections could be made with surprising ease’ and suggests, ‘Instead of building investigations on a national basis, should historians and art historians alike not proceed from a comparative perspective? This would greatly help to understand how foreign models may have influenced national subjects’.209 Clearly, as Waterhouse first set out, ‘the evidence must be sought mainly in the pictures themselves’, but his statement that hardly any of the numerous English travellers who wrote accounts of their journeys in France betrayed the slightest interest in the state of contemporary painting in that country [. . .] English travellers and Ambassadors might have their portraits painted in France and bring them home, but no French traveller in England that I know of did the same until the days of the refugees from the French Revolution, requires some revision. It is clear from the evidence cited above that Marie-Antoinette’s circle and the Devonshire set were familiar with each others’ portraits, both through their dissemination in engraved form but also from their travels.

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 123 Even a cursory comparison of the now iconic portrait of Marie-Antoinette with a rose by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and equally famous portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire by Thomas Gainsborough, reveals a striking resemblance in pose and format, if not the brushwork and handling (1783, Kronberg: Private collection of Hessische Hausstiftung; 1787, Chatsworth: Devonshire Collection). The ethereal dresses and hats, the positioning of their hands and the pink rose held by both sitters, the benevolently regal gaze, even the rakish tilt to their plumed hats are all remarkable similarities. The queen’s portrait was painted in 1783 and was exhibited in the Paris salon that year, a hastily executed substitute for a virtually identical portrait of the queen en chemise or en gaulle which the artist was forced to withdraw following a public outcry at its perceived impropriety. Despite this initial reaction the much-maligned muslin dress portrait became something of a succès de scandale and the essential elements of this portrait and its replacement went on to be widely copied. The Gainsborough portrait was executed four years later, in 1787, but unfortunately is not documented in the Chatsworth archives (none of the duchess’s commissions are) and not only has its history been obfuscated by its long disappearance from that collection and subsequent theft (it finally returned to Chatsworth in 1994) but attention has not unnaturally concentrated on this sensational second life and not on illuminating the circumstances of its execution. It receives short shrift from John Ingamells in his calendar of the duchess’s portraits, where the scholar catalogues it under Gainsborough’s ‘doubtful portraits’.210 This is refuted outright by Chatsworth’s curators who do not believe the identity of the sitter to be in question.211 It is not only possible but entirely likely that Lady Elizabeth Foster saw one or all versions of Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of the queen during her 1785 visit to Versailles. She and Georgiana cannot have failed to be aware of the fracas that surrounded the portrait’s first presentation to the public, and it may even have appealed to the duchess’s playful sense of humour to base her own portrait along similar lines. Considering the proliferation of Vigée Le Brun portraits at this time and the artist’s considerable fame, the duchess may have sought to realise aspects of this sophisticated template, modelled beguilingly by Marie-Antoinette, but judiciously through the moderating lens of a peculiarly English sensibility. The portrait is certainly far bolder in its conception than Gainsborough’s previous endeavour of 1783 (Washington: NGA). Yet another example is that of the extraordinary full-length portrait of Lamballe’s sister-in-law, the duchesse de Chartres, by Joseph Siffred Duplessis (1725–1802), in which the duchess poses supine on a beach in a silk satin dress and sandals (c. 1777–1778, Chantilly: musée Condé). The composition affects a romanticism that anticipates Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and seems indebted to Angelica Kauffman’s painting of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos (1774, Museum of Fine Arts Houston), then in the collection of Sir Edward Vernon, a great admirer of her work, as well as the celebrated Roman sculpture of the Greek goddess from which Kauffman took inspiration. An impression of Jean Marie Delattre’s print after Kauffman’s painting, published in London, appears in Marie-Antoinette’s album of English prints.212 The princesse de Lamballe, the duchesse de Polignac, the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Elizabeth were all devotees of the double friendship portrait, a format pioneered by French artists. A double portrait of the duchess and Lady Elizabeth Foster executed by the French miniaturist Jean-Urbain Guérin (1760–1830) on one of their two visits together to Paris in May–August 1790 and November–December 1791

124  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe bears a marked resemblance to a portrait of the duchesse de Polignac with her sisterin-law by Brun (London: Wallace Collection).213 On the 11th of August 1790, Georgiana wrote to her mother, Lady Spencer ‘My hair is doing by Bezier—my picture drawing by Guerin’ (the artist himself recorded the duchess sitting for him on the 12th of November).214 The work is typical of Guérin’s acknowledged specialty: ‘portraits of female sitters in profile, single or in groups, before a black background, which are modelled after the isolated figures on dark grounds seen in Roman (‘Pompeian’) wall paintings’ and two copies were made, one for each sitter.215 Christoph Martin Vogtherr interprets this commission as ‘a token of friendship, even love, between the two women’.216 Brun’s portrait of the duchesse and comtesse de Polignac drawn the very same year is strikingly similar and served a similarly emotive purpose. The princesse de Lamballe chose to be portrayed this way in a portrait with the comtesse de Laval, again by Brun.217 Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Charles-Nicolas Cochin were other wellknown proponents of these portraits, the latter also patronised by the princesse de Lamballe. Isabey described the double portraits of friends or relatives he produced during the revolutionary years as portraits de consolation, a ‘mutual gift of love’ usually prompted by an imminent separation.218 It is therefore interesting to note that Isabey credited his sensitively realised velvety drawings to the chiaroscuro influence of English mezzotints, referring to his works in this vein as dessins dans la manière anglaise.219 There is also more than a suggestion of Cosway about his miniatures of women swathed in transparent veils. Some of these similarities can of course be ascribed to common fashions—this is evidently the case with Bornet’s miniature of Lamballe and Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Elizabeth (1789, Paris: Louvre; 1787, Chatsworth: Devonshire Collection). In England, French dress had long been considered superior to domestic products (with the exception of Spitalfield silk) and increasingly in France Anglomania had brought with it an appreciation for the ‘simplicity’ of English, specifically ‘country’ fashions. The queen made a gift of her favoured muslin dresses to Georgiana and is generally accepted as having introduced French style and fashion to corresponding English circles, while the English gloves and plumed hats worn by the Duchesses of Devonshire and Marlborough appeared in French fashion plates and were taken up by the queen and her courtiers.220 Admittedly, this did not always have the desired effect. Frances Burney was highly entertained by the ‘English’ dress sported by the duchesse de Polignac and her daughter at an event held by George III and Queen Charlotte: I was much amused by their dress, which they meant should be entirely a l’Angloise; for which purpose they had put on plain undress gowns, with close ordinary black silk bonnets! I am sure they must have been quite confused when they saw the Queen and Princesses, with their ladies, who were all dressed with uncommon care, and very splendidly.221 Nevertheless, the previously noticeable sartorial divide between these two countries began to narrow in the 1780s and the women of these two societies began to dress more and more alike, yet far from being a minor point this a strong indication of converging cultural perspectives and as the duchesse de Polignac’s letter to the Duchess of Devonshire makes plain, the desire to promote and subsume in return their own and each others’ customs.

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 125

3.8  The Princesse de Lamballe’s Second Visit to England, 1791 In June of 1791 the princesse de Lamballe made a second and final journey to England, this time as a fugitive. She was one of many compatriots who fled to London to escape the worsening situation in Paris; the following month Lady Malmesbury observed drily to her friend Lady Elliott, ‘You must take to studying French as the whole island will be full of them soon’.222 The princess’s departure was directly precipitated by the royal family’s flight to Varennes on the 20th of June. Lamballe learnt of this escape in a letter the queen had arranged for her to receive the following morning in which missive she urged the princess to think to her own safety as well. Embarking at Montreuil, the princess arrived in England on Saturday the 25th of June.223 However, the visit was destined to be short-lived for no sooner had she landed at Dover but the princess learnt of the royal family’s interception and with ‘the most extreme anguish of mind [. . .] immediately took her passage for Ostend, in one of Minet and Fector’s packets’.224 Travelling via the Netherlands, Lamballe arrived in Brussels on the 3rd of July where she was reunited with the queen’s friend, comte Fersen.225 A week later she journeyed on to the free Imperial city and spa destination, Aix-la-Chapelle (modern-day Aachen), where she wrote her will, before leaving in October for Paris.226 The Courier de l’Europe reported on the 18th of that month, ‘Il y eut Dimanche dernier grand jeu chez la Reine. Le cercle etoit fort brillant. Mme de Lamballe etoit aupres de Sa Majeste’.227 It was at some point over the next few months, probably in the spring, when the whole of Paris was undergoing violent upheaval and the fate of monarch and nation hung in the balance that the princess set about commissioning another English garden, this time for her house in Passy, enlisting the talents of Thomas Blaikie. Her original garden at Rambouillet was no longer her own, the château long since having been sold to Louis XVI at the king’s request.228 An inventory made of the Passy house before it was sold by Lamballe’s heirs shows that there was already a jardin anglais in the grounds,229 so this was to be a third garden in this style and this act of patronage, poignantly her last, must largely have been an attempt to recall those halcyon days at Rambouillet, to create a pocket idyll in the midst of chaos, and, strong in moral purpose and fortitude as she was, generally maintain a front of resolute stoicism. In his journal Blaikie recalled his meeting with the princess to discuss the laying out of the garden, The Duke d’Orleans desired me to go to Passy to see the Princess de Lamball [sic] who had a garden to Make and desired me to undertake; went the day the Duke ordered but being a few minutes too late he was gone; however I met the Princess who told me she wished I would make her a plan of her garden as her intention was to Charge and to employ as many of the poor of Passy as I could; I approuved very much of her goodness and promised soon to make her a Plan.230 Sometime later the gardener returned to the house, and took the plan of her Garden to the Princess Lambal [sic] who approved of it but desired I should charge with the works as She had confidence more on Me than any of her people but as I told her I could not undertake that but would trace and look after the works but could not keep account of the work if she would make one of her people to keep their accounts and to pay the workmen.231

126  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe The princess asked Blaikie to return the following week, which he did, only to learn she had been forcibly taken in the night.232 Following her removal from Passy on the 20th of June 1792, the princess was taken to join the queen in the Tuileries. On the night of the 19th of August 1792 they were separated for the last time when Lamballe was formally arrested and taken to the nearby La Force prison in anticipation of her trial. Following the princess’s imprisonment, rumours of the very worst travelled across the Channel with astonishing rapidity, eerily prophesising what was to come. In a letter written to Queen Charlotte the month before Lamballe’s death, the Prince of Wales added a hastily written postscript: P.S. Since I wrote the other side of this letter I hear it as the report of all the passengers of the packet & generally beleived [sic], that poor Madame de Lamballe had her head struck off on the Tuesday or Wednesday, but I flatter myself yt. this is by no means certain.233 A few days later the queen replied, the unfortunate end of the Prince de Poix, & the approaching one of Madame de Lamball [sic] had not reached us yet. It shews that there is no regard to persons, for Madame de Lamball being a Princesse de Carignan I should have thought would have escaped with her life, as such a step may perhaps draw the resentment of other Powers upon the Assembly.234 When confirmation eventually came of the princess’s unspeakably grisly death her English circle was appalled and sickened. The Prince of Wales wrote to the Duchess of Devonshire, My heart bleeds for the poor Queen of France whenever I think of her, & I cannot tell you how I suffer’d when I learnt the shocking end of poor Madame de Lamballe. In short, they are such monsters in France yt. I think the world cannot be too soon rided [sic] not only of such execrable & barbarous villains themselves, but of their whole race.235 Horace Walpole reversed his former position of indifference towards the princess, railing in a letter to Robert Nares, The ferocity that assassinated the Princesse de Lamballe is unexampled. In her terror she lost her senses—the monsters paused till she came to herself, that she might feel the whole of her sufferings! The epilogue to her martyrdom was scarce less horrible. They forced the King and Queen to stand at the window and behold the trunkless head on a pike!—and this, in that delicate Paris, that has always reproached our theatre with being too sanguinary—oh no, to be sure they required that our actors and actresses should commit actual murders on the stage.236

3.9 Conclusion The princesse de Lamballe’s visit to England in 1787 and her activities there are critical aids in assembling a more complete picture of the princess as patron and collector, yielding important insights into her previously unknown anglophile interests. The

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 127 portrait she commissioned from Richard Cosway during her visit, though we remain ignorant of its exact appearance, is continuing evidence of her canny use of portraits for political and social ends. Its commission is also further indication of her comparatively adventurous appetite and desire to trial different artists and styles, as well as a mark of her regard for British portraitists. The widespread success of her unofficial portrait in cameo by Wedgwood illustrates the extent of her renown in England and the collectability or visual appeal of her ‘head’, or likeness. Before and after her two visits the princess commissioned two lavish English gardens, which rank arguably as her most expansive gestures as patron. But for the princess, the second of these gardens, which was in fact her third such enterprise, was no mere affectation for unlike many other French proponents of this fashion she had acquired an intimate and authentic understanding of English gardens and the English country house during her long sojourn in England. The discovery of her collection and display of English prints is similarly illuminating. Once again this was a passion she shared with Marie-Antoinette, whose own hitherto unidentified yet substantial acquisitions revealed here are of significant interest in their own right, documenting as they do the queen’s keen interest in English culture and topical events, as well as providing more details about the nature of prints in Lamballe’s possession. These also show that for once in their relationship, Lamballe was if not the instigator of this taste then certainly the more dominant of the two in its development, by virtue of her superior grasp of the English school arising from a direct and sustained exposure to it. The centrality of enlightenment principles and the cult of sensibility to Lamballe’s taste, discussed in Chapter 2, are reinforced here, finding expression in her English gardens and sentimental prints. The latter too are an indication of more connoisseurial interests than are traditionally ascribed to Marie-Antoinette’s circle and when combined with the artistic impulses documented in the preceding chapter help to round out our understanding of the princess as a cultivated amateur. In short, the anglophile princesse de Lamballe is continued evidence of the sophisticated and worldly female patron who was once thought lacking from Marie-Antoinette’s court. These findings demand that we broaden our existing concept of the ancien régime patron to include alternative models that better allow for the rigid constraints within which female patrons operated. It was possible to be an enthusiastic and informed patron and collector (and to be perceived as such), without concentrating solely on monumental works of architecture or extensive picture collections; portraits, prints, gardens and an international reputation as a figure of cultural influence all played their part. Intriguing possibilities are thrown up by Marie-Antoinette’s purchases of English portrait prints, including those of the Duchess of Devonshire and Prince of Wales. Bearing in mind the connections scholars have already made between the French and English schools of painting and portraiture during this period, it would be surprising if the close-knit friendships that sprang up between the Devonshire set and the circle of Marie-Antoinette during the last two decades of the eighteenth century resulted in no perceptible correlations in the portraits both groups commissioned, especially during this age of portrait mania and lively cultural curiosity. After all it was these very trans-national relationships that framed so many of their activities during this period—whether designing gardens, collecting prints or donning new fashions. The stylistic similarities shared by some of these portraits are hardly accidental, and can be interpreted as part of the general evolution in late eighteenth-century portraiture

128  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe towards a more fluid and, arguably, universal visual idiom, one that dissolved national borders and was shaped as much by the shifting social climate in Europe and travellers’ introduction to foreign mores and models as by traditional native court paradigms. It is also symptomatic of the international character of Neoclassicism. This is, admittedly, still a vastly underexplored area of research and as Stéphane Roy has argued, numerous case studies must still be undertaken before art historians can begin to assume with some degree of confidence a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of this exchange. However one point is clear: the role of the print market was vital in bridging these two cultures. This artistic or cultural sorority among the leaders of these two elite societies further augments the argument developed in Chapter 2, namely that women in late eighteenth-century France and here, in England, looked to and relied on each other for affirmation of and guidance in their expressions of individual taste. Art historians should therefore attempt to be more flexible in their interpretation of courtly spheres of patronage of this period and endeavour to look beyond geographical boundaries.

Notes 1 J. T. Boulton (ed.), News from Abroad: Letters Written by British Travellers on the Grand Tour (Liverpool, 2013), p. 17. 2 P. Mansel, ‘Courts in exile: Bourbons, Bonapartes and Orléans in London, from George III to Edward VII’, in D. Kelly and M. Cornick (eds), A History of the French in London: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity (London, 2013), pp. 99–127, 99. 3 Ibid., p. 102. 4 Porter, Enlightenment, p. 326. 5 J. Marchand (ed.), Souvenirs du 10 Aout 1792 et de l’Armée de Bourbon (Paris, 1929), p. 351. 6 J. Marchand, ‘Introduction’, in F. de la Rochefoucauld, trans. S. C. Roberts, A Frenchman in England 1784 Being the Mélanges sur l’Angleterre of François de la Rochefoucauld (Cambridge, 1933), p. xiii. 7 ‘Quelques lettres à mon ami, sur mon voyage d’Angleterre’, May 1790, in F. M F. de Grimm and D. Diderot, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (16 vols., Paris, 1813), v, p. 392. 8 A, Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (London, 2002), p. 120. 9 Campan, The Private Life, p. 172, n. 3. 10 Bath Chronicle (14 June 1787). Entry for the 17th of June 1787, in S. Cooke (ed.), The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney (2 vols., Oxford, 2011), ii, p. 159. 11 The princess’s entourage may have included her personal physician, Dr Saiffert, as is suggested by Beaumarchais. Letter from Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais to Théveneau de Morande, dated Paris, 11th of July 1787, Pierre Bergé & Associés Sale, 17 May 2011, lot 47. Lamballe may well have engaged native attendants as well, as a watercolour portrait of Frances Bulwer (1758–1796) now at Snowshill Manor identifying the sitter as ‘Lady in Waiting to the Princess Lamballe’ appears to record (NT. 1336261.2). 12 London Evening Post (20–22 November 1766). 13 Porter, Enlightenment, p. 78. 14 The princess’s departure from Calais is discussed by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807) in a letter written at Calais on the 9th of July 1787 to the comte d’Esterno, ministre plénipotentiaire in Berlin, Alde Paris, Lettres & Manuscrits Autographes, 6 May 2008, lot 149. The Times (11 August 1787). 15 Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser (10 July 1787). 16 New London Magazine 3/30 (1787), p. 521. 17 Letter from George Montagu to Horace Walpole, Lewis, The Yale Edition, xxxiii, p. 567, n. 1. Walpole mentioned observing Lamballe at Versailles in a letter to Lady Ossory in 1775 (although, curiously, in a letter to the Earl of Strafford in 1787 he stated, ‘I never saw her,

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 129 not even in France’). Letter from Walpole to Lady Ossory, 18 August 1775, Lewis, The Yale Edition, xxxii, p. 255; Letter from Walpole to Strafford, 28 July 1787, Lewis, The Yale Edition, xxxv, p. 389; Letter from Walpole to Conway, 20 July 1787, Lewis, The Yale Edition, xxxix, p. 456; Letter from Walpole to Lady Ossory, 6 September 1787, The Yale Edition, xxxiii, p. 567. 18 Morning Herald (20 July 1787). 19 ‘Burrell, Sir Peter, 2nd Bt. (1754–1820), of Langley Park, Beckenham, Kent’, in R. Thorne (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1790–1820, (electronic version) (London, 1986). 20 The Gentleman’s Magazine 62 (1787), p. 734. 21 Public Advertiser (25 July 1787). 22 ‘Court Circular’, The Times (28 July 1787). 23 NA, SP 78/260/111, folio 264 & SP/78/272/52. 24 Letter from Horace Walpole to the Earl of Strafford, 28 July 1787, Lewis, The Yale Edition, xxxv, p. 389. 25 The Times (30 July 1787). 26 The Times (1 August 1787); ‘Foot Race’, Brighton Gazette, XXI (Brighton, 1787). 27 The article also recorded the presence of Charles Fox and, ‘The Princess de Carignon, flanked by the Lord of Clermont and Colonel Fitzpatrick, walked over the course’, The Times (3 August 1787); ‘To the Public’, Brighton Gazette (1 August 1787). 28 Entry for the 7th of August 1787, F. Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1842), i, p. 600. 29 Lescure, La princesse, p. 266. 30 A. Tinniswood, A History of Country House Visiting: Five Centuries of Tourism and Taste (Oxford, 1989), p. 107. 31 D. Arnold (ed.), The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (Stroud, 2013), p. xiii. 32 Ibid. 33 Tinniswood, A History of Country House, p. 99. 34 Ibid., p. 95. 35 Quoted in Girouard, Life in the French, p. 165. 36 J. Adhémar and M-C Barthe, Les Joies de la Nature au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1971), p. 10. 37 E. Ballaira, trans. S. Ricca and C. Penazzo, The Stupinigi Hunting Lodge (Turin, 2014), p. 20. 38 Letter from the Comte de Viry to the Sardinian Minister of Foreign Affairs, dated 18 July 1774. AST, Mazzo 216. 39 N. Scarfe (ed.), Innocent Espionage: The La Rochefoucauld Brothers’ Tour of England in 1785 (Woodbridge, 1995), p. 142. 40 K. Morgan (ed.), An American Quaker in the British Isles: The Travel Journals of Jabez Maud Fisher, 1775–1779 (Oxford, 1992), p. 86. 41 Ibid. 42 Caledonian Mercury (Saturday 15 September 1787). 43 The Times (28 September 1787). 44 Ibid. 45 J. Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’, Brown: The Omnipotent Magician, 1716–1783 (London, 2012), p. 173. 46 J. Friedman, Spencer House: Chronicle of a Great London Mansion (London, 1993), p. 34. 47 Ibid, p. 227. 48 Lady Lucan’s fine miniature production, in Lord Spencer’s collection, was particularly noticed by the princesse de Lamballe, who herself excels in this delicate species of painting, The British Mercury Or Annals of History, Politics, Manners. . ., III/8 (1787), p. 253. 49 Kentish Gazette Friday 26 October 1787. 50 Ibid. 51 The Times (11 October 1787). 52 The Times (30 July 1787). 53 S. Lloyd et al., Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 51.

130  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 4 In 1786. Ibid., p. 50. 5 55 G. Barnett, Richard and Maria Cosway: A Biography (Cambridge, 1995), p. 94. 56 Ill. Lloyd et al., Richard and Maria Cosway. 57 This is reproduced in ibid., pl. 34, as ‘M. de Polignac’. Neither of the two portraits is reproduced in Lloyd’s exhibition catalogue although there is a caption for that of Gabrielle [Yolande] de Polignac, Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway. 58 Quoted in Junot, Histoire des Salons, ii, p. 114. 59 Barnett, Richard and Maria, fn. 21. 60 Catalogue of Objects of Art and Vertu, Gold Snuff Boxes, Miniatures Watches and Coins, Christie’s, Spencer House, Wednesday 4 March 1953, lot 70 (annotated copy in Christie’s Archive, King St). 61 Ibid. 62 Catalogue of Objects of Art and Vertu Miniatures, Watches and Coins, Christie’s, Spencer House, Monday 18 May 1953, lot 55, (annotated copy in Christie’s Archive, King St). A miniature of the princesse de Lamballe attributed to Cosway, although in fact clearly nineteenth century and a reduced copy in reverse of Rioult’s painting at Versailles, came up for sale in 2017: Burstow & Hewett, Battles, East Sussex, Picture Sale, 2 August 2017, lot 238. 63 L. Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: the rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven and London, 1983), p. 1. 64 W. T. Whitely, Artists and Their Friends in England 1700–1799, 1st edn (2 vols., London, 1928), ii, p. 67. 65 ‘Introduction’ in, R. Reilly, Wedgwood Portrait Medallions (London, 1973), up. 66 Wedgwood Museum Archives, Box no. 2 document 831 & 988. 67 ‘Introduction’ in, R. Reilly, Wedgwood Portrait Medallions (London, 1973), up. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., cat. 68. 72 Cabanès, La princesse de Lamballe, p. 167, fig. 46. 73 I thank Béatrice Coullaré, Musée du Louvre, and Agnès Villela-Petit, Cabinet des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques de la Bibliothèque nationale de France for their kind assistance. 74 A. Storelli, Jean-Baptiste Nini, sa vie son oeuvre, 1717–1786 (Tours, 1896); H. Nocq, Les Duvivier (Paris, 1911). 75 Ibid. Nocq, p. 128. 76 AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 6. 77 Nocq, Les Duvivier, p. 117. 78 Letter from Josiah Wedgwood Junior to Josiah Wedgwood Senior, Etruria, Saturday April 1788, K. E. Farrer (ed.), Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (3 vols., 1973), iii, p. 68. 79 A creamware example, thought to date from c. 1790 is in the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama. (AFI.1856.2008). 80 R. Reilly, Wedgwood Jasper (London, 1994), p. 543. 81 J. Tassie, A Descriptive Catalogue of a General Collection of Ancient and Modern Engraved Gems, Cameos as Well as Intaglios, Taken from the Most Celebrated Cabinets in Europe; and Cast in Coloured Pastes, White Enamel, and Sulphur, by James Tassie (2 vols., London, 1791), ii, p. 744, no. 14256. 82 The portrait of Lamballe is listed in R E Raspe’s descriptive catalogue of Tassie’s works, I. Roscoe (ed.), A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660–1851 (London, 2009), no. 40. 83 J. Wedgwood, Catalogue de camées, intaglios, médailles, bas-reliefs, bustes et petite statues (Staffordshire, 1788). 84 15 October 1787 cited in Bertin, Madame de Lamballe, p. 184. 85 M. de Decker, La princesse de Lamballe, 3rd edn (Paris, 2006), p. 172. 86 In 1770 the princess’s father-in-law planned to take her to the seaside in Normandy, Le Havre de Grace, for her health; her sister-in-law the duchesse de Chartres visited Forges-les-Eaux in 1772 to recover from a miscarriage; in June 1775 the princess took the waters at Plombière and is also thought to have visted Vichy; in 1775 she spent three months at Bourbonne les Bains; in 1789 the princess visited the spa town of Aix la Chapelle (and later returned in exile) and visited Spa in 1791, where the duchesse de Polignac had convalesced in 1779.

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 131 87 J. Leigh, The Search for Enlightenment: An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century French Literature (London, 1999), p. 19. 88 P. Mansel, Prince of Europe: The Life of Charles Joseph de Ligne (1735–1814) (London, 2003), p. 67. 89 Ibid., p. 41. 90 R. Wittkower, Palladio and English Palladianism (London, 1983). 91 J. Grieder, Anglomania in France 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse (Geneva; Paris, 1985), p. 14. 92 Quoted in D. L. Hays, ‘ “This is not a Jardin Anglais” Carmontelle, the Jardin de Monceau, and irregular garden design in late eighteenth-century France’, in Beneš and Harris, Villas and Gardens, pp. 294–326, p. 323. 93 Scarfe, Innocent Espionage, p. 44. 94 Ibid., p. 45. 95 Ibid. 96 AN 300 AP I 893. 97 Letter from the comte de Mercy to Maria Theresa, 2 July 1774, Arneth and Geffroy, Corréspondance secrète, ii, p. 193 (letter XLVI). 98 I. Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XV, André le Nôtre and the creation of the Gardens of Versailles (London, 2006), p. 318. 99 On the planning and execution of the queen’s gardens at the Petit Trianon see M. Chapman et al., Marie-Antoinette and the Petit Trianon at Versailles (San Francisco, 2007), pp. 145–172 and C. Waltisperger, ‘Trianon et le retour à la nature’ in Salmon, Marie-Antoinette, pp. 274–291. 100 N. Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (Boston; London; Sydney, 1982), p. 93. 101 J. Milam, Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art (Lanham, MD, 2011), p. 75. 102 Chapman, Marie-Antoinette, p. 146. 103 T. Clayton, ‘Publishing Houses: Prints of Country Seats’, in Arnold, The Georgian Country House, pp. 43–60, p. 43. 104 ‘Etats de livres et d’estampes adresses à M. Campan pour la Reine’. AN, 440 AP 2 4–10. 105 The Austrian Francophile prince de Ligne had visited England in the summer of 1767 where he marvelled at the gardens of Blenheim, Wilton and Windsor. His English garden at Beloeil, completed in 1775, included grazing sheep. Mansel, Prince of Europe, p. 41. 106 G. Lenôtre [pseud. Louis Léon Théodore Gosselin] Le Château de Rambouillet (Paris, 1930), p. 85. 107 E. DeLorme, Garden Pavilions and the Eighteenth-Century French Court (Woodbridge, 1996), p. 279. 108 See Service National des Travaux, La restauration des fabriques du domaine national de Rambouillet (France, 2007). 109 AN O1 3440. 110 The original drawing is in the Archivio Doria-Pamphilij, Rome. Bettini’s annotation read: “A Rambuÿer 1782 desiné apr natur pr Bettinj 178/ il ÿ avet la P. L’Abubal [princesse de Lamballe] que se ballaceana”. D. L. Hays, ‘Francesco Bettini and the Pedagogy of Garden Design in Late Eighteenth-century France’, in J. Dixon Hunt and M. Conan (eds.), Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art, Chapters of a New History (Philadelphia, 2002) pp. 93–120, p. 105; n. 45. 111 D. Posner, ‘The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard’, Art Bulletin, LXIV (1982), pp. 75–88; J. Milam, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings: Visual Games in Rococo Art (Manchester, 2007), p. 76; p. 78; R. Rand (ed.), Intimate Encounters, Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth Century France (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 112 M. Mosser, ‘Les architectures paradoxales ou petit traité des fabriques’, in M. Mosser and G. Teyssot (eds.), Histoire des jardins de la Renaissance à nos jours (Paris, 2002), pp. 259–276, p. 269. 113 ‘chaumière’, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed), http://encyclopedie. uchicago.edu/. vol.3, p. 257.

132  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 14 M-F. Boyer, ‘The Princess’s Folly’, World of Interiors, 28 (3) (2008), pp. 170–177. 1 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. The upholstery silk is a modern reproduction rewoven to the original design. 118 AN O1 3440. 119 DeLorme, Garden Pavilions, p. 281. 120 Y. Bottineau, ‘Le Château de Rambouillet’, Monuments Historiques de la France, 112 (1980), pp. 65–80, 78. 121 Boyer, ‘The Princess’s Folly’. 122 AN O1 3440. 123 L. Châtel, The Eighteenth-Century Picturesque, or the English Taste for Rusticity, podcast of paper delivered at the Rustic Nature Artistic Rusticity Symposim at the Maison Française, Oxford, 16 July 2013, www.mfo.ac.uk/?q=en/podcasts/rustic-nature-and-artisticrusticity#sthash.yL3j8aWo.dpuf. Accessed 12 October 2014. M. Mosser, ‘Poétique des origines: huttes et grottes dans les jardins du XVIIIe siècle en France’, podcast of paper delivered at the Rustic Nature Artistic Rusticity Symposim at the Maison Française, Oxford, 16 July 2013, www.mfo.ac.uk/?q=en/podcasts/rustic-nature-and-artisticrusticity#sthash.3SSQS7ch.dpuf. Accessed 12 October 2014 124 Ibid. 125 M. Roland Michel, ‘Entre scène et jardin’ in Mosser and Teyssot, Histoire des jardins, pp. 239–248, 243. 126 DeLorme, Garden Pavilions, p. 283. 127 A.-N. Dezallier d’Argenville, Voyage Pittoresque Des Environs De Paris (Paris, 1779), p. 207. 128 Ibid., p. 208. 129 P. Rosenberg, Fragonard (New York and Paris, 1987–1988), cat. 168. 130 Ibid. 131 Lot notes for either a preliminary drawing or later copy of the painting by the artist, Christie’s Old Master and 19th Century Drawings, 3 July 2007, London, King St, Sale 7409, Lot 137.M-A. Dupuy-Vachey, trans. J. Tittensor, Fragonard (Paris, 2006); Daniel Wildenstein gives the painting its Rambouillet title in his catalogue though he acknowledges this was a later addition, D. Wildenstein, L’opera complete di Fragonard (Milan, 1972), p. 106, cat. 464. 132 Christie’s Old Master and 19th Century Drawings, lot 137. 133 J-P. Cuzin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Vie et œuvre. Catalogue complet des peintures (Paris, 1987), cat. 193. 134 Ibid, p. 100. 135 According to Cuzin it is not entirely certain that the duke did comission it, although the painting has been in the collections of the Hôtel de Toulouse since the early nineteenth century, Ibid., p. 196. 136 Letter from Madame Hall to Adèle [Adélaïde] Hall, Nogent, 27 September 1781, K. Asplund (ed.), P. A. Hall, sa correspondence de famille (Stockholm, 1955), pp. 43–44, no. 9. 137 M. Symes, The English Rococo Garden (Oxford, 2011), p. 9. 138 Ibid., p. 14. 139 D. Arnold, ‘Defining Femininity: Women and the Country House’, in Arnold, The Georgian Country House, pp. 79–99, p. 79; p. 99. 140 Martin, Dairy Queens, p. 52. 141 Ibid., pp. 118–119. 142 Ibid., p. 210. 143 DeLorme, Garden Pavilions, p. 278. 144 Babelon, Le Château d’Amboise, p. 141. 145 Anonymous, Le Porte-Feuille du bon homme, ou petit dictionnaire très-utile pour l’intelligence des affaires présentes (Paris, 1791), p. 11. 146 Although Marie-Antoinette’s early education has been derided by historians, the Abbé de Vermond was enlisted to take it in hand before her marriage and made considerable

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 133 strides, providing tutelage in literature, French and other subjects. He found his pupil ‘more intelligent than has generally been supposed’ and in possession of ‘sound judgement’; it was her powers of concentration and initiative (she was, afterall, 13 years of age at the time) that he found lacking. S. Zweig, trans. E and C. Paul, Marie Antoinette (London, 2010), p. 22. Lamballe was educated with her sisters in the convento della visitazione in Turin, where all the princesses of Savoy were schooled in a rigorously pious education. G. Datta De Albertis, La Principessa di Lamballe, 1749–1792 (Milan, 1935), p. 13. 147 A. Griffiths, ‘English Prints in eighteenth-century Paris’, Print Quarterly, 22 (4) (2005), pp. 375–396, 384. 148 Avezou and Dumoulin, ‘La Maison de Mme de Lamballe’, p. 99. 149 AST, Cat. 107 Mazzo I, No. 3 & No. 5. 150 A. Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (London, 2004), p. 81. See also T. Chapman, The English Print 1688–1802 (London; New Haven, 1997), pp. 216–220. 151 Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking, p. 83. 152 Blondel quoted in J. Whitehead, The French Interior in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1992), p. 91. 153 AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 6. 154 Griffiths, ‘English Prints’; A. Griffiths, ‘Two Letters on the Print Trade between London and Paris in the Eighteenth Century’, Print Quarterly, 9 (3) (1992), pp. 282–284; S. Roy, ‘The Art of Trade and the Economics of Taste: The English Print Market in Paris, 1770– 1800’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 6 (2008), pp. 167–192. See also B. Jobert, ‘Estampe anglaise, estampe française: une histoire commune?’ in O. Meslay et al. (eds.), D’outre Manche: l’art britannique dans les collections publiques françaises (Paris, 1994), pp. 114–29. 155 Roy, ‘The Art of Trade’, p. 183. 156 Griffiths, ‘Two Letters on the Print Trade’. See also P. Casselle, ‘Pierre-François Basan, marchand d’estampes à Paris (1723–1797)’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile de France: mémoires, 33 (1982), 99–185. 157 L. Whiteley, ‘Prints at French Salons, 1673–1800, rev. of Dictionnaire des Artistes exposant dans les Salons des XVII et XVIIIe siècles à Paris et en province 1673–1800 by Pierre Sanchez’, Print Quarterly, 23 (1) (2006), pp. 76–78, 77. 158 Cited in Ibid. 159 Griffiths, ‘English Prints’, p. 382. Roy publishes an advertisement for the exhibition from the Journal de Paris in his article, ‘The Art of Trade’, p. 174. 160 Griffiths, ‘English Prints’, p. 384. 161 M. Préaud et al, Dictionnaire des éditeurs d’estampes à Paris sous l’Ancien Régime (Nantes, 1987), p. 53. 162 In 1779 Bergny’s shop was in the ‘rue Coquillière, en face de la rue de Grenelle-SaintHonoré’, by 1788 however, it had moved to the rue du Coq-Saint-Honoré’, Ibid. 163 AN, 440 AP 2 4–10 ‘Etats de livres et d’estampes adresses à M. Campan pour la Reine’. 164 Roy, ‘The Art of Trade’, p. 170. 165 Journal de Paris, 107, 17 April 1787, pp. 469–70, quoted in Ibid., p. 184. 166 For seventeenth-century French collectors, the different states and levels of rarity of prints were part of their allure, as they are for collectors today. A. Schnapper, Curieux du Grand Siècle. Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1994), p. 248. 167 D. Alexander, Affecting Moments: Prints of English Literature Made in the Age of Romantic Sensibility (York, 1993). 168 J. Mullan, ‘Sensibility’ and ‘Sentiment’ in J. Black and R. Porter (eds.), A Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century History (London, 1996), pp. 675–676. 169 D. Alexander, ‘Kauffman and the Print Market in Eighteenth-century England’, in W. W. Roworth, Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England (London, 1992), 141–178. 170 If not, then the earlier pair showing starching and indigo dyeing, published in 1769, ‘Domestick Employment’ by Butler Clowes after Henry Morlan (London: BM, inv. 2010,7081.1730 & 1731).

134  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 171 In 1794 the engraver Pierre Laurent opined that England had inundated France with its prints, ‘et surtout des productions du Burin de Bartolozi’. ‘Pétition de Pierre Laurent, graveur, à la Convention nationale’, Paris, 1794, AN F17 1281, pièce 141, quoted in Roy, 2006, p. 184. 172 Roy, 2006, p. 175. 173 AN, 440 AP 2 4–10. 174 ‘Colonel Tarleton, et prince de Galle au pied’, AN, 440 AP 2 4–10. 175 ‘1. famille du Duc de Marlborough’, AN, 440 AP 2 4–10. 176 ‘Miss Sheridan, Miss Siddons, Mrs Hartley et Siddons en oval par Sherwin a 12: 24’;‘1. Miss Abingthon [sic] en rouge’ 6. livres and ‘Miss Robinson en Noir oval’;‘du 22 avril 1784, 2. Miss Siddons et Martley (?) ‘Envoyé a Monsieur Campan par ordre de la Reine par Basan et Poignant’. AN, 440 AP 2 4–10. 177 BN: Ad-48-Fol.-Ad-49-Fol. 178 See the portraits of Pompadour and of the comte and comtesse de Provence in Griffiths’s appendix. Griffiths, 2005, p. 392. 179 Ibid. 180 Griffiths, 2005, p. 393. 181 Ibid., p. 395. 182 ’1. Duchesse de Devonshire de Bartolozzi’ and ’1. Les Enfants de la Duchesse de Devonshire’, ‘du 22 avril 1784 ‘Envoyé a Monsieur Campan par ordre de la Reine par Basan et Poignant’, AN, 440 AP 2/14. From 1773–1788, Basan was in partnership with ÉtienneLéon Poignant—see Préaud, 1987, p. 42. 183 E. Hamilton, A Catalogue raisonné of the engraved works of Sir Joshua Reynolds from 1755 to 1822, London,1884, p. 96 184 Porter, English Society in the 18th Century 2nd edn (London, 1990), p. 231. 185 Bath Chronicle (2 January 1794). 186 Fraser, Marie Antoinette, p. 146, n. 6. 187 K. Chrisman-Campbell, ‘French Connection: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the Anglo-French Fashion Exchange’, Dress, 31 (2004), pp. 3–14 188 D. M. Stuart, Dearest Bess: The Life and Times of Lady Elizabeth Foster afterwards Duchess of Devonshire (London, 2012), p. 31. 189 General Evening Post (24–26 July 24 1787). 190 ‘Our Repository of Poetical Favours contains [. . .] Verses from the Duchess of D—e, to the Princesse de Lamballe, &c. &c. from’, The Lady’s Magazine, September 1787, London, p. 450. No doubt these were similar in style to the verses/lines the duchess wrote for Lady Elizabeth Foster—which were composed in English and in French. 191 A. Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London, 1998), p. 195. 192 Ibid. 193 Fraser, Marie Antoinette, p. 541. 194 Letter from the duchesse de Polignac to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, August 14, 1783, quoted in Chrisman-Campbell, ‘French Connection’, p. 6. 195 ‘List of a few things in Lady Elizabeth Foster’s Apartment with the places where they are to be found’, reproduced in Stuart, Dearest Bess, Appendix I. 196 E. K. Waterhouse, ‘English Painting and France in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 15 (3–4) (1952), pp. 122–135, 122. Another early study is the Kenwood House exhibition catalogue, The French taste in English painting during the first half of the 18th century (London, 1968). 197 J. Hedley, ‘L’influence Française sur l’art du portrait Anglais au XVIIIe siècle’, in X. Salmon (ed.), De Soie et de Poudre, Arles: Actes Sud (2003), pp. 102–134, 109. 198 G. Glorieux, ‘L’Angleterre et Watteau au XVIIIe siècle: La réception de la fête galante par les amateurs anglais’, The British Art Journal, 7 (2) (Autumn 2006), pp. 50–55. 199 E. Waterhouse, Gainsborough (London, 1958), p. 44. 200 M. Rosenthal and M. Myrone, Gainsborough (London, 2002), p. 214; J. Hayes, The Portrait in British Art (London,1991), p. 88. 201 Ibid., p. 113.

The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 135 202 R. Rosenblum, ‘Reynolds in an International Milieu’, in, N. Penny (ed.), Reynolds (London, 1986), pp. 43–54. 203 P. Joannides, ‘Some English Themes in the Early Work of Gros’, The Burlington Magazine 117 (873) (1975), pp. 774–785, 784. 204 Ibid. 205 Most recently with O. Meslay, L’art anglais dans es collections de l’Institut de France (Paris, c. 2004); O. Meslay and B. Crespon-Halotier, Les peintres britanniques dans les salons parisiens des origines à 1939 (Dijon, 2003); O. Meslay et al., 1994, and Meslay’s online catalogue produced in collaboration with the Louvre, D’Outre Manche: L’art britannique dans les collections publiques françaises: http//: http://musee.louvre.fr/bases/ doutremanche/index.php?lng=0 206 C. Oulmont, ‘Portraits inédits par J.-L. Mosnier’, Revue du dix-huitième siècle, 1914, II, pp. 205–206. 207 Hedley, 2003, p. 104. 208 Joannides, 1975, p. 784. 209 Roy, 2006, p. 192. 210 J. Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery. Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760–1790, London, exh. cat. 2004, p. 147. 211 Correspondence with Charles Noble, Curator of the Devonshire Collections, 21 May 2013. I thank Mr Noble for his kind assistance. 212 BN Ad-48-Fol.-Ad-49-Fol. 213 Brun’s portrait, in a private collection, is ill. in Blanc, Portraits de femmes, p. 251. 214 Letter from Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire to Lady Spencer, August 11, 1790, quoted in Chrisman-Campbell, ‘French Connection’, p. 10; S. Duffy and C. M. Vogtherr, Miniatures in the Wallace Collection, London, 2010, p. 85, cat. 28 215 Ibid. 216 Ibid. 217 Ill. in de Herdt and de La Rochefoucauld, Louis-Auguste Brun, no. 68. 218 M. A. Oppenheimer, The French Portrait: Revolution to Restoration, exh. cat., Northampton MA, 2005, p. 7. 219 Ibid., p. 124. 220 See Chrisman-Campbell, ‘French Connection’, p. 5. 221 Entry for the 17th of June, 1787, in Cooke, The Court Journals, ii, p. 160. 222 In July 1791, quoted in K. Carpenter, ‘The novelty of the French émigrés in London in the 1790s’, in Kelly and Cornick, 2013: 69–90, p. 74. 223 Evening Mail, June 24, 1791–June 27, 1791; Issue 364. 224 General Evening Post, June 25, 1791–June 28, 1791; Issue 9009. The London Chronicle also reported that the princess was embarked at Dover for Ostend. London Chronicle, June 25, 1791–June 28, 1791; Issue 5436 225 Her arrival was recorded by the comte de Fersen, also in Brussels, in his diary. Three days later he noted, ‘Le 6.—Diné et soirée chez Sullivan. Conversation avec madame de Lamballe des bêtises et des commérages’. Entries for 3rd and 6th of July 1791, H. A. von Fersen and R. M. Klinckowström, Le comte de Fersen et la cour de France, Paris, 1877, p. 4. 226 Fersen reported her leaving for the capital on the 29th of October‘Le 10 [. . .] Lamballe partie pour Aix’; ‘Samedi 29.—Vu la princesse de Lamballe qui est partie pour Paris’. Ibid, p. 4; p. 33. However the date suggested by the Courier de l’Europe (see below) conflicts with this. 227 Courier de l’Europe, vol. 30, Mardi 18 October, 1791, p. 254. 228 The château was sold to Louis XVI by the duc de Penthièvre on the 29th of December, 1783. 229 Cabanès, La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 497. 230 T. Blaikie and F. Birrell (ed.), Diary of a Scotch Gardener at the French Court at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2012), p. 215. 231 Ibid., p. 231. 232 Ibid.

136  The Anglophile Princesse de Lamballe 233 Letter from the Prince of Wales to Queen Charlotte, Brighton, 24 August 1792, in Aspinall, The Correspondence of the Prince of Wales, ii, p. 266, letter 684, 38718–9. 234 Letter from Queen Charlotte to the Prince of Wales, Weymouth, 26 August 1792, ibid., p. 268, letter 686, f. 36393–4. 235 Letter from the Prince of Wales to the Duchess of Devonshire, 26 September 1792, ibid., p. 290, letter 696, f. 41996–7. 236 Letter from Horace Walpole to Robert Nares, 12 September 1792, Lewis, Yale edition of Walpole’s correspondence, xv, p. 220.

© RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot

Plate 1 Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, portrait of the family of the duc de Penthièvre, 1768, oil on canvas, 177 × 255.5 cm (Versailles: musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon)

Plate 2 Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1770, pencil, watercolour and gouache on paper, 25.5 × 19.3 cm (Chantilly: Musée Condé) © Grand Palais (domaine de Chantilly)/René-Gabriel Ojéda

Plate 3 Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, portrait presumed to be of the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1768, oil on canvas, 114 × 90 cm (private collection) © Formerly The Matthiesen Gallery and Stair Sainty, London

© MAD, Paris/Laurent Sully Jaulmes

Plate 4 Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, portrait of the duc and duchesse de Chartres with their families, c. 1775–1776, oil on canvas, 130 × 194 cm (Paris: musée Nissim de Camondo)

Plate 5 Marie-Victoire Lemoine, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1779, oil on canvas, 61 × 49.5 cm (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse) © Banque de France

Plate 6 Joseph Ducreux, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1778, oil on canvas, 123 × 96 cm (Versailles: Château de Versailles) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Daniel Arnaudet

Plate 7 Jean-Laurent Mosnier, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1780, oil on canvas, 206 × 145 cm (Lamballe: Mairie de Lamballe) © Ville de Lamballe

Plate 8 Karl Anton Hickel (1745–1798), portrait of the princesse de Lamballe. Vaduz, LIECHTENSTEIN. The Princely Collections—Vaduz-Vienna. Oil on canvas, 66 × 44 cm, Inv.: GE 1675 © 2018 LIECHTENSTEIN, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna/SCALA, Florence, © Photo SCALA, Florence

Plate 9 Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, portrait of the princesse de Lamballe, 1782, oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm (Versailles: Château de Versailles) © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot

© Philippe Berthé/Centre des monuments nationaux

Plate 10 Claude-Martin Goupy (c. 1720–1793), chaumière aux coquillages (constructed 1779–1781), in the princesse de Lamballe’s English garden at the Château de Rambouillet

Plate 11 Claude-Martin Goupy (c. 1720–1793), interior of the chaumière aux coquillages (constructed 1779–1781), with furniture by Toussaint-François Foliot (1748–c. 1808), in the princesse de Lamballe’s English garden at the Château de Rambouillet © Colombe Clier/Centre des monuments nationaux

Plate 12 François Boucher, ‘Aminta freeing Sylvia surprised by a Satyr’, 1755, oil on canvas, 104 × 139 cm (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse) © RMN-Grand Palais/Christian Jean/Jacques L’hoir

Plate 13 Interior of the princesse de Lamballe’s salon at the Hôtel de Toulouse (now called the Salon Fragonard), showing François Boucher, ‘Sylvia relieving Phyllis from a Bee Sting’, 1755, oil on canvas, 104 × 139 cm (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse) © Banque de France

© Banque de France

Plate 14 Interior of the princesse de Lamballe’s salon at the Hôtel de Toulouse (now called the Salon Fragonard) with original boiseries from the 1780s (Paris: Banque de France, Hôtel de Toulouse)

Plate 15 Jan van Huysum, still life (one of a pair formerly in the princesse de Lamballe’s collection), c. 1718–1722, oil on panel, 80.2 × 60.3 cm (private collection, Courtesy of Sotheby’s)

Plate 16 Photograph of the garden façade of the Hôtel de Lamballe today, with its double revolution staircase Photo: Author

4 ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ The Private Collection and Public Patronage of the Princesse de Lamballe, a Courtier-Collector

4.1 Introduction Patrick Michel has described the eighteenth century as the greatest period of collecting and connoisseurship in French history, citing the sheer number and quality of private collections assembled during these years as evidence supporting this view.1 But if the aesthetic and technical brilliance of the fine and decorative arts of the eighteenth century have long been recognised, the contribution of the female courtiers whose inspired patronage made much of it possible has not. It is clear that in eighteenthcentury France, as elsewhere in Europe, the court no longer monopolised patronage as it had in the previous century and the increasingly perilous state of the royal finances precluded more extensive support.2 Encouragement for the arts now came from bases other than the court and church, and as society itself was evolving, new and varied types of patron and collector were also emerging. Nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically given the monarchy’s rapidly receding authority and prestige, the court was still the most reliable and constant source of patronage. Courtiers may not have set the fashion for contemporary genre or history painting3, but they were unequivocally instrumental in determining the fashionable course of everything else: portraiture, architecture, gardens, interiors, decorative arts, fashion; and literary, theatrical and musical patronage. Moreover, through their visible financial support of art institutions and the backing they gave individual artists and artisans, particularly those seeking admission to the Academy, they shaped the very anatomy of the art world and its protagonists. With the exception of the prince de Conti, the comtesse de Verrue (both relatives of the princesse de Lamballe), Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry, the marquis de Marigny and the comte de Vaudreuil, ‘courtier-collectors’ have received little attention.4 Despite extensive scholarship on Madame de Pompadour, female patrons in particular have largely had their influence undercut, diluted or rendered incidental. One recent assessment of Mme Geoffrin, the prominent salonnière and woman of letters, was that she collected solely in order to furnish and ornament her apartments, although her taste, which can be judged from a surviving inventory, was both modern and cosmopolitan.5 But of all the women in this period, it is those attached to MarieAntoinette’s court who have been dealt a particularly dismissive treatment. Interest in the interiors inhabited by the queen and the women of her circle, and the collections assembled within them, has intensified in the past two decades, but while art historians have rightly read luxury and elegance in these carefully conceived spaces rarely have they interpreted them as displays of an informed taste, and never enlightened

138  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ connoisseurship. Marie-Antoinette’s activities have been described as decorating rather than collecting.6 This despite the fact that in her private rooms in every palace the queen was surrounded by works of art of her own selection and that she seemed ‘genuinely sensitive to the power of works of art’.7 The queen displayed works drawn from the collections of Louis XIV in her chambre de parade and acquired Chinese porcelain and other objets d’art at auction and from marchands merciers for her private rooms.8 Following her mother’s death she displayed Maria Theresa’s collection of fifty lacquer boxes, and inventories show that in one room the queen had assembled her own collection of over 140 small objets d’art in rock crystal, pietra dura, petrified wood, porcelain and lacquer.9 In the aftermath of the first few tumultuous weeks of the revolution, the queen moved swiftly to protect these collections, she thought for posterity, by entrusting some of them to the care of her dealer, Dominique Daguerre.10 One cannot but be struck by the fact that Maria Theresa’s boxes are considered by scholars to be a collection when connected with the Empress,11 but once in MarieAntoinette’s possession deteriorate into mere knick-knacks. The dispersed collections of eighteenth-century French courtiers now form the backbone to some of the most famous galleries and museums in the world. To what, then, can one attribute this reluctance to view Marie-Antoinette and her peers, the princesse de Lamballe among them, as ‘proper’ patrons and collectors of art? In part it is due to the negative reputation of the decorative arts that were so central to their collections. In the past four decades these have been restored to the centre of art historical scholarship and collecting studies, but eighteenth-century decorative arts in particular were neglected for many years, tarnished by their association with a reign of perceived excess. At the same time, the sheer force of interest in the person and violent misfortunes of Marie-Antoinette and the notoriety under which her legacy has laboured has had the unfortunate consequence of deflecting attention away from her more cultivated or artistic pursuits. Because the figure of Marie-Antoinette has until very recently been so greatly derided, her court has not been judged a forum for artistic patronage of any great significance. The dispersals caused by the revolution have further compounded the general neglect of the status of the queen and her courtiers as patrons and collectors, making any serious study of their dismembered collections an exercise in painstaking excavation. Consequently, there have been few serious studies of courtier-collectors from this period and fewer still of the women in the queen’s circle.12 The princesse de Lamballe, long dismissed as a lachrymose simpleton whose superintendency was assumed to have been merely titular, has never even been considered as a collector or patron, much less seriously evaluated in these roles. We must also contend with the fact that eighteenth-century female courtiers were rarely, if ever, described by their peers or in the literature of the time as collectors proper, either because their status and wealth predicated an inherent taste and discrimination, and this paired with the presence of dynastic collections made such descriptions unnecessary or irrelevant, or because this appellation now carried bourgeois associations with a mercantile-class collector that would have made its application to them inappropriate. The term ‘collector’ was not regularly employed in the eighteenth century as it is now, nor did it convey the same meaning. The princesse de Lamballe would have thought of herself as an amateur and patron, possibly a curieux or connoisseur, but not a ‘collector’.13 Nor do we yet fully understand the role played by gender in these activities—could the princesse de Lamballe, as a woman, aspire to be a serious ‘collector’, was this something that was encouraged of her sex or considered

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 139 appropriate? Or was a woman of her position and with her professional role expected to cultivate the traditional profile of the courtly patroness in the renaissance tradition? Attitudes in England at this time show that ‘gentlemen thought of connoisseurship as their prerogative, and not appropriate to artisans or women’,14 but there has been no equivalent study of this issue in the French context. Although we know women participated in the activities of the amateur and frequently marshalled or sponsored artistic talent, we know little of how they were viewed or how they viewed themselves.15 But then as Michel has remarked of this period, ‘l’histoire des femmes collectionneuses reste à écrire’.16 The discovery and rediscovery of a wealth of inventories, financial papers and other unpublished archival documents relating to the princesse de Lamballe therefore present an ideal opportunity to begin to rectify these lacunae and by appraising the princess’s status as collector, patron and cultural model, one can also begin to illuminate the nature of a female courtier’s collections and the character of female patronage at the court of Marie-Antoinette generally. This chapter will examine the image the princess cultivated of herself, and its reception, before going on to survey her patronage and collecting in its broadest sense. It is impossible to give a full account of all of the princesse de Lamballe’s collecting activities, so disparate were her collections, scattered across many residences and palaces, and thus this study will focus specifically on her three private and most personal residences: the Hôtel de Lamballe, the Hôtel d’Eu and the Hôtel de Toulouse, arguably the most significant and for which the greatest documentation survives.17

4.2  A Note on Sources On the 17th of January 1793 the notary Denis Trutat and his assistant arrived at the Hôtel de Toulouse to begin compiling the princesse de Lamballe’s probate inventory at the request of her executor and heirs.18 It was a task that would take them four months to complete. The resulting document, over 300 pages in length, with 1, 276 entries, each one for multiple objects, is today in the Archives Nationales where its presence has gone relatively unnoticed. It covers the princess’s main residences: the Hôtel de Toulouse, the Hôtel de Lamballe and the Hôtel d’Eu. Together with the princess’s last will and testament, prepared at Aix-la-Chapelle on the 15th of October 1791; documents drawn up on the confiscation of the princess’s assets in 1792; a large cache of the princess’s financial documents and inventories in the Archivio di Stato, Turin; an inventory of the princess’s jewels in the Rosenbach Library; and a catalogue of the princess’s library from the Hôtel de Toulouse in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, it is a precious primary source. While these inventories are a remarkable record that makes some form of reconstruction possible they often contain gaps and inconsistencies. The clerks frequently omitted the very information art historians deem most crucial. In the princess’s 1793 inventory the paintings are rarely identified—either by artist or title—and often only the most perfunctory of descriptions is given. Conversely, the subjects of prints are often recorded, probably because their lettered titles were clearly visible. It is extremely challenging to identify individual pieces from the princess’s collection from these descriptions. For example, although the princess’s furniture would have borne the stamp of the cabinetmaker responsible, the notary did not consider this information relevant and made no record of it, making it very difficult indeed to trace these today

140  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ except in rare cases where the piece was one of very few made and distinctive enough to earn a detailed description. Almost all of the princess’s furniture that has surfaced comes from the royal palaces, where the Garde-Meuble’s practise of stamping or labelling courtiers’ names on the back has permitted their identification and they can be cross-referenced with entries in the journal. The Lugt repertoire contains no record of a collector’s mark for the princesse de Lamballe that might enable one to locate her prints and drawings, but Lugt contains many marks that are still unidentified and in any case the use of collectors’ marks on works on paper was still very far from common at the end of the eighteenth century; neither the duc de Penthièvre nor the duc de Chartres had one, so this is no reflection on the princess’s status as a collector. Nor did collectors mark objets d’art at this time so the princess’s collection of Far Eastern porcelain in particular is also impossible to track down. Fortunately, Sèvres pieces are usually identified by model. As for the princess’s participation in some of the century’s greatest sales, although she would have made acquisitions this way there is only one instance in which her name can be attached to specific lots: the 1782 sale of the duc d’Aumont’s collection.19 Like the royal couple, Lamballe concealed her identity in the saleroom by using an intermediary, often the dealer Ph. F. Julliot, and it is his name that appears in annotated sale catalogues, not hers. One of the richest hunting grounds has proved to be the princess’s library. Books, which, on the whole, retain much of their value in being preserved intact, have not fallen victim to the fate of other objects that may have been melted down, divested of valuable parts or generally taken apart or destroyed. The princess’s coat of arms on all the bindings of her books has facilitated their identification and ensured their continuing circulation.

4.3 The Princesse de Lamballe: A Profile of the Female Courtier Collector-Patron The princess possessed three of the most critical factors for a collector of this period: position (and with it, influence), means and precedent. In 1779 Jean Baptiste Castor de Favre (1727–1784), a member of the Société Littéraire de Metz, dedicated his pastoral poem Les Quatre Heures de la Toilette des Dames, to Lamballe, describing the princess as a figure ‘qui protège les beaux Arts’. This was of course intended to flatter his patron, but the epithet would scarcely have been conceivable had not the princess enjoyed a reputation as a sophisticated woman of letters who understood and supported the fine arts. By this stage, Lamballe had assumed a national and even international profile as a courtier whose tastes lay in cultivated spheres, bolstered by her own talents and accomplishments. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, this was a view the princess actively projected of herself; Favre’s dedication is one of several contemporary statements that prove its successful reception. The princess was twice painted in the guise of the noble amateur, as a painter by Gautier-Dagoty and as a draughtswoman by Mosnier. She was publicly acknowledged as a figure with considerable artistic gifts and remained a practising artist throughout her life; even on the day of her trial, the princess was carrying a porte-crayon.20 She endeavoured to increase her knowledge through travel by journeying to England and parts of Europe where she visited famous collections and palaces, and other places of architectural interest. As a patron of the École Royale Gratuite de Dessin from 1787 and through her support of fledgling academicians, she gained further public exposure in this role.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 141 She was among the first of her circle to extend her patronage to aspiring new women artists including Lemoine and Labille-Guiard. Her standing with her peers is indicated by the success of her Paris salons and her election to Grand Mistress of Paris’s first all-women masonic lodge. As for means, from 1775 onwards, the princess received 100,000 livres per annum for her post as Surintendante with occasional supplementary payments. A statement of her accounts between the 1st of June 1784 and December 1790 drawn up by her secrétaire des commandements, Jean-Louis Toscan, shows that her income from various sources (her father-in-law’s annuity and regular monetary gifts; her court salary; property-derived income)21 for a 5 ½ year period totalled just over 2,839,694 livres. Her expenditure, however, for the same period came to just over 2,631,794 livres.22 She did of course spend prodigious sums of money, but a large portion of this went towards maintaining several residences, her staff (whose every cost she met—from food and clothing to physician’s and apothecary’s bills) and towards entertaining. This was a requirement of court life; any courtier seen to be too parsimonious was viewed with suspicion and resentment. Through her father-in-law, however, the princess had access to further funds. The duke owned over thirty châteaux and huge expanses of land across France, employing almost 500 staff across these domains.23 His annual income in 1781 alone was well over 4 million livres.24 The duke regularly gifted the princess generous sums of money and made her a number of substantial loans. Several illustrious precedents may have determined the princess’s activities as patron. There were many important collectors in her family and the princess must have been conscious of her place in this great lineage. In Paris, Lamballe’s paternal great-grandmother, Jeanne-Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes (1670–1736), the comtesse de Verrue, had assembled an outstanding collection of works of art, dispersed in two sales: one in 1737, followed by another in 1762 arranged by Lamballe’s father.25 Lamballe’s paternal grandparents presided over a fine collection largely assembled by their ancestors the comte and comtesse de Soissons at their Paris residence, the palatial Hôtel de Soissons (destroyed 1748).26 Here the couple frequently commissioned work from artists including Carl Vanloo.27 Lamballe’s childhood residence, the Palazzo Carignano, designed by Guarino Guarini between 1679 and 1684 and a masterpiece of European baroque architecture, was an elaborate showpiece built to display extraordinary collections of around 1,000 paintings by Carracci, Maratti, Titian and others along with countless objets d’art and an extensive library, all the fruits of the second prince de Carignan, the deaf mute Emanuele Filiberto Savoia-Carignano (1628–1709), an erudite figure who was considered a true connoisseur of architecture and painting. His art collection, before its two sales in 1742 and 1743, was equal to those of other major Royal European collectors, including his cousin in Vienna, Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736), who often visited Turin, staying at the Palazzo Carignano. Prince Eugene himself possessed one of the most famous picture collections of the early modern period, housed in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. He died without issue, and despite fierce competition, Lamballe’s uncle, Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy (1701–1773), King of Sardinia, 28 managed to secure the collection for the Turin branch of the House of Savoy, in full awareness of its significance and the prestige it brought for the Italian court, raising the latter as it did to one of the main players in Europe in the matter of

142  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ picture collections, on a level with the courts in Dresden, Paris, London, Munich, and Vienna, and installed it in the Palazzo Reale in 1741.29 Lamballe would have been intimately familiar with this prestigious collection which, once integrated with existing Sabaudian collections in the royal palace, included works by Brueghel, Caravaggio, Hendrik Goltzius, Poussin, Raphael, Guido Reni, Rembrandt, Salvator Rosa, Teniers, Van Dyck and de Vries. We may suppose that the princess cherished her connection to this prince, as she had a copy of the funeral oration glorifying him in her library.30

4.4  The Princess’s Apartments at Versailles and Other Royal Palaces From contemporary journals and newspapers we can deduce that the princesse de Lamballe divided her time principally between Versailles, Fontainebleau, Rambouillet, Sceaux (destroyed and rebuilt), Eu, Aumale (destroyed), the Hôtel de Toulouse and from 1783 onwards, the Hôtel de Lamballe. Courtiers at Versailles were housed according to a complex scale of gradation based on rank, professional role and their relationship to the monarch. Those courtiers who did not give satisfaction found their social devaluation reflected in a mandatory change of accommodation, usually to accommodate a rival whose star was on the rise. We can thus trace the exaltation and then gradual decline of the princesse de Lamballe’s position in the queen’s affections by the moves she made between three different apartments, each one diminishing in location. At Versailles, the princess shared the suite of twelve rooms and eleven entresols occupied by her father-in-law, and formerly, her late husband, which the duke had first been allocated in 1756. After her appointment as Surintendante in September 1775, the princess was accorded sole use of these and the duke rehoused in another apartment. The princess’s suite of rooms was prestigiously located in the extreme corner of the first floor of the aile du midi overlooking an internal courtyard, the cour de l’Apothicaiererie (later called the cour de Monsieur), an external courtyard, the cour de la Bouche de Mesdames, and the rue de la Surintendance.31 The wing was sometimes referred to as the aile des Princes as the princes and princesses of the blood, senior ranking courtiers and the queen’s favourites were lodged there. This was the very apartment that had once been occupied by her predecessor as Surintendante, Mlle de Clermont, and the significance would not have been lost on Lamballe.32 This section of the wing, known as the pavillon de la surintendance, with windows on all three sides, was light and expansive, with easy access from the cour des Princes yet, being somewhat removed from the main bustle of the palace, still relatively private. Surviving plans in the Archives Nationales show the apartment’s spacious proportions, but it was completely remodelled in the nineteenth century and is now used by the French Government as their salles du sénat.33 In 1780 the princess was forced to relinquish this choice terrain to the duc d’Angoulême, the comte d’Artois’s eldest son. She was moved to an apartment directly beneath it on the ground floor, composed of a ‘salon, petit salon, boudoir, bibliothèque, chambre à coucher, antichambres, salle à manger, garde-robe, bains, chambre de dame d’honneur et entresols’. 34 The benefits of this apartment were much the same as the one above: light, and spacious quarters. At this time, the princess made a request to extend her rooms, by adding on a gallery running the length of the external courtyard. Plans were drawn up, but ultimately her bid was denied.35 In contrast, her rival, the duchesse de Polignac, who was at that time

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 143 in ascendancy, had been allowed to make extensive costly alterations to her suite of rooms. In 1786, Lamballe moved for a third and final time, ceding her apartment to the comtesse de Provence (from whose residence some of the existing boiseries date),36 and was re-housed in a suite of twelve rooms and entresols in the Surintendance—still in the same wing and near her friend the duchesse de Bourbon,37 but on the other side of the palace, on the ground floor, giving on to the gardens.38 It was not the princess who bore the costs of furnishing, decorating and maintaining her court apartments where she was required to accompany and give service to the queen, but the Bâtiments du Roi and the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne and, apart from any personal items the princess brought with her, the contents remained the property of the crown. When, after the revolution, the royal family and their court were moved to the Tuileries Palace on the 6th of October 1789, large swathes of furniture and furnishings were either uprooted to accompany them or put into store.39 Following this, virtually every piece of furniture and every work of art in every room at Versailles and all the other royal palaces was disposed of in the notoriously devastating revolutionary sales held between the 25th of August 1793 and October 1795.40 Traces of Lamballe’s residence at countless royal palaces vanished with the disposal of these treasures and the palaces’ rooms have undergone countless alterations since the period of her residence. The situation is further complicated by the fact that French royal furniture was regarded as a moveable chattel.41 In a constant cycle of acquisition, modification and disposal, the furniture and furnishings in French royal palaces drifted from one room to another, from occupant to occupant and palace to palace, descending down through the ranks as they grew gradually outmoded until finally stripped for the most costly materials and destroyed. These peregrinations of both courtiers and objects throughout the network of French palaces increased during Marie-Antoinette’s reign.42 Here and there, pieces of Lamballe’s furniture from royal palaces have surfaced, but it is difficult to appreciate which of these and their corresponding interior schemes were indisputably evidence of the princess’s own taste, as many arose from the GardeMeuble’s policy of recycling. For example, in 1777, identical orders of benches were filled for the comte d’Artois and Lamballe, to be used in their respective billiard rooms at Fontainebleau—in total eight benches and sixteen matching stools.43 By 1786 two of these had found their way to the duchesse de Polignac’s apartment.44 A lyre-backed chair from one of Lamballe’s apartments at Versailles later reappeared in her rooms at the Tuileries.45 Similarly, a suite of furniture by one of the menuisier dynasty Foliot, originally commissioned by Madame du Barry in 1771 for the château de SaintHubert, was re-employed for the princesse de Lamballe in her rooms at Versailles and Fontainebleau and are today in the Petit Trianon.46 The princess’s largest suite of court rooms was at Fontainebleau where in the wing overlooking the cour de la Fontaine she had two salons (one is now the 2ème Salon de l’Empereur), a dining room, a billiards room, a bedroom, cabinet and antechamber, all of which were refurbished in the summer of 1786.47 Claude-Mathieu Magnien (1741–1829) created a commode for one of these rooms48 and in 1788 the princess took delivery of a suite of cream lacquered furniture by Jean-Baptiste Boulard (c. 1725–1789) for her salon; four of the ten cabriolet chairs reappeared in a 2013 sale.49 In addition to Boulard, many other famous menuisiers and ébénistes attached to the Garde-Meuble are also known to have worked for the princess though the commissions themselves are yet to resurface: Jacques Bircklé (1734–1803), Nicolas-René Dubuisson (1728—after 1785); Jacques Lucien (1748—after 1811); and Jean-Baptiste

144  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ Sené.50 The château inventories provide the most information.51 In 1787, the princess’s third and final apartment, on the garden façade of the Aile du Midi, was composed of an anti-chamber and adjoining room; a dining room; a salon de compagnie; a billiards room; bedroom; boudoir; a library; garderobe; and several rooms for her ladies-inwaiting and staff. The dining room, with its twenty chairs, screens, wall lights and chandelier, was decorated with a crimson and gold scheme. The inventory mentions a Regency marble-topped marquetry commode. The principal entertaining room, the salon de compagnie, was decorated in green and white with a wide array of social types of furniture, including sofas and voyeuses and twenty-four lyre-backed mahogany chairs covered in green morocco.52 Today, two of these elegant chairs, with their little sun mouldings, by Sené and bearing his stamp, one still pasted with the label ‘Pour . . . la princesse de Lamballe a Versailles. No 93’, are in the Hôtel de Soubise. A third was sold at auction in 2017 (see Figure 4.1).53 The focal point in this room was an elaborate 16-foot Savonnerie carpet with royal coat of arms and insignia. Also

Figure 4.1 Jean-Baptiste Sené, chair from the princesse de Lamballe’s apartment at Versailles, 1787, mahogany and velvet © Daguerre, Paris

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 145 present were two pairs of two-armed wall lights with a ram’s head, a laurel garland interlacing between the branches and a garlanded vase surmounted by a pinecone finial. A pair matching this exact description, possibly one of the very same pairs in question, was sold recently by a French dealer, identified as being after a design by Jean-Charles Delafosse (1734–1791).54 The green décor continued in the billiards room with green silk hangings and curtains, and green Utrecht velvet green Gros de Tours silk-covered white benches. In the bedroom the princess had a large floral and ribbon-patterned carpet with a white ground, and another pair of the ram’s-head wall lights. Her boudoir contained a niche bed swathed in drapery and elaborate white silk passementerie and an assortment of carved and gilded furniture all upholstered in the same floral white-ground Gros de Tours silk. A large Boulle bureau plat with gilt-bronze mounts of female masks and smiling espagnolettes, from the cabinet of the princess’s first Versailles apartment (recorded in a 1776 inventory), which was sent to the Tuileries in 1791, is also now in the Hôtel de Soubise (Figure 4.2).55 The bureau plat, which was executed in c. 1710, and a number of other pieces described in the inventories of her rooms—commodes and wall lights, for instance—dated from a previous generation and for this reason one suspects that of all her multiple residences, Lamballe’s quarters in the palace of Versailles were the least personal, not only because this was an ‘office’ of sorts for her, but because palace lodgings were notoriously incommodious, with courtiers all on top of one another and furniture borrowed or inherited from other occupants. Though her first two apartments were particularly spacious, on reading the inventories one is

Figure 4.2 André-Charles Boulle, bureau plat from the princesse de Lamballe’s apartment at Versailles, c. 1710, rosewood (palissandre), gilt-bronze and black morocco leather, Archives Nationales, Paris Photo: Author

146  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ struck by the number of temporary beds for the princess’s ladies and staff. There were a correspondingly high number of folding screens, to bring greater privacy. Contemporaries spoke of the princess frequently entertaining in her apartments and her unsuccessful attempt to build a gallery extension was no doubt motivated by social ends. One of Gustav III’s favourites, Baron Taube, on a visit to Versailles in April 1780, wrote of the little parties and parlour games that the princess and the duchesse de Polignac often hosted in their apartments, which the queen always attended, and often Louis XVI as well.56 The following year the marquise de Bombelles described a late summer supper hosted by the princesse de Lamballe in her apartment, which the queen and Mme Élisabeth attended; the marquise only retiring to bed at one o’clock in the morning.57 Similarly, Gustav III attended Lamballe’s suppers at Versailles, writing of one such event in June 1784.58 Nevertheless, the year she was nominated Surintendante, in November 1775, Lamballe purchased a house of her own near the palace, the Hôtel d’Eu, from the duc de Penthièvre. There the princess had more freedom to arrange the interiors to suit her taste and from them we can therefore gain a better idea of its nature.

4.5  The Hôtel d’Eu, Versailles59 The Hôtel d’Eu was left by the comte d’Eu to his cousin, the duc de Penthièvre. The house was a two- or three-minute carriage ride, at most, from the palace and situated on the rue des Bons-Enfants at numbers 20, 22 and 24, backing on to the Petite Place, where the stables were situated, making it the ideal pied à terre.60 The house encompassed a neighbouring property, the Hôtel du Maine, which also belonged to the duke: when Lamballe later tried to lease out the Hôtel d’Eu (as this property is referred to in her inventories and other archival documents) in the uneasy months following the fall of the Bastille, the advertisement in the Journal de Versailles described the houses as adjoining, ‘Deux maisons très-logeables, susceptibles d'être séparées, avec beaucoup d'écuries & remise, appellée hôtel d'Eu, rue des Bons-Enfants, à Versailles, à louer ensemble ou séparément’.61 By the late 1790s the Hôtel d’Eu, having been left to go to rack and ruin after the princess’s death, was described as being in a dilapidated state and at some point in the nineteenth century it was demolished. Similarly, a large apartment complex now occupies the site of the former Petite Place, though its original footprint can be discerned. The rue des Bons-Enfants was one of the most prestigious residential streets in the town, where a number of members of the royal family and senior courtiers also had lodgings. The house was inventoried in April 1793 and the contents reflect its proximity to the palace and the princess’s working life there. Pierre de Nolhac suggested that after the princess had been moved to her third set of what proved to be dissatisfactory lodgings in the palace in 1786, she would have chosen, when in Versailles, to stay in this house with her entourage.62 Once again, the inventory records many examples of valuable furniture in rich materials, but frustratingly without any information as to the makers. The salon, hung with red silk, was situated on the ground floor, overlooking the rue des Bons-Enfants and contained the greatest concentration of works of art. Here was a wide array of portraits in gilded frames, including one of Marie-Antoinette, four pastels, several ivory and wax portrait reliefs and a large canvas of five children in an interior, a portrait that could well have shown Lamballe with some of her siblings or perhaps relatives from Turin. These were hung with a number of oils, one a landscape, another depicting Tobit recovering his sight.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 147 This could very well have been Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s (c. 1500–1563/67) 1555 painting of this subject, now in the Louvre, and from the duc de Penthièvre’s collection, which was seized in 1793.63 Alternatively it might have been the work of another artist—this was a popular subject at the time, the noted art collector the marquis de Voyer d’Argenson (1722–1782) owned a much-admired oil by Rembrandt of this scene, widely disseminated in engraved form.64 Lamballe would have likely known the work, being familiar with her fellow courtier’s collection at the château d’Asnières, particularly as it included many fine Dutch and Flemish pictures, a taste first developed in Paris by her relative, the comtesse de Verrue. The remainder of the works consisted of forty-four framed prints, principally of mythological or biblical subjects and some landscapes. Among these were: ‘Une gravure représentant hector et Andromaque’ and ‘une autre Représentant La mort d’Andromaque’. Hector’s farewell to Andromache and their little son Astyanax ahead of his fatal battle with Achilles became an enormously popular subject in the last quarter of the eighteenth century; its timeless themes of heroic sacrifice and familial love must have appealed to the princesse de Lamballe, but the solitary and tragic figure of Andromache in particular would have had especial significance for her. The Trojan princess endured the murder or untimely death, one by one, of all her family, parents and siblings, before experiencing the premature death and mortification of her husband and the murder of her young son, her only child. Finally, the long-suffering Andromache was separated from her homeland and forced to serve as concubine to the son of the man who had slain her husband. The princesse de Lamballe had also been afflicted by tragedy in her life. Her life was blighted early on by her husband’s promiscuity, venereal illness and viscerally unpleasant death. At the age of 29 she lost both her parents in swift succession, followed by the illness and death of her favourite younger brother, who had earlier brought dishonour on his family by marrying unsuitably and without permission, leading to his permanent estrangement from the House of Savoy. Above all, the princess was, like Andromache, a childless widow living in a foreign land. The second print, described as the death of Andromache, was more likely a scene of Andromache lamenting the death of Hector, a frequent companion piece to the couple’s farewell and a subject treated by several artists of this period including Angelica Kauffman (1772). As discussed in Chapter 3, both the princess and Marie-Antoinette collected English stipple and mezzotinted prints of sentimental subjects. Taking into account the nature of the prints that follow in the princess’s inventory, it is almost certain that they were two prints after Kauffman’s paintings of these subjects (Figure 4.3).65 Similar in tone were two scenes from the life of Ulysses and another representing Aristides, presumably his banishment and probably after Kauffman (1774, London: BM). Literary subjects included the death of Princess Armida—the princess had Tasso’s epic poem in her library—and two prints depicting Heloise and Abelard. A large portion of the prints seem to have been after famous paintings by Kauffman. For example, four hand-coloured prints described as allegorical figures of Justice, Prudence, Fortitude and Temperance must have been the artist’s series of the four cardinal virtues published in London in 1777 (Figure 4.4). Similarly, an English print ‘représentant L’innocence’ could have been Kauffman’s ‘Innocence’, in which a young woman cradles a small lamb, reminiscent of St Anne (1782, London: BM). Of particular interest, and fitting to this environment, were two allegorical scenes of the birth of the dauphin. A number of prints of this event were published. One

148  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’

Figure 4.3 James Watson after Angelica Kauffman, ‘The parting of Hector and Andromache’, 1772, London, published by Robert Sayer, mezzotint, 46 × 57.4 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

example showed Marie-Antoinette presenting the dauphin to the allegorical figure of France and was designed by one of the queen’s official painters, Ignazio Campana (Paris: BN). It bore a dedication to the queen and a flattering verse, ‘il a déjà les traits, les graces de sa Mere’, making it a clear candidate for the print Lamballe had on her wall. Another possibility was a print in which she too was represented along with the royal governess, both of them having attended and played a symbolic role in the birth (for example, Figure 2.4). A number of biblical subjects included the death of Abel, a print of Isaac and Jacob, and another of Susannah and the Elders. The latter might have been one of any number of prints executed on this subject in the second half of the eighteenth century, but it is tempting to propose it might have been one of the most popular stipple prints, which also fitted with the character of the prints already exhibited.66 With these were five mezzotints, including two entitled by the clerk, Le Marêchal [sic] and La Jolie Famille, the latter evidently a Greuzian scene of domestic bliss, which doubtless made a neat comparison with a print the princess had of the Holy Family. Finally, there was a hand-coloured devotional print of St Michael. This very large group of prints answered several of the princess’s interests. First, the novelty and exoticism of English stipple prints satisfied her Anglophile inclinations, and the newly developed technique employed her appreciation, as an artist, of the

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 149

Figure 4.4 Gabriel Scorodumoff after Angelica Kauffman, ‘Fortitude’, 1777, published by Robert Sayer and John Bennett, London, stipple etching, 35.9 × 30.5 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

mechanics of art. In addition, in such numbers stipple prints (and the mezzotints with which they were interspersed) would have created a powerful and cohesive atmosphere. David Alexander notes of the stipple etching, ‘With its bold profile, oval format and the bright sanguine in which it was generally printed, this was a striking and novel object’ and collectors ‘treasured them as fine prints’.67 The nuanced visual effects of these prints—the subtle shading of stipple prints and the strong painterly chiaroscuro of mezzotints—gave them a greater depth and dimension than traditional engravings which appeared flatter. Furthermore, the range of colours they were printed in— sealing-wax red, patinated bronze and a smoky black—lent them a further sense of antiquity. But the subjects themselves, including the academic history and allegorical

150  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ paintings of Angelica Kauffman, also demonstrated to the princess’s visitors her ready familiarity with and penchant for classical themes and showed she endorsed the moral examples and other lessons they conveyed. The notional protagonist of many of these compositions was the ‘Ancient Matron’: the ideal and idealised woman of antiquity, the virtuous and loyal daughter, mother or wife who was ‘strong yet tragic’.68 The compelling messages enacted were particularly persuasive coming from Kauffman’s hand as a woman artist and the only female history painter in England, but sufficiently aestheticised—not only in the artist’s characteristically pathetic treatment of such material, but through the soft powdery medium of stipple—to prevent too strident an appearance. There was a clear correspondence between the noble figure of the Ancient Matron and that of the woman Lamballe strove to be, and we might suppose that such visual encouragement to emulation provided a counterpart to the didactic works relating to her position and duties, which could be found in her library. The prints Lamballe chose to display gratified a desire to see her own dutiful nature and constancy, the trials of her position, her own travails, recast and classicised in a virtual tableau adorning her walls. In this way the most disquieting episodes from her life were given a veneer of decorum and classical poignancy, absolved of any unsavoury taint. The exemplum virtutis provided by these women, their ‘moralising Historicism’, would have been an inspiration or paradigm for Lamballe and her circle as they were the republic and empire that succeeded them.69 Their pairing with a number of biblical prints further strengthened their message. The princess’s penchant for sentimental subjects also showed her capacity for heightened emotion, which was in itself a display of her refinement.70 As Brewer explains, ‘The refined person was portrayed not so much as someone who was discerning but as someone who had an overwhelming, spontaneous emotional response to art’.71 They were an indication of the princess’s moral character, as people possessed of a greater sensitivity were regarded ‘as morally more virtuous’.72 When Mme de Genlis recounted her tales of Lamballe fainting at the smell of violets or the sight of a still life containing a lobster, she meant to humiliate her, suggesting a false or overblown display of sensitivity, even a certain prissy prudishness. Brewer says, ‘Sentiment was a spontaneous emotion, a feeling whose value did not depend upon its being observed by others [. . .] Behaviour intended to impress others rather than generated spontaneously was considered unnatural and artifical’.73 The situations Genlis described are clearly fanciful, but she must have based them, looking back from the self-possessed 1820s, on the neoclassical period’s admiration for exhibitions of a ‘feminine’ delicacy. Since women were particularly associated with the movement of sensibility it seems likely that these prints, in which women are glorified for shouldering burdens, willfully sacrificing their own happiness and submitting to an often terrible fate, were created at least in part with a female audience in mind. It is worth noticing that these were far more solemn and reflective compositions than those seen in the stipple prints Marie-Antoinette acquired, discussed in Chapter 3, and this seems to have been one field in which their paths diverged, however faintly. The high neoclassicism witnessed in the works displayed throughout the Hôtel d’Eu was a hallmark of the collections of the princesse de Lamballe, and a style that permeated all her interiors. An excellent example of this is a satinwood writing table by David Roentgen, with gilt-bronze mounts by David de Lunéville, that most likely belonged to the princess (Figure 4.5).74 This was probably from her ground floor apartment at Sceaux, where the duc de Penthièvre is known to have commissioned several

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Figure 4.5 David Roentgen, writing table, detail showing the marquetry top depicting Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius fleeing Troy, 1775–1780, cherry and oak veneered with maple, mahogany, tulipwood and other woods (London: V&A, Jones Bequest) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

pieces from the famous German cabinetmaker for his daughter-in-law, undoubtedly at her request.75 The oval top is inlaid with a pictorial marquetry scene in coloured woods of the escape of Aeneas from the Sack of Troy and military trophies. The table dates from 1775 to 1780, and the scene was designed by the German court painter to the Elector of Trier, Januarius Zinck. The composition was so popular that Roentgen created at least twenty-eight other similar tables.76 It is a supreme example of ‘painterly’ marquetry—furniture whose complex compositions vie with those of neoclassical paintings.77 Here again was the mythological imagery and themes of sacrifice, fortitude and vanitas (intimated by the ruins of the city), seen in the prints of scenes from the Trojan War at the Hôtel d’Eu. The clerks also found an abundance of Sèvres in the house, including a service described as: ‘Un dejeuner de porcelaine de Seve [sic], garni de quatre tasses, sucrier et pot au lait’, probably a tea service, perhaps that she mentions in her will as a bequest to Mme de Las-Cases, and another English influence. Throughout the rooms were a number of very valuable clocks, perhaps gifts from her father-in-law who was interested in horology and collected these. In this residence, as in her others, as shall be seen, the princess had a large quantity of arrangements of important Sèvres biscuit porcelain figure groups, displayed under glass. One such group was comprised of ‘un jardinier, et une jardiniere, un vase à fleurs’, pairing the figures of gardeners with a flower vase (Figure 4.6). There were also ten individual Sèvres figures, not identified by the notary, and two additional groups including ‘L’amour en capuchon’, undoubtedly the hooded ‘Amour Capucin’ of 1777. The second group featured ‘Jeannot’—this

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Figure 4.6 ‘Jardinier’ and ‘Jardinière’ figures, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain, 1780s. De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images

was Janot the comic figure from Dorvigny’s farcical play ‘Les Battus Paient L’Amende’, played with great success to Paris audiences by the actor Volange in 1779–1780 (Figure 4.7). The ‘Mémoires Secrets’ observed in 1779, ‘On a modelé Janot en porcelaine de Sèvres, et son buste en cette matière est en ce moment l’étrenne à la mode; la Reine en a pris plusieurs pour distribuer à ses favoris et favourites’.78 Thus Lamballe’s figure may have been a gift from Marie-Antoinette, although there does exist a record in the Sèvres archives of an order the princess placed for this figure on the 24th of January 1781.79 No doubt displayed with Janot were the three other figures in the series, which Lamballe had ordered in December the same year: Jeannette, Jérôme and Eustache Pointu.80 Other purchases Lamballe made in the 1770s–1780s recorded in the archives of the manufactory include ‘La Nourrice’, in which a woman closely resembling Marie-Antoinette nurses a small baby whilst observed by the wet nurse and her little son (Figure 4.8). This was inspired by the contemporary aristocratic enthusiasm for breastfeeding one’s own children, as modelled by the queen herself. Probably displayed with this would have been Lamballe’s group, ‘La Vache’, which shows a dairymaid milking a cow, a model illustrative of the nobility’s interest in idealised scenes of farms and peasants and the health-giving properties of milk, exemplified by the construction of pleasure dairies.81 Like her own portrait with the queen’s children, the childless superintendent recognised the value in showing her support for a movement in which her own mistress had been instrumental. One of the queen’s

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Figure 4.7 Figure of the actor Volange as ‘Janot’, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain, c. 1780, 30 × 11.5 cm (London: V&A Museum) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

pleasure dairies was after all established at the princess’s former home, Rambouillet. Also displayed with these items were the biscuit figure groups ‘La Fidélité’, probably the model known as ‘La Fête au Château/La Fidélité Modèle’, a touching scene of a courting couple, and the manufactory’s inventive ‘Groupe au papillon’ (Figure 4.9).82 Returning to the probate inventory, another group in the rooms at the Hôtel d’Eu is described as containing ‘Belises’, presumably Belisarius, a figure produced by a different French manufactory, Lunéville (Figure 4.10). The blind Roman general is shown guided and supported by Tiberius, who helps him to avoid a serpent passing under his feet. The figure was based on Hubert François Gravelot’s frontispiece for Jean-François Marmontel’s Bélisaire and a copy of this same book was in Lamballe’s library. This

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Figure 4.8 Louis-Simon Boizot, ‘La Nourrice’, 1774–1775, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain figure, 19.5 cm (private collection, Courtesy of Sotheby’s)

suggests the theme was one that interested the princess and spoke to her dutifully charitable nature witnessed in the many acts of compassion and philanthropy she undertook throughout her life for the poor and unfortunate.83 Taken as a whole, this veritable forest of biscuit porcelain shows Lamballe to have embraced one of the greatest innovations in porcelain of her generation. Biscuit porcelain, invented in 1751 but newly improved by Sèvres with the introduction in 1774

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Figure 4.9 Étienne-Maurice Falconet, ‘La Fête au Château/La Fidélité Modèle’, c. 1766–1773, Sèvres, biscuit porcelain, 20.1 × 15.9 cm (private collection, Courtesy of Sotheby’s)

of hard-paste porcelain, was prized for its flawless white unglazed surface, which resembled the colour and fine grain of the purest polished marble. From 1773 to 1800, the factory developed ever more diverse and ambitious figure groups that were often reduced versions of well-known sculptures.84 Being on an intimate scale they were perfect for the shrinking neoclassical interior, but nonetheless large enough for the princess to display as independent sculptures. Her acquisitions included both lofty subjects after the antique and more whimsical figures that could only have been produced in this medium, including figures from the stage and playful putti. The princess had acquired all of the most famous figures produced by Sèvres in the 1770s and 1780s,

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Figure 4.10 Belisarius (after a print/frontispiece designed by Hubert François Gravelot for Marmontel’s Bélisaire), c. 1765–1789, Lunéville, biscuit porcelain (London, V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

and once more she shared this taste with Marie-Antoinette’s circle. Mme Élisabeth, for instance, had some of the same figures.85 Sèvres featured prominently in all of the princess’s residences. Aside from its unrivalled quality and cunning innovations, as a royal manufactory the acquisition of its wares was tantamount to a patriotic gesture. Moreover, it was greatly favoured by Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. The king in particular purchased vast quantities

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 157 of Sèvres during his reign, almost to the point of mania: services, vases, figures and plaques. He was, as John Whitehead has stated, ‘the single greatest patron’ the manufactory had ever had.86 The duc de Cröy, who attended suppers hosted by the duc de Penthièvre, recalled in his memoirs Lamballe’s presence at the annual Christmas display of Sèvres’s latest wares in the cabinets du Roi and at the dinner that followed.87 These annual sales at the palace were often where courtiers picked up the latest designs. A very expensive, richly decorated Sèvres porcelain gobelet (cup) designed to be the centrepiece of a garniture was purchased by the princesse de Lamballe at one such sale in December 1782–January 1783 for 144 livres.88 Similar models were also sold to Mme Élisabeth and the comtesse de Provence, with an example in the Getty displaying the extravagant gilding and exceptional workmanship of the factory’s painters. Both the Getty’s cup and saucer have a deep-brown ground colour, resembling stained oak or leather, and are painted with raised trompe l’œil ruby, pearl and foiled gold necklaces enclosing painted busts evoking carved hardstone or shell cameos, all in the renaissance style (Figure 4.11).89 Lamballe would have displayed this cup flanked by a small number of other pieces of different shapes and proportions—garnitures rarely exceeded seven pieces—to create a varied arrangement that was pleasing to the eye.90 This would have been one of many judicious groupings in her rooms—the fashion was for small selections rather than the wall of porcelain en masse seen in the previous century. A room, the Mercure de France advised, ‘must not look like a dealer’s shop’.91 In the Hôtel d’Eu we find examples of another central strand of Lamballe’s collections: Far Eastern porcelain, in particular a number of Chinese magots. These were

Figure 4.11 Antoine Capelle, Pierre-André Le Guay, Etienne-Henri Le Guay and Philippe Parpette, Sèvres cup and saucer (gobelet et litron), 1781, soft-paste porcelain, 7 × 9.4 cm (LA, CA: Getty) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

158  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ objets de goût usually sold by Marchands Merciers and became popular from the late seventeenth century onwards, featuring in the collections of amateurs throughout the eighteenth century, including those of Boucher, Madame de Pompadour, Pierre Louis Paul Randon de Boisset (one of the greatest collectors of the period) and even Queen Marie Leszczyńska.92 Magots (also known as Pagods) were small porcelain Chinese figures or idols, usually male and occasionally of rotund Buddha-esque proportions, often shown seated cross-legged. In the first half of the eighteenth century they exhibited a slightly comical, vulgar or grotesque appearance but by Lamballe’s time had become more refined in character, particularly German and French models produced in blanc de chine. Like many of her other porcelain objects they are described as having been placed on gilded plinths and under a ‘cage de verre’—a glass dome or case, expensive additions used of course to display and protect these objects but also to mark them out as prized pieces in her collection.93

4.6  Residences of the Duc de Penthièvre The widowed princesse de Lamballe chose to remain a dependent of her father-inlaw, the duc de Penthièvre, and thus shared his life and many residences. Those most frequented were Anet, Aumale, Bizy, Crécy, Eu, Rambouillet, Sceaux, the Hôtel de Toulouse and Vernon. The princesse had suites of rooms at all of these châteaux and probably a dozen or so more besides. However, the contents of the duke’s residences were confiscated and dispersed in the months following his death on the 4th of March 1793, pursuant to the decrees of the 1st of August and 17th of September 1793 that ordered the deportation of all members of the Bourbon family and the sequester and, ultimately, confiscation of their properties and those of French émigrés. This comprehensive disposal of the duc de Penthièvre’s chattels, the legal property of his sole heir, the duchesse d’Orléans, naturally included the princesse de Lamballe’s collections. The duke’s own probate inventory does provide useful information as to some of their contents, if not always the degree of detail necessary to identify specific objects or their makers.94 It is important to recognise that it was the duke himself who financed the furnishing and maintenance of Lamballe’s apartments in his multitude of châteaux. In 1772, for example, he spent 1,131 livres on ‘70 aunes de Damas de Gênes bleu et 12 aunes de taffetas d’Angleterre bleu céleste’ for the princess’s apartment at his Crécy château,95 very likely chosen by the princess herself, as she later used this same draper to furnish her house in Passy. It also becomes clear from the duke’s own financial records and those of the artists and artisans he patronised that some of Lamballe’s most expensive acquisitions for her collection were paid for by him, certainly in the residences she shared with him. In 1785 the duke acquired for Lamballe from the goldsmith bronzier Rémond and Louis XVI’s official sculptor, Louis-Simon Boizot, for the princely sum of 3,400 livres, a pair of gilt-bronze girandoles (candelabrum) of female figures holding baskets of flowers.96 This design was probably created bespoke for Lamballe and the pair was displayed prominently in the princess’s salon at the Hôtel de Toulouse.97 Here it was seen and admired by many of her circle for soon it became a particularly fashionable model for the goldsmith, one example being a duplicate version commissioned by the princesse Kinsky.98 The same year, and again for a special commission of a new design, the duke paid 5,500 livres for an elaborate neoclassical firedog from Rémond for the princesse de Lamballe. This featured two winged nymphs, their torsos

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 159 terminating in foliate scrolls, holding a smoking cassolette, above a decorative lapis medallion designed to incorporate her monogram.99 The original design for this surfaced in Munich in the 1980s and a second example is in the Hermitage; an identical firedog created to this design, probably for the duc de Bouillon, exists at the Calouste Gulbenkian (Figures 4.12 and 4.13). This use of the princess’s monogram would have been repeated across a number of objects in her interiors, an early, modern form of personal ‘branding’. She ordered Sèvres candlesticks with her monogram,100 and to the same end, the princess would have incorporated her coat of arms, which appears in her portrait by Hickel and also conspicuously graced her table, in the form of a lavish sugar sculpture.101 (See Figure 4.14.) As with the diamonds and other jewellery her father-in-law lent Lamballe to wear, for which he procured a receipt, the duke no doubt considered all these purchases he made for her ultimately his chattels. Whether this was an unspoken arrangement or an agreement with articulated terms is not clear, but it seems that despite her generous income, the exorbitant costs of maintaining court life precluded the princess from laying out the sort of sums her immensely rich father-in-law could easily afford. It is clear, as with the case of her English garden at Rambouillet and the staggering costs involved in its creation, that the duke acted with great generosity on behalf of his daughter-in-law, perhaps in recognition of her faithful companionship.

Figure 4.12 Design for a firedog by François Rémond commissioned for the princesse de Lamballe, c. 1780, Paris, pencil and wash drawing (St. Petersburg: The State Hermitage Museum) © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

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Figure 4.13 François Rémond, firedogs, c. 1785, gilded bronze, 43 × 50 cm (Lisbon: Museu Calouste Gulbenkian) © Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

Figure 4.14 Dark hardwood mould for sugar paste table decoration, carved with the coatof-arms of the princesse de Lamballe, French, eighteenth century (Durham: The Bowes Museum) © The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co.Durham

4.7  The Hôtel de Toulouse, Paris102 Of all Lamballe’s many residences, the Paris hôtel particulier she shared with her father-in-law was the most important. This was the site of the princess’s salon, where she received the queen and her courtiers, and formed the backdrop to visits from domestic and foreign royalty and dignitaries. Designed by François Mansart and completed in 1640, the house was originally known as the Hôtel de La Vrillière then from 1713, as the Hôtel de Toulouse (but was familiarly referred to as the Hôtel de Penthièvre during the duc de Penthièvre’s residence) (Figures 4.15 and 4.16). The hôtel was one of the city’s most beautiful private mansions, with its classical façades, large courtyard, formal garden studded with antique statues, spacious and well-lit rooms

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 4.15 Jean Marot, ‘Veue et Perspective du devant de l’Hostel de la Vrilliere, du dessein de Mr Mansart, Architecte’, view and perspective of the Hôtel de la Vrillière [the Hôtel de Toulouse in the 17th century, showing the entrance and internal courtyard], c. 1635–1650, Paris, published by Pierre Mariette I, etching (London: Victoria and Albert Museum)

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 4.16 Jean Marot, ‘Veue et Perspective de l’Hostel de la Vrilliere du costé du Jardin, du dessein de Mr Mansart Architecte’, view and perspective of the Hôtel de la Vrillière [the Hôtel de Toulouse in the 17th century, showing its formal garden], c. 1635–1650, Paris, published by Pierre Mariette I, etching (London: Victoria and Albert Museum)

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 163 and majestic internal staircase (Figure 4.17). It was particularly admired for its ornate interiors and outstanding collections of paintings, sculpture and tapestries, the very best of which were housed in a long mirrored gallery flooded with reflected light on the first floor: the Grande Galerie, now called the Galerie Dorée. A description of the house and its gallery appeared in Luc-Vincent Thiéry’s Guide des Amateurs, in which he praised the ‘nobility’ of the house, ‘un des plus beaux de Paris’, and described the Salle des Amiraux with its parade of sixty-one busts and portraits of the admiralty including a canvas of the comte de Toulouse and a bust of the reigning duke.103 This room communicated with another chamber of portraits in which pictures of all the kings of France were set into the panelling, with a bust of Louis XVI displayed on the chimney piece. A full-length portrait of the same appeared in another room, a personal gift presented by the monarch to the duke. Thus the princess was fully cognisant of the impact and significance of a suite of dynastic portraits. However what is most significant in Thiéry’s account is that with these descriptions of the acknowledged artistic highlights of the house the author included a long and detailed passage on the princesse de Lamballe’s private apartments, although the duke’s own no doubt sumptuous rooms go unremarked. This is suggestive of the princess’s cachet and that her well-appointed rooms and their contents were considered of particular interest to other connoisseurs. The princess’s suite of rooms was located on the first floor in the right wing of the central part of the house that overlooked the main courtyard and the rue de la Vrillière. Flooded with natural light, they were separated from the Galerie Dorée by just one room. These were originally the duke’s own rooms, but he re-assigned them

Figure 4.17 View of the garden of the Hôtel de Toulouse today, looking towards the Galerie dorée Photo: Author

164  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ to the princess after her marriage and she had them completely refurbished.104 As the interiors and contents of the house are today vastly altered, Thiéry’s passage is invaluable and worth quoting in full: Le grand cabinet qui est ensuite, communique, à droite, à l’appartement de S.A.S. Madame la Princesse de Lamballe, & à gauche, à la grande galerie. On y remarque deux dessus de porte, par le Guerchin, représentans, l’un Esther devant Assuérus, l’autre Agar dans le désert. La chambre à coucher de la Princesse, très richement décorée, est ornée de deux tableaux ovales, par François Boucher, & des médaillons en marbre du Roi & de la Reine sur les portes qui conduisent au sallon. Sur la cheminée sont deux magnifiques vases imitant le lapis, d’où sortent des girandoles de bronze doré d’or moulu. On doit aussi remarquer le feu dont est décoré la cheminée. Le lit à la turque est placé entre deux colonnes sculptées & dorées. Le Sallon de la Princesse, dont la boiserie, dans le genre moderne, est peinte en blanc & or, est tendu de velours bleu de ciel, avec des galons & franges d’or. Les portières & meubles sont de même étoffe. Sur la cheminée sont placés, sur des piédestaux de marbre, des figures de femmes en bronze enfumé, soutenant sur leurs têtes des girandoles de bronze doré d’or moulu. On y admire aussi un feu de même matière, & précieusement fini. Sur les portes sont des arabesques en bas-reliefs sculptés avec goût.105 It is surely no accident that the door giving on to the princess’s apartments was dominated by two overdoor paintings from the duke’s collection depicting strong, selfsacrificing biblical female characters: Esther and Hagar, which, the eventuality of copies aside, must be the Guercino canvasses now in the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Pinacoteca di Brera.106 The two oval pictures by Boucher, which Thiéry mentions hanging in the princess’s bedchamber, remain in the house today, although now in what was once the princess’s salon (Plates 12–13). Showing two scenes from the life of the nymph, Sylvia, these high rococo works were part of a series of four executed for Madame de Pompadour in 1755, purchased by the duc de Penthièvre for the Hôtel de Toulouse in 1757.107 Lamballe chose these from among the house’s other paintings to hang in her apartment. Apparently unfazed by their association with a divisive royal mistress, they were a startling choice for her bedroom in stark contrast to the biblical figures outside her door. The second in particular is an example of Boucher at his most titillating and rather contradicts the princess’s nineteenth-century reputation for prudery. Perhaps these were for her an evocation of the bonds of female solidarity encouraged by her queen or, in their depiction of feminine ministrations, a reflection of the duties she daily practised in execution of her office. As paintings by an artist from a previous generation, it suggests the princess had tastes that transcended mere novelty. An artist herself, Lamballe must have appreciated their particularly fine colouring, seen in the two protagonists’ tangle of white, lilac, daffodil yellow and vibrant red drapery. The marble medallion portraits of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI that Thiéry observed on the doors leading to Lamballe’s salon signalled to all those who visited the princess’s privileged relationship with and access to the monarchs. They must have been similar in appearance to a pair of richly gilded marble medallion portraits of the couple in the Wallace Collection.108 This was a form of portrait ornament favoured by

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 165 their circle: Louis XVI had a gilded moulded portrait bust of Marie-Antoinette on one of the doors in his private rooms at Versailles. An inventory from October 1793 noted that in the antichamber of Lamballe’s apartment, there were four overdoor paintings, portraits from the ‘Venetian’ school. 109 The fashionable Turkish bed in the princess’s bedchamber was part of a trend towards exoticism that continued throughout her suite of rooms as the range of turquerie and chinoiserie objects listed in her inventory confirm. An earlier rococo example in the Getty is comparable, although Lamballe’s would have been more neoclassical in style, overhung with a large ornamental canopy, as seen in Delafosse’s design for a Lit à la Turque in the Nouvelle Iconologie Historique ou Attributs Hiéroglyphiques, from 1770. These beds were deliberately more informal than their heavy baroque forerunners and in the princess’s case were a nod to the prevailing enthusiasm for the boudoir turc endorsed by both Marie-Antoinette and the comte d’Artois. Thiéry then proceeded to the princess’s salon. This was her social platform, the site of her famous gatherings where the most distinguished courtiers rubbed shoulders with the cultural luminaries of the day, where she received visiting dignitaries and royalty, and most importantly, Marie-Antoinette, and was therefore the largest and most carefully conceived room of her apartments. The boiserie, Thiéry informs us, was in the goût moderne or neoclassical style—a white ground with gilding—also seen in the king and queen’s private apartments at Versailles and in the Petit Trianon. This created a much lighter and more informal effect than the darker, stained veneer and painted boiseries of the past. As the panelling is still in situ in what is now the Banque de France’s ‘Salon Fragonard’, we can add to Thiéry’s description that the room was very large, rectangular in form and that the panelling incorporated classically derived palmette friezes with each door presided over by prominent gilded medallions of Minerva, Cleo and Terpsichore (Plate 14 and Figure 4.18). These figures—the goddess of wisdom and the muses of history and dancing—were chosen to signal the room’s function as a space for musical concerts, elegant conversation and informed debate. Terpsichore is shown playing a harp, rather than her conventional lyre, a highly personalised detail that refers to the princess’s own mastery of this instrument, which she would have played here. The sky-blue silk velvet textiles were, together with the white and gilding, an allusion to the colours of French royalty. Thiéry mentions a pair of elaborate branched candelabra with patinated bronze female figures on marble pedestals, which are a match for the Rémond and Boizot commission of 1785 discussed earlier in this chapter.110 A similar pair is today in the Wallace Collection.111 In furnishing her salon, the princess was propelled by the necessity of creating a convivial space in which to receive and entertain the queen and inevitably she would have had an eye to her mistress’s personal taste. In this room the battle for social omnipotence was waged and the collections displayed therein were, like the princess’s portraits, another subtle tool in her campaign to maintain and enhance her position at court. As Norbert Elias has observed, For those making up the bonne compagnie of the ancien régime, the tasteful arrangement of house and park, the more elegant or more intimate decoration of rooms according to fashion and social convention, or the refined cultivation of relations between men and women, were not only amusements enjoyed by individuals, but vital necessities of social life. Competence in these fields was a prerequisite for social esteem, which professional success brings today.112

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Figure 4.18 Gilded medallion of Terpsichore playing a harp, 1780s, detail of mouldings in the princesse de Lamballe’s salon at the Hôtel de Toulouse Photo: Author

We can supplement Thiéry’s description with the details contained in the inventory of the princess’s apartment. This reveals that the princess had ten rooms over two floors with a connecting staircase: an antechamber for her valets; a Salon de Compagnie; her bedroom; a cabinet de toilette; a cabinet de bains; a garderobe where her wardrobe and furs were kept; a library; a cabinet adjoining the library where most of the paintings from her collection were concentrated; a Grand Salon, i.e., the large reception room described by Thiéry; and a further room opposite the library that served as a study-cum-cabinet of curiosities.

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4.8  Furniture in the Hôtel de Toulouse As Antonia Fraser points out in her revisionist biography of Marie-Antoinette, the queen was demonstrably an ‘ardent connoisseur’ of furniture, concluding that ‘the elegant spirit of Marie Antoinette is perhaps better represented by those exquisite pieces of her known furniture that survive than anything else’.113 While there may linger still a view of eighteenth-century French decorative arts as effete remnants of a profligate age, to the eighteenth-century consumer, they represented innovation and exquisite technical perfection in native artisanal industries. The employment of exotic woods and other rare and costly materials brought a certain worldliness to the interior, and their alliance to the mechanical arts, a branch newly championed by enlightenment texts like the Encyclopédie, made them arguably a potent symbol of modernity.114 The furniture recorded in the princess’s apartment was mainly in mahogany and occasionally in bois des indes (sandalwood), and thus consistent with what was most fashionable among the elite during this period. Again, while it is clear from their recorded values and descriptions that the princess had many important pieces, it is not possible to identify them. However, one can determine from a small number of surviving pieces of furniture belonging to the princess and her father-in-law their general sphere of taste, which ran particularly to elaborate marquetry. The duc de Penthièvre was a client of the ébénistes Jean-Pierre Latz (c. 1691–1754) and Gilles Joubert (1689– 1775), known respectively for their accomplished floral and geometric marquetry.115 He also engaged the pre-eminent cabinetmaker of the neoclassical period, Georges Jacob (1739–1814).116 In addition to the Roentgen table discussed earlier, the princess patronised Jacques Bircklé, whose work attracted Marie-Antoinette, Madame Élisabeth and the duc d’Orléans,117 and Nicolas René Dubuisson, official cabinetmaker to the Louis XVI from 1778.118 She shared with Marie-Antoinette and most of their contemporaries a strong propensity for lacquer. At Sceaux in 1779 a contemporary described ‘l’appartement de Madame la Princesse de Lamballe, où l’on remarque un magnifique lit à l’angloise, garni en laque’.119 In her will Lamballe left her beloved sister-in-law, the duchesse d’Orléans, ‘un déjeuné avec la Cassette en laque qui le renferme’, formerly in the collection of the duc de Penthièvre’s mother, the Comtesse de Toulouse.120 Elaborate pieces of furniture formed the subject of several bequests in Lamballe’s will, suggesting not least their value but also her personal taste for and often emotional attachment to these objects. To her lady-in-waiting, Mme de Las-Cases, she left a gift that had seen many convivial gatherings: ‘mon déjeuné a thé, table et tout ce qui le compose’. To Mme de Brunoy she bequeathed a favourite mahogany ‘Grand Canapé’ and matching screen and to Mme de Vauban, ‘mon Grand secretaire en Bois Jeaune’. Destined for her fellow courtier and close friend, Madame de Kercado, was a particularly special gift of ‘une grande ecritoire verte et le Pendule qui est dans ma chambre’ with the proviso ‘que cette pendule soit déposée dans La chambre qu’elle occupera le plus ce qui me rappellera toutes les heures a son souvenir’. She left her English strong chests (safe boxes for jewels and other valuable items and documents) to her friend the academician and diplomat, the comte de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817), with the intriguing statement that they be sent to him unopened ‘comme une marque de mon amitié et confiance en luy’. A list of tradesmen with whom Lamballe had accounts compiled after her death provides a roll call of Paris’s finest luxury merchants. Key names among the creditors are Dominique Daguerre, probably the most famous marchand mercier in all of France and implicitly trusted by Marie-Antoinette; L’Épine, Marie-Antoinette’s

168  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ watchmaker; Bernard Molitor, an ébéniste also patronised by the queen; and JeanBaptiste Regnault, a menuisier from the faubourg Saint-Antoine.121

4.9  Porcelain in the Hôtel de Toulouse Porcelain was ubiquitous in aristocratic French interiors of this period. In 1731 the Mercure de France proclaimed, ‘[P]orcelain is one of the finest ornaments for collectors’ cabinets and the apartments of princes and great lords’122, and by 1783 the comte d’Angiviller wrote that porcelain now possessed a status equal to jewellery, mirrors and ‘des autres ouvrages d’art qui distinguent dans toutes les Cours d’Europe, ce qui sort de la main des Français’.123 Lamballe’s inventory shows that French, German, Chinese and Japanese porcelain all featured in her different residences. In the princess’s Grand Salon were a pair of white Sèvres biscuit porcelain lamps described as bearing the figure of ‘L’Étude’, which from this description must be Boizot’s Study, usually paired with Philosophy, dating from c. 1785 (Figure 4.19). Study is represented by a young woman absorbed in a book and Philosophy by a youth writing with a stylus and tablet. From the description in the inventory, however, it is clear that Lamballe chose to have a pair of both the female allegorical figures, rather than one of each sex as was intended, perhaps for reasons of symmetry, or perhaps because, as in several of her portraits, she preferred to reinforce the message of feminine studiousness. Other Sèvres figure groups included one identified as a Marchande d’Amours, the same subject as a print Lamballe had at the Hôtel de Lamballe. Continuing the predominantly classical and mythological themes witnessed in her other residences were a white marble sculpture group of Venus and Cupid on a gilded plinth; two large biscuit porcelain figures of Venus and Mercury; two of Pygmalion and Prometheus; two of Psyche and Cupid; and one of Diana and Endymion, all displayed under glass (Figures 4.20–4.21). All of these were classic models. The Psyche and Cupid pair is one of the most famous figure groups Sèvres ever produced. The cupid was realised

Figure 4.19 Louis-Simon Boizot (1743–1809), pair of Sèvres biscuit porcelain oil lamps with gilt-bronze flame finials showing the allegorical figures of Study and Philosophy, c. 1785, 29 × 30 cm © Frank Partridge

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Figure 4.20 Sèvres figures of Venus and Mercury after works by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, c. 1770, soft-paste porcelain, 23.3 × 24 cm (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum) © The Walters Art Museum

after Falconet’s l’amour menaçant, now a canonical work of the rococo period, partly because it appears in Fragonard’s 1767 painting, ‘The Swing’ (London, Wallace Collection).124 Similarly, Venus and Mercury were based on a pair of marble statues produced for Frederick the Great’s palace of Sansouci, by the great Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Thus, together this arrangement of figures formed a gallery of some of the period’s choicest sculpture, all in miniature. Other select examples of the finest Sèvres within the princess’s collection were several painted porcelain plaques, a newly invented product designed to be treated as a painting in its own right, which collectors could hang in their cabinets with their other pictures. One of these, ‘1 tableau de porcelaine de Sevres representant des Sultanes’, was from the series of three executed by the manufactory after a Gobelins tapestry cycle designed by Amédée Van Loo (Figure 4.22). Not only were turquerie scenes enduringly fashionable, but the symbolism of scenes depicting a Sultana giving orders to her attendants was entirely appropriate to the queen’s superintendent. Once again, this was a taste she shared with Marie-Antoinette, who purchased several plaques between 1774 and 1776 and one from the same series in 1784: ‘le Déjeuner de la Sultane’ at a cost of 3,000 livres.125 For the same price Louis XVI acquired its pendant, ‘La toilette de la Sultane’ in 1784 and the final plaque in the series in 1787.126

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Figure 4.21 Sèvres group of Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1764–1773, soft-paste biscuit porcelain, 36.1 cm (London: BM) © Trustees of the British Museum

From the princess’s will we also learn of an important bequest of one of her Sèvres porcelain services to her lady-in-waiting, Madame de Ginestous: ‘mon service de Porcelaine de Sevre’.127 As Lamballe didn’t deem it necessary in her will to identify the pat­ tern she must have assumed her lady-in-waiting would know which service she meant, presumably the most important. Sèvres services, which were composed of a high number of hand-painted and gilded pieces, were an enormously expensive and therefore infrequent purchase: Marie-Antoinette only commissioned four in her lifetime. The princess appears to have had three. The first, delivered between 1778 and 1779, was intended ‘pour l’office’, in other words a plain, everyday service probably for the use of her senior staff and attendants, a function reflected in the relatively modest price of 12 livres per plate.128 The second was a gilded floral service she purchased on the 9th of February 1781 (Figure 4.23). Marie-Antoinette placed an order for an identical service around the same time, and it is not known who was led by whom in this regard.129 Probably a dessert service, it was composed of 110 pieces and cost a hefty 2,268 livres

Figure 4.22 Amédée Van Loo (after), ‘Le déjeuner de la Sultane’, c. 1783, Sèvres painted porcelain plaque, 39 × 49 cm (Sèvres: Cité de la céramique) © 2018 Photo Josse/Scala, Florence © Photo SCALA, Florence

Figure 4.23 Sugar bowl and saucer from the princesse de Lamballe’s Sèvres service ‘double fillet bleu, roses et barbeaux’, painted and gilded soft-paste porcelain, 1781 (Creil: Musée Gallé-Juillet) © Musée Gallé-Juillet, Ville de Creil

172  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ and, by way of comparison with the first, 21 livres per plate.130 The princess supplemented it with further pieces in 1787. The pattern was the most simple of all MarieAntoinette’s services. Each piece was painted with double navy blue fillets set off by undulating lines of gilding enclosing an arrangement of irregularly spaced pink roses and cornflowers, the effect of a scattering of freshly picked wildflowers, the unaffected ‘natural’ style to which the queen and her circle were increasingly drawn. The most elaborate of Lamballe’s services, however, was yet to come. A plate from the princesse de Lamballe’s third service, and its original design, commissioned c. 1788, are in the Sèvres museum and archives (Figure 4.24).131 This is similar to the first, again with floral sprays, but shows the increasing influence of neoclassical ornament, with a more rigid ordering and the classical motifs present in the blue and gold borders. While Sèvres has the greatest presence within the eighteenth-century French porcelain in Lamballe’s collection, she also had two vases from the duc d’Angoulême’s Paris manufactory and several pieces from the other great manufactory of this period, Meissen, including two large vases and a little cat grouped together with snuff boxes and other small objets d’art.132 Along with the princess’s luxurious silver and gold

Figure 4.24 Soup plate from the princesse de Lamballe’s Sèvres service, c. 1788, painted and gilded soft-paste porcelain (Sèvres, Cité de la céramique) © RMN-Grand Palais (Sèvres, Cité de la céramique)/Martine Beck-Coppola

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 173 mounted toilette service, she kept a little Meissen bottle decorated with La Fontaine’s fable of the fox and the stork.133 One can discern the princess’s taste for exoticism in the turquerie plaque already mentioned and also a print depicting ‘des Dames Turques’, but even more so in chinoiserie, including an assortment of individual figures of ‘chinois’, one even seated on an elephant and all resembling the magots noted above in Lamballe’s other residences. These were part of a larger and more important collection the princess acquired of antique Chinese and Japanese porcelain. The inventory drawn up at Marie-Antoinette’s request of her most cherished collections of objets d’art at Versailles confirms her keen interest too in Far Eastern porcelain and lacquer.134 She and Lamballe both acquired porcelain from the sale of the collection of the duc d’Aumont, a noted connoisseur of Asian porcelain, held in 1782.135 Lamballe paid 2,000 livres for a figure in porcelaine de truité, a type of Japanese porcelain with a dark grey opaque ground whose craquelure resembled the scales of a trout, an effect particularly prized by discerning collectors.136 Another mark of the serious eighteenth-century French connoisseur or collector was a medal cabinet. The princess collected medals and portrait medallions in porcelain, terracotta and hardstone, displaying them in three different mahogany medal cabinets. These included sixty-three porcelain portrait plaques of the kings of France, thirty-six terracotta portrait medallions and 199 sulphur medallions in the antique style, as well as numerous other framed and glazed individual cameos. The fashion for medals had begun in around 1700, and Krzysztof Pomian has estimated that at one point over a third of all Paris collections contained medals.137 However, interest in them peaked in the first quarter of the eighteenth century and after this they became the preserve of only a select number of collectors (Pomian estimates around thirty-nine existed in Paris between 1750 and 1790), which makes Lamballe’s collection all the more distinctive. She may have been influenced by the duc d’Orléans’s cabinet de médailles at the Palais Royal, which drew many visitors and was referred to in Thiéry’s guidebook. Medals had always been a sign of the collector’s erudition and were the easiest objects with which to effect a connection to antiquity being far smaller and more portable than, for instance, life-size sculpture.138 In her library, Lamballe had two of the key texts that had popularised the neoclassical revival of Greek and Roman models: The Antiquities of Herculaneum (1773) and Jean Claude Richard de Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque de Naples et de Sicile (1781–1786), the latter containing plates showing mounted collections of medals and portrait medallions.139 Prominently listed among the legatees in her will and therefore a close friend was the scholar and diplomat Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817), a renowned expert in antiquities. Lamballe’s display cabinets added to the general tenor of Lamballe’s collection as a ‘cabinet mixte’—an eclectic collection that might contain natural history, drawings, prints, pictures, books, medals and engraved gems, and are a clear sign of her connoisseurial interests.140 In these rooms would have been the princess’s collections of snuff boxes, miniatures and gold boxes, valued at 6,190 livres. These jewel-encrusted objects were another sign of the princess’s wealth and aristocratic status and an accessory to the rituals of polite society. Their diminutive dimensions also fit the general character of the princess’s collection, especially her taste for intimacy of scale seen in small prints, small pictures, medals, cameos and medallions. This was a tendency seen in noble collections from across this period. According to the princess’s will, she kept these in a lacquer chest with drawers. She bequeathed the boxes to her friends and executors the marquis de La Vaupalière and marquis de Clermont-Gallerande.

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4.10  The Princess’s Picture Collection at the Hôtel de Toulouse141 Seventy-six paintings are recorded in Lamballe’s apartment in a variety of media (oil, gouache, papier-mâché, pastel, pen and ink) on a variety of supports. The predominant categories are seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish bamboccianti followed by portraiture, other genre paintings and floral still lifes. There were not enough works to suggest a collector’s cabinet of a dedicated amateur. In contrast, for example, one of the leading collectors of the century, Jean de Jullienne, had 376 paintings displayed throughout his whole house and a separate collection of 2,300 drawings, while the period’s most prolific collector of drawings, Pierre-Jean Mariette, assembled around 9,400 sheets (although the bulk of these he had inherited).142 This was just one tranche of the princess’s fine art collection (she had other paintings in other residences), but it is nonetheless sufficient to extrapolate about her collection and taste as a whole. The star works in the collection were two portraits by Rubens and Gonzales Coques (1614/1618–1684). Rubens was quite possibly the most revered artist in France at this time. As Vigée Le Brun’s husband, the artist and dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, wrote, ‘Rubens est sans doute le plus beau génie et le plus habile coloriste dont la peinture puisse se glorifier [. . .] Nul genre ne lui est échappé: l’histoire, le portrait, le paysage, les animaux, l’architecture, il a cru pouvoir tout faire, et il a fait tout’.143 He continued by saying that ‘Les tableaux de Rubens seront toujours recherchés, et d’un très-grand prix’, concluding that ‘Toutes les grandes collections possèdent de ses ouvrages’.144 The seventeenth-century Flemish painter Gonzales Coques, though not so well known today, was a name as familiar to eighteenth-century society as that of Rubens and was viewed as a brilliant successor to Van Dyck. In Le Brun’s estimation, Gonzales eut un pinceau précieux, large et facile; il colorait avec une fraîcheur surprenante, les têtes et les mains; il avait une touche peu commune dans les petits ouvrages. Je lui ai assigné la première place après van Dyck, et je ne crains point d’avoir exagèré; il disposait ses portraits comme ce dernier, il semble avoir eu le même génie. The dealer also noted the rarity of his paintings in French collections: ‘Il sont trèsrares aujourd’hui, sur-tout dans les grandes collections, et se trouvent plus ordinairement chez les particuliers’.145 For the princess to possess works by artists of this calibre speaks of her desire to form a picture collection of quality, but that these were portraits is particularly revealing for the work of both artists in this genre was enormously influential on contemporary painters and the princess may well have enjoyed the conceit of displaying her own portraits by Vigée Le Brun alongside those of the masters who had inspired them. Joining these important works were two oval portraits of a woman and a young boy and two pastel portraits of female sitters, very likely the princess’s intimates. A painting of a spaniel may well have been a portrait of one of the princess’s dogs. Two Flemish paintings of a slumbering man and a smoking den appear to suggest David Teniers the Younger or a follower. Probably also Dutch or Flemish were two further canvases of a man holding a tankard of beer and its pendant, a woman holding ‘cornets de plaisir’ and a panel painting of an accordion player. Lamballe’s enthusiasm for Northern paintings was such that in the spring of 1778, she absented herself from court in order to spend a week in the Netherlands with her sister-in-law, the duchesse de Chartres, where the two made a tour of prominent collectors’ cabinets, royal palaces, a famous lettertype

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 175 printing workshop and other cultural and picturesque sights commonly recorded in the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings Lamballe collected.146 To the locals’ astonishment, the pair even visited a Dutch smoking den, an action that only makes sense when one considers that this was the very subject of one of Lamballe’s paintings.147 The chief impetus for this journey can only have been Lamballe’s taste for Dutch paintings and her curiosity about the world depicted within them, an inclination corroborated by books she had in her library on the appearance and customs of Holland.148 The princess’s interest in tenebrist painting is demonstrated by the presence of three such works in her collection: a painting of a Spanish woman holding a candle and two allegorical portraits of a man and woman showing the effects of fire and candlelight. The diversity of the collection is indicated by the existence of paintings on supports other than canvas including a female portrait on black velvet, a late eighteenth-century innovation (in 1810 for example, Vauchelet lodged a patent for a ‘Method of Painting on Silk Velvet’) that was probably inspired by the earlier practise of printing etchings on silk and, like this example, probably created for a specialist market. There were also the Sèvres painted porcelain plaques discussed earlier, two paintings on ivory and four on marble, the latter a particularly current neoclassical vogue. Works that may well have been executed by amateur artists, quite possibly the princess herself, include two marine paintings on papier-mâché, the subject very probably suggested by her father-in-law’s position as Grand Admiral de France, and a vase of flowers embroidered on a white silk satin ground. The princess was shown at her needlework in her portrait by Carmontelle, a conventional image but one which seems to represent a real accomplishment (Plate 2). The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a music stool cover purportedly made by Lamballe. In the centre is a circular medallion enclosing a cherub astride a lion playing a lyre, worked in petit-point stitch, a neoclassical emblem consistent with her own taste.149 When, during the revolution, the princess was taken to the Tuileries from her house in Passy, she brought with her a little box that contained her needlework and a pair of gold scissors.150 Also displayed in the princess’s rooms were a number of pictures with biblical and compassionate subjects, a category present in her other residences, such as Moses’s parting of the Red Sea; a scene described by the clerk as that of a woman presenting an elderly man with some food (perhaps the true subject of this painting was Belisarius); and a child giving alms to a beggar. In a related genre were the moralising, sentimental and mildly erotic compositions of a girl grooming a cat, a woman reading a letter and another holding a bird, all three the same oval format and very likely the work of one artist. If these were modern works, then they may well have been by Greuze, but otherwise they were most likely by the Dutch Golden Age artists from whom he took his inspiration. Interspersed with a selection of landscapes were a quantity of English prints and a selection of continental prints that echo the themes already evoked in the paintings: a female gardener; the fountain of love; a devotional subject; two portrait prints of unidentified sitters; a vase of flowers; the Turkish ladies mentioned previously; and a group of undescribed prints, one hand-coloured. To these we can add two more prints of special interest. The first was a glazed engraving of the Battle of Pavia, the definitive encounter of the Italian War of 1521–1526 in which the Italian and Spanish Papal States (including Lamballe’s home region of Piedmont) roundly defeated their French foe. Given Lamballe’s current position at the very centre of the French court this was a droll inclusion that might have amused Lamballe’s more observant guests. The second is a print showing the Académie Royale that reinforced the princess’s support of this and other artistic institutions.

176  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ The only painting from Lamballe’s collection that can be traced today is a highly finished vanitas still life by Jan Van Huysum (Plate 15). Knowing the princess’s love of Dutch painting, Marie-Antoinette gave a pair of these to the princess, having originally received them as a wedding present from her mother, Maria Theresa, who had commissioned them.151 Now separated from its companion, the painting shows an acutely observed arrangement of fruit, flowers and insects. The pair would have joined other still lifes in the princess’s collection, such as two oval floral arrangements, one described as being a relief carved in stone. Further evidence of the princess’s personal taste in pictures comes from her will. She made special provision in her will for three paintings from her collection. One she left to her aunt, the princesse de Conti, ‘connaissant son Gout pour la peinture’. This was a little panel in enamel depicting a peasant, which Lamballe begged her aunt to accept as a ‘marque de ma tendresse pour elle’. Similarly sentimental was a bequest to her friend Madame de Brunoy of two paintings, one representing Melancholy, the other Happiness: ‘Je désire que ce dernier luy rappelle celuy que j’éprouvais d’être aimé par Elle’. As these were special legacies they suggest that these—bambocciata and allegorical works—were the genres the princess most valued. Implicit in her message was the understanding that in order to recognise connoisseurship and taste in her aunt and friend, she had to possess these qualities herself. This profile of the princess’s picture collection demonstrates that while not radical in her tastes, the princess possessed all the categories of paintings found in other respected collections of the day. Most collectors during the second half of the eighteenth century continued to focus on old masters or seventeenth-century paintings from primarily the Dutch, Flemish, Italian and French schools, with some interest too in early German painting. The work of contemporary artists was present in her collection—and as shown earlier in this chapter, virtually all of the prints acquired by the princess were by contemporary printmakers reproducing the work of contemporary painters, though not always in the numbers seen in the group of collectors Colin Bailey has identified. Bailey has pointed to Marie-Antoinette’s perceived lack of interest in contemporary art as evidence of the queen’s philistinism, writing ‘Marie-Antoinette’s appreciation of French art was even less profound than her husband’s. If she is remembered today as Vigée-Lebrun’s protectress, her first portraitist was the mediocre Swede, Adolf Ulrich Wertmüller (1751–1811), whose work was ridiculed even at the time’.152 However, the Wertmuller commission was only executed at the request of the artist’s patron, Gustav III, for whom the finished portrait was intended, and Marie-Antoinette was dismayed by the results.153 Her portraits by Vigée Le Brun and others pushed the very boundaries of the genre, particularly for one of her status, hence the outrage they often elicited at the salons. As for the king’s absence of taste, Louis XVI acquired at auction two of the very same works that had hung in La Live de Jully’s cabinet,154 a collector celebrated by Bailey, and under his auspices the crown pursued a committed campaign to bolster contemporary history painting and effected numerous administrative reforms to the Academy.155 We can perhaps trace the grudging attitude of many art historians towards Marie-Antoinette back to a single statement made by her First Lady of the Bedchamber, Madame Campan, in her posthumously published memoirs, where she recalled, ‘Marie Antoinette took little pains to promote literature and the fine arts’.156 Campan described the queen as being painted by ‘indifferent artists’ and further remarked, The Queen had not that enlightened judgement, or even that mere taste, which enables Princes to foster and protect great talents. She confessed frankly that

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 177 she saw no merit in any portrait beyond the likeness. When she went to the Louvre, she would run hastily over all the little “genre” pictures, and come out, as she acknowledged, without having once raised her eyes to the grand compositions.157 The ‘little’ genre pictures Mme Campan dismisses out of hand were among the most sought after paintings by Paris collectors, but whatever its veracity, Mme Campan’s opinion has visibly diminished Marie-Antoinette’s contribution as a patron of the arts in the eyes of subsequent generations and all her circle has been similarly stigmatised. The point to be made here is not that Marie-Antoinette and her peers were great visionary collectors, the most significant of their age, but that they were neither the disinterested nor uninformed trifling ‘decorators’ they have been portrayed to be. Moreover, the barometer of taste against which they have been continually judged and found wanting is blind to both the subtleties and realities of female court patronage during this period. Should, for instance, the presence of contemporary French painting be a factor in determining the quality of female courtiers’ collections? Patrick Michel has argued that it was not the influence of the salons or an especially progressive taste that prompted some collectors to collect modern painting but the fact that the inflated prices fetched by northern and old master paintings left those without princely clout or fortune little other choice.158 Paradoxically, the absence of old masters in a painting collection has also been read by art historians as evidence of a dearth of connoisseurship. The truth of the matter is that Lamballe and her peers had very different motivations from the new breed of art lovers emerging in Paris. They were not firstgeneration collectors from families of relatively new wealth and little authority desiring upward social mobility. We therefore cannot view the taste exhibited by courtiers such as Lamballe as outmoded or regressive, especially when they assembled works from the very schools and genres most esteemed by contemporary connoisseurs. These were pictures that would have been considered wise investments and complemented the existing works found in dynastic collections formed by their forebears over many generations.159 To suggest courtiers’ acquisitions were not sufficiently avant garde by twentieth- or twenty-first century standards, is to deny the established and respected taste of the amateur and connoisseur of the time. Instead, it is more profitable to ask how Lamballe’s own contemporaries would have judged the quality of her collection. A list of notable Parisian collections compiled by Thiéry in his ‘Guide des Amateurs’ contains the name of one solitary woman collector, a widow named Madame Sorin. The identity of this individual is now entirely lost to us, but the more salient point is the nature of the contents of this collection that met with Thiéry’s hard-won approbation. The author’s description was as follows: Madame veuve Sorin, logée quelques maisons au-dessus & du même côté de l’hôtel de Montmorenci, possede un joli petit cabinet, composé de tableaux de Teniers, Vouwermans, Van Ostade, Guillaume Heus, Moucheron, Bourdon, Paul Brill, Bartholomée Breemberg, Palamede, Vatteau, &c, d’un beau tableau de M Vernet, fait à Rome en 1744; de deux autres de M. la Grenée l’aîné, & d’autres de MM. Caza-Nova & Hue; de Mesdames Vallayer-Coster & Filleul; on y voit aussi un tableau dans le genre de Rubens, représentant Jupiter & Calisto; une Pastiche de Teniers, d’après le Guide, & deux petites miniatures de M. Caza-Nova.160

178  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ Here, then, was a small paintings cabinet formed along very similar lines to Lamballe’s: the Dutch and Flemish schools greatly in evidence; a work by a key rococo artist of the previous generation, in this case Watteau (Lamballe, as detailed above, had two works by Boucher in her bedroom); paintings by a woman artist who was later official painter to Marie-Antoinette, Anne Vallayer-Coster—undoubtedly floral still lifes as she was chiefly a flower painter, a genre also taken up by Lamballe; and one or two pictures by canonical artists, in this case, a work in the manner of Rubens. Like Lamballe, Mme Sorin owned a relatively select number of paintings, which suggests that quantity was not a characteristic deemed essential of a praise-worthy collection. But there is an additional reason the princess may not have collected pictures in larger numbers in her apartment at the Hôtel de Toulouse—for their expense was no barrier to her, and the furniture and other decorative arts she acquired were far dearer than paintings—and this was that there existed already in this residence, indeed just one room away from her, an expansive and much-lauded picture gallery. Most courtiers had existing collections of art in their ancestral homes which they inherited from their predecessors and from which they continued to derive prestige, even if only by association. The duc de Chartres, for instance, enjoyed a reputation as a man of some taste chiefly because of the famous picture collection in his Paris residence, the Palais Royal. In fact, the collection had been largely assembled by his great-grandfather and not only did the duc de Chartres make few additions to it, but he later sold it to finance his political campaign.161 The grande galerie in the Hôtel de Toulouse (today known as the Galerie Dorée) was the undisputed centrepiece of the great house and considered one of the city’s finest collections of art. The gallery is an extraordinary 40 metres in length with ceilings 8 metres in height, thereby making it over half the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (73 m × 10m), a very imposing space for a private house. The collection had been assembled by two generations of the La Vrillière family and then further augmented by the duc de Penthièvre’s parents, the comte and comtesse de Toulouse, when they purchased the house in 1713. Thiéry described it as an ideal display case.162 Although it inevitably must have contained some copies and misattributions, the paintings included work by Tintoretto, Pietro da Cortona, Van Dyck, Veronese and Poussin, the very artists whose works achieved the highest prices on the market at that time.163 The princess would have walked this gallery daily when in residence and it may aguably have made the need to collect on a comparable scale both unnecessary and illogical.

4.11  The Hôtel de Lamballe (Hôtel de Lauzun), Passy164 The last of the princess’s residences to be examined in this chapter was also the most informal. The princesse de Lamballe purchased her country house in Passy, the Hôtel de Lauzun known colloquially as the ‘maison de la rue de Seine’ (today called the Hôtel de Lamballe and currently the Turkish ambassador’s residence), on the 1st of February 1783 from the duc de Lauzun.165 Passy was then a small rural, yet fashionable, village conveniently close to Paris and the princess summered there partly because of the restorative environment it offered, with its fresh air and mineral water sources, but mainly for its proximity to Marie-Antoinette at the nearby royal palace, the château de la Muette, and to the duc de Penthièvre, who leased the magnificent château de Passy from the marquis de Boulainvilliers between 1769 and 1789 (demolished 1827) and another house in the village until 1793.166 At some point the

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 179 queen also established a pied-à-terre in Passy on the rue Basse, a stone’s throw away from Lamballe on the rue de Seine, while the duchesse de Polignac often stayed with Jacques Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, the former Intendant des Invalides, at the Hôtel de Valentinois (demolished 1839) on the rue de l’Annonciation.167 The queen thus effectively positioned herself squarely between her two favourites. The Hôtel de Lamballe occupied a spectacular river-side situation on 5 hectares of land, the house poised on the crest of a slope affording views down over three lilacfilled terraced gardens to the Seine (Figure 4.25 and Plate 16).168 Grevenbroeck’s painting shows the site in 1740, with the Château de Passy and its grounds on the left, which the duc de Penthièvre would rent, and next to it, the Hôtel de Lauzun, later the Hôtel de Lamballe, at that time with a red brick-faced façade that was later removed.169 The artist shows the garden as being composed of formal parterres and statues. This work, and a painting from 1757 by Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste Raguenet (Paris: musée Carnavalet), show the house’s proximity to the riverbank. Raguenet’s shows the house with more expansive and informal gardens and highlights the privacy of its setting, with the town visible in the background. Today, the site is quite altered, with most of the land visible in the paintings having long since been parcelled up and sold off and with the now suburb of Passy having grown up around the house. Photographs from 1910 and 1920, however, capture some of the former scale of the gardens and grandeur of the house’s setting. With her father-in-law’s assistance, the princess paid 110,000 livres for the house and surrounding land.170 This sum included the existing furniture, which was valued at 30,000 livres. From the descriptions of the furniture and textiles in the princess’s probate inventory, it is not so very difficult to distinguish these from the items introduced to the interiors by Lamballe herself during her eight-and-a-halfyear residence, which date from the 1780s and are neoclassical in style. Instantly one appreciates that these were summer furnishings and schemes, reflecting the house’s function as a country house and retreat from Paris. In each room there was a profusion of light-weight printed cottons mainly Perses—floral printed cottons of the highest quality171—and toile d’anglaise: blue and white printed cottons, usually of English manufacture.172 There was a large quantity and variety of furniture throughout the house including some very valuable mahogany pieces but as the cabinetmakers are not recorded, the notary being only interested in the cumulative value of the different materials employed, these are of limited use to this study.173 The different types of furniture described, however, are a useful testimony to the period’s sociability and include an array of smaller more ‘intimate’ furniture that underscores the princess’s use of the house as a space in which to entertain her fellow courtiers.174 Many items reflect the nature of the entertainments that took place during the princess’s residence, such as the games tables and the well-equipped wine cellar with its champagne. A beautiful hand-painted jeu de Cavagnole thought to have belonged to the princess is in the collections at the Musée Gallé-Juillet, together with part of her porcelain service.175 In the princess’s bedroom, overlooking the garden, the effect was one of commodious luxury. Pier glasses on the walls helped to flood the room with natural light and the walls were papered with ‘panneaux de tapisseries en papier’. This was English flocked wallpaper simulating silk damask or cut velvet (or a French imitation of this) and a sign that the princess sought an informal appearance to her rooms and embraced the latest fashionable innovations, with yet again an eye to English sensibilities.176 A number of other rooms were also papered, including a salon with arabesque wallpaper and a cabinet with Chinese-style paper. Wallpaper was more economical than silk and certainly faster and easier to source, install and maintain but it was also

© Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet

Figure 4.25 Charles-Léopold Grevenbroeck, ‘Passy et Chaillot, vus de Grenelle’, 1740, oil on copper, Paris, musée Carnavalet

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 181 very much of the moment and it was for all these reasons that Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI introduced several elaborate papered schemes to the rooms they had been forced to occupy in the Tuileries at short notice, between 1789 and 1792.177 In the princess’s bedroom and the adjoining dressing room were a variety of seat furniture in sociable forms designed for conversation, such as a ‘tête-à-tête’ (a loveseat) and a ‘causeuse’ (a sofa for two people). Together with a particularly lavish lit en niche, valued at 600 livres, the princess had a mahogany desk and a little tulipwood secrétaire with built-in book shelves so she could read and work in her bedroom. On the chimney piece in the bedroom were displayed two candlesticks with fluted stems and silvered pearl ornament. Once again, the princess’s taste matched (or followed) that of MarieAntoinette, who had a very similar pair of gilt candlesticks with silver strands of pearls at Saint-Cloud as did the comtesse d’Artois.178 The other rooms in the house were also furnished in this comparatively simple scheme, that is, the white-ground floral perse textiles and mahogany or tulipwood furniture. Marie-Antoinette used a very similar scheme to this—white ground Perses set off by dark mahogany-veneered furniture, together with small works of art and intimate types of furniture such as alcove beds and niches, throughout her private apartments at Versailles and in the Petit Trianon, and it is to these we can look to gain an understanding of the appearance of the interiors of the Hôtel de Lamballe and to appreciate further the extent of their shared aesthetic. The walls of all these rooms were hung with many prints, mainly hand-coloured and from the English School or mezzotints in the English manner. In the cabinet de toilette next to the bedroom were seven ‘English’ prints including ‘l’arracheur des dents’ which could be the mezzotint of this title by Johann Simon Negges, a copy of an English print by John Dixon.179 Also present was a mezzotint depicting the romantic courtship of rural couple, Palemon and Lavinia, a subject drawn from James Thomson’s quintessentially English and staggeringly influential poem, ‘The Seasons’ (1726–1730), where the pair represent autumn. This was probably the sensitive version executed by John Raphael Smith in 1780 after a painting by William Lawranson, which shows a demure Lavinia allowing a gallant Palemon to take her hand (Figure 4.26).180 A print in a gilded frame entitled ‘La marchande d’amours’ is likely Jacques Firmin Beauvarlet’s print after Joseph Marie Vien’s famous 1763 painting (the print published in 1778). A number of other impressions are worth noting, in particular four after Watteau. With these were ‘le grand marché de chevaux’, a print by Jean Moyreau (1691–1762) after Philips Wouwerman (1619–1668) from a large series by the printmaker reproducing the Dutch artist’s œuvre, chiefly equine scenes, a subject wholly appropriate given Passy’s proximity to the horse races in the Bois de Boulogne (Figure 4.27). More significantly, however, the print was after a painting that had once been in the collection of Lamballe’s great-grandmother, the comtesse de Verrue, and at the time the print was made, in 1737, was in the collection of the comte de Clermont, cousin of the duc de Penthièvre. As a group, these prints evoked and mirrored in a most flattering light the sort of Elysian gatherings that would have taken place in the princess’s gardens just outside. Both rustic scenes of courting couples and equestrian subjects were influenced by the northern tradition and sensibility, largely derived from the example of Rubens’s fêtes champêtres, so it is not surprising that these found particular favour with Lamballe in view of her strong taste for Flemish painting.181 The princess also had a print identified as depicting ‘Agar reçu par Abraham’, which must be the version by Jean Massard (1740–1822), the printmaker often employed to reproduce Greuze’s work, in this case after Phillip van Dyck. Not only was the print

182  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’

Figure 4.26 John Raphael Smith after William Lawranson, ‘Palemon & Lavinia’, 1780, London, published by Smith, mezzotint, 50.3 × 35.3 cm (London: BM)

of a biblical subject after the work of an artist greatly admired during this period, but it bore a dedication to Marie-Antoinette, increasing its appeal to the princess. A separate inventory for the Hôtel de Lamballe exists that was drawn up in 1794 by the Commission des Arts.182 This was a body established by the revolutionary government of the First Republic to investigate and confiscate valuable works of art and other cultural assets contained in noble properties belonging to exiled, imprisoned or

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 4.27 Jean Moyreau after Philippe Wouwermens, ‘Le Grand Marché Aux Chevaux’, from ‘Oeuvres de Philippe Wouwermens Hollandois’, Paris, etching, 1737, 44.8 × 65.7 cm (London: Victoria and Albert Museum)

184  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ guillotined aristocrats, as well as monasteries and churches, which were desecrated with impunity. This brief document lists some of the art and more expensive objects from the house that were not included in the original inventory or in the main sale of the princess’s Passy effects held in March 1794. It comprises mainly porcelain, which corroborates the princess’s particular taste for these objects demonstrated in her other residences. The clerk recorded a number of special pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, three violet jasper Medici vases and four richly gilded and ornamented vases on streaked red marble plinths. Some of these valuable mounts were described as having been mutilated suggesting an attempt to prise them from the porcelain, which seems to point to the collection having been plundered at some point between Lamballe’s death and the revolutionary sales eighteen months later. A duplicate version of this document obtained by the lawyer to Lamballe’s elder nephew and heir, Prince Charles Emanuel de Savoie-Carignan, contained an extra object: a portrait of the prince, which was located and returned by Courtois to Turin.183 Also listed in the inventory was an ivory group in five pieces representing Venus enchained by Love, described as a miniature sculpture ‘d’une rare éxecution, sculpté par belletête, surmonté d’un pied enrichi de Trophés du même genre’. This was identified by the clerk as the work of the French ivory carver, Jean-Antoine Belleteste (1730–1811), and was the microcarver’s most famous creation, a Venus and Cupid group briefly mentioned in the nineteenth-century literature, when its existing location was then unknown. Lamballe’s little sculpture seems very likely to be that by Belleteste in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (Figure 4.28).184 The dimensions of the Walters ivory match those of the notary’s description—around 5½ inches without the plinth— and it is clearly divisible into five pieces. Manacles are visible about Venus’s wrists and ankles, although the connecting chains have been lost at some point in the object’s history. Furthermore, the plinth is ornamented with a trophy exactly as described in Lamballe’s inventory. Belleteste had created numerous elaborate microcarvings for Marie-Antoinette having made his reputation with miniature versions of the Four Seasons statues by François Girardon (1628–1715) at Versailles (Dieppe, Musée de Dieppe). Apart from the ivory group, the most spectacular and, for the present study, most significant object was a white marble demi-oval table with mahogany feet, ornamented with eleven oval plaques in jasper and coloured marbles, which the notary observed had been made and shipped from England but damaged when being unwrapped. This must be the neoclassical-style table inlaid with cameos Lamballe lists in her will, which was a present to her from the queen: Je donne et Lègue a madame de Donissan une table que la Reine m’a donnée en bois précieux avec des camées montés en or moulu; me venant d’une main chère je ne puis mieux en disposer qu’en La transmettant a mon amie intime. The jasper and coloured marble plaques were in fact Wedgwood jasperware, and the idea for the gift may have come to the queen from the princess’s visit to England in 1787. A table of an appearance very similar to the description of the princess’s was sold at Christie’s in 2015 (Figure 4.29).185 It belongs, as does probably the princess’s table, to a small group of six known examples commissioned by the marchand mercier, Dominique Daguerre, whom the princess made other puchases from, and who masterminded the juxtaposition of Weisweiler’s elegant cabinetmaking with imported

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 185

Figure 4.28 Jean-Antoine Belleteste, Venus and Cupid, eighteenth century, carved ivory with ebony plinth, 22.3 cm (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum) © The Walters Art Museum

Wedgwood plaques. In 1790, Lamballe herself purchased some cameo plaques from Sèvres, probably the manufactory’s new designs imitating Wedgwood.186 In the chapel at the Hôtel de Lamballe were a series of devotional works including a painting on copper of St Francis in the Desert described as being in the manner of ‘Carache’ (presumably, the Carracci), a white marble papal bust, ten paintings representing the Life of Christ and a font bearing an enamel painting of St Charles. A list

186  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’

Figure 4.29 Adam Weisweiler, a late Louis XVI ormolu and cameo-mounted burr yewwood and mahogany table travailleuse with Wedgwood plaques commissioned by the marchand mercier, Dominique Daguerre, c. 1785–1790 (private collection photo) © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

of prints included in the inventory contained a view of the city of Constantinople, Turgot’s celebrated map of Paris and six paintings or drawings of battle and hunting scenes. Perhaps most intriguing is the mention of two jars containing marine plants and two natural history specimens (regrettably no further details are given), indicating the princess’s collection included some naturalia, possibly the remnants of a larger group. These became popular in the eighteenth century among those women of the upper-bourgeoisie and aristocracy who, traditionally barred from the scientific sphere, took an interest in science and the natural world. For the amateur woman collector,

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 187 they were often a diverting social and intellectual entertainment for their guests.187 The princess took an interest in current scientific thinking: in 1784 the duc de Penthièvre created a professorial chair for hydrography at the collège des Jesuites d’Eu in Eu, and between 1783 and 1788 the distribution of prizes was done in the presence of the princesse de Lamballe and her aunt, the princesse de Conti.188 Similarly, she had a copy of a famous treatise on sanitation by the Lyonnais eye surgeon Jean-Janin de Combe-Blanche in her library.189 As a practising artist, Lamballe may also have been using these specimens as a source for still-life studies, perhaps along the lines of Boucher’s art collection, which contained shells and naturalia the artist drew on in his painted œuvre and were displayed in such a way as to satisfy ‘both the desire for tasteful spectacle and a genuine interest in scientific instruction’.190 Similar collections typically included minerals, crystals, precious and semi-precious stones, coral, shells, fossils and plant and marine samples. Lamballe’s library contained pertinent reference texts that would have supported such a collection, including Buffon’s famous Histoire Naturelle Générale and Noël-Antoine Pluche’s Le Spectacle de la Nature.191 Her collection of naturalia may have been modest, but taken in conjunction with her selection of books, may suggest a real interest in the natural world. At the Hôtel de Lamballe the princess’s taste for rustic simplicity, already discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to Lamballe’s gardens, and the queen’s domains, especially Trianon and Rambouillet, were embodied in the light and airy surroundings far removed from court formality. There is further evidence here of the themes that emerge across the princess’s portraits and collections: sociability, emulation of the queen and the consistent striking of an English note, manifest in the prints, textiles, furniture and wall hangings the princess chose for her interiors.

4.12 Sale and Dispersal of the Hôtel de Lamballe and Collections at Other Residences Following the princess’s death on the 3rd of September 1792, revolutionary officials moved extraordinarily rapidly to secure her assets, sealing off her house and contents the very next day. The probate inventory began in Paris on the 17th of January 1793 and on the 3rd of August 1793 the National Convention decreed that the Passy house and its contents be sequestered and sold for the profit of the ‘Trésor national’.192 The sale was advertised and a detailed list of its contents relayed in a poster produced for the occasion announcing: ‘Vente De Meubles & Effets provenant de la succession de la ci devant Princesse Lamballe A Passy’.193 This was the established convention—the sale of Marie-Antoinette’s effects from the Petit Trianon were promoted the same way. Advance warning was also given in the Paris edition of Affiches, annonces et avis divers with a précis of the contents, reproducing the lengthy text from the poster.194 These advertisements show that the house had been completely stripped of its contents. Along with all the furniture and furnishings, the kitchen and garden equipment and the princess’s cellar of fine wines comprising 3,856 bottles were also offered for sale. Not included, however, were a number of objets ‘de luxe’ and more valuable works of art, which had been siphoned off, some or all of which are described in a second inventory. Although the Passy sale did include many pedestrian items such as linen and kitchen utensils, we can see from the poster that it also contained many of the most valuable pieces in the princess’s collection, those that would have been highly

188  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ prized by her and are mentioned in the main inventory. Here, for instance, is a great deal of her fine furniture, her porcelain as well as art and objets de goût such as paintings, engravings and porphyry and jasper vases. The sale began at 9 o’clock in the morning on the 23rd of March, 1794, and continued over several days achieving 91,487 livres 17 sols.195 As Lamballe had originally paid 30,000 livres for existing furniture and furnishings in the house acquired by the duc de Lauzun just ten years earlier, this reinforces the evidence that the princess had added substantially to the contents of the house. Further sales were held of some of the furniture and furnishings found in the princess’s apartment at the Hôtel de Toulouse and the Hôtel d’Eu at Versailles.196 Together these achieved 63,804 livres.197 A further sale of the princess’s effects from La Force prison was also held on the 5th of October 1792.198 The prince de Carignan’s lawyer, Jacques Courtois, himself remarked that in their haste to complete these illegal sales, revolutionary officials had parted with the lots for well below their market value. Thus these sums, while relatively high, are not representative of the true value of Lamballe’s collections. In his brief to the prince, Courtois stated that the furniture and other objects found at Passy and the Hôtel de Toulouse were less considerable than they might have been because for the greater part of the year of her death Lamballe had been living at the Tuileries, where she had been taken on the 4th of November 1791,199 and given rooms which she presumably furnished with her more precious effects. Surviving bills from the summer of 1792 show that she was still actively frequenting her usual merchants in Paris purchasing gloves, muslin, lace and silk taffeta from the luxury drapers Le Normand and Dupin, furniture from the ébéniste Molitor and an array of goods from the marchand mercier Dominique Daguerre and marchand fayancier Duban.200 There are bills from buttonmakers, candlemakers and an apothecary (where she purchased sirops, tooth pastes and digestive pills) as well as one for 200 bottles of champagne. In June, the princess received delivery of a mahogany nécessaire with accompanying silver, porcelain, crystal and cutlery along with a silver chamberpot and four coffee spoons from the ébéniste Palma (fl. 1787–1792).201 This same nécessaire she took with her to the Temple prison, and finally to the prison of La Force, where, Courtois believed, it was later stolen. Of Lamballe’s possessions in her Tuileries apartment, the lawyer wrote, ‘Everything was plundered, or is supposed to have been’, on the 10th of August 1792, the day the royal family and Lamballe with them fled the palace when it was stormed by the populace and their Swiss Guards massacred.202 Incredibly, the princess’s diamonds, gold boxes, snuff boxes and some of her silver, all of which had been placed for safekeeping with her première dame, Mlle Mertens, were not seized and sold, the shrewd woman managing to evade revolutionary authorities. It is not clear what ultimately became of these and the art and furniture held back from sale. Some items that were thought to have been preserved were found to be missing. Courtois thought the missing silver and copper must have been taken to the national treasury and copper depot, along with some objects he believed to have been take to the ‘Museum’, meaning the Louvre, which he was confident they would be able to claim back, or be compensated for . . . if they could succeed in identifying them. Again, the fate of these collections is not known, but the presence of the Belleteste ivory in the Walters Art Museum seems to point to their being sold at a later date.203 After the princess’s death, huge debts accumulated on her estate and at one point there was a plan to sell these in order to realise enough capital to pay her creditors and honour the numerous annuities due to her former household, although Courtois later

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 189 doubted this would be sufficient. Her property (two farms, the Passy and Versailles houses) was sold, with great difficulty and at a loss. With the disappearance of the court from Versailles, the princess’s house there had plummeted in value. It was found to be practically in ruins and the repairs would have cost more than the house itself was now worth. While in Paris investigating the prince de Carignan’s claims, Courtois did manage to locate and arrange the return to Turin of two portraits of the princess and these are likely the only tangible items from the princess’s collection that made their way home.204 It was determined that the princesse de Lamballe’s assets, which in life had been considerable, were, by the time of her death, significantly reduced and only continued to diminish as a result of the events immediately following her demise. When the princess came to prepare her will, Courtois wrote, she was consulting more the generosity of her heart, than the state of her fortune. The events of 1792, the chaos that ensued and the general mismanagement and neglect of the princess’s assets and property while sequestered—officials allowed these to be damaged, stolen and fall into disrepair—the illegal sales, along with their allowing an accumulation of debts, annuities and interest on both of these, meant that the estate had dwindled to almost nothing.205 Years later, the marquise de Lâge de Volude was still chasing the life annuity Lamballe had left her in her will, hoping to be compensated by the prince de Carignan.206 In fact he himself was in the same position and in 1818 his successor was still trying to secure compensation from the French Government for their lost inheritance. Lamballe’s private collections were just that: private, known only to those fortunate enough to be admitted to her residences. This may account for the fact that they went largely unreported in contemporary sources. But the princess’s cultural activities—her attendance of the opera, the theatre, the salons and public concerts—were highly visible and were meticulously set down in the gazettes and journals of the time. Although any courtier of some standing was automatically a patron of some description, the princess helped to nurture her reputation as a fully fledged patron of the arts by pledging her support to some of the period’s leading composers and writers. These activities require careful consideration if we are to gain a comprehensive understanding, as Lamballe’s peers did, of the princess’s status as a patron in the broadest, and thereby most authoritative, sense.

4.13  Musical Patronage Throughout her life Marie-Antoinette had an abiding love of music and was universally praised for her accomplished musical gifts and graceful dancing. She was by some distance the most musical queen ever to sit on the French throne. In the damning words of her First Lady of the Bedchamber, Mme Campan, ‘The Queen gave no direct encouragement to any art but that of music’.207 This was scarcely accurate, but it is certainly true that this was an area of the arts in which Marie-Antoinette was a visible and enthusiastic patron, and it was therefore socially expedient for her courtiers to be seen to embrace this interest. The queen’s influence contributed directly to the performance and appreciation of music becoming ever more central to the activities of the late eighteenth-century salon, and a sensitive understanding of this art became a legitimate ‘social asset’; those less musically adroit were at a serious disadvantage with salons becoming ‘ordeals for the non-musician’.208 In one way or another, MarieAntoinette was associated with every major composer of the period, but she was

190  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ particularly pivotal in reviving interest in the harp, an instrument that had languished in obscurity from the end of the fifteenth century. In the 1700s a series of innovations helped to expand and improve the instrument’s tonal range and the quality of its sound, in particular the single action hook mechanism with multiple pedals and the damper pedal, both developed by Jean-Henri Naderman, who became harp maker to Marie-Antoinette. While the instrument was played by both sexes it came very early on to be particularly associated with women.209 This vogue continued under MarieAntoinette in whose inner circle all the female courtiers, the princesse de Lamballe among them, took up the instrument, and a fashion soon developed for women to be painted with their harps. Of the twenty or so late eighteenth-century harp portraits that survive today all but one feature female sitters and again Marie-Antoinette was probably the originator of this vogue when she was twice painted with her harp by Gautier-d’Agoty. As discussed in Chapter 2, it is almost certainly the princesse de Lamballe who is shown listening to the queen’s performance in her chamber at Versailles in the second of these portraits (Versailles: musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon). Marie-Antoinette frequently gave concerts to her circle in which she sang herself, and she and Lamballe are known to have performed harp duets together. The harp as an enhancer of and partner in a woman’s beauty and talent became a highly personal instrument and increasing emphasis was placed on its decoration. Refinements in techniques and mechanisms deserved a corresponding elevation in ornament and it must have been the increasing visibility of harps—their public exposure at concerts and in portraits—that also led to renewed artistic efforts in their embellishment; the harp became a work of art in its own right.210 In the inventory of the princess’s private apartments at the Hôtel de Toulouse, the notary recorded a harp with its case, in a room facing the library.211 An eighteenthcentury pedal harp that purportedly belonged to the princesse de Lamballe is today in the Cité de la Musique in Paris.212 This provenance is supported by the inscription of the princess’s name on the verso of a wooden section of the instrument’s neck: ‘A L’Auguste Princesse Lamballe’. However, the harp’s proportions are very small and of a scale more appropriate to a child, which makes this supposed connection with the princess problematic.213 The harp’s painted iconography of fêtes galantes are similar to those found on other harps of the 1780s, stressing what contemporaries saw as the pastoral origins of the instrument at a time when the taste for idealised nature in the fine and decorative arts had begun to cross over into music as well. Mme de Genlis, one of eleven Parisian harp mistresses who is also credited with contributing to the rise in popularity of the harp,214 connected the image of sheep grazing in bucolic landscapes with the origins of harp playing in her 1811 treatise on the instrument. 215 This shift in taste, encouraged by views expressed by Rousseau and others, was a rejection of the static and hyper-refined baroque model of operatic and musical composition and performance in favour of a more ‘authentic’ and unpretentious musical style and aesthetic, a pastoral form that also led to a renewed interest in musique champêtre or rustic instruments such as the hurdy gurdy and bagpipes. Paris was the centre for harp composition, and ambitious composers naturally sought patrons. Musical dedications are an important source of information for aristocratic patronage, providing insights into the popular view or reputation of the dedicatee. In total, the princesse de Lamballe attracted five separate musical dedicatory epistles, all for the harp. As this distinction was generally only accorded to the most illustrious of courtiers and even then usually only once,216 the clutch accorded

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 191 the princess confirms her popular association with this instrument. While not on a par with Marie-Antoinette’s fourteen, it was nonetheless greater than Louis XVI’s three and the four accorded the duchesse de Polignac, who was widely renowned for her musical talent.217 The first of Lamballe’s dedications came in 1773 from JeanPierre Baur (1719–after 1773) who dedicated a collection of four sonatas each for the harp, clavecin, pianoforte and violin to the duchesse de Chartres, the princesse de Lamballe and the duchesse de Bourbon in 1773. Both duchesses garnered obsequious dedications praising their musical taste and talents.218 The princesse de Lamballe, not yet appointed as Surintendante, was less well known at this time and consequently accorded a much simpler dedication. Next to enlist the princess’s favour was Francesco Petrini (1744–1819) with his pieces for harp and harp accompaniment published by monthly subscription in 1779–1780, which he dedicated to the duchesse de Bourbon and Lamballe. He followed this in 1783 with a second dedication to the princess.219 Around the same time the ill-fated yet exceptionally gifted Jean-Baptiste Krumpholtz, a former pupil of Petrini’s, dedicated his Op. 8 no. 6 for the harp to the princess as well. Finally, Exupère de La Manière’s (fl. 1782–1794) 1er Recueil de huit Préludes, huit Chansons & Romances published in 1787 was also dedicated to Lamballe.220 The first three composers in particular were great luminaries of the music world. Baur was the first composer to understand and score for the harp’s unique qualities, showcasing effects like the undulating arpeggios seen in his compositions dedicated to Lamballe, Chartres and Bourbon.221 When Petrini and Krumpholtz made their respective dedications in the 1780s, they were the city’s leading harp composers and their work is still standard in the repertoire today. Their music was performed at the Concert Spirituel (the first public concert series in Paris, held in the Salle des Cent Suisses in the Tuileries palace), and all three composers gave lessons or trained other musicians; Jean Baur had taught the duchesse de Chartres, while Petrini had instructed Marie-Antoinette’s harp master, Hinner. Nor were the dedications that preceded these works merely a base form of flattery; this was a transaction. The dedications could only be made with the consent of the patron and on the understanding that they made a contribution to the publishing costs. Thus Lamballe was effectively financing the publication and dissemination of Baur, Petrini, Krumpholtz and de La Manière’s music, helping to grow both their renown and her own reputation as a discerning and magnanimous patron through her support of harp music, the instrument in which she was known to excel. This was part of the princess’s broader campaign to be viewed as one of the court’s great patrons of the arts. As with painting, a patron’s reputation was far stronger if she or he exhibited a practical and, preferably, detailed understanding of the art being endorsed. Lamballe’s role as a musical patron was enhanced by her facility with different instruments. That contemporaries accepted this view of her is confirmed in a portrait by Nicolas Lavreince (1737–1807), which shows the princess taking a central role in a salonconcert (Figure 4.30). During the second half of the eighteenth century there was an important shift in attitudes towards the social role and function of music and musical performance. Where previously music had been secondary to theatre and painting in the hierarchy of the arts, enlightenment thought accorded it an important role in the expression of emotions and the aesthetics of sentiment. As an art form it became more democratic and more informal with the creation of new arenas and formats for playing and listening to music—including most crucially for the courtly sphere, the musical salon or salon-concert. These enabled grandees to promote new artists

192  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’

Figure 4.30 François Dequevauviller after Nicolas Lavreince, ‘L’Assemblée au concert’, c. 1783, Paris, published by Dequevauviller, etching and engraving, 40.2 × 50.2 cm (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

and their compositions, whose talent they could claim to have cultivated through their generosity. It also provided an appropriate setting for aristocrats and courtiers to display their own talents and, in Lamballe’s case, very probably the distinction of playing pieces that had been dedicated to her alone. The salon depicted in Lavreince’s work is that of Mademoiselle de Condé (Louise Adélaïde de Bourbon, 1757– 1824), Lamballe’s first cousin once removed, to whom the print is dedicated.222 This was staged at her personal residence, the Hôtel de Bourbon-Condé in Paris, and the room’s decor suggests concerts were a regular occurrence—two draped female statues hold a lyre and a lute, and the decorative overdoors feature putti, a lyre and a flute. Lamballe is located at the centre of the activity, seated next to her cousin, in front of a niche containing a large ornamental stove. Mlle de Condé sings and Lamballe accompanies her on what is either a harpsichord or a pianoforte, with sheet music entitled ‘Concerto di Musica’. The princess appears to be directing the recital as she faces her cousin yet unites the group by maintaining eye contact with the cellist seated next to her, the comte de Fersen (Figure 4.31). One of their company holds a violin and gallantly leans against the back of Mlle de Condé’s chair listening to her sing. A secondary group to their right is composed of a flautist, a violinist and two men inspecting and arranging the music. The sword of one of these figures, just visible

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 193

Figure 4.31 Detail of Figure 4.30 showing the princesse de Lamballe playing a pianoforte or harpsichord

beneath the table, suggests that this little orchestra is not comprised of professional musicians, but noble amateurs. Further instruments wait to be taken up, a violin on a table, a horn resting against a violin case on the floor and a cello abandoned against a chair. Lavreince’s intention was to show the convivial bustle of the events regularly attended by the French aristocracy, in this case with individual portraits of key members known to the print’s dedicatee. The princess’s taste for musical performance is further shown by the discovery that she had in her salon a glass harmonica in an ebonised and gilded case.223 Although invented in Germany, it was Benjamin Franklin who perfected this instrument in Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century at a time when unorthodox and mechanical instruments were gathering interest. The crystalline tones of the glass harmonica fascinated audiences; Mozart composed music for the instrument, and Angelica Kauffman was depicted playing it. One can imagine the princess played the instrument during her salons to entertain and entrance her guests almost as a form of parlour game. To complement her playing, Lamballe had a section in her library devoted to music manuscripts. This included works associated with the queen such as Delaborde’s Choix des Chansons mises en musique, which was dedicated to Marie-Antoinette (then dauphine) and accompanied by plates designed by Moreau le Jeune (Paris, 1773),224 and the published scores of works whose debut performances they had attended together such as the opening performance of Gluck’s most famous opera, Orphée et Eurydice (Paris, 1774).225 Lamballe had three bound manuscripts of the

194  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ work of Marie-Antoinette’s favourite composer,226 including Armide (1777),227 and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), which Gluck dedicated to the queen and performed to great acclaim in Paris on the 18th of May 1779.228 She also had a copy of Desforges’s opéra bouffon, L’Epreuve Villageoise (Paris, 1784), put to music by Grétry and performed for the first time by the Comédiens Italiens ordinaires du Roi on the 24th of June 1784.229 The princess would have played from this music: her copy of the Airs détaches de M. de la Mothe et autres (ninety-nine pages of bound sheet music) even bears written annotations to its pages, possibly added by the princess herself.230

4.14  Library and Books The second half of the eighteenth century was a golden age in France for book printing and artist-designed book illustration, both of which led to a steep rise in bibliophilia; French books were collected across Europe. Within the noble interior, the library had long been a male province, but in the 1700s, with rising literacy rates, female courtiers began introducing libraries to their official suite of rooms and a number of them sat for their portraits in these new settings. Marie-Antoinette had three libraries, at Versailles, the Petit Trianon and in the Louvre palace,231 and her official Reader, the abbé Vermond, was also librarian for the prestigious Bibliothèque Mazarine. The queen’s library contained a high number of music manuscripts and French translations of English books as well as literary masterpieces of the age, by authors including Pascal, Rousseau, Molière, Racine and Voltaire, among others.232 Recent research has shown that educated, well-read princesses and other prominent female courtiers were instrumental in advancing the cause of early modern women’s education and literacy. By extension, their libraries were commonly viewed by contemporaries as didactic paradigms and their literary tastes and reading habits proved enormously influential.233 A number of catalogues of women’s libraries were published during the eighteenth century, including those of Lamballe’s great-grandmother, the comtesse de Verrue (1737) and Madame de Pompadour (Paris, 1765).234 There was public interest too in the reading habits of Marie-Antoinette and her circle. The year of her marriage in 1770, Jacob-Nicolas Moreau published a ‘catalogue raisonné’ entitled, Bibliothèque de Madame la Dauphine, which presented a prescribed reading plan for women of quality, based purportedly on texts in Marie-Antoinette’s library. A catalogue was also published of the library of the queen’s comrade in arms, the comte d’Artois (Paris, 1783), of which Lamballe possessed a copy.235 The princesse de Lamballe kept at least two large, significant libraries in her Paris and Passy residences. The Hôtel de Lamballe library contained 782 volumes, mainly fiction, and classics such the Odyssey and an edition of the Lettres d’Abélard et d’Heloïse, genres appropriate to a country house setting, while at her official residence, the Hôtel de Toulouse, her library was twice the size and more erudite in character. A manuscript catalogue of the contents of the latter survives in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, its entries confirming the importance of the princess’s collection of books. The catalogue was presumably prepared by the princess’s librarian and official reader, the chaplain, Marie-Nicolas-Silvestre Guillon (1760–1847)236 and is a unique source of information on the princess’s cultural and artistic interests and her status as a cultivated patron. It also underscores the clear social and political function of a courtly library during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Although some of Lamballe’s books are also included in her general inventory, the catalogue provides additional details as to the bindings, composition and categorisation of the library.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 195 While studies of library catalogues cannot confirm which, if any, books courtiers actually read, we have the princess’s own testimony that she was a voracious reader. In a letter written probably from a country residence, the princess remarked to a friend, ‘Je dévore lettres et livres,—toute la petite bibliothèque y a passé—les contes de Marmontel m’ont paru bien fades’.237 In her bedroom at the Hôtel de Lamballe, the princess had kept a secrétaire surmounted by ‘une petite bibliothèque’—a small bookcase, so that she always had some reading material close to hand. Her childhood residence, the Palazzo Carignano, housed a famous library that had been given to the second prince de Carignan by his tutor, a well-known Piedmontese intellectual, and her ancestor, Prince Eugene of Savoy, had been a dedicated bibliophile.238 The library at Rambouillet, assembled by the duc de Penthièvre’s father was also considered exemplary, and a published catalogue of its contents appeared in 1726.239 This interest of the princess’s was significant enough to be recorded in her portrait by Jean-Baptiste Charpentier where she is shown reading, and a portion of the library itself is visible in Hickel’s portrait of the princess at her desk (discussed in Chapter 2). Moreover, the princess kept libraries in her first two apartments at Versailles and requested to have one installed in her third.240 The catalogue of the princess’s Paris library was composed in 1785, when she was at the height of her renown, and is therefore especially useful in that it reflects the contents from a period of maturity. That it was drafted during her lifetime and undoubtedly at her express request reveals a clear desire to systematise and tabulate her library and take careful stock of a growing collection. Moreover, the fact that the princess desired a library of her own, independent from her father-in-law’s, even though shared family or dynastic libraries during this time were common,241 and the duke maintained significant libraries in all of his main châteaux with 3,121 books at Anet and 968 in Paris,242 was a deliberate statement of intent and independence on her part. A library such as this was also a valuable asset. Diderot, for example, put his private library up for sale in order to raise funds for his daughter’s dowry. It was not just the quality of the editions in Lamballe’s library that represented a significant financial investment on her part, with their exquisite plates designed and etched by leading artists and printmakers, but the costly personalised bindings protecting each book. Some of these tomes were later the subject of several bequests and from their description in her will, we learn that the princess employed the artisanal bookbinder, N.-D. Derome, who was also bookbinder to the queen. It is plain that she valued the skill of this artisan as she took pains to mention him by name in the legacies. Bindings were highly personalised and a princess or queen might go through several versions, as she progressed from royal daughter, to foreign bride, to widow. A mourning binding from Lamballe’s widowhood features the shield of her coat of arms enclosed by a widow’s knotted cord on a prayerbook,243 but for most of her adult life Lamballe employed three different bindings of varying complexity, appropriate to the category of the publication: a combination of either her name or her coat of arms with a number of, usually floral, decorative elements. The library catalogue is a hand-written manuscript with gilt-edged pages, bound in faun leather and stamped with Lamballe’s coat of arms. Its contents are carefully laid out, the works all classified by theme and the formats, paper, bindings and occasionally the endpapers all noted. In all, 502 titles are recorded in 1,642 volumes. Lamballe’s contemporaries would have drawn a distinction between the library of a man or woman of letters, which was expected to be comprehensive though not exhaustive in scope containing well-known publications, fine editions and expensive bindings,

196  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ and that of the curieux, who collected rare or special editions.244 From her catalogue we can place Lamballe in the former category—she collected for knowledge, aesthetics and pleasure; not for esoteric rarity. All the key categories deemed necessary of an excellent library were present: theology, history, industry and fine arts, linguistics, rhetoric, history of literature; poetry; theatre; novels and contes; geography, travel; biography and music. The library was another unit of her collection and another means of projecting her identity, even if in an idealised form. Surprisingly, perhaps, in view of the princess’s supposed piety, there are only two titles (in two volumes) of theological works, one a treatise in defence of religion, the other Fontenelle’s oracles. It is hard to reconcile this with the devout figure of Lamballe so often evoked in the biographical literature. Historians have emphasised her Catholic upbringing, her convent education and her regular church attendance with a father-in-law famed for his good works, though all of these were established conventions of the time. The princess made no reference to religion in her portraits, despite an obvious precedent for this iconography in the portraits of her forebears. Her membership of a masonic lodge seems evidence of a pliant faith. The absence of theological works in any great number does suggest that while observant, the princess made no strict study of her religion as did, for example, the princesses Louise, Clotilde and Madame Élisabeth. She had considerably more works, for instance, on jurisprudence. Both poetry and novels were popular categories. Novels were read for pleasure and to pass the time but were also instructive about the outside world, one rarely encountered by women sheltered by palace walls.245 The princess had copies of all the key enlightenment texts: the complete works of Rousseau, Claude Adrien Helvétius’s De L’esprit (1776) and related work De l’homme de ses facultes intellectuels et de son education, Adrien Richer’s Theatre du Monde (1785 edition) and in particular, all thirty-five volumes of the Encyclopédie, classified under ‘Belles Lettres’.246 In her will the princess bequeathed this to the chevalier de Durfort. Of course this was a valuable gift but it was also symbolic, the princess using the possessive pronoun, ‘my Encyclopedia’, to signal the importance to her of this work and enlightenment thought generally. This, together with the literature on sentiment she acquired, detailed in Chapter 2, puts her enlightenment tastes into a particular context, one strongly biased towards a Rousseauesque romanticism. Nor is it surprising to find a number of books on travel in Lamballe’s library. In addition to the journeys she made to England and the Netherlands in 1787 and 1778, and to Brittany with her father-in-law, she also travelled incognito through the West of France with her lady-in-waiting the marquise de Lâge de Volude and visited spa towns across Europe.247 The princess had de Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde, the exhaustive twenty-four volume espistolary-format travelogue, Le Voyageur Français (Paris, 1772) and Les aventures de M. Robert Ch. dit de Beauchene in la nouvelle france’ (Amsterdam, 1783). More unexpected is the discovery that she was avidly following Captain James Cook’s voyages and discoveries in the South Pacific, with three different titles in thirteen volumes on this subject, only recently published in translation.248 History, however, was overwhelmingly the most substantial section of Lamballe’s library, with 146 titles in 690 volumes, equivalent to almost half of the entire library. This category is so substantial that it is worth considering by sub-category. These show that French history was by far the largest section, followed by classical history. It may be significant that the princess acquired more books on the history of England

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 197 than on her native Italy. She had only three books on ecclesiastical history, albeit in thirteen volumes. What becomes immediately apparent, however, is the degree to which the princess’s library was a support to and token physical manifestation of her professional life. She had numerous works pertaining to the functions, responsibilities and character of royalty, such as court prayer books and royal almanachs, a copy of L’Office de la semaine sainte à l’usage de la maison de la Reine (1776) and more philosophical treatises on the state of princes, such as Jacob Nicolas Moreau’s, Les devoirs du prince réduits à un seul principe, ou discours sur la justice, which had been dedicated to Louis XVI and published at Versailles in 1775.249 It was essential that Lamballe maintain a detailed knowledge of the systems of the court and her place within it. An exact understanding of and faithful execution of her duties, as well as those of her rivals and inferiors was critical to her political success. And yet, while she was herself an integral part of the court system, she was not necessarily blind to its faults, owning two controversial publications satirising Louis XV.250 She also had histories of her own house, including the Histoire généalogique de la maison royale de Savoie and Théâtre des États du duc de Savoie, and important works relating to foreign queens, such as the funeral oration composed for the Spanish Infanta, Marie-Louise.251 History generally, and the practical precedent it served, even through its classical antecedents, was visibly important to her. An undated letter survives in which the princess asks the publisher and bookseller Duflos to send her the remaining three volumes of ancient history she is due from a set of twelve, evidence of a careful attention to her acquisitions.252 Mounting evidence of the princess’s interest in strong-minded female figures is conveyed by her possession of Madame de Puisiex’s Les caractères (1750), a moralising treatise which the author, a collaborator of Diderot’s, had dedicated to Marie Leszczynska; a general history of famous women; histories of the lives of Marguerite d’Anjou, Queen of England and Joan of Arc; and a copy of Marie de Medici’s memoirs.253 Imagery relating to such femmes fortes, firmly established by the seventeenth century, helped to define the iconography of female portraiture in the course of the following century, including several of Lamballe’s own portraits. The princess’s appreciation of specialist imprints also becomes clear. In her will Lamballe left to Madame de Luines, ‘tous mes Livres de Limprimerie de Didot et reliés par Derome’. Didot was a distinguished printing firm which still exists today. The technical refinements they brought to letterpress printing during this period attracted the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who paid them the distinction of visiting their workshop. The prince de Carignan’s lawyer, Courtois, later took expert advice to establish the value of this legacy.254 The princess herself took an interest in the art of book printing; she had a ‘petite imprimerie’ installed opposite her library in the room that housed her curios.255 This was an interest shared by her circle.256 Louis XV, Louis XVI’s mother and Louis XVI himself all had their own imprints and presses at Versailles.257 Mme de Pompadour, too, had a press placed in her private apartments at court.258 Lamballe had visited a famous lettertype workshop in the Netherlands and must have printed many of her own small works with her press, but regrettably these do not survive. The princess’s library in the Hôtel de Toulouse was a working library and counterpoint to her library in Passy, the rural retreat. The library’s proximity to the Grand Salon and Salon de Compagnie suggests it was viewed as part of her complement of social rooms and was therefore designed to be seen by visitors and its contents

198  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ admired. As part of the setting for her salons it was an aid to staging clever, eloquent and diverting conversation—the courtier’s greatest tool. Lamballe’s library furnished her not only with matter for such exchanges—but also, through the many manuals on the subject of correct discourse, with the actual mechanics of conversation, from correct grammar, pronunciation and articulation to the subtleties of reasoning and debate. On either side of the library were the two rooms in which the greater part of her collection was concentrated, her cabinet and curios room. At Passy, the library was furnished with an elegant satinwood sécrétaire à cylindre and filled with numerous ornaments and small garnitures of porcelain. But the Paris library was furnished differently, less ‘cosily’ and with a greater degree of simplicity. Alabaster candlesticks and two Jasper vases placed on pedestals were the sole ornaments, the centrepiece presumably being the books themselves. The walls were no doubt lined with shelves, as glimpsed in Hickel’s portrait and as can be seen in Marie-Antoinette’s private library at Versailles, which has recently been restored. In the room opposite the library was an assortment of writing and drawing materials as well as a number of red morocco portfolios; an ecritoire and accompanying inkwell and poudrier; a little knife; and pair of scissors.259 A number of elements characteristic of a kunstkammer or study were also present: an ivory mounted ‘Coquillier de Coco’; an agate tazza; ‘1 oeuf d’yvoire tavaillé à joue’; ‘1 oeuf de Coco’; ‘1 petite Lunette’; ‘1 Lunette d’approche montée en or’ as well as an ivory mounted microscope. Coconut shells fashioned into goblets, ewers and other vessels, and ostrich eggs embellished with luxurious European silvergilt mounts were a key element of renaissance cabinets of curiosities usually accompanied by other natural materials such as coral and mother-of-pearl.260 The scales and microscope in Lamballe’s rooms and her gold mounted spyglass are part of this endeavour and were instruments she would have used to catalogue her samples. If the princess’s library was a physical expression of her commitment to knowledge then the literary dedications made to her were confirmation of her reception as an intellectual role model for other high-born literate women. The abbé de La Pérouze (fl. c. 1770) dedicated a morally improving collection of spiritual poetry put to music, ‘a l’usage des jeunes demoiselles’, to the princesse de Lamballe.261 In 1777, the Chevalier de Prunay, who was Captain of the Grenadiers, published the Grammaire des dames, dedicating it to the princesse de Lamballe and complimenting her ‘Suffrage éclairé’. Copies of the work were presented by the author to the queen, the comtesse de Provence, the comtesse d’Artois, Madame Élisabeth, Madame Adélaïde and Madame Sophie, an event that was publicised in the Mercure de France. 262 The purpose of the work was to teach girls and young women the correct orthography of the French language, to recognise and avoid provincial expressions and to curb ‘vicious’ pronunciation. Its frontispiece shows a young woman, who holds a copy of the Grammaire, instructing a group of nine little girls, each with their own copy of the book, reading with rapt attention. To reinforce the book’s premise and intended readership, each section of the book is adorned with a vignette showing a woman reading in a domestic interior. Such illustrations, showing young women studying and absorbed in their reading, were common in didactic texts aimed at the female sex and ‘normalised and increased awareness of reading and book ownership’.263 These books were part of a wave of conduct and etiquette books published in the 1770s–1780s when the debate on women’s education was intensifying.264 For one of these texts to be dedicated to Lamballe, and on the subject of maintaining the purity of the French language, the nation’s bedrock, shows she was considered a role model for young women of the

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 199 noble and upper middle classes, but more crucially, that the education of women was a matter of importance to her. Not all works dedicated to the princess were didactic however. Favre’s La Toilette des Dames is an example of the pastoral literary genre of the period: half poetry, half pseudo-classical fantasy.265 The four different times of the day are each represented by the toilette preparations of a different goddess, Diana, Psyche, Europa and Juno. On its publication in 1779 the poem received middling reviews, one critic opining that the clumsy prose and farcical scenarios were unworthy of the princess to whom they were offered.266 However, the journalist noticed and approved of the poet’s veiled allusion in the text to Lamballe as Europa, and of the woman herself: ‘une très-aimable Princesse, (Madame la Princesse de Lamballe) qui se plaît à protéger les talens’.267 It is possible that the little mask that appears with Favre’s lines, ‘Europe est la beauté parfaite/ Pour qui j’ai formé mes portraits’, was intended as a portrait of Lamballe.268 The journalist Louis-François Metra’s verdict on the poem was that it was a magnificent work.269 The poem was popular enough to be reissued in 1783, perhaps because of its appealing illustrations, designed by Pierre Thomas Leclerc. Lamballe’s own copy, in octavo grand format, is listed in her library catalogue where the librarian took care to note the book’s dedication.270 It was common for a royal patron to devote him or herself to fostering one or two young talents—Marie-Antoinette sponsored the writers Chamfort and Delille—and the princess gave special attention to Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755–1794) and Népomucène-Louis Lemercier (1771–1840), both of whom she encountered through her father-in-law. Florian was the duke’s page and gentleman poet, usually to be found at Rambouillet, Sceaux and Anet when the duke was in residence.271 His work is little read today, but his early efforts were praised and encouraged by Voltaire.272 In 1784, Florian dedicated some of his fables, Receuil des nouvelles, to the princesse de Lamballe. The following year he dedicated six more, Les six nouvelles de M. de Florian. Lamballe had his complete works bound by Didon in violet morocco and catalogued in her library.273 The princess was also pivotal in launching the career of the precociously talented poet and dramatist Lemercier. The son of the duc de Penthièvre’s secrétaire des commandemens, Lemercier was the princess’s godson and acknowledged protégé. He wrote his first play, Méléagre, when he was just 16 years of age and having read the tragedy the princesse de Lamballe urged the queen to support a public performance, which she duly did, the play receiving its first performance in 1788 at the Théâtre Français with the queen and the princess watching from the royal box.274 The princess’s will is also an important source of information on her personal network and interests. The executors were Pierre Charles Maignard, marquis de La Vaupalière (1730–1815) and Charles-Georges, marquis de Clermont-Gallerande (1744–1823),275 who were in exile with the princess at Aix-la-Chapelle and present when she drew up the document.276 Bequests were made to the comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, a man of letters whose publication Voyage Pittoresque de la Grèce (Paris, 1780) had been a great success. The Swedish ambassador the comte de Creutz described him as having ‘beaucoup d’esprit’ and being one of a group of men ‘qui donnent le ton dans la société’.277 Lamballe’s sister-in-law, the princesse de Carignan, another beneficiary, was described as a ‘philosophe’ by no less an authority than Voltaire.278 Madame de Donissan was Marie-Françoise de Donnissan, marquise de Citran (1747–1839), a fellow freemason,279 whose daughter mentioned Lamballe in her memoirs.280

200  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’

4.15 Conclusion While the turmoil of the revolution and the intervening centuries are against us it is still possible to erect more than a spectral framework of the collections of the princesse de Lamballe and conjure something of their vanished beauty and import. The princess, who has long been denied the status of either collector or patron within the narrative of ancien régime collecting, was on the contrary an informed amateur. The inventories of her residences testify to her penchant for all the requisite objets that issued from a period perceived by many as unsurpassed in elegance and sophistication: sumptuous textiles and wallpapers; furniture displaying virtuoso marquetry; innovative new forms of Sèvres porcelain; and objets de vertu in precious materials. But there are also signs of a more profound engagement with connoisseurial interests in her presentation of cameos, medallions and portraits in purpose-built cabinets, her collection of Far Eastern porcelain, some with a famous provenance, a cabinet of curiosities and suggestions of a collection of naturalia, all underpinned by a well-conceived library and foreign travels that reveal her to be intellectually and culturally curious. The princess was by no means an obsessive or even a systematic collector; the objects she acquired in the greatest numbers were northern bambocciata, portraits, English prints and French and Far Eastern porcelain. The subjects that emerge most frequently across the collections were biblical and mythological: she loved nothing so well as the high neoclassicism of her time. Devotional works were largely confined to her chapel and the absence of theological treatises in any large number in her library point to a more moderate faith than has previously been supposed. This may indeed have been in deference to the general tone set by the queen, who was not one for religious fervour, but it nonetheless diverges from the much-vaunted piety claimed for the princess by historians. There is a discernible continuation of the fashionable anglophile tastes witnessed elsewhere and described in Chapter 3 but the princess was no slave to novelty, also demonstrating an appreciation for the rococo works of her grandparents’ generation. Her enthusiasm for and knowledge of art was enriched by her own facility with drawing, painting, limning, letterpress printing and needlework. Often the prints she acquired had a personal significance for her, being connected to a person or event in her life. We can assume that her taste, which was entirely concordant with other noble collections of the time, is fairly representative of that of other female courtiers in her circle. Certainly Lamballe and Marie-Antoinette were closely aligned in this respect, often making identical acquisitions and the princess used every opportunity to show her sympathy with and connection to the queen. Beyond a shared enjoyment and sense of solidarity this was one way for Lamballe to maintain a constant presence and continued relevance in the queen’s life. Often assisted by her father-in-law, particularly for her most costly acquisitions, the princess had nevertheless ample means to fund these practises, illustrious precedents by way of example and an enquiring and enlightened mind to pursue them. The peripatetic existence of the courtier, adrift on a continuous circuit from palace to palace ensured that there was never one single or central repository for all her collections which contributes to their fragmented appearance. Yet each of her three private residences fulfilled an important function in her political and social life, and the collections displayed there supported the different facets of her work and professional identity.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 201 If the princess falls short in twentieth- and twenty-first century estimations as a collector of pictures, although not in the context of her own time, she does not disappoint as a patron of the arts. She was well regarded as is patently clear from the artists, sculptors, writers and composers who desired to link their name with hers. Here again her efforts were informed by personal experience, she was an accomplished amateur musician, who played the pianoforte, the harp and even the glass harmonica; she took a leading role in salons-concerts and performed with the queen. After her mistress, the princess received the highest number of musical dedications of any courtier of the time and helped to support the careers of several composers and writers. The difficulty of classifying the largely uncharted collections of female courtiers remains. This was a period of transition in which the traditional model of the court patron was gradually ceding to the amateur and very soon, the collector. The princesse de Lamballe was one of the last in generations of courtly patrons who saw it as incumbent on their class to protect the arts in all their forms, a model that would be dismantled by the revolution. On the crest of this great shift, the princess would have been typical of many in her circle: equal parts courtier, femme savante and amateur. There remain too, many ambiguities, particularly with regard to exactly who in Marie-Antoinette’s circle took the lead in dictating taste and fashions. Nor is the picture of Lamballe’s collection complete and it is very likely that further objects deriving from her collections will continue to surface. As research continues on Parisian dealers and artisanal workshops no doubt other orders and commissions the princess placed will also come to light. It is hoped that future scholars will build on this beginning and that further case studies on the courtiers of Marie-Antoinette’s circle will be undertaken; certainly this investigation shows that there is a wealth of material to be uncovered on these under-researched figures and any one of them may be found, like the princesse de Lamballe, to be a devotee and ‘Protector’ of the arts.

Notes 1 P. Michel, Peinture et Plaisir. Les Goûts Picturaux Des Collectioneurs Parisiens Au XVIIIe Siècle (Rennes, 2010). 2 F. Haskell, ‘Patronage’, in Encyclopedia of World Art, 1st edn (17 vols., New York and London, 1959–1963), xi, pp. 118–131. 3 C. Bailey, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven and London, 2002). 4 A. R. Gordon and C. Ayçaguer-Ron (eds.), The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny (Los Angeles, CA., 2003). Bailey, Patriotic Taste; Salmon, Madame de Pompadour. 5 M. David-Weill, ‘La collection de peintures de Madame Geoffrin’, in B. Degout and J. Charles-Gaffiot (eds.), Madame Geoffrin une femme d’affaires et d’esprit (Milan, 2011), pp. 66–67. 6 P.-X. Hans, ‘Créer des Intérieurs Raffinés Plus Que Collectionner’, in Salmon, Marie-Antoinette, pp. 152–187. 7 Ibid., p. 152. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 154. 10 M. Jallut, ‘Les collections de Marie-Antoinette’, Arts Asiatiques, 20 (1969), pp. 209–220. 11 Yonan, Maria Theresa. 12 From Marie-Antoinette’s immediate circle, see Bailey, Patriotic Taste on the comte de Vaudreuil, also the subject of a small display at the National Gallery, London: ‘The comte de Vaudreuil Courtier and Collector’ (2012); D. Alcouffe, La Folie d’Artois (Paris, 1988): J. Trey, Madame Élisabeth: Une Princesse au Destin Tragique 1764–1794 (Milan, 2013), and

202  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ a study of the collections of the Bourbon-Conti princes, Lamballe’s cousins: Musée Louis Senecq, Les trésors des princes de Bourbon Conti (Paris, 2000). 13 C. Guichard, ‘Taste Communities. The Rise of the Amateur in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45 (4) (2012), pp. 519–547. 14 J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), p. 256. 15 See C. Guichard, Les amateurs d’Art à Paris au XVIII siècle (Seyssel, 2008). 16 Michel, Peinture et Plaisir, p. 102. 17 Nor have I included here a discussion of the princess’s jewels, her collection of gold boxes and snuff boxes, or her silver. I have omitted an examination of the Hôtel de Louvois, a house the princess purchased in 1783 near the Hôtel de Toulouse, on the rue de Richelieu, to stable her horses and accommodate her staff and where she was also storing her aunt’s (the princesse de Conti) possessions, no doubt due to the latter’s separation from the prince de Conti. 18 AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581, No 361. It was to this and a copy in private hands that three historians referred to in their publications, without providing archival references: Bertin, Madame de Lamballe; Avezou and Dumoulin, ‘La Maison de Mme de Lamballe’; Arnaud, La princesse de Lamballe. The ‘inventory’ of the ‘sale’ in Passy (the author probably meant the probate inventory) was briefly referred to (again without reference) in J.-P. Naudé Des Moutis, Auteuil-Passy: Demeures et Jardins XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1982), pp. 11–12. 19 J. C. Baron Davillier, Le Cabinet du duc d’Aumont, et les amateurs de son temps (Paris, 1870), p. v. 20 This was found with a number of other small items when her pockets were searched. A. Bourgnon de Layre in Mortimer-Ternaux (ed.), Histoire de la terreur, 1792–94: d’après documents authentiques (8 vols., Paris, 1863–1881), iii, p. 497. 21 In addition to the Hôtels de Lamballe, d’Eu and de Louvois, the princess owned two farms in the Eure-et-Loir district. AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 4. 22 Bertin, Madame de Lamballe. 23 Duma, Les Bourbon-Penthièvre, p. 207. 24 Ibid., p. 571. 25 The comtesse de Verrue’s daughter, Maria Vittoria di Savoia, princesse de Carignan, was the princesse de Lamballe’s paternal grandmother. On the comtesse see C. Rubini, ‘Les collections de la comtesse de Verrue’ in H. Marx (ed.), Dresde ou le rêve des Princes: la Galerie de peintures au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2001), pp. 132–135; B. Scott, ‘The comtesse de Verrue. A lover of Dutch and Flemish Art’, Apollo, 97 (1973), pp. 20–24.. 26 J. Rogister, ‘ “Comme en lieu de conquête assurée” Les activités du prince et de la princesse de Carignan en France, 1718–1750’, in J.-L. Quantin and J.-C. Waquet (eds), Papes, Princes et Savants dans l’Europe Moderne (Geneva, 2006), pp. 252–267, p. 254. 27 J. Rogister, ‘Philippe V successeur de Louis XV? Les démarches secrètes de 1724–1728’, in S. Osorio-Robin (ed.), Philippe V d’Espagne et l’Art de son temps: Actes du Colloque des 7, 8 et 9 juin 1993 à Sceaux (2 vols., Sceaux, 1995) ii, pp. 141–167, 143. 28 Lamballe’s maternal aunt, Polyxena of Hesse-Rheinfels-Rotenburg, was consort to Charles Emmanuel III. 29 C. E. Spantigati, ‘From Vienna to Turin: Prince Eugene’s Collection in the Palazzo Reale’ in A. Hussein-Arco, Prince Eugene General-Philosopher and Art Lover (Vienna, 2010), pp. 274–275. 30 Oraison funèbre du prince Eugène de Savoye (Paris, 1762), Ms 4258, p. 59. 31 P. de Nolhac, Histoire du Château de Versailles au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1918), p. 129. 32 This is indicated on the Plan du rez-de-chaussée de l’aile du Midi et du parterre du Midi dans le château de Versailles, 1735. 33 AN, O1 1071 n° 170. For his very kind help and expertise in retracing the location and layout of these apartments, and many other areas besides, I am hugely indebted to Olivier Delahaye. 34 AN, O1 17813 n° 56 bis—59 and O1 17818 n° 2 & 5. de Nolhac, Histoire du Château, p. 130. 35 ‘Élévation d’un projet de galerie à la suite de l’appartement de la princesse de Lamballe’. AN O1 17813 n° 27–35. P. Verlet, Versailles, (1st edn, Paris, 1961), p. 720. 36 See F. Didier, ‘Les appartements de Monsieur et Madame à l’extrémité de l’aile du Midi en 1787’, Versalia, 21, 2018, pp. 59–80. 37 Nolhac, Histoire du Château de Versailles, p. 130.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 203 38 AN O 17804 n° 5–7. Verlet, Versailles, pp. 717–721. 9 C. Baulez, ‘François Rémond et le goût turc dans la famille royale au temps de Louis XVI’, 3 Colloque Versailles, 2 vols, ii, Versailles, Décembre 1987, pp. 500–509, p. 501. 40 P. Verlet, French Royal Furniture (London, 1963), p. 52. 41 Ibid., p. 42. 42 Ibid., p. 45. 43 Ill. in P. Verlet, Le Mobilier Royal Français, rev edn (4 vols., Paris, 1990), i, p. 68. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., ii, p. 150. 46 Illustrated in the online catalogue records for Inv. V5756 and Inv. V5749 (1/2), Château de Versailles: Les Collections, accessed 18 August 2015 at http://collections.chateauversailles. fr/#b88603f5-c81c-4503-bfc0-e5128b98b282. 47 AN O1 3395. 48 F. de Salverte, Les Ébénistes du XVIIIe Siècle, 4th edn (Paris, 1953), p. 209. Salverte cites AN O1 3639. 49 Catalogue notes for Lot 161, Tableaux Anciens, Mobilier et Ojets d’Art, Aguttes (DrouotRichelieu), Paris, 6 December 2013. A pair from the set of ten were also sold by CouturierNicolay, Paris, December 1994, lot 108, 50 Salverte, Les Ébénistes du XVIIIe Siècle, p. 24, 25, 99, 103, 205, 212, 296 & 306. Salverte cites specific furniture commissions in tulipwood and mahogany for Lamballe in Bircklé’s account book: AN O1 3641 to 3650; in Sené’s account book: AN O1 3639 & 3642; for Dubuisson’s 1784 commissions his account book in the Archives de la Seine. 51 The history, distribution and contents of these apartments are discussed in my forthcoming essay in M. Ledbury and R. Wellington (eds.), Living Versailles (London, 2019). 52 AN O1 3462. 53 Inventory number: AN, AE/VIa/187. I am grateful to Stéphanie Maillet-Marqué for her kind assistance. This information comes from Pierre Verlet’s notes on the object file. The AN chairs were identified by Verlet from their entry in the Journal de Garde-Meuble (O1 3641): Le Mobilier royal français (vol. II, 2.nd ed. [1955] 1992, pl. 35. The third chair was sold by Daguerre, Paris, 10/11/2017, lot no 265. 54 Paire d’appliques d’époque Louis XVI, modèle de Jean-Charles Delafosse’, Antiquités Rigot et Fils, Ref. 54761. These have flames instead of the pinecone finial but it is possible that the clerk mistook them for a more conventional pinecone. The two-branch model is unusual and therefore considerably rare. 55 Inventory number: AN, AE/VIa/4. Information from Verlet’s notes on file as cited above. 56 Letter from Evert Vilhelm Taube, Baron Taube to Gustav III, King of Sweden, dated Versailles, Thursday 20 April 1780. Electronic Enlightenment. 57 Letter from the marquise de Bombelles to the marquis de Bombelles, Versailles, 13 August 1781, in E. Lever, Lettres intimes (1778–1782): Que je suis heureuse d’être ta femme (Paris, c. 2009), p. 58 Letter from Gustav III, King of Sweden to Greve Gustaf Filip Creutz, Paris, Sunday 20 June 1784. Electronic Enlightenment. 59 Unless explicitly stated all inventory references in this section discussing the Hôtel d’Eu pertain to AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581, No 1202–1276 and Archives départementales des Yvelines, 4 Q 147 & 5 Q 236. See also Arnaud, La princesse de Lamballe, pp. 201–202. 60 J. -A. Le Roi, Histoire des rues de Versailles et de ses places et avenues (Versailles, 1861), p. 52. 61 Journal de Versailles, No. 55, Affiches et Avis Divers, Jeudi 29 Octobre 1789. 62 Nolhac, Histoire du Château de Versailles, p. 130. 63 ‘Le jeune Tobie, aidé de l’archange Raphaël, rend la vue à son vieux père Tobit’, Louvre, Inv. 1335. 64 A. Young, Letters Concerning the Present State of the French Nation (London, 1769), p. 209. 65 A French stipple print in the English style of ‘Andromache Weeping over the Ashes of Hector’ was also executed in Paris by Jean-Baptiste Lucien in 1786–1794, see the impression in the BM: 1899,0713.111. 66 Such as Gabriel Scorodumoff after Guido Reni, ‘Susannah and the Elders’, 1779, colour stipple etching, 25.3 × 19 cm (London: BM). 67 D. Alexander, ‘Kauffman and the Print Market in Eighteenth-century England’, in Wassyng Roworth, Angelica Kauffman, pp. 141–178, p. 153. 1

204  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 68 W. Wassyng Roworth, ‘Ancient Matrons and Modern Patrons: Angelica Kauffman as a Classical History Painter’, in Hyde and Milam, Women, Art and the Politics, pp. 188–210, p. 191. 69 R. Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ, 1970), p. 51. 70 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 114. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., p. 117. 74 Accession file for 381–1874, Furniture, Textiles & Fashion department, Victoria & Albert Museum. 75 W. Koeppe, Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens (New York, 2012), p. 35. 76 Ibid., cat. 21 & 22. 77 Notes by Peter Thornton, V&A object file Furniture & Woodwork Department, museum number: 1060:1 to 3–1882. 78 Mémoires secrets cited in T. M. Dumersan, ‘Histoire des Theatres du Boulevard’, Le Monde Dramatique: Histoire des Théâtres Anciens (Paris, 1837), vol.5, p. 67. 79 I am very grateful to Mme Virginie Desrante, formerly Curator of European Porcelain at the Cité de la Céramique Sèvres & Limoges, for this and the following group of references. Sèvres purchase made by the princesse de Lamballe in the Manufactory’s Registre des Ventes: 24 janvier 1781, Janot et Eustache Pointu. AMNS, Vy8 folio 54. 80 Ibid., ‘Janot et Eustache Pointu, Vy8 folio 54; 31 décembre 1781, 2 figures non nommée, Jeannette et Jérôme Pointu, La Fidélité. Vy8 folio 151. 81 See M. Martin, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Cambridge, MA, 2011). 82 AMNS ’17 juillet 1775, La Nourrice et La Vache (Vy6 folio 18); 31 décembre 1781, La Fidélité (Vy8 folio 151); 32 décembre 1782, 1 groupe et 2 figures non nommés + 2 vases « fleurs et biscuits » (Vy8 folio 259); 32 décembre 1786, 3 « groupe au papillon » (Vy10 folio 117 verso); 8 juin 1789, 1 groupe non nommé (Vy10 folio 332); 11 janvier 1790, 3 plaquette camée (Vy11 folio 1 verso). 83 Ms 4258, p. 135. 84 R. Savill, The Wallace Collection: catalogue of Sèvres porcelain (3 vols., London, 1988) ii, p. 820. 85 Trey, Madame Élisabeth, p. 118. 86 Ibid, p. 78. 87 E. H. de Grouchy and P. Cottin, Journal inédit du duc de Cröy (1718–1743) (4 vols., Paris, 1906–1907) iii, p. 224. 88 A. Sassoon, Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain. Catalogue of the Collections (Malibu, 1991), p. 123. 89 Ibid. 90 S. Castelluccio trans. S. Grevet, Collecting Chinese and Japanese Porcelain in PreRevolutionary Paris (Los Angeles, 2013), p. 132. 91 Mercure de France, February 1731, p. 330 and G. Boffrand, Livre d’Architecture (Paris, 1745), p. 42, both cited in Ibid. 92 D. Kisluk-Grosheide, ‘The Reign of Magots and Pagods’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 37 (2002), pp. 177–197. 93 For example, the marquis de Marigny, a noted collector, displayed his porcelain in this way, A. R. Gordon and C. Ayçaguer-Ron (eds.), The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny (Los Angeles, CA., 2003), p. 9. 94 17 April 1793, AN, MC Et. XXXV, 962. 95 Duma, Les Bourbon-Penthièvre, p. 521. 96 Original order from Rémond’s ledger quoted in Musée Lambinet, Louis-Simon Boizot (1743–1809): Sculpteur du roi et directeur de l’atelier de sculpture à la manufacture de Sèvres (Paris, 2001), p. 294. 97 They are mentioned by Thiéry in his description of the princess’s apartment: ‘Sur la cheminée sont placés, sur des piédestaux de marbre, des figures de femmes en bronze enfumé, soutenant sur leurs têtes des girandoles de bronze doré d’or moulu’, Thiéry, Guide des amateurs, i, p. 306.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 205 98 Musée Lambinet, Louis-Simon Boizot, p. 294. 99 I thank Christian Baulez and Nuno Vassallo e Silva for their kind help. Ibid., pp. 296–297; Baulez, ‘François Rémond et le goût turc’ dans la famille royale au temps de Louis XVI, L’Objet d’art, 2, décembre 1987, p. 24–45. Christian Baulez identified the corresponding entry in Rémond’s account book; M.C.N. XXXV 962, 27 April 1793, see H. Ottomeyer and P. Pröschel, Vergoldete Bronzen: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Technik der Bronzearbeiten, zu Künstlern und Werkstätten (2 vols., 1986), ill. i, p. 279; ii, p. 598. 100 Verlet ‘Le Beau Service’, p. 66. 101 I. Day, Royal Sugar Sculpture: 600 Years of Splendour (County Durham, 2002) p. 2; 28 & 37. 102 Unless explicitly stated all inventory references in this section discussing the Hôtel de Toulouse pertain to AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581, No 1–314. 103 L.-V. Thiéry, Guide des amateurs & des étrangers voyageurs à Paris (2 vols., Paris, 1787) i, pp. 304–311. 104 F. Laudet, L’hôtel de Toulouse. Siège de la Banque de France (Paris, 1932), p. 34. 105 Thiéry, Guide des amateurs, i, pp. 306–307. 106 Museum number 1963/2.45, University of Michigan Museum of Art Online Collections, accessed 18 August 2015 at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/musart/x-1963sl-2.45/1963_2_45A.JPG?from=index;lasttype=boolean;lastview=thumbnail;resnu m=12;sl9=ic_exact;size=20;sort=relevance;start=1;subview=detail;view=entry;rgn 1=ic_all;q1=guercino. 107 A. Gady, ‘Banque de France: L’hôtel de La Vrillière et ses collections’, Dossier de L’Art Thématique, 5, (Dijon, 2013), p. 43. See also J. Barreau and A. Gady, ‘L’hôtel de La Vrillière, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs 1635–1650’ in J.-P. Babelon et al., François Mansart. le génie de l’architecture (Paris, 1998), pp. 147–151. 108 Inv. S392 and S393. 109 ‘Dans l’antichambre de l’appartement de la dame Lamballe: quatre dessus de porte, école vénitienne, représentant des portraits’. Revue de l’art francais ancien et moderne, p. 204 (XXVII Rapport des citoyens Lemonnier et Moreau, membres de la Commission de monuments, relativement aux monuments d’art existant au ci-devant hotel Penthièvre), Ier Brumaire an II, pp. 203–204. 110 Original order from Rémond’s ledger cited in Musée Lambinet, Louis-Simon Boizot (1743–1809), p. 294. 111 Inv. F142. 112 N. Elias, trans. E. Jephcott, The Court Society (Oxford, 1983), p. 114. 113 Fraser, Marie Antoinette, p. 262. 114 See E. Lavezzi, ‘The Encyclopédie and the idea of the decorative arts’, in Scott and Cherry, Between Luxury, pp. 37–62. 115 A. Pradère, Les Ébénistes Français de Louis XIV a la Révolution (Paris, 1989), p. 159; p. 219, fig. 217. 116 Thieme and Becker,‘Jacob’, Allgemeines Lexicon, xviii, p. 228. 117 Catalogue note for Lot 139, ‘Mobilier et Objets d’Art’, Tajan, Paris, 15 December 2011. 118 Catalogue note for Lot 74, ‘Meubles et Objets d’art du XVIIème, XVIIIème et XIXème siècles’, Kohn, Monaco, 28 July 2011. 119 M. Hurtaut, Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs (4 vols., Paris, 1779) iv, p. 601. 120 AST Cat. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 1 121 AST Cat 107, Mazzo 1, No. 35. 122 Mercure de France, February 1731, p. 330 cited in Castelluccio, Collecting Chinese and Japanese porcelain, p. 132. 123 Report by the comte d’Angiviller dated 28 August 1783, quoted in J. Whitehead, Sèvres at the Time of Louis XVI (Paris, 2015), p. 10. 124 State Hermitage Museum and Courtauld Institute of Art, The Triumph of Eros: Art and Seduction in Eighteenth-Century France (London, 2006). 125 Salmon, Marie-Antoinette, p. 208. 126 Ibid. 127 AST Cat. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 1. 128 See Verlet ‘Le Beau Service’.

206  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 129 Salmon, Marie-Antoinette, p. 230; 130 Verlet ‘Le Beau Service’. 131 MNC27991, and corresponding design: 2011.3.2522 ; R182, no. 111. 132 Marie-Antoinette had a similar porcelain cat in her collection. Jallut, ‘Les collections de Marie-Antoinette’, pp. 209–220. 133 There is no model of this type recorded in the Meissen literature, however a gilt-metal mounted Chelsea scent bottle from c. 1755, showing Aesop’s fable of the fox and Stork, was sold at Sotheby’s, London on the 25th October 2016, lot 692. 134 Ibid. 135 Davillier, Le Cabinet du duc d’Aumont, p. v. 136 On this type of porcelain see Castelluccio, Collecting Chinese and Japanese porcelain, p. 206. 137 K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1990). 138 Ibid., p. 125. 139 Ms 4258, p. 291. 140 P.-T.N Magny and M. Hurtaut, Dictionnaire Historique De la Ville de Paris et de Ses Environs (4 vols., Paris, 1779), ii, p. 7. 141 Having omitted in this study an examination of the princess’s Hôtel de Louvois, I have also passed over the sale of French, Dutch and Italian old master pictures held there in May 1783: Notice de différens tableaux des écoles italienne, flamande et françoise; Bijoux d’or, Oiseaux injectés, & Minéraux divers; Dont la Vente en sera faite le Mardi 6 jeudy 8 Mai & jours suivans[. . .] Maison des Ecuries de Mme la Princesse de Lamballe où on les pourra voir la veille & le jour de la Vente, Paris, 1783. Its description on the Getty’s Provenance Index Database expresses uncertainty as to whether the contents of the sale are likely to have belonged to Lamballe. Basan appears to have held other sales here in the past, despite possessing his own premises. The lots include landscapes by the Torinese painter, Signarolli, which might support the view that the princess was the consignor of at least some of the lots. 142 J. Tonkovich, ‘Jean de Jullienne as a Collector of Drawings’, in C. M. Vogtherr and J. Tonkovich, Jean de Jullienne: Collector & Connoisseur (London, 2011): 28–47, p. 29. 143 J-B. P. Le Brun, Galerie des Peintres Flamands, Hollandais et Allemands (3 vols., Paris, 1792–1796), i, p. 13. 144 Ibid., p. 15. 145 Ibid., p. 36. 146 Letter from C. W. F. Dumas to the Commissioners, The Hague, 22 May 1778, ‘Adams Papers’ National Archives Founders Online, accessed 18 August 2015 at http://founders. archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-06-02-0109-0001. Middleburgse courant, no. 65, Saturday 30 May 1778. 147 C. W. F. Dumas to the Commissioners The Hague, 2 June 1778, ‘Adams Papers’ National Archives Founders Online, accessed 18 August 2015 http://founders.archives.gov/ documents/Adams/06-06-02-0124-0002 148 Ms 4258, p. 271. 149 Accession number: 13.589, Museum of Fine Arts Boston Online Collections accessed 18 August 2015 at www.mfa.org/collections/object/a-cover-for-a-music-stool-68321. 150 AST, Cat 107, Mazzo 1, No. 14. 151 Consigned by John Humble, Lot 1928 from Sale Catalog Br-447, European museum, No. 8 King Street. St James’s, 29 Dec 1807, Getty Provenance Index Database, accessed 18 August 2015 at http://piprod.getty.edu/starweb/pi/servlet.starweb. This painting was also recently sold at Sothebys, London, lot 37, Old Master Paintings, 5 July 2006. 152 Bailey, Patriotic Taste, p. 167. 153 M. Olausson, ‘Wertmüller’s Portrait of Henri Bertholet-Campan with the Dog Aline’, Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm, 20 (2013), pp. 19–20, 20. 154 The king bought two paintings that derived from La Live de Jully’s collection in the comte de Merle’s sale of 1784. In fact, the king’s agents were active on behalf of the monarch at many famous sales of collections of singular quality throughout this period. Edwards, The Conti Sales, p. 94. 155 Halliday, Facing the Public, p. 7. V. Spate, ‘Introduction’ in Australian Gallery Directors Council, French Painting: The Revolutionary Decades 1760–1830 (Sydney, 1980), p. 8.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 207 156 Campan, The Private Life, p. 137. 157 Ibid., p. 138. 158 See Michel, Peinture et Plaisir and P. Michel, ‘Le tableau et son prix à Paris, 1760–80’, Auctions Agents and Dealers (Oxford and London, 2007), pp. 53–68, p. 67. 159 The security of their investments was foremost in contemporary collectors’ minds as evinced by the paramount importance placed on authenticity. See Michel, ‘Le tableau et son prix’, p. 68. 160 Thiéry, Guide des Amateurs, i, p. 454. 161 See F. Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: some aspects of taste, fashion and collecting in England and France, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1980). 162 Thiéry, Guide des Amateurs, i, p. 307. 163 Patrick Michel cites the example of Pietra da Cortona’s Jacob et Laban achieving the highest price of a registered sale during the eighteenth century: 36,001 livres. Michel, ‘Le tableau et son prix’, p. 66. 164 Unless explicitly stated, the inventory references in this section discussing the Hôtel de Lamballe pertain to AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581, No 739–1172. 165 Avezou and Dumoulin, ‘La Maison de Mme de Lamballe’, p. 98. 166 P. Chenevier, ‘Le château seigneurial de Passy’, Bulletin de la Société historique d’Auteuil et de Passy, 11/2, (1923) 11/2, pp. 17–24. See also E. Wahl, ‘Marie-Antoinette à la Muette et au Bois dans les premières années du règne de Louis XVI’, Bulletin de la Société historique d’Auteuil et de Passy, 6 (5) (1908), pp. 142–146. 167 The rue Basse is today the rue Raynouard and the rue de Seine is now the rue Berton. The sale of the house belonging to the ‘citoynnne Capet’ was listed on the 11th of February 1793. L. Mar, ‘Éphémérides du XVIe Arrondissement’, Bulletin de la Société historique d’Auteuil et de Passy, 4 (8) (1902), pp. 219–220, 220. 168 Cabanès, La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 357. 169 See C. Vantroys, ‘L’Hôtel de Lamballe. La résidence de la Turquie en France’, Hors-Série de Connaissance des arts (Paris, 2009). 170 He advanced her a loan of 25,000 livres. Duma, Les Bourbon-Penthièvre, p. 337. 171 S. Grant, Toiles de Jouy: French printed cottons 1760–1830 (London, 2010), p. 139. 172 P. G. Tortora and R. S. Merkel, Fairchild’s Dictionary of Textiles (New York, 2010), p. 581. 173 In the library for example, which overlooked the terrace and the garden, was a secrétaire with floral marquetry valued at an extraordinary four hundred livres, evidently an exceptional piece. 174 On the role played by furniture in conditioning social behaviour see M. Hellman, ‘Furniture, Sociability and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 32 (40 (1999), pp. 415–445. 175 I thank Marion Kalt for her kind assistance. 176 C. C. Oman and J. Hamilton, Wallpapers: A History and Illustrated Catalogue of the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2nd edn (London: 1982), pp. 46–49. 177 B. Jacqué, ‘Wallpaper in the Royal Apartments at the Tuileries, 1789–1792’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 13 (1) (Fall-Winter 2005–2006), pp. 2–31. 178 C. Baulez, notice for a ‘Paire de Flambeaux’, Société des Amis de Versailles accessed 31 July 2015 at www.amisdeversailles.com/objet_detail.php?id_objet=83. 179 On this print and earlier versions see the catalogue record for BM. 1937,1105.5. 180 See S. Jung, James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–1842 (Lanham and London, 2015), pp. 126–128. 181 As discussed by Michael Levey in Rococo to Revolution, 1st edn (London,1966), O. T. Banks, Watteau and the North (New York, 1977) and most recently explored in the Royal Academy exhibition, N. van Hout et al., Rubens and His Legacy (London, 2014). See also V. L. Atwater, ‘The Netherlandish vogue and print culture in Paris, 1730–50’, Simiolus, 34 (3–4), (2009–2010), pp. 239–250. 182 ‘Etat des Objets d’art trouvé Chez la cidevant Princesse Lamballe a la maison de Passy, et reservée par la Commission temporaire des arts [. . .] ’, AN F17 1269, Dossier No 22. This inventory is dated 7 Ventose L’an Second [25th of February 1794]. 183 ‘Apperçu de ce qui étoit dû par la Nation Française à la Succèssion Lamballe’, AST, Cat 107, Mazzo 1, No. 10.

208  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 184 Accession number 71.415. At present the museum’s recorded provenance for this object only extends to its acquisition by bequest in 1931. 185 Lot 7, Sale 10670, Taste Of The Royal Court: Important French Furniture And Works Of Art From A Private Collection, 9 July 2015, Christie’s London, King Street. 186 I am very grateful to Mme Virginie Desrante for this archival reference. Sèvres purchase made by the princesse de Lamballe in the Manufactory’s Registre des Ventes: 11 janvier 1790, 3 plaquette camée, AMNS Vy 11 folio 1 verso. 187 A. Gargam, ‘Savoirs mondains, savoirs savants: les femmes et leurs cabinets de curisoités au siècle des Lumières’, Genre & Histoire, 5 (2009), pp. 1–15. 188 C. Bréard, ‘Recherches sur le College d’Eu, fondé en 1582 par Henri Ier de Lorraine’, Revue des sociétés savantes de la France, series 5, tome 1, 1870, pp., 436–439, p. 439. 189 Lettre sur L’anti-méphitique (Vienna, 1783) in Ms 4258. The surgeon was decorated by the king and a correspondent of Voltaire. J.-P. Pointe, Éloge de Jean-Janin de CombeBlance (Lyon, 1825), p. 20. 190 J. Priebe, ‘The Artist as Collector: François Boucher (1703–1770)’, Journal of the History of Collections, Advance Access published 28 January 2015, doi: 10.1093/jhc/fhu063. 191 Ms 4258, p. 33; p. 39. 192 Revolutionary decree of the 3rd of August 1793, AN, collection Rondonneau, Carton X, 18, cited in Cabanès, La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 352 and Avezou and Dumoulin, ‘La Maison de Mme de Lamballe’, p. 99. 193 AN, ADXXe 70. 194 Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers, ou Journal Général de France, (Duodi 2 Germinal An II [22nd March 1794], No. 446), No. 445 bis, (‘Additions à la Feuille du Duodi Germinal), p. 6755. 195 This is the date and time advertised on the poster; the same date is given in a document published by Cabanès (La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 486). However Courtois gives it as 16 April 1794 and mentions the sale was suspended by six weeks. This may have been the date when it resumed or perhaps the final day of the sale, it is not clear. AST Categ. 107 Mazzo 4, no. 1. 196 AST. categ. 107. Mazzo 1 no. 10. 197 Although the unit is not specified. ‘Apperçu de ce qui étoit dû par la Nation Française à la Succèssion Lamballe’. Ibid. 198 AST. Categ. 107, mazzo 3. 199 Arnaud, La princesse de Lamballe, p. 308. 200 AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No 35 and Mazzo 2. 201 Etat d’un Necessaire fait et fourny Pour la Princesse Lamballe, Littérature et Arts, Alde, Paris, 30 May 2013, lot 289. 202 ‘Apperçu de ce qui étoit dû par la Nation Française à la Succèssion Lamballe’, AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 10. 203 AST, Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 6. 204 AST. Categ 107, Mazzo 1, No. 7 (chapitre. 8). 205 AST. Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 4 & 5. 206 Letter from the marquise de Lâge de Volude to the prince de Carignan, Madrid, 8 June 1798. AST, Cat 107, Mazzo 1, No. 34. 207 Campan, The Private Life of Marie Antoinette, p. 139. 208 J. Tick, ‘Musician and Mécène: Some Observations on Patronage in Late 18th-Century France’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 4 (20 (1973), pp. 245–256, 247. 209 L. Barthel, Au cœur de la harpe au XVIII siècle (Paris, 2005), p. 117. 210 See for example, P. Thornton, Musical Instruments as Works of Art, 2nd edn (London, 1982). 211 AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581, No 1–314. 212 This harp by an unknown maker (Inventory No. E.19) was formerly in the collection of Louis Clapisson from whom this provenance was claimed. I thank Thierry Maniguet for his kind help and expertise on this harp. I also thank Joël Dugot. The connection to Lamballe was also recorded in 1861: L. A. Godey and S. J. Buell Hale (eds.), Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine (London, 1861), lxiii, p. 94. This must be the same harp recorded by Lescure: La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 107.

‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 209 13 I am grateful to Thierry Maniguet for this information. 2 214 Barthel, Au cœur de la harpe, p. 95. 215 S. F. du Crest, comtesse de Genlis, Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre à jouer de la harpe (Paris, 1811), p. 1. 216 D. Hennebelle, ‘Un observatoire du patronage musical au XVIIIe siècle: les épîtres dédicatoires’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 56 (2) (2009), pp. 30–51. 217 Ibid. 218 B. Gustafson, A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699–1780 (Oxford, 1990), p. 44. 219 F. Petrini, Troisieme recueil de pieces & d’airs choisis, avec accompagnement de harpe, dedie a Mme la princesse de Lamballe [Op. 19, no. 6] (Paris, 1783). 220 1er Recueil de huit Préludes, huit Chansons & Romances ‘avec accompagnement de harpe, paroles & musique du même Auteur’, dédié à S.A.S. Mme la Princesse de Lamballe, par M. Exupere de la Manière, Maîre de harpe et de chant; Œuvre 9e; prix 7 liv. 4 f. A Paris, chez l’Auteur, rue Coq-Héron, au coin de la rue Coquillère, maison de M. Catenoi, & aux adresses ordinaires de musique’, Journal de Paris, Mardi 13 Mars 1787, no. 72. p. 311. 221 Barthel, Au cœur de la harpe, pp. 120, 122. 222 The daughter of Lamballe’s maternal cousin, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, prince de Condé (1737–1818). ‘Trois Règnes Louis XIV- Louis XV- Louis XVI’, La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe, 6, (June 1933), p. 137; G. W. Lundberg, Lavreince. Nicolas Lafrensen Peintre Suédois, 1737–1807 (Paris, 1949), p. 13. 223 AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581, No 1–314. 224 Ms 4258, p. 118. 225 C. Hippeau (ed.), Paris et Versailles. Journal Anecdotique de 1762 a 1789 (Paris, 1869), p. 90. 226 Bibliothèque de feu M. Eugène Valdruche: Livres Anciens et Modernes (Paris, 1913), p. 110–111. 227 Ms  4258. 228 Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Fétis 2.682 C (RP). 229 E. Quentin-Bauchart, Les femmes bibliophiles de France (XVIe, XVIIe, & XVIIIe siècles) (2 vols., Paris, 1886), ii, p. 224. Mahé, ‘La princesse de Lamballe Bibliophile’, p. 387. 230 John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection (Harvard University Theatre Collection), call number M1619; A37 1770. 231 G. Barber, The James A. Rothschild Bequest: Printed Books and Bookbindings (London, 2013), p. 134. 232 Quentin-Bauchart, Les femmes bibliophiles de France, ii, p. 228. 233 López-Vidriero, The Polished Cornerstone of the Temple. 234 Catalogue des livres de la marquise de Pompadour (Paris, 1765). 235 Mahé, ‘La princesse de Lamballe Bibliophile’, p. 386. 236 E. Charavay (ed.), L’Amateur d’autographes (422 vols., Paris, 1866), v, p. 351. 237 Lescure, La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 463. 238 G. W. von Hohendorf and A. F. de Cardona, Grosse Bibliophile des 18. Jahrhunderts Prinz Eugen von Savoyen (Vienna, 1969). 239 Catalogue de la bibliotheque du chateau de Rambouillet, appartenant au comte de Toulouse (Paris, 1726). 240 On her request to install a library in her third apartment see W. Ritchey Newton, L'espace du Roi : la cour de France au Château de Versailles, 1682–1789 (Paris, 2000), p. 256. 241 Barber, The James A. de Rothschild Bequest, p. 131. 242 Duma, Les Bourbon-Penthièvre, p. 538. 243 Mahé, ‘La princesse de Lamballe Bibliophile’, p. 387. 244 A. Griffiths, Prints for Books: Book Illustration in France 1760–1800 [The Panizzi Lectures 2003] (London, 2003), p. 116. 245 López-Vidriero, The Polished Cornerstone of the Temple, p. 11. 246 Ms 4258, p. 49. 247 Lâge de Volude, B. S. R. de F Fuchsamberg d’Amblimont, marquise de and L A. La Morinerie, Souvenirs d’Émigration de la Marquise de Lâge de Volude, 1792–1794 (Évreux, 1869), p. xxxvi. 248 Ms  4258.

210  ‘Protector of the Fine Arts’ 249 Les devoirs du prince réduits à un seul principe, ou discours sur la justice, dédié au roi (Versailles 1775), SCIPIO database catalogue record 407130214, accessed 18 August 2015 at http://connexion.oclc.org/WebZ/DBSearch?sessionid=cnxs01.prod.oclc.org-46335idhfpduy-sjiv2k. 250 These were Marmontel’s Belisaire (1767) and Crébillon’s Le Sopha, Conte Moral (1742). Ms 4258, p. 135. 251 Oraison funèbre de Marie-Louise, infante d’Espagne, impératrice douairière des Romains par l’abbé Jacque (Brussels, 1790), SCIPIO database catalogue record 123758982, accessed 18 August 2015 at http://connexion.oclc.org/WebZ/NewClientTag?sessionid=cnxs01. prod.oclc.org-46335-idhfpduy-sjiv2k:dbname=oluc. 252 Letter reproduced in Lescure, La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 463. 253 Now in the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, FS IX 192 A. Ms 4258, p. 253. 254 Courtois’s bill of services to the prince de Carignan includes a claim for travel costs to meet ‘Citoyen Tronchet’ or ‘Cronchet’, ‘pour consultation su Sujet des Livres légués a Mad.e Deluines’. Courtois’s bill from Paris, 10 March 1798, AST, Cat 107, Mazzo 2. 255 I thank Antony Griffiths for clarifying this entry for me and for his insights on the subject of amateur printing presses. 256 On the queen’s considerable patronage of lettertype printing see Campan, The Private Life of Marie Antoinette, p. 139. 257 G. A. Crapelet, De la Profession d’Imprimeur (Paris, 1840), p. 36. 258 G. Peignot, Dictionnaire raisonné de bibliologie (3 vols., Paris, 1802–1804) iii, p. 172. 259 AN, MC Et. LVIII, 581, No 1–314. 260 I thank Dr Lisa Skogh for her useful comments on kunstkammers. 261 Premier recueil de poésies spirituelles ajustées sur les plus beaux airs des opéra comiques avec accompagnement de violon et basse chiffrée, a l’usage des jeunes demoiselles, dédiées a son A. S. Madame la Princesse de Lamballe par M. l’abbé de La Pérouze (Paris; Lyon, c. 1770–1784). A copy of this exists with the duc de Penthièvre’s binding: SCIPIO database catalogue record 800599671, accessed 18 August 2015 at http://connexion.oclc.org/ WebZ/DBSearch?sessionid=cnxs01.prod.oclc.org-46335-idhfpduy-sjiv2k. 262 ‘Annonces et Notices’, Mercure de France, Paris, Saturday 13 August, 1785, p. 93, quoted in Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, p. 127. 263 López-Vidriero, The Polished Cornerstone, p. 4. 264 N. Bérenguier, Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France (Farnham, 2011). 265 H. G. Keene ‘preface’, Abbé de Favre, trans. H. G. Keene, Beauty’s Day (Les Quatre Heures De La Toilette Des Dames) (London, 1890), pp. vii-viii. 266 J.-B. G. A. Grosier, Journal de Littérature, des Science et des Beaux-Arts (30 vols., Paris, 1779–1783) i, p. 388–89. Affiches, annonces, et avis divers, no.26, 28 June 1780, p. 102. 267 Ibid (Grosier). 268 Lescure detected the features of Lamballe on a different page in a cul de lampe depicting a female mask with a halo of hair. Lescure, La Princesse de Lamballe, p. 470. 269 Bertin, Madame de Lamballe, p. 77. 270 Ms 4258, p. 74. 271 F. Lorin, ‘Florian chez le Duc de Penthièvre A Rambouillet: Sa Vie, Ses Oeuvres’, Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Rambouillet, x, (1895), pp. 180–306, p. 181. 272 Ibid., p. 185. 273 Ms 4258, p. 113; 131; 142; 146. 274 Lady Sydney Morgan, France, 2nd edn (2 vols., London, 1817) i, p. 146; J. R. Effinger, ‘Lemercier’s Méléagre’, Modern Language Notes, XX/7 (1905), pp. 211–212. 275 Their exact identites are recorded in a document cited by Lescure, p. 454. 276 The marquise de Lâge de Volude recorded their presence at Aix. Lâge de Volude, Souvenirs d’Émigration, p. xcvii. 277 Letter from Greve Gustaf Philip, comte de Creutz to Gustav III of Sweden, Stockholm, Sunday 30 November 1783. Electronic Enlightenment. 278 Letter from Voltaire to the marquise du Deffand, Ferney, Friday 13 August 1773. Electronic Enlightenment. 279 Bertin lists her name among attendees in the minutes of Lamballe’s masonic society. 280 La Rochejaquelein, marquise de, Mémoires de Mme la marquise de La Rochejaquelein.

5 Epilogue

Some of the very last official portraits produced of the princesse de Lamballe—a ghostly chalk drawing by Henri-Pierre Danloux and Claude Bornet’s sober miniature—seem eerily to foreshadow her untimely end.1 Like Marie-Antoinette, such was the princess’s celebrity, so intense the fascination in her person, that her likeness was recorded even during her imprisonment, with dispassionate realism and characteristic physiognomic accuracy by the young artist Georges François Marie Gabriel (1775–1836), whose other subjects included the patients of an insane asylum (Figure 5.1). Motivated perhaps by the same spirit of curiosity that led David to sketch Marie-Antoinette as she passed by him on her way to the guillotine, Gabriel’s drawing is nonetheless more detailed: as the princess was held at La Force for a period of just under two weeks, from the 20th of August to the 3rd of September 1792, there was sufficient time for the artist to capture her features. Shown in profile, the simple earrings and hair bundled up unceremoniously on top of her head reflect her humbled state and create a sharp contrast with her official portraits. Her circumstances were certainly reduced. At the Tuileries, Temple and finally La Force, the princess left behind her a dwindling trail of belongings that make for poignant reading, each list reduced further to the essentials with the next abrupt departure, until finally her belongings were comprised only of chemises, petticoats and towels.2 In fact, the princesse de Lamballe continued to be pictured until the very day of her death, when Madame Tussaud was instructed to take a cast from the princess’s decapitated head. From this cast Mme Tussaud created a mould and then a wax mask which she took with her to England in 1802 when she toured the country with her collection of waxworks. The mask continued to be exhibited until about 1832.3 And the princesse de Lamballe’s image has endured. Long after her death, for almost two centuries, her image continued to proliferate in the flood of commemorative portraits executed after her original corpus of likenesses. The afterlife of many of the princess’s portraits, as well as that of objects derived from her collection treated with a reliquary-like reverence, has been one of fetishised martyrdom closely interwoven with the propaganda that attended the royalist cult of Marie-Antoinette.4 In life, Marie-Antoinette and the princesse de Lamballe were known to exchange tokens of friendship: miniatures and other jewellery inlaid with hair. The August 1795 inventory of both women’s jewels includes examples of a diamond ring and three gold boxes set with hair.5 Most famously, during the revolution, Marie-Antoinette had a ring mounted for the princesse de Lamballe, which contained a lock of her whitened hair and the inscription ‘blanched by sorrow’.6 A large gold and pearl ring containing the

212  Epilogue plaited hair of both women survives in the collections of the Musée Carnavalet and is today displayed in the Conciergerie (Figure 5.2).7 Throughout the nineteenth century princess and mistress were reunited once more, first in the drawing rooms of collectors, then in the halls of public museums and galleries.8 Artists from this period re-created and re-imagined her part in both the halcyon days of the ancien régime and its brutal end (Figure 5.3) and Victorian aristocrats

Figure 5.1 C. Jules Porreau after Georges François Marie Gabriel, ‘Princesse de Lamballe’, 1845, etching, published by Vigneres, Paris (London: V&A) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 5.2 Reliquary ring containing interwoven hair from Marie-Antoinette and the princesse de Lamballe, 1790, pearls, gold and hair (Paris, musée Carnavalet) © Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet

Figure 5.3 Joseph Caraud (1821–1905). ‘Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI at the Trianon with Madame Lamballe’, 1857. Christie’s Images Limited. oil on canvas. 88.9 × 116.8 cm © 2018 Christie’s Images, London/Scala, Florence © Photo SCALA, Florence

214  Epilogue donned silk dresses, wigs and feathers to masquerade as the princess in fancy dress (Figure 5.4). This tide of sentiment has done her legacy as a serious and influential patron of the arts a great disservice. For despite her short life, she grew to be a model of the well-rounded cultivated female patron that has long been thought absent from MarieAntoinette’s court. The sheer number and range of portraits executed of the princess are far more considerable than has previously been supposed. The first portraits of the young princess executed under the auspices of her father-in-law are revealing in their exploration of late eighteenth-century widowhood and a developing domestic affection. Then came a phase of transition as the princess gained greater independence and

Figure 5.4 Lady Ampthill (Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria 1885–1901), dressed as the princesse de Lamballe at the Devonshire House Ball, 27 July 1897 (London: V&A Lafayette Photograph Archive) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Epilogue 215 agency through her career at court and her service to the queen, which, together with her publicly visible roles as freemason and salonnière, made her a public figure and art patron of considerable renown and influence. This was enhanced by the princess’s international reputation as a talented amateur artist in her own right and propelled by her financial and social support of aspiring artists and art institutions. The princess’s engagement with the cult of sentiment and advocacy of women artists is shown here to have been allied to the sorority encouraged by Marie-Antoinette within the women of her select circle. Revelations of Lamballe’s previously unknown anglophile inclinations, private collections, library and musical and literary patronage further reveal her informed and cultivated character. Overturning entrenched and deeply flawed perceptions of the princesse de Lamballe and recovering the full range of her patronage and cultural influence enables Marie-Antoinette’s own visual programme to be recast and understood in richer terms, which in turn compels us to consider afresh the virtues, aims and complexities of pre-revolutionary French female court patronage.

Notes 1 Claude Bornet, miniature of the princesse de Lamballe, 1789, watercolour on ivory 6.5 cm diameter signed and dated ‘Bornet 89’, Paris: Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques Inv. RF 150 Danloux’s portrait (private collection) is illustrated in DeLorme, Garden Pavilions, p. 277 and B. R Portalis., Henry-Pierre Danloux, peintre de portraits, et son journal durant l’émigration (Paris, 1910), p. 36. 2 AST Categ. 107, Mazzo 1, No. 14. 3 The mask is mentioned in the exhibition guides and pamphlets of 1803, 1818 and 1832 but is no longer in the museum’s collections today. Either one or both of the original mould and subsequent waxes were probably lost in a 1822 shipwreck or 1925 museum fire. Early twentieth-century postcards and newspapers reveal that a modern wax figure of the princess was created for the museum’s wax dioramas of the royal family: see Illustrated London News, 29 April 1950, p. 654. 4 Hair work rings exchanged by the two women are one example (now in the musée Carnavalet). The princess’s correspondence is another: one nineteenth-century author attested that three compromising letters from Marie-Antoinette were found concealed in the princesse de Lamballe’s hair when she was arrested (other variations say the incriminating evidence fell from her head at the first blow of her assailant’s sabre). M. comtesse de Villermont, Histoire de la Coiffure Féminine (Paris, 1892), p. 695. The historian and collector, Félix-Sébastien Feuillet de Conches, claimed to possess one of these letters. M. de La Rocheterie and G. L. E. marquise du Fresne Beaucourt, Lettres de Marie-Antoinette (Paris, 1895), p. Liii. One collector even acquired a copy of ‘The Constitution of 1793’ that was said to be bound in ‘skin taken from the loins of Princesse de Lamballe’. H. T. Kirby, ‘Books Bound in Human Skin: An unusual Biographical Excursion’, Apollo, 1 (2390 (1945), pp. 25–26. Early royalist commemorative prints/ propaganda were produced of the royal family and usually include the princess (see Appendix D). Countless posthumous medals, miniatures and prints continued to be produced of the princesse de Lamballe throughout the nineteenth century. In addition to the wax cast displayed by Mme Tussaud, the musée Grévin in Paris had at one time in the nineteenth and early twentieth century a wax display of the princess in its French Revolution diorama, though this is no longer in its collection. 5 Diamants de la Reine et de la Princesse de Lamballe, 21 August 1795, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, no.s 13, 33, 81 & 89. 6 J. L. H. Campan, Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette, reine de France et de Navarre, 2nd edn (Paris, 1823), ii, p. 150. 7 Musée Carnavalet, La Révolution française dans l’histoire, dans la littérature, dans l’art (Paris, 1939), p. 68. 8 It was common for nineteenth-century collectors to display busts of the princess and the queen together. John Jones, whose collection is now in the V&A Museum, did this in his London townhouse. See B. S. Long, Catalogue of the Jones Collection (London, 1923).

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Unpublished Theses Beaurain, D., ‘L’art du portrait en France au dix-huitième siècle: l’image de la société et l’histoire d’un genre à travers la pratique, la critique et la diffusion’, PhD thesis, Lille, Université de Lille, 2002. Wells-Robertson, S., ‘Marguerite Gérard’, PhD thesis, New York, New York University, 1978.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture 10 – 11, 33, 90, 122, 137, 176 Adélaïde, Madame (1732–1800) 35, 49, 52, 63, 96, 198 Aix-La-Chapelle (Aachen) 51, 70 – 71, 74, 125, 130n86, 139, 199 amateurs (meaning expert/scholar/collector) 138, 158, 163, 174, 177, 200 Ampthill, Margaret, Lady (1874–1957) 214 Anglomania 18, 83 – 84, 94, 111, 112, 122, 124 Artois, Charles Philippe, later Charles X, comte d’ (1757–1836) 48, 49, 96, 118, 142, 143, 165, 194 Artois, Marie Thérèse de Savoie, comtesse d’ (1756–1805) 7, 14, 27n9, 33, 41, 46, 52, 64, 67, 118, 181, 198 Barry, Madame du (1743–1793) 32, 44, 61, 89, 92, 137, 143 Bartolozzi, Francesco (1727–1815) 109, 112, 113 – 114, 115, 118, 119 Bath, city of 86, 88 Baur, Jean-Pierre (1719- after 1773) 191 Belleteste, Jean-Antoine (1730–1811) 184, 185, 188 Bettini, Francesco 97 – 99, 131n110 Bibliophilia see Libraries and literary patronage Bircklé, Jacques (1734–1803) 143, 167 Boizot, Louis-Simon (1743–1809) 37, 154, 158, 165, 168, 168 Boizot, Marie-Louise Adélaïde 37 Bornet, Claude (1733–1804) 124, 211 Boucher, François (1703–1770) 17, 18, 46, 158, 164, 178, 187, plate 12 – 13 Boulard, Jean-Baptiste (c. 1725–1789) 143 Boulle, André-Charles (1642–1732) 145, 145 Bourbon, Louis Marie Thérèse Bathilde d’Orléans, duchesse de (1750–1822) 24, 59, 62, 67, 143, 191 Brighton, city of 86, 88

Brionne, Louise Julie Constance de Rohan-Guémené, comtesse de (1734–1815) 31 Brun, Louis-Auguste (1758–1815) 60, 124 Brunoy, Madame de 167, 176 Campan, Jeanne Louise Henriette (1752–1822) 2, 28n47, 39, 176 – 177, 189 Campana, Ignace Jean Victor (1744–1786) 40, 148 Capet, Marie-Gabrielle (1761–1818) 57, 58 Caraud, Joseph (1821–1905) 213 caricatures see pamphlets and prints, satirical and pornographic Carignan, Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, prince de (1770–1800) [the princesse de Lamballe’s nephew and heir] 188, 189, 197, 208, 210n254 Carignan, Christine Henriette of HesseRheinfels-Rotenburg, princesse de [the princesse de Lamballe’s mother] (1717–1778) 8, 9, 23, 62, 147 Carignan, Louis Victor of Savoy, prince de (1721–1778) [the princesse de Lamballe’s father] 9, 10, 23, 52, 62, 88, 141, 147 Carignan, Marie Joséphine Thérèse de Lorraine, princesse de (1753–1797) [the princess de Lamballe’s sister-in-law] 86, 108, 199 Carignan, Maria Vittoria Francesca of Savoy, princesse de (1690–1766) [the princesse de Lamballe’s paternal grandmother] 141, 202n25 Carignan, Victor Amadeus of Savoy, prince de (1743–1780) [the princesse de Lamballe’s elder brother] 8 Carignano, Palazzo see Turin/Piedmont Carmontelle, Louis Carrogis (1717–1806) 20, 22, 24, 30n98, 62, 63, 65, 95, 108, 175, plate 2 Chantilly, Château de 30n98, 44, 96, 106

228  Index Charles Emmanuel III, King of Sardinia (1701–1773) 6, 7, 26n3, 141, 202n28 Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland (1744–1818) 51, 83, 85 – 86, 89, 124, 126 Charpentier, Jean-Baptiste (1728–1806) 3, 5n16, 10, 11 – 12, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 – 22, 24, 34, 42, 94, 195, plate 1, plate 3 Chartres, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, duc de (1747–1793) [from 1785, the duc d’Orléans] 14, 19, 20, 22 – 24, 28n47, 49, 58, 61, 63, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 108, 110, 118, 125, 140, 167, 173, 178, plate 4 Chartres, Marie Adélaïde de BourbonPenthièvre, duchesse de (1753–1821) [from 1753 – 1769, Mlle de Penthièvre; from 1785, the duchesse d’Orléans] 14, 16, 19, 20, 22 – 24, 28n47, 30n98, 49, 56, 59, 61, 62 – 63, 67, 106, 123, 130n86, 158, 167, 174, 191, plate 1, plate 4 chinoiserie 102, 165, 173 chocolate (consumption) 12 – 13 Choiseul, Louis-Marie-Gabriel-César, baron de (1734–1796) 8 Choiseul-Gouffier, Marie-Gabriel-FlorentAuguste, comte de (1752–1817) 167, 173, 199 Clermont, Mademoiselle de 35, 38, 44, 142 Clermont-Gallerande, Charles George, marquis de (1744–1823) (also spelled Clermont-Gallerand) 14, 173, 199 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas (1715–1790) 36, 38, 124 concerts, musical 165, 189, 190, 191, 192, 201 Condé, Louise Adélaïde de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de [princesse de] (1757– 1824) 192 Conti, Louis-François-Joseph de BourbonConti, comte de La Marche, then prince de (1734–1814) 23, 51, 137, 202n17 Conti, Marie-Fortunée d’Este, Comtesse de La Marche, then princesse de (1731–1803) 14, 23, 24, 30n100, 51, 176, 187, 202n17 conversation piece 17 – 18, 54, 94, 121 Cosway, Richard (1742–1821) 33, 34, 65, 89 – 90, 118, 124, 127, 130n62 country houses 86 – 88, 94, 107 Courtois, Jacques 184, 188, 189, 197, 210n254 Daguerre, Dominique 138, 167, 184, 186, 188 Danloux, Henri-Pierre (1753–1809) 211 Derome, N-D 195, 197 Devonshire, Georgiana (née Spencer), Duchess of (1757–1806) 85, 86, 88, 89,

90, 92, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127 Diamond Necklace Affair of 1784 69 Donissan, Marie-Françoise de, marquise de Citran (1747–1839) 184, 199 Dubuisson, Nicolas-René (1728—after 1785) 143, 167 Ducreux, Joseph (1735–1802) 3, 12, 41 – 46, 43, 63, plate 6 Duprà, Giuseppe (1703–1784) 7 Durfort, chevalier de 196 Élisabeth, Madame [Élisabeth Philippine Marie Hélène de France] (1764–1794) 63, 64, 146, 156, 157, 167, 196, 198 Embroidery/needlework 20, 23, 39, 95, 112, 175, 200 English school of painting, links with French school 121 – 124 enlightenment thought 2, 17, 18, 52, 56, 59, 75, 83, 94, 104, 127, 167, 191, 196, 200 Épinay, marquise d’ 8 Eu, Hôtel d’ see Lamballe, Marie Louise Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan, princesse de (1749–1792), residences Fersen, Axel von, count (1755–1810) 125, 135n225 – 226, 192, 192 Feuillet de Conches, Félix-Sébastien (1798– 1887) 2, 215n4 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de (1755–1794) 13, 199 Foliot, Toussaint-François (1748-c.1808) 104, 143, plate 11 Foster, Lady Elizabeth (1758–1824) 64, 89, 120, 121, 123 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790) 193, 197 freemasonry 2 – 3, 46, 58 – 60, 62, 69, 101 – 102, 141, 196, 199, 210n279, 215 French revolution 3, 74, 108, 109, 122, 124, 138, 143, 175, 182, 184 furniture prints see stipple prints Gabriel, Georges François Marie (1775– 1836) 211, 212 Galerie dorée see Lamballe, Marie Louise Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan, princesse de, residences, Hôtel de Toulouse Garand, jeweller and goldsmith 8 gardens 60, 62, 84, 87, 94 – 108, 125, 127, 137, 143, 144, 159, 160, 179, 181, 187 Gautier-Dagoty, Jean-Baptiste André (1740– 1786) 3, 22 – 25, 25, 36, 62, 140, 190, plate 4 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de (1746–1830) 2, 4n2, 13 – 14, 16, 28n47, 150, 190

Index 229 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland (1738–1820) 31, 35, 51, 85, 86, 89, 114, 124 Gérard, Marguerite (1761–1837) 57, 58 Ginestous, Marie Hieronlyma Louise Celeria, comtesse de 62, 88, 170 Gluck, Christoph Willibald (1714–1787) 193 – 194 Goupy, Claude-Martin (c.1720–1793) 102, plate 10 – 11 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste (1725–1805) 11, 12, 60 – 61, 67, 175, 181 Guébriant, comtesse de 8 Guémené, Victoire de Rohan, princesse de (1743–1807) 10, 39 Guénard, Élisabeth 2 Guillon, Marie-Nicolas-Silvestre (1760–1847) 194 Gustav III, King of Sweden (1746–1792) 65, 71, 146, 176 hair work/jewellery 19, 94, 211, 212, 213, 215n4 Hall, Pierre Adolphe (1739–1793) 46, 48, 107 harp, instrument, playing and dedications 24, 36, 65, 165, 166, 190 – 191, 201, 208n212 hermitages 94, 96, 101, 102, 103, 108 Hickel, Karl Anton (1745–1798) 3, 27n11, 33, 51 – 56, 54, 55, 159, 195, 198, plate 8 Holy Shroud, The 6 Hôtel Dieu 59 hunting 87 Huysum, Jan van (1682–1749) 176, plate 15 Hyde, Catherine 2 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826) 69 Kauffman, Angelica (1741–1807) 3, 49, 63, 79n105, 109, 112, 113, 117, 117, 123, 147, 148 – 149, 150 Kercado, Madame 167 Krumpholtz, Jean-Baptiste (1742–1790) 191 Labille-Guiard, Adélaïde (1749–1803) 51, 57, 57 – 58, 60, 67, 68, 141 lace 7, 8, 21 – 22, 51, 57, 121 Lâge de Volude, Stéphanie Béatrix d’Amblimont, marquise de (1764–1842) 2, 62, 74, 86, 189, 196 Lamballe, Louis Alexandre Joseph Stanislas de Bourbon, prince de (1747–1768) 6, 9, 13, 15 – 16, 19, 20 – 23, 24, 27n14, 27n17, 51, 52, 85 – 86, 106 Lamballe, Marie Louise Thérèse de SavoieCarignan, princesse de (1749–1792): allegorical representation as Flora 35,

42 – 45, 46, 62; amateur artist 4, 33, 35, 46, 49, 51, 75, 127, 140, 175, 200, 215; ambition 33, 39, 66, 70, 84; amboise, comtesse d’, incognito as 32, 88, 196; appearance 7, 13, 31, 44, 61; celebrity status 32, 36, 46, 85; charity 9, 22, 59, 60, 154; character 13 – 14; collection, Chinese porcelain 157 – 158; collection, clocks and watches 9, 74, 151, 167 – 168; collection, medals 92, 173; collection, pictures 174 – 178; collection, prints 60, 68, 84, 96, 108 – 111, 127, 139, 140, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 173, 175, 176, 181, 186, 187, 200; collection, sale and dispersal of 187 – 189; collection, Sèvres 3, 151 – 157, 159, 168 – 172, 175, 185, 200; death 19, 44, 126, 211; downfall 69 – 74; dowry and trousseau 23; dutch and netherlandish painting, taste for 147, 174 – 175; école royale gratuite de dessin, patron of 140; education 9 – 10, 132n146; England, travel to 83 – 89, 125 – 126; English gardens 87, 94 – 108, 125 – 126, 127, 159; English social circle 85 – 89, 120 – 121, 126; enlightenment thought, embrace of 52, 56, 59, 75, 94, 127, 196; exile 51, 74, 125, 130n86, 199; farms 189, 202n21; freemasonry 58 – 60, 141; furniture/menuisiers and ébénistes/ luxury merchants 51, 143, 167 – 168, 181, 188; glass harmonica 193; hairstyles 7, 9, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 51, 56, 57, 60, 62, 92, 211; harp 190, 208n212; health 21, 30n86, 86, 93 – 94, 150; income 39, 40, 141; jewellery 8 – 9, 15, 19, 36, 49, 51, 159, 185, 188, 211; library and literary patronage 194 – 199; Marie-Antoinette, companion portraits 60; Marie-Antoinette, gifts to 14, 35, 36; Marie-Antoinette, loss of favour with 66 – 67, 69; MarieAntoinette, meeting and friendship 1, 6, 14, 31 – 32, 36, 45, 74 – 75, 125, 146, 178, 193; Marie-Antoinette, portrait with children of 67 – 69; Marie-Antoinette, reconciliation 74 – 75; Marie-Antoinette, shared taste 11, 14, 34, 40, 41, 53, 56, 75, 84, 94, 104, 111, 127, 147, 156, 167 – 168, 169, 173, 181, 184, 187, 200; marriage 8 – 10, 15; musical patronage 189 – 194; naturalia and scientific thinking, interest in 186 – 187; neoclassical tastes 56, 102, 147, 151, 155, 158, 165, 172, 173, 175, 179, 184, 200; netherlands, travel to 174 – 175; pamphlets and prints, satirical and pornographic 3, 33, 46, 69 – 74, 71 – 73; patronage of women artists 2, 4, 33, 34, 51, 56 – 58; Penthièvre, relationship with duc de 8, 9, 14, 23,

230  Index 32, 35, 36, 39, 41, 49, 74, 95, 130n86, 142, 146, 150 – 151, 158, 159, 175, 187, 200, 210n261; portraits see individual entries for artists: Francesco Bettini, Louis-Simon Boizot, Claude Bornet, Louis-Auguste Brun, Ignace Jean Victor Campana, Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Richard Cosway, Henri-Pierre Danloux, Joseph Ducreux, Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, Georges François Marie Gabriel, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Pierre Adolphe Hall, Karl Anton Hickel, Angelica Kauffman, Adélaïde LabilleGuiard, Nicolas Lavreince, Marie-Victoire Lemoine, Jean-Laurent Mosnier, LouisÉdouard Rioult, Antoine Vestier, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; portraits, exhibited 35, 46, 56, 211; portraits, medals 92, 93, 215n4; residences (Fontainebleau 142, 143; Hôtel d’Eu and Hôtel du Maine, Versailles 139, 142, 146 – 158, 188 – 189, 203n59; Hôtel de Lamballe, Passy 3, 84, 87, 109, 110, 111, 125 – 126, 139, 142, 158, 168, 175, 178 – 189, 180, 194, 195, 197, 198, 202n18, 202n21, 207n164, plate 16; Hôtel de Louvois, rue de Richelieu, Paris 202n17, 202n21, 206n141; Hôtel de Toulouse, Paris 18, 23, 35, 92, 107, 109, 132n135, 139, 142, 158, 160 – 178, 161 – 163, 166, 187 – 190, 193, 194 – 198, 202n17, 205n102, plate 5, plate 12 – 14; Rambouillet 15, 17, 20, 69, 87, 94 – 108, 97 – 103, 125, 142, 153, 158, 159, 187, 195, 199, plate 10 – 11; Sceaux 13, 16, 24, 56, 106, 142, 150, 158, 167, 199; Versailles (palace apartment) 142 – 146); rivalry with the duchesse de Polignac 33, 64 – 67; salon 51, 141, 165; sensibility 58 – 62, 69, 147; surintendante, appointment and role 4n2, 26, 32 – 41, 44, 53, 66, 74, 92, 141, 142, 146, 191; unpopularity at court 32 – 33, 39; widow, representation as 20 – 26; will 28n52, 36, 59, 74, 139, 167, 173, 189, 197, 199 La Force prison 70, 75, 126, 211 Lambesc, Charles Eugène de Lorraine, prince de (1751–1825) 31 Lastic, Charles Antoine Renaud, chevalier de 8 Lavreince, Nicolas (1737–1807) 191 – 193, 192 Leblanc, Paris jeweller 9 L’Épine, Paris watchmaker 167 – 168 Lemercier, Louis-Népomucène (1771–1840) 199 Lemoine, Marie-Victoire (1754–1820) 33, 56, 57, 58, 60, 79n101, 141, plate 5

libraries and literary patronage 4, 51, 52, 59, 60, 96, 109, 112, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 150, 153, 166, 173, 175, 187, 190, 193, 194 – 200, 207n173, 209n240, 215 Ligne, Charles Joseph, prince de (1735– 1814) 13, 94, 96, 131n105 Lobkowicz, Maria Gabriella, princess of (1748–1828) 6 London 51, 83, 85 – 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 110, 118, 122, 123, 125, 142 Louis XIV, King of France 9, 66, 106, 138 Louis XV, King of France 9, 24, 31, 42, 52, 63, 197 Louis XVI, King of France 32, 35, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 53, 63, 83, 84, 88, 92, 96, 98, 104, 118, 125, 146, 156, 158, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 176, 181, 191, 194, 197, 231 Louise, Madame [princesse] 1737 – 1787 31, 196 Lucien, Jacques (1748—after 1811) 143 Magnien, Claude-Mathieu (1741–1829) 143 Maine, Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon, duchesse de (1676–1753) 17, 56 Maria Theresa, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire (1717–1780) 31, 33, 41, 45, 66, 69, 95 Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France: anglophile 85, 94; collections/taste 165, 167 – 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 177, 181, 184; companion portraits with the princesse de Lamballe 53 – 56, 60; downfall 74; english prints and books 110, 111 – 119, 120, 123, 150; fondness for Sèvres 156; freemasonry, views on 59; friends, scrutiny of choice of 69; friendship with Duchess of Devonshire 120 – 121, 122; gardens 95 – 96; gifts to the princesse de Lamballe 152, 176, 211; library 194, 198; literary patronage 199; muslin dress portrait scandal 61; patron, dismissed as 3, 34, 108, 137 – 139, 176 – 177, 189, 214; pornographic pamphlets 3, 69 – 74; portraits 11, 12, 22, 33, 34, 36, 40, 41, 42, 46, 48, 52, 62, 67, 92, 107, 123, 165, 211; portraits in the princesse de Lamballe’s collection 146, 148, 164, 176; regard for the princesse de Lamballe 1, 32, 74 – 75; revival of harp 189 – 190, 191; royalist cult of 1, 44, 211; women artists 58, 61, 178, 215; works associated with queen in the princesse de Lamballe’s collection 182, 193, 194, 200 marquetry furniture 143, 144, 151, 151, 167, 168, 200, 207n173

Index 231 maternal imagery, sentiments and motherhood 14, 26, 67 – 68, 74 – 75, 112 Melfi, Leopoldina Maria di Savoia-Carignano Doria Pamphilj princess of (1744–1807) 6 Mercy-Argenteau, Florimond Claude, comte de (1727–1794) 14, 28n48, 30n86, 31, 41, 64, 66, 69, 95 mezzotints 53, 111, 112, 114 – 115, 118, 124, 147, 148, 149, 181 miniatures 8, 21, 27n9, 34, 35, 40, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 58, 67, 68, 75, 78n83, 88, 89, 90, 93, 96, 118, 121, 124, 173, 177, 211 Molitor, Bernard 168, 188 Mosnier, Jean-Laurent 46 – 51, 50, 56, 58, 63, 122, 140, plate 7 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–1791) 193 Muette, Château de la 178 Oberkirch, Henriette Louise de Waldner de Freundstein, baronne d’ (1754–1803) 2, 13, 16, 26 Orléans, Louise Marie Adélaïde de BourbonPenthièvre, duchesse d’ (1753–1821) see Chartres, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre, duchesse de (1753– 1821) Orléans, Louis-Philippe, duc d’ (1747–1793) see Chartres, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, duc de (1747–1793) Orléans, Louis-Philippe, duc d’ [le Gros] (1725–1785) 31 Oxford, city of 86, 88 Palazzo Carignano see Turin, Palazzo Carignano Palazzo Reale see Turin, Palazzo Reale Paliano, Caterina di Savoia-Carignano, princess of (1762–1823) 6 pamphlets and prints, satirical and pornographic 46, 47, 69 – 70, 71 – 73 Paris, city of 65, 71, 74, 83, 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 108, 109, 110, 112, 118, 120, 123, 125, 126, 141, 147, 152, 160 – 161, 172, 173, 177, 178, 179, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193, 194, 198 Passy 3, 84, 87, 109, 110, 125, 126, 158, 175, 178 – 180, 181, 184, 187, 188, 189, 194, 197, 198, 202n18, 180 Passy, Château de 178, 180 Penthièvre, Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, duc de (1725–1793): ambition 9, 35 – 36, 106; anglophile 94 – 95, 108; character 16 – 17, 59; collection/taste 107, 108, 135, 140, 147, 150 – 151, 164, 167; family 15, 19, 23, 29n56, 38, 63, 86,

181, 195; household 27n15, 53, 199; income and property 104, 106, 135n228, 141, 158, 159, 160, 179; Lamballe, relationship with the princesse de 8, 9, 14, 23, 32, 35, 36, 39, 41, 49, 70, 74, 95, 130n86, 142, 146, 150 – 151, 158, 159, 175, 187, 200, 210n261; portraits 3, 10 – 17, 12, 19 – 20, 22 – 26, 25, 34, plate 1, plate 4, 53, 214 Penthièvre, Mademoiselle de see Chartres, Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre, duchesse de (1753–1821) Penthièvre, Marie Thérèse Félicité d’Este, duchesse de (1726–1754) 15, 29n56 Petit Trianon see Versailles Petrini, Francesco (1744–1819) 191 Polignac, Diane Louise Augustine, comtesse de (1746- c. 1818) 36, 64 – 65, 66, 69 – 70, 89, 124 Polignac, Yolande Martine Gabrielle de Polastron, comtesse then duchesse de (1749–1793): ambition 64 – 65; anglophile 85, 112, 120, 121, 124; appearance and character 14, 64, 65, 80n161; downfall 69 – 74; furniture 143; gouvernante, as 38, 64; Lamballe, rivalry with the princesse de 33, 64 – 67; Marie-Antoinette, favour and relationship with 36, 64, 69, 142, 146, 179; musical talent 64, 65, 66, 191; portraits 61, 64 – 67, 70, 72 – 73, 74 – 75, 81n165, 89, 123, 124 Polyxena Christina Johanna Hesse-RheinfelsRotenburg, Queen of Sardinia (1706– 1735) 26n3, 59, 202n28 Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de (1721–1764) 2, 4n7, 18, 21, 46, 92, 108, 118, 134n178, 137, 158, 164, 194, 197 prints see mezzotints; stipple prints Provence, Louis Stanislas Xavier, later Louis XVIII, comte de (1755–1824) 49, 57, 118, 134n178 Provence, Marie-Joséphine-Louise de Savoie, comtesse de (1753–1810) 7, 14, 33, 41, 61 – 62, 108, 118, 134n178, 143, 157, 198 Racconigi, Castello reale di see Turin/ Piedmont Rambouillet, Château de see Lamballe, Marie Louise Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan, princesse de, residences Regnault, Jean-Baptiste 168 Rémond, François 158, 159, 160, 165, 204n96 Reynolds, Joshua 87, 110, 114, 115, 116, 118, 121 – 122, 124

232  Index Riesener, Jean-Henri (1734–1806) 51 Rioult, Louis-Édouard (1790–1855) 44, 45, 63, 130n62 Roentgen, David (1743–1807) 150, 151, 167 Savoy, François Eugène, prince of (1663– 1736) 109, 141, 142, 195 Sceaux see Lamballe, Marie Louise Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan, princesse de, residences Sené, Jean-Baptiste 143 – 144, 144 sensibility, cult of 4, 58 – 62, 65, 66, 69, 75, 87, 109, 110, 112, 123, 127, 147, 150, 175, 176, 191, 196, 215 September massacres 1, 44, 187 Sèvres 50, 140, 151 – 155, 152 – 155, 156 – 157, 157, 159, 168, 168 – 172, 168 – 172, 175, 185, 186, 200 shell cottages 102 – 107 snuffboxes/gold boxes 8 – 9, 49, 138, 172, 173, 188, 202n17, 211 stipple prints 89, 109, 112, 115, 147, 148, 149, 150 Stupinigi see Turin/Piedmont, Stupinigi syphilis see venereal disease Temple prison 42, 44, 70, 71, 188, 211 toilette, ritual of 39, 49, 109, 140, 166, 169, 172 – 173, 181, 199 Toscan, Jean-Louis 141 Toulouse, Hôtel de see Lamballe, Marie Louise Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan, princesse de, residences Toulouse, Louis Alexandre de Bourbon, comte de (1737–1783) 17, 108, 118, 163, 178, 195 Toulouse, Marie Victoire Sophie de Noailles, comtesse de (1688–1766) 13, 15 – 17, 35, 108, 118, 167, 178

Tuileries, palais des 51, 67, 74, 126, 143, 145, 175, 181, 188, 191, 211 Turin/Piedmont: Castello Reale di Racconigi 8, 108; Palazzo Carignano 7, 9, 104, 105, 141, 195; Palazzo Reale 6, 27n8 – 9, 142, 202n29; Stupinigi 7, 27n12, 88, 129n37 turquerie 108, 117, 165, 169, 173, 175 Vallayer-Coster, Anne (1744–1818) 52, 58, 177, 178 venereal disease 15 – 16, 19, 21, 147 Verrue, Jeanne Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes, comtesse de (1670–1736) 108, 137, 141, 147, 181, 194, 202n25 Versailles: Château 9, 16, 19, 35, 36, 142 – 158, 165, 173, 178, 181, 184, 190, 194, 195, 197, 198; Petit Trianon 94, 95, 99, 104, 165, 181, 187, 194, 213; Town 146, 188, 189 Vestier, Antoine (1740–1824) 58 Victoire, Madame [princesse] (1733–1799) 12, 63, 96 Victor Amadeus III, King of Sardinia (1726– 1796) 6, 7, 41 Vigée Le Brun, Élisabeth Louise (1755–1842) 3, 13, 49, 57, 58, 60, 61 – 62, 63, 65 – 66, 67, 70, 89, 118, 123, 174, 176, plate 9 Villefranche, Eugène de Savoie, comte de (1753–1785) [Lamballe’s younger and favourite brother] 147 Wales, George Augustus Frederick, later George IV, King of Great Britain and Ireland, prince of (1762–1830) 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 114, 118, 126, 127 Walpole, Horace [Horatio], 4th Earl of Orford (1717–1797) 33, 85 – 86, 120, 126 Wedgwood 91 – 93, 91, 127, 184 – 185, 186 Weisweiler, Adam 184, 186