Orleans Collection
Granvelle had been the "greatest private collector of his time, the friend and patron of Titian and Leoni and many other artists",[8] including his protégé Antonis Mor.
[14] The year after Odescalchi's death in 1713, his heirs began protracted negotiations with the great French connoisseur and collector Pierre Crozat, acting as intermediary for Philippe, duc d'Orléans.
[15] The French experts complained that Christina had cut down several paintings to fit her ceilings,[16] and had over-restored some of the best works, especially the Correggios, implicating Carlo Maratta.
[19] According to Reitlinger, his most active phase of collecting began in about 1715,[20] the year he became Regent on the death of his uncle Louis XIV, after which he no doubt acquired an extra edge in negotiations.
[16] Rearrangements had been made to accommodate the paintings; connoisseurs particularly praised the Galerie à la Lanterne, with its even, sunless top light diffused from the cupola overhead.
[25] For most of the 18th century it was easy to visit the collection, and very many people did so, helped by the printed catalogue of 1727, republished in 1737, Description des Tableaux du Palais Royal.
[27] Paintings were hung, not by 'schools' or by subject but in order to maximise their effects in juxtaposition, in the 'mixed school' manner espoused by Pierre Crozat for his grand private collection in his Parisian hôtel.
There were paintings by Philippe de Champaigne now in the Wallace Collection and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a Eustache Le Sueur which turned up in 1997 over a door in the Naval & Military Club and is now in the National Gallery.
[34] The Dutch paintings included 6 Rembrandts, 7 works by Caspar Netscher (one now Wallace Collection) and 3 by Frans van Mieris (one now National Gallery) that were more highly regarded then than they are now.
The Leda went to Frederick the Great of Prussia, the Danäe to Venice, where it was stolen and eventually sold to the English consul at Livorno, and Jupiter and Io went to the Imperial collection in Vienna.
By the early 17th century the dynasty was in terminal decline, and the bulk of their portable art collection was bought by the keen collector Charles I of England in 1625–27.
Some Mantuan paintings therefore passed from Prague via Christina to the Orleans Collection, while more were bought by French collectors in the London "Sale of the Late King's Goods" in 1650, and later found their way to the Palais-Royal.
[51] These paintings were exhibited for sale in the West End of London in April 1793 at 125 Pall Mall, where admissions at 1 shilling each reached two thousand a day, and sold to various buyers.
[52] Philippe Égalité, as he had renamed himself, was arrested in April 1793 and was guillotined 6 November, but in the meantime sale negotiations for the Italian and French paintings were renewed, and they were sold for 750,000 livres to Édouard Walkiers, a banker of Brussels, who soon after sold them on, unpacked, to his cousin, Count François-Louis-Joseph de Laborde-Méréville, who had hoped to use them to add to the French national collection.
After the start of the Reign of Terror, and the execution of his father as well as the Duke of Orléans, Laborde-Méréville saw he had to escape France, and brought the collection to London in early 1793.
[53] The French and Italian paintings then spent five years in London with Laborde-Méréville, the subject of some complicated financial manoeuvres,[54] including the failure of an attempt supported by King George III and the Prime Minister Pitt the Younger to buy them for the nation.
Gower, who was perhaps the prime mover and must have known the collection well from his time as British ambassador in Paris, contributed 1/8 of the £43,500 price, Carlisle a quarter, and Bridgewater the remaining 5/8s.
[55] The pictures were put on exhibition for seven months in 1798, with a view to selling at a least a part of them, in Bryan's Gallery in Pall Mall, with the larger ones at the Lyceum in the Strand; admission was 2/6d rather than the 1s.
[58] Castle Howard, home of the Earls of Carlisle, originally had fifteen works, now much reduced by sales, donations, and a fire,[59] but the Bridgewater/Sutherland group remain intact to a large degree.
The London market in these years was flooded by both other collections from France itself, and those dislodged by the French invasions of the Low Countries and Italy—by 1802 including Rome itself.
[62] An example of a work now only known from a replica (in the Galleria Borghese in Rome) and studies is Aeneas and his Family Fleeing Troy, the only secular history painting by Federico Barocci.
It was taken to Rome by Queen Christina, passed to the Orleans collection, and finally sold at auction in London for 14 guineas in 1800 (the price probably reflecting the poor condition some sources mention), since when its whereabouts are unknown.
[63] The paintings of both portions of the collection were bought by a wide range of wealthy collectors, the great majority English, as the wars with France made travelling to London difficult for others.
Major buyers included Thomas Hope, a Dutch banker (distantly of Scottish extraction) sheltering in London from the Napoleonic Wars, who with his brother (of Hope Diamond fame) bought the two large Veronese allegories now in the Frick Collection, and works by "Michelangelo", "Velásquez" and Titian,[64] John Julius Angerstein, a Russian-German banker whose collection later became the foundation of the National Gallery and John Bligh, 4th Earl of Darnley.
