#the wallace collection

[questwithambition]

Sunday: cafes, art galleries and bookshops

[allegorypaintings]

An Allegory of Fruitfulness

Artist: Jacob Jordaens (Flemish, 1593-1678)

Date: 1620–1629

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: The Wallace Collection, London

Description

In this unusual and enigmatic composition, a group of satyrs and humans of various ages are gathered around a woman, who holds a large cornucopia. The grapes proffered by other figures invoke the hedonistic world of the wine god, Bacchus, who according to ancient Roman mythology presides over the Autumn harvest. The central figure points to two children, leaving us in no doubt that this is a celebration of Nature's bounty. Jordaens probably did not have a single literary source in mind, but rather intended to draw out the close association of peace and fecundity, particularly at a time when the war-torn Netherlands was enjoying a period of peace (known as the Twelve Year's Truce).

Thanks to Sir Richard Wallace, who acquired the painting in 1872, our Allegory of Fruitfulness is a very rare example of a mythological painting by Jordaens in a British collection. The artist painted the subject twice: another version is in Brussels, at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. The main difference between the compositions is that the cornucopia-bearing woman is seen from the front in our painting, and from the back in the Brussels picture. A major conservation project recently revealed that Jordaens originally painted her with her back turned in the same way as in the Brussels painting, and then repainted her to show her in her present position.

[artsandculture]

The Swing (1767) 🎨 Jean-Honoré Fragonard 🏛️ The Wallace Collection 📍 London, England

The painting is Fragonard's most famous work, and one of the most emblematic images of eighteenth-century art. Its genesis is reported by the writer Charles Collé. According to his journals and memoirs for 1767, the history painter Gabriel-François Doyen was commissioned by an unnamed ‘gentleman of the Court’ late in 1767 to paint his young mistress on a swing, pushed by a bishop with himself admiring her legs from below. Doyen, who had just had a major success at the Salon as a religious history painter, refused and suggested Fragonard. Fragonard was at that time about to completely change his career from a history painter with important royal commissions to a painter of small and highly sophisticated cabinet pictures. This was at least in part a reaction to his problems with payments from the royal arts administration. The commission might have in part triggered that change or might simply have come at the right moment.The painting marks the re-launch of Fragonard's career with paintings for a small, well-informed circle. Those could either be highly erotic works, like P430, or works that required an advanced knowledge of art history and old master painting. Fragonard's move was highly successful.

Compared with the original brief, in the finished painting, the older man is no longer a priest, a barking dog has been added, and Falconet's sculpture of 'L'amour menaçant (Menacing Love)' comments on the story. Fragonard answers the libertine intentions of his patron by picking a Rococo style. Fragonard often employed different styles or languages at the same time, and he seems to have seen a Rococo idiom as particularly apt for an erotic scene. This move has fundamentally shaped perceptions of Rococo art. With Fragonard's famous work, the style changed its associations. Fragonard combines a backward-looking Rococo element with a pre-Romantic rendering of a forceful and uncontrollable, often obscene nature.

The name of the work derives from an engraving by Nicolas de Launay after the painting that was published in 1782. It has been used as a template for countless caricatures and is increasingly popular with contemporary artists and designers.

[mythologypaintings]

Erigone Conquered (Erigone Vaincue)

Artist: François Boucher (French, 1703 - 1770)

Date: 1745

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: The Wallace Collection, London

Description

As described by Ovid, Bacchus, disguised as a bunch of grapes, deceives the nymph Erigone. Originally the painting, together with P442, formed part of a set of four representing the Seasons, all of which were shaped in the same manner and engraved by Charles Duflos in 1751. From their shape and low viewpoints it is clear that they were painted as overdoors to be inserted into decorative panelling. The other two pictures in the series depict the winter as return of Diana from the hunt (Retour de chasse de Diane; Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay) and summer (Les confidences pastorale; Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Two of the seasons were thus depicted in the guise of mythological subjects, two as pastorals.

[galleryofart]

Pastoral with a Bagpipe Player

Artist: François Boucher (French, 1703 - 1770)

Date: 1749

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: The Wallace Collection, London

Description

With its pendant, P482, the painting represents some Boucher’s most ambitious works in the pastoral mode. Boucher continued the pastoral, utopian mode of Watteau's Fêtes galantes, anchoring them more clearly in an idealised, Italian setting. By exchanging Watteau's contemporary Parisians with idealised shepherds and shepherdesses, Boucher further removed the scenes from a recognizable contemporary reality, transposing them into an entirely imaginary world. While Watteau produced cabinet-sized pictures, Boucher often employed the pastoral for large-scale room decorations, as is the case here.

The two pictures originally belonged to the Daniel-Charles Trudaine, who worked as governor of the Auvergne, before being put in charge of roads and bridges in France, a capacity in which he was responsible for extending and modernising the network considerably. From 1745 he instigated and supervised the production of a new street atlas of France. Trudaine hung the two paintings in the grand salon on the ground floor of his country house at Montigny–Lencoup near Fontainebleau.

The scene was inspired by the theatrical characters of the immensely popular pantomimes of Boucher's friend, Charles-Simon Favart. At the Opéra Comique, where Boucher was both set designer and a keen member of the audience, Favart’s musical dramas combined the Arcadian idealism and aristocratic sensibilities of pastoral poetry with the rustic, sentimental characters of popular theatre. The painting depicts the cousins Lisette and Babette with the little shepherd who wins his sweetheart’s affection and a crown of flowers by serenading her on the bagpipes.

[daydreamsandplaylists]

Hello my guiding light, my North Star, my siren call

[hanssloane]

Snake (one of set),

Late 16th C/early 17th C

Unknown artist

Bronze

The Wallace Collection

[empirearchives]

Details of the Divorce of Josephine and Napoleon (15 December 1809)

by Henri Frédéric Schopin

Michel Louis Etienne Regnaud in the back looking dead inside. He looks a lot like Louis Bonaparte here.

Napoleon placing his hand on the hands of his stepson, Eugène. Behind them is Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, on the right.

Josephine with her daughter, Hortense. The man to the right of them is Cambacérès, the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire (Napoleon’s second-in-command).

Everyone else. They include Marshal Bessières holding a chair, Marshal Ney and the Vice-Grand Elector, Talleyrand.

The bee symbol used here was the symbol of the First French Empire. Almost everything with the Napoleonic bees were either altered or destroyed during the Bourbon Restoration.

[portrait-paintings]

Miss Nelly O'Brien

Artist: Joshua Reynolds (English 1723 - 1792)\

Date: c. 1762–1764

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: The Wallace Collection, London

Description

Nelly O’Brien (d. 1768) was a well-known beauty and courtesan, who sat for Reynolds on a number of occasions between 1760 and 1767. The present picture is similar to a work in the Hunterian Art Gallery; both almost certainly date to 1762–4.

O’Brien is portrayed in fashionable contemporary dress, holding a Maltese lapdog. By c.1763, she was the mistress of Frederick St John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke (1732–1787). However, there is no evidence to suggest that the portrait was commissioned. Rather, it is thought that Reynolds painted it without a particular buyer in mind, as a means of demonstrating his skills. The portrait is notable for its interplay of light and shadow, particularly in the upper part of the sitter’s body, where the wide brim of the bonnet casts a shadow over her face and bosom. Reynolds rendered with great subtlety the different tones, colours and fabrics of eighteenth-century costume, particularly in the skirt area, where a transparent layer of lace is convincingly and effectively portrayed overlying the quilted material underneath.

The sitter’s forward-facing pose, in which she directly engages with the viewer, is bold and suggestive. It is thought that Thomas Lawrence may have been inspired by the composition, when developing his similarly-arresting portrait of the Countess of Blessington, a painting now also in the Wallace Collection (P558). Certainly, Reynolds’s portrait was well-known throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, having been engraved on multiple occasions.

The portrait was acquired by the 2nd Marquess of Hertford in 1810.

[octaviasdread]

(don’t repost photos)

The Wallace Collection, London

a vast collection of art, sculptures, furniture, and historical armour within a gorgeous townhouse with its original decor and influences from the French rococo style

[lyingsummerchild]

The Wallace Collection, London

[questwithambition]

I had a delightful Sunday last week: coffee and a wander around The Wallace Collection, walking though Marylebone with an obligatory stop at Daunt books, and then basking in the sun at Regent’s Park with a cupcake 🧁

[kultofathena]

Tod Cutler – 14th Century Effigy Rondel Dagger

Mid to late 14thC Rondel dagger. Featuring a flower shaped pommel and disc guard in bronze with a fluted wooden grip. A very strong double sided, diamond section blade. This type of ‘gentle’ motif of a flower was typical of knights of the 13th and 14th C. You can see motifs and daggers like this on effigy’s and artwork throughout the period. Later rondel daggers had a top ‘disc’ style guard as well but early ones had a more normal shaped dagger pommel as seen here. The unsharpened blade is crafted from EN45 high carbon steel and the guard is a composite of bronze and wood; the pommel is cast from matching bronze and the blade is peened over the pommel to complete the dagger. The grip is polished wood.

As well as the dagger being typical of the period it comes with a very distinctive ‘cupped’ leather sheath which has been shaped around the bottom rondel with a brass shaped shape with fluting and a heart motif cut out.

[aquitainequeen]

You all know what I thought, the moment I saw this picture.

I've been on this hellsite far too long.

[foundatthemuseum]

The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals - 1624

(information, thoughts and sources below the break)

Found in The Wallace Collection, London, The Laughing Cavalier is probably a portrait you've seen as in a print or referenced in film. Despite it's name however, the sitter isn't depicted laughing and was almost certainly not a cavalier. The portrait gained it's name in the Victorian era and stuck to this day.

Frans Hals paintings were widely regarded in his lifetime and by those after, an 1885 letter from Vincent van Gogh to his younger brother Theo van Gogh enthuses about Hals' use of colour, particularly noting the depth of tone in his blacks, writing that  "Frans Hals has no less than twenty-seven blacks" which is especially apparent in this painting along with the remarkable embroidery.

The portrait can be seen at The Wallace Collection in London, as well as online as part of the Frans Hals: The Male Portrait exhibition.

(opinions) I loved being able to see this portrait in person, on a good screen you can see the difference in the blacks but as someone who had only ever seen it in low-quality prints it honestly stunned me when I saw it in person. Up-close you can really see every little detail and regardless who the sitter was (we have theories, but it's not certain who he was) he has a level of charisma in this portrait that's very charming.

Sources:

The Laughing Cavaler image - The Wallace Collection

Vincent Van Gough's letter - Van Gough's letters Webexhibits

[eco-friendly-ghost]

Wallace Collection - DayDream

Daydream, I fell asleep amid the flowers

For a couple of hours on a beautiful day

Daydream, I dreamed of you amid the flowers

For a couple of hours, such a beautiful day