Description
A capriccio of an Italianate harbour at sunset, with merchants, fishermen and stevedores on the shore in the foreground, men-o'-war at a quay beyond oil on canvas 16 x 21 7/8 in. (40.5 x 55.5 cm.) PROVENANCE Lieutenant-G‚n‚ral Jean-Baptiste-F‚lix-Hubert de Vintimille, comte du Luc, gouverneur de la Citadelle de Marseille; (+) sale, Julliot, Paris, 22 December 1777, lot 4 (to the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, on behalf of Tolozan?). Claude Tolozan (1728-1796); (+) sale Paillet-Delaroche, Paris, 23 February 1801, lot 60, 'L'effet de ce pr‚cieux morceau, est pris … l'heure du soleil couchant, et rendu avec cette admirable intelligence de clair-obscur et de perspective, qui ont assign‚ … Claude le Lorrain, cette renomm‚e que donne un talent sup‚rieur.' (3,802 francs to J.J. Martin Laporte on behalf of Delessert). Etienne Delessert (1735-1816), by whom bequeathed to his son Jules-Paul-Benjamin, Baron Delessert (1773-1847), H“tel d'UzŠs, 176 rue Montmartre, Paris, by whom bequeathed to his brother Fran‡ois-Benjamin-Marie Delessert (1780-1868), H“tel Delessert, 176 rue Montmartre, Paris, and by descent to the present owners. LITERATURE Notice sur la collection de tableaux de MM. Delessert, Paris, 1844, no. 72, 2nd edn. 1846, no. 107. M. Kitson and M. R”thlisberger, 'Claude Lorrain and the Liber Veritatis', The Burlington Magazine, 1959, no. 680, p. 382, illustrated. M. R”thlisberger, Claude Lorrain, The Paintings, New York, 1979, I, LV27, pp. 147-8; II, fig. 74. B. AquilliŠre, 'Une Collection d'art au XVIIIŠme siŠcle: la collection Tolozan', Travaux de l'Institut de l'Histoire de l'Art de Lyon, 13, September, Lyons, 1990, pp. 29-30. EXHIBITION Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Le Cabinet de l'Amateur, February-April 1956, no. 53. NOTES Claude has long been known as the greatest of all painters of the 'ideal landscape' - painted images of nature that were intended to be more beautiful and better ordered than nature herself. To the genre, Claude made the distinctive contribution of using light as the principal means both of unifying a composition and of lending beauty to the landscape - a legacy that was to influence generations of subsequent artists, including Richard Wilson and Turner. Claude was born in a village near Nancy, but moved in his 'teens to Rome, and shortly after to Naples, where he studied under the German-born landscape painter Goffredo Wals. He then returned to Rome where he completed his artistic training in the workshop of Agostino Tassi. In 1625, Claude returned to Lorraine where he was taken on as assistant by Claude D‚ruet, the court painter to the duke. About a year later, he returned to Rome, where, with the exception of short trips to other parts of Italy, he was to remain for the rest of his long life. This painting belongs to a group of three harbour capricci of similar compositions by Claude. The earliest work, in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland, is dated 1637; another, dated 1639, is in the Louvre. The three pictures, bathed in a pink and orange sunset, share the same imaginary palace on the left and the group of three men conversing in the foreground. R”thlisberger suggests a date of 1638 for the present work, a date that is consistent with Claude's practice of painting on a small format (often on copper) in the 1630s. Many of Claude's pictures depict either sunrise or, as here, sunset. These were considered the most poetic times of day and the complementary hours of morning and evening were to be of special significance to the artist throughout his life. Indeed he would often juxtapose the two times of day in pairs of pictures. To his contemporaries, the most striking evidence of Claude's study of nature was his depiction of the sun. To show the sun in the sky was not of course unprecedented, but Claude was the first artist both to do so and (as here) to use the sun as the source of light for the whole picture. This work, which has remained in the same collection for the last two hundred years, is recorded in the Liber Veritatis, Claude's own chronologically arranged catalogue of 195 of his pictures. The catalogue takes the form of an album of drawings executed in pen and bistre wash in which the artist, from 1636 until his death, reproduced the image of the paintings he was selling and indicated the name of the patron or town or country of destination. The drawing corresponding to the present picture is inscribed on the back 'pour le secrtaire du marqu quev'. Professor R”thlisberger suggestes that the marquess is Fran‡ois-Annibal d'Estr‚es, marquis de Coeuvres (c. 1573-1670), subsequently the duc d'Estr‚es, the French ambassador in Rome from 1636 to 1641. The identity of his secretary, however, has not yet been identified. During his stay in Rome the marquis arranged for the shipment to France of many Roman pictures and antiques, amongst which may well have been the present work. Claude Tolozan (1728-1796) was the younger son of Antoine Tolozan, a commoner who having made a fortune in his native Lyons as a silk merchant and banker, bought an office of nobility in the Cour des Monnaies en Lyon, taking the title ‚cuyer et seigneur de Montfort from an eponymous estate that he acquired. His son followed his father as a courtier, going to Paris where he became Introducteur des Ambassadeurs … la Cour du Roi, and formed over the course of his life a notable collection of Old Masters (for which, see B. AquilliŠre, op. cit., pp. 27-33). AquilliŠre suggests that Jean-Baptiste Lebrun, a dealer and expert who advised most of the great collectors in Paris before 1789, was almost certainly Tolozan's advisor in the purchases of his pictures; an annotation in one of the surviving Tolozan sale catalogues notes that the picture had been owned by Lebrun - presumably an indication that he had bought the painting at auction, probably the du Luc sale, on Tolozan's behalf. The sale of his collection of Old Master Paintings in 1801 was in effect the last of the great sales of the eighteenth century, given the personality of the propretor and the time of the collection's assemblage. Amongst the many remarkable works sold were three paintings by Rembrandt, including an Adoration of the Shepherds (National Gallery, London) and a Portrait of a Man (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), two pictures by La Hyre including the Landscape with bathers (Louvre, Paris), Chardin's Serinette (Louvre, Paris), two Bourdons including a Christ amongst the children (Louvre, Paris) and Terborch's Music Lesson (National Trust, Waddesdon Manor). The sale raised the astonishing total of 335,613 francs. Among the buyers were the writer Dominique Vivant-Denon, the painters Jean-Fran‡ois He and Carle Vernet and the banker Etienne Delessert, who purchased the present picture along with thirty-two other works for a total of 33,085 francs. The Delessert collection was one of the most notable in Paris in the later nineteenth century. The family fortune was founded by (Gabriel-)Etienne Delessert (1735-1816), the son of a Lyons silk-merchant; having moved to Paris in circa 1775 he began lending money to sellers of luxury goods, and thereby became a banker, being one of the founders of the Caisse d'Escompte. His eldest son (Jules-Paul-)Benjamin Delessert (1773-1847) was in 1802 appointed R‚gent of the Banque de France and in 1812 was ennobled as baron Delessert. During the Bourbon Restoration he combined his function as d‚put‚ (intermittently between 1817 and 1842) with business interests, his most notable achievement being the creation of the Caisse d'‚pargne in 1818. A member of the Acad‚mie des Sciences, his considerable wealth enabled him to collect paintings, a field in which he showed individuality and distinction. His most spectacular purchase was made at the sale in 1843 of the collection of the Marqu‚s de Las Marismas de Guadalquivir, when he spent 27,250 francs on Raphael's Orl‚ans Madonna (Mus‚e Cond‚, Chantilly). Among other Old Master paintings, he owned a strong group of Dutch cabinet pictures, such as Pieter de Hooch's Merry Company (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and eighteenth-century French paintings, including Greuze's Portrait of the engraver Jean-Georges Wille (1763; Mus‚e Jacquemart-Andr‚, Paris). Benjamin's younger brother, Fran‡ois-(Benjamin-)Marie Delessert (1780-1868), was successful as a businessman and banker and was a d‚put‚ between 1831 and 1848. He, too, collected paintings. Both Delessert collections were united on Benjamin's death, and the majority of the collection was subsequently sold at auction in Paris in 1869 (for which, see Charles Blanc, 'La Galerie Delessert', La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1869) although some of the pictures, including the present work, remained in the possession of the family.
