Literature
Catalogue Raisonné des 215 Tableaux les plus capitaux du Cabinet de Monsieur le Comte de Sellon 'd'Allaman, dont une partie se voit dans son hôtel à Genève, et l'autre dans son château d'Allaman, en Suisse pays de Vaud...., Geneva 1795, p. 54, no. 148: 'Ruysdael (Salomon), le bord de la mer, sur lequel on voit des établissments de pêche; plusieurs bateaux des pêcheurs, et des groupes d'arbres peu feuillés. Ce tableau, fidèle image de la nature hollandoise, est composé avec goût, et a un ton de couleur argentin. C'est un des plus capitaux de ce maître';
Catalogue complet de la galerie de tableaux du Comte de Sellon. 578 nos. Catalogue de tableaux appartenant à Monsieur le Comte de Sellon à Genève... , Geneva 1798, p. 35, no. 1: 'catalogue des tableaux perdus dans les différents appartements du château, à Allaman, no.1. Ruysdael, Salamon, peint sur toile, haut 2 pieds 21 pouces large, 3 pieds. Vue d'une eau, divers bateaux pêcheurs. Ce tableau très capital est d'une belle exécution'.
Notes
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION
The composition, with the river bank receding on a diagonal towards the right distance, paralleled in the sky by the horizontal strokes of the laden brush, is entirely typical of Ruysdael?s work of the early to mid-1640s. Another very similar work from the same year, 1644, was formerly in the Henle collection and was sold London, Sotheby's, 3 December 1997, lot 11. Ruysdael painted a smaller but very similar work on panel in the following year, in which the disposition of the two main groups of trees with fishing boats clustered in their shadows along the river bank is virtually repeated. This is now in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg.υ1 In these and other paintings of this date Ruysdael brought to fruition a compositional theme he had been exploring since early in the previous decade, and they remain some of his finest works. Hitherto entirely unrecorded, this lot and lot 52 in this sale originally formed part of the celebrated collection of Old Master Paintings formed at the end of the 18th century by Jean de Sellon (1736-1810), and continued in the 19th century by his son Jean-Jacques de Sellon (1782-1839). They were kept in the family's house in Geneva and in their country residence, the Château d?Allaman outside the city. Alongside the collection of François Tronchin (1704-98), that of the De Sellon family must be considered among the most important of all Swiss collections of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Château d?Allaman was constructed around the year 1200 on the shores of lake Geneva, to the west of Lausanne (Fig. 1). Purchased by the Marquise de Langalerie in 1723, the Savoyard fortress was changed into a hospitable castle. Upon her demise the castle was purchased in 1755 by the young Genevois banker Jean-Gaspard [de] Sellon. It was his son Jean de Sellon who assembled the celebrated collection of pictures, mostly during an extended sojourn in Italy between 1789 and 1794.υ2 While his travels in Italy were no doubt connected with the family's banking and silk businesses, he also wished to avoid the riots in Geneva which followed the French Revolution. He was in Rome in 1790, where he most likely bought the Caravaggesque Madonna and Child which is lot 52 in this sale. In the following year he was in Naples, where he probably acquired the notable Neapolitan pictures in his collection, and from 1792-94 he was in Florence, where he lived in the villa La Mattonaia. Alas we have no surviving records of most of his purchases, but it was surely in Florence that he bought François-Xavier Fabre's Portrait of Vittorio Alfieri, painted in the same city in 1793. He must have collected at a prodigious rate since the catalogue started in 1795, just after his return to Geneva, records a selection of the best 215 paintings, of which 160 were Italian. In total the collection seems to have numbered an astonishing 578 works, divided by location, of which fully a quarter were Italian. Of these some 233 pictures were hung in the family's Geneva residence, while 189 hung in the rooms at the chateâu d'Allaman, with another 156 in store. Among the early Italian works were pictures attributed to Giotto, Starnina, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio and Giovanni Bellini, then Leonardo, Raphael and Correggio, but it was among the later pictures in which the greatest concentration of quality lay, including the major works by Mattia Preti, Giovanni Domenico Cerrini and Andrea Vaccaro that are preserved today in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva. Jean de Sellon also collected a substantial group of Dutch paintings. To judge from early inventories, these included a strong group of paintings by Northern Italianate and Bamboccianti painters including works by Pieter van Laer, Sebastien Bourdon, Johannes Lingelbach and Pieter van Bloemen. This predilection for italianate themes suggests that many of these were evidently also acquired in Italy. The Comte de Sellon had a particular taste, for example, for the work of Jan Miel, owning no less than eight examples, including the exceptional Fair at Frati, once owned by the Marchese Tommaso Raggi and sold Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 8 May 2007, lot 33. After the death of Jean de Sellon, the collection was continued and enlarged by his son Jean-Jacques de Sellon, himself one of the most important jurists and thinkers in Swiss history (Fig. 3). His experience in Italy as a young man, where he learned that Leopold, Grand-Duke of Tuscany, had abolished capital punishment in Florence without increasing the crime rate, probably laid the foundations for his future beliefs. Entering the legislative council of Geneva in 1816, Jean-Jacques fought continuously against capital punishment, his credo in the absolute respect for human life led him to fight against slavery, and in 1830 he founded the Society for Peace (Société de la Paix), the first on the Continent, soon after that founded in England and that in the United States of America. A great admirer of Napoleon I, Jean-Jacques offered hospice to many members of that family and other dignitaries, both in the townhouse in Geneva and at the Chateâu d?Allaman. The sizeable collection of paintings he inherited was enlarged by portraits of figures that he admired for their compassion in humanity, including two of Madame de Staël, whose Salon he frequented. These he kept in his country villa 'La Fenêtre' at Pregny.υ3 Like his father, he was an ardent patron of contemporary art and an admirer of landscape painting, commissioning works by contemporary Genevois painters to complement the numerous Italianate views in the family collection. Thus works by painters from their native Switzerland such as Pierre-Louis de la Rive (1753-1817), François Diday (1802-1877) and Wolfgang-Adam Toepffer (1766-1847) would hang alongside those bought in Italy and France by Marcello Leopardi (d.1795) and Bénigne Gagnereaux (1756-1795). In contrast to his father, who seems to have been a very private man, Jean-Jacques de Sellon was more public-spirited, and many of these paintings he subsequently gave in 1826 to the newly formed Musée Rath in Geneva, in order to encourage young painters. Among the sixteen pictures given by him to the new Museum were Dutch landscapes by Pieter van Laer, Willem Schellinks and Dirck Wijntrack and a flower-piece by Jan van Os. 1. Inv. 322, reproduced by P. Sutton in the exhibition catalogue, Masters of 17th Century Dutch landscape painting, Amsterdam, Boston, Philadelphia 1987, p. 472, fig. 3.
2. See M. Natale, Le goût et les collections d'art italien à Genève du XVIIIυe au XXυe siècle, Geneva 1980, pp. 66-68.
3. See M. Rudloff-Azzi, ?Le Musée Historique de La Fenêtre. Jean-Jacques de Sellon ou l'art au service d'une éducation patriotique?, in Geneva. Revue d'Histoire de l'Art et d'Archéologie, LIII, 2005, pp. 173-216.
