The Orleans Collection was a very important collection of over 500 paintings formed by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, mostly acquired between about 1700 and his death in 1723.Louis-François Dubois de Saint-Gelais, 1727. Description des tableaux du Palais Royal avec la vie des peintres à la tête de leurs ouvrages, Preface. Reprinted 1737 and 1972 (Geneva). The descriptions are online at the Getty Provenance Index - choose Archival documents, and search with Orleans Collection in "Owner's name". Apart from the great royal-become-national collections of Europe it is arguably the greatest private collection of Western art, especially Italian, ever assembled, and probably the most famous,Watson, 202, and Penny, 461 and Reitlinger, 26 helped by the fact that most of the collection has been accessible to the public since it was formed, whether in Paris, or subsequently in London, Edinburgh and elsewhere.
The core of the collection was formed by 123 paintings from the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden, which itself had a core assembled from the war booty of the sacks by Swedish troops of Munich in 1632 and Prague in 1648 during the Thirty Years War.Penny, 463 During the French Revolution the collection was sold by Louis Philippe d'Orléans, Philippe Égalité, and most of it acquired by an aristocratic English consortium led by Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. Much of the collection has been dispersed, but significant groups remain intact, having passed by inheritance.Penny gives a concise history of the collection in a few thousand words, with special reference to the paintings in the National Gallery. Watson covers the history from Prague to London in 175 pages; his book is the history of the Frick Veronese. From their bibliographies, there do not appear to be any full listings in English of the collections of Rudolf, Christina or the Dukes of Orléans, still less ones with current locations. One such group is the Sutherland Loan or Bridgewater Loan, including sixteen works from the Orleans Collection,Penny, 466 in the National Gallery of Scotland, and another is at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. There are twenty-five paintings formerly in the collection now in the National Gallery, London, which have arrived there by a number of different routes.Penny, 461 lists 25, though for example the National Gallery catalogue for the Flemish School (Martin, 1970) lists other Orléans provenances that are not certain in the "Index of Previous Owners". There are also, in 2008, at least two further ex-Orleans paintings on loan to the National Gallery, a Guercino and the Gentileschi Finding of Moses, for which see below.
The collection is of central interest for the history of collecting, and of public access to art. It figured in two of the periods when art collections were most subject to disruption and dispersal: the mid-17th century and the period after the French Revolution.Watson discusses both periods in "Interludes" at the end of his Parts 2 and 5. Reitlinger's Chapter 2 deals with the latter period.
Rudolf and Christina
The paintings looted from Prague Castle had mostly been amassed by the obsessive collector Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor (1552–1612), whose own bulk purchases had included the famous collection of Emperor Charles V's leading minister Cardinal Granvelle (1517–86), which he had forced Granvelle's nephew and heir to sell to him. Granvelle had been the "greatest private collector of his time, the friend and patron of Titian and Leoni and many other artists",Trevor-Roper, 112. One Granvelle painting that seems to have made the full Prague-Stockholm-Paris-London journey is a version of the Correggio variously called The School of Love, The Education of Cupid or Venus with Mercury and Cupid, of which the prime version is now in the National Gallery. The prime version was bought by Charles I, then by the King of Spain in 1650, returning to England only in 1815 via the collections of Manuel de Godoy and Joachim Murat. including his protégé Antonis Mor. The Swedes only skimmed the cream of the Habsburg collection, as the works now in Vienna, Madrid and Prague show.A stray Veronese of Rudolf's, overlooked since his time, turned up in the castle in 1962.
Most of the booty remained in Sweden after Christina's departure for exile: she only took about 70 to 80 paintings with her, including about 25 portraits of her friends and family, and some 50 paintings, mostly Italian, from the Prague loot, as well as statues, jewels, 72 tapestries, and various other works of art. She was concerned that the royal collections would be claimed by her successor, and prudently sent them ahead to Antwerp in a ship before she abdicated.Watson, 127-9
Christina greatly expanded her collection during her exile in Rome, for example adding the five small Raphael predella panels from the Colonna Altarpiece, including the Agony in the Garden now reunited with the main panel in New York, which were bought from a convent near Rome.Watson, 158. The other panels are now in London: two at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the other National Gallery; National Gallery page on the division of the Raphael altarpiece. She was apparently given Titian's Death of Actaeon by the greatest collector of the age, Archduke Leopold William of Austria, Viceroy in Brussels - she received many such gifts from Catholic royalty after her conversion,Penny, 255. It is clearly shown in one of the Teniers' views of Leopold's galleries. Leopold's collection is now part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. and gave some generous gifts herself, notably Albrecht Dürer's panels of Adam and Eve to Philip IV of Spain (now in the Prado).
On her death she left her collection to Cardinal Decio Azzolino, who himself died within a year, leaving the collection to his nephew, who sold it to Don Livio Odescalchi, commander of the Papal army,Watson,168-9; Odescalchi was the nephew of Pope Innocent XI, though in fact his money was inherited and his career greatly improved after his uncle's death. at which point it contained 275 paintings, 140 of them Italian.Watson, 170 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. The sale was finally concluded and the paintings delivered in 1721.Penny, 462-3, and Metropolitan The French experts complained that Christina had cut down several paintings to fit her ceilings,Penny, 462 and had over-restored some of the best works, especially the Correggios, implicating Carlo Maratta.Watson, 196-7
Royal owners
Collection in Paris
The Orleans collection was housed in the magnificent setting of the Palais-Royal, the Paris seat of the dukes of Orléans. Only 15 paintings in the printed catalogue of 1727 had been inherited by Philippe II from his father, Philippe de France, Duke of Orléans, Monsieur (1640–1701); the "collection" as catalogued was by no means all the art owned by the dukes, but recorded only that part kept together in the Palais-Royal for public viewing.Penny, 462 & 464, and Watson, 185-6, who says Phillippe inherited over 550 paintings (including miniatures) from his father in all. He also inherited small but high quality collections from Henrietta Anne Stuart, his father's first wife, in 1701 and his father's lover, the Chevalier de Lorraine in 1702.Watson, 185-6.
According to Reitlinger, his most active phase of collecting began in about 1715,Reitlinger, 27, see also Watson, 185ff the year he became Regent on the death of his uncle Louis XIV, after which he no doubt acquired an extra edge in negotiations. He also began to be presented with many paintings, most notably the three of Titian's poesies, now in Boston and shared by Edinburgh and London, which were given by Philip V of Spain to the French ambassador, the Duc de Gramont, who in turn presented them to the Regent.Brigstocke, 181 for the two "Diana" subjects in Edinburgh/London. He also bought the damaged Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Collection), once owned by Anthony van Dyck, in France. See Ingamells, 1985.
Christina's collection only joined Philippe's shortly before the end of his life and most of the other works were bought in France, like the Sebastiano del Piombo Raising of Lazarus, with some from the Netherlands or Italy, like the Nicolas Poussin set of the Seven Sacraments, bought from a Dutch collection by Cardinal Guillaume Dubois in 1716.Penny, 462 and Robert W. Berger, 1999. Public Access to Art in Paris, "The Galérie d'Orléans, Palais Royal", pp 201-08. Other sources included the heirs of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, and Cardinal Dubois, with an especially important group from Jean-Baptiste Colbert's heir the Marquis de Seignelay, and others from the dukes of Noailles, Gramont, Vendôme and other French collectors.Buchanan, Vol I, 14 and in his listings, Penny and Watson passim
The paintings were housed in two suites of large rooms running side by side down the west or library wing of the palace, with the smaller Dutch and Flemish works in smaller rooms.Penny, 464 The gallery suites of rooms still retained much of their original furniture, porcelain and wall-decorations from their use by Phillippe's father as grand reception rooms and according to a visitor in 1765 it was "impossible to imagine anything more richly furnished or decorated with more art and taste". 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.Penny, 462-5 has more details on the architectural setting 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.Description des tableaux du Palais Royal avec la vie des peintres à la tête de leurs ouvrages, text by Louis-François Dubois de Saint-Gelais (1669-1737), who was later the secretary of the Académie royal de peinture et de sculpture; it was the first published catalogue of a French princely collection. This contained 495 paintings, though some continued to be added, and a few disposed of.Penny, 462. Buchanan lists several paintings from the catalogue that did not reach London.
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.The 'mixed school' method of hanging had been established in the late seventeenth-century writings of André Félibien and Roger de Piles (Berger 1999:200). The mixture on a wall of erotic and religious subjects was disapproved of by some visitors. The collection was most notable for Italian paintings of the High and Late Renaissance, especially Venetian works. The collection included no fewer than five of the poesies painted for Philip II of Spain, of which two are now shared between Edinburgh and London, two always in London (Wallace Collection and National Gallery), and one in Boston. A series of four mythological allegories by Veronese are now divided between the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and the Frick Collection (with two, one illustrated above) and Metropolitan Museum in New York. Another Veronese series, the four Allegories of Love now in the National Gallery, hung as overdoors in the central salon, which also held the larger Veronese series, three of the Titian poesies and Correggios.