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The Turkish Lovers

(c. 1770 France)

Colnaghi

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Baron Antoine Marie Albert Héron de Villefosse (d. 1888), with two other panels entitled The Toast and The Picnic ; his sale (as ‘The Marquis H de V’), Christie’s, London, 5 June 1871, lot 212, as ‘J.B. Le Prince, a set of three panels, painted with conversations surrounded by arabesques, birds and medallions of animals’; purchased there by Toms for 115 gns from whom probably acquired by Henri-Louis Bischoffsheim (1829-1909), who installed them in Bute House, London; and thence by descent to his daughter, Amelia, wife of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald, 2nd Bt., and 20th Knight of Kerry, who transferred them to 16 Mansfield Street, London; and thence by descent to Sir John Fitzgerald, Knight of Kerry; Acquired by Wildenstein, July 1946 (‘The Turkish Lovers’ was acquired privately from the family of Sir John Fitzgerald, February 1950); all three panels sold to a British Private Collector, March 1970.

The King of Illustrated Papers, 1902; C. Hussey, ‘A London House of the XVIIIth Century - 16 Mansfield Street, the Residence of Lady Fitzgerald’, Country Life, vol. LXVII, 26 April 1930, pp. 604-9; The Burlington Magazine, March 1951, p. 102 (in a review of the Wildenstein exhibition); J. Cornforth, London Interiors, London, 2000, pp. 97-103, (The Turkish Lovers reproduced in the Boudoir, South Audley Street, facing p. 100 and in the Drawing Room, Mansfield Street p.100)

Wildenstein, The French Eighteenth-Century Interior, February/March 1951

This delightful turquérie forms part a set of three decorative panels, possibly conceived originally as a set of four-two western and two oriental subjects . Each panel features pairs of lovers, though the present picture also includes the third figure of a page-boy in the background and the other two panels, entitled The Picnic and The Toast, showing pairs of lovers in western costume, are now in a private collection. The panels have a very distinguished nineteenth-century provenance. The first recorded owner is Baron Antoine Marie Albert Héron de Villefosse, who had a notable collection in Paris of French eighteenth - and Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century pictures. The series then belonged to the collector Henri-Louis Bischoffsheim (1829-1909), who installed them as part of the decorations of his London residence, Bute House, 75 South Audley Street in Mayfair (now the Egyptian Embassy) where The Turkish Lovers was incorporated Into the panelling of the Boudoir. Following the sale of the house, the panels were inherited by his daughter, Lady Fitzgerald, who installed the Turkish Lovers in the Drawing Room (also known as the Tapestry Boudoir) of her London house, 16 Mansfield Street, where the painting was photographed in situ for a Country Life article in 1930. All three panels subsequently passed to Wildenstein in the 1940s, who included them in an important exhibition in 1951, and they then disappeared from view from the 1970s until their recent re-emergence.

While The Picnic and The Toast show pairs of lovers in western costume picnicking in a pastoral open-air setting, The Turkish Lovers is set in a woodland glade where a make-shift tarpaulin slung between a tree gives the air of an oriental tent sheltering the lovers who are dressed in the Turkish costume, the fashion for which was popularized in eighteenth-century France through the paintings and drawings of Boucher, Le Prince and Carle van Loo and the pastels of Liotard. A man dressed as a sultan, his turban decorated with ostrich feathers and a string of pearls, sips a cup of tea while reclining on cushions, while his paramour, dressed as a sultana, gazes into his eyes, her arm round his neck and her other hand holding a cup. In the background a page boy sips tea from a saucer while the Turkish table in the foreground is set with a red stoneware teapot, of a type, based on Chinese Yi- hsing originals, which was extensively imitated at Meissen, a blue and white ginger jar and a famille-rose jar with a cover, possibly containing sugar. The form of the cartouche with its birds and cornucopias closely echoes that in canvas entitled The Picnic where the lovers are also shown in a reclining position, their amorous feelings reflected by the cooing doves overhead. This suggests that these two pictures were conceived as pendants, one western and the other oriental, with The Turkish Lovers showing a more advanced stage in the courtship.

The vogue for Turkish subjects in France gained currency in the 1720s, following the visit to Paris in 1721 of the Ottoman ambassador, Mehmet Effendi and was further disseminated in Oriental prints, travel literature, theatrical pieces and operas. These included Pulchinelle the Grand Turk, by Gillot and Handel's Admeto, an aria from which inspired the Turkish concert depicted in Carl van Loo's The Grand Turk giving a concert for his mistress (1727, Wallace Collection, London). By the 1730s it had become fashionable for even the most high-born ladies to have themselves depicted à la turc such as in Nattier's portrait of Mademoiselle de Clermont en sultane (1733, Wallace Collection, London), where the ostensibly Turkish subject matter justified a chic degree of undress, which would have been unacceptable in more formal modes of portraiture, though the costumes worn bore little resemblance to authentic Turkish dress. The visit paid by Liotard to Constantinople by Liotard in the 1740s, inspired a more genuine interest in Turkish dress and customs, popularized by the publication In 1747 of Guer's moeurs et usages des turcs, with engravings by Duflos after Boucher, without, however, inhibiting the whimsical nature of the sultans and sultanas of Boucher and Leprince whose inspiration accounts for the delightfully pantomime quality of Huet's Turkish Lovers.

Although the circumstances of their original commission are unknown, the series is likely to have been painted for an eighteenth-century French town-house or château and may well have been acquired by the Baron de Villefosse in the mid-nineteenth century, when many important Parisian town-houses were demolished and their fixtures and fittings sold off as a result of the remodelling of the city by Baron Haussmann. In 1871, when the paintings were sent to London for sale at Christie’s, they were attributed to Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, who, with his master Boucher, also painted a number of turqeries; and it was as Le Prince that the paintings were exhibited by Wildenstein in 1951. There are indeed some elements which are reminiscent of his work: in particular the facial types of the women and the foliage. However, recent research provides grounds for reattributing these canvases to Le Prince’s pupil, Jean-Baptiste Huet, an artist who was particularly popular with late nineteenth-century collectors, such as Moïse de Camondo, who created a whole room decorated with his canvases, the Salon des Huet, in what is now the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris.

Unlike the canvases by Huet in the Musée Nissim de Camondo (one of which is dated 1776), the main scenes are enclosed within arabesques with grisaille paintings of sporting subjects set within cartouches below. Similar framing motifs do appear in Huet’s graphic work: in a watercolour in Berlin and a series of engravings of birds and animals enclosed in arabesque borders. But this framing motif appears to be unique in Huet’s paintings and harks back to the Bérainesque paintings of his uncle, Christophe Huet II (1700-1759), in particular the singerie decorations in the Musée Condé, Chantilly (c. 1735) and the panels in the Hotel de Rohan, Paris, painted between 1749 and 1752. The closest parallels, though, are with the set of four wall panels attributed to Christophe Huet, formerly in the Château d’Ognon and now in the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. These chinoiserie panels, which are much closer in spirit to The Turkish Lovers than to its less exotic companion works, explore similar themes of open air picnicking. Particularly striking are the similarities between the treatment of the birds incorporated into the arabesque decoration at the base and those in the Birmingham panels: the ducks, for example, at the base of the ‘The Turkish Lovers’ are almost identical. The motif of the grisaille panels enclosed in cartouches is also very similar and there are cornucopias of fruit and flowers in both sets of panels, though in The Turkish Lovers, we find the striped tulips which were associated with Turkey.

The figures themselves are different in style to the work of Christophe Huet and show similarities with the work of Boucher and the young Fragonard, which suggests a later dating, probably in the 1770s, though conceivably as late as the 1780s. Iconographically all three panels hark back to themes popularized in the first half of the eighteenth-century and the rather rouged faces, found in the Huet paintings in the Nissim de Camondo, the romantic glances and gestures, and the dainty retroussé noses would be inconceivable without the example of Boucher. The facial type of the Turk's blonde paramour, reminiscent of early Fragonard, is similar to Huet’s portrait of his wife, engraved by Demarteau, while the young man in the Toast, one of the two companion works now in a private collection, is almost identical to the young man in Huet’s cartoon L’Escarpolette for a Beauvais tapestry in the Camondo Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris, which is one of a series of Pastorales commissioned from Huet in 1780. The figures are conceived in the same romantic spirit as those in the Nissim de Camondo canvases, though here expressed in oriental fancy dress and with the arabesque framing elements not present in the Nissim de Camondo canvasses. The affinities shown here with the paintings of Boucher and Fragonard could be explained by the very close contact that Huet had with both artists during late 1760s, when he was working alongside them on the decorations for the Salon of Demarteau’s house or by the influence of his master Le Prince, who had been a pupil of Boucher. Despite the overall air of fantasy, the realistically painted sheep and dogs seen in the painting entitled The Toast are the work of a skilled animal painter and this strengthens the case for attributing these panels to Huet, arguably the leading animal painter in France during the second half of the eighteenth century and a worthy successor of Oudry and Desportes.

Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet I (1745-1811) was born in 1745 in the Louvre, the son of Nicolas Huet, an animal and armorial painter in the Garde Meuble du Roi. He was the nephew of the decorative painter, Christophe Huet II (1700-1759), who collaborated with Claude Audran III on the decoration of the Château d’Anet, and painted some famous singerie and arabesque decorations at the Château de Chantilly and in the Hotel Rohan, Paris. Jean-Bapiste Huet was apprenticed first to the successful animal painter, Dagommer, before entering in 1766 the studio of Boucher’s pupil, Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, for whom he worked during the later 1760s and with whom he seems to have enjoyed a very close relationship. He quickly assimilated Boucher’s style and may even have been instructed by the master himself, becoming one of the most skillful of Boucher’s imitators. In 1769 he married Marie-Généviève, daughter of the painter Jean-François Chevalier, by whom he had three sons, all of them artists. In 1767 Huet began to exhibit at the Salon and in 1769 was made a member of the Académie Royale, having submitted as his reception piece Dog attacking geese (Musée du Louvre, Paris), and was admitted to the Académie as an animal painter. He continued to exhibit at the Salon until 1802. His animal paintings were praised by Diderot who compared them favourably to works by Oudry. Despite the air of fantasy in his paintings, which was derived from his master Le Prince, Huet, like his English counterpart Stubbs, had a very firm grasp of the anatomy of animals and published several studies of animal skeletons. In 1770, at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Pierre, the young Huet was commissioned to paint with Fragonard a series of four canvases for the King’s Dining-Room at Versailles. These were apparently never executed, but between 1765 and 1770 he collaborated with Boucher and Fragonard on a decorative scheme for the engraver Gilles Demarteau’s house in Paris, consisting of large paintings representing landscapes and animals, against a trellis-like backdrop. At that time Huet was principally known as an animal painter, but in 1779 he made his début as a history painter at the Salon with a huge painting of Hercule and Omphale, which received rather mixed reviews. More successful were the numerous drawings that he made of sporting, gallant and pastoral subjects in the 1770s, which were popularized through the engravings of Demarteau, who had been Boucher’s principal engraver. In the 1770s and 1780s he also painted a number of landscapes and pictures of the seasons and times of day in the manner of Boucher. He was also a prolific print-maker, engraving plates for the Duc de Choiseul’s Voyage pittoresque en Grèce. In 1790 Huet became attached to the textile manufactory of Jouy, as well as the famous tapestry factories of Gobelins and Beauvais, for whom he provided numerous designs in the manner of Boucher and Oudry. Although Huet’s later work showed the influence of neo-classicism, he remained largely untouched by the more austere spirit of the French Revolution and continued to paint subjects in the Rococo manner until the end of the eighteenth century.

Up until 1871, when these pictures were sent for sale in London, they belonged to an important Parisian collector, the Baron Héron de Villefosse, who died in 1888. They may have been acquired by him, or his father, the first Baron de Villefosse, who was secretary to the cabinet under Louis XVIII and created Baron and Counsellor of State by Charles X. The pictures which the Baron sent for sale in London in 1871, included important French eighteenth-century paintings by, or then attributed to, Watteau, Pater, Greuze and Fragonard, as well as very fine Dutch and Flemish paintings by artists such as Steen, van Ostade and Teniers. It is likely the panels were acquired shortly after the Christie's sale by Henri-Louis Bischoffsheim, an important collector and member of a prominent European banking family, who settled in London around 1860 and purchased Bute House in 1872. These paintings formed part of the French decoration of the Boudoir, where they and other French eighteenth-century paintings were flanked by decorative painted and embroidered panels. Surviving photographs of the interiors at Bute House display an interior of almost Rothschildean opulence. The ceiling of the Blue Drawing Room, for example, housed Giambattista Tiepolo’s masterpiece, Allegory with Venus and Time, now in the National Gallery, London, which remained in situ until sold by the Embassy in 1969. Bischoffsheim also formed an outstanding collection of Old Master Paintings, including English portraits by Hoppner, Reynolds and Romney, major Dutch paintings including a View of Amsterdam by Ruisdael (formerly Phillips Collection, Eindhoven), Ochtervelt’s Oyster party (Private Collection), Philips Koninck’s Landscape (Statens Museum, Copenhagen), and Anthonis Mor’s Isabella of Valois (Phillips Collection, Eindhoven) and good eighteenth-century French pictures, such as Nattier’s full-length Portrait of the Duc de Penthièvre and François Hubert Drouais’s House of cards and Blowing bubbles. The collection was sold at auction at Christie’s on 7 May 1926, following the sale of the house after the death of his widow in 1922, but these paintings were removed by Bischoffsheim’s daughter, later Lady Fitzgerald, who used them to decorate the drawing room of her London house in Mansfield Street, where she stayed until the war. The Turkish Lovers was recorded there in a Country Life article by Christopher Hussey, who recorded that ‘the wall panel is a Rococo arabesque in the manner of Pillement.’ After 1945, the paintings were acquired by Wildenstein, exhibited by them in 1951 and sold in the early 1970s to a private collector since when they had disappeared from view until their recent acquisition by Colnaghi.