French School, late 18th century

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'), London, Christie's, 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'), for 115 Guineas, to Toms;
From whom probably acquired by Henri-Louis Bischoffsheim (1829-1909), Bute House, London, then 75 South Audley Street, London;
Thence by descent to his daughter, Amelia, wife of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald, 20th Knight of Kerry, 2nd Baronet of Valencia (1844–1916), who transferred them to 16 Mansfield Street, London;
Thence by descent to Sir John Fitzgerald, 21st Knight of Kerry, 3rd Baronet of Valencia (1884–1957);
From whom acquired by Wildenstein, February 1950 (Wildenstein had already bought the two companion panels from the family in July 1946);
All three panels sold to a British private collector, March 1970;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 26 April 2007, lot 119, where unsold;
Acquired by the present owner shortly thereafter.

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

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. 604–09;
The Burlington Magazine, March 1951, p. 102 (in a review of the Wildenstein exhibition);
J. Cornforth, London Interiors, London 2000, p. 100, fig. 16, reproduced in the drawing room of Mansfield Street, and p. 101, reproduced in the boudoir of South Audley Street.

This delightful turquérie is one from a set of three decorative panels that formerly hung in Bute House, London, now the Egyptian Embassy.¹ The owner of Bute House, Henri-Louis Bischoffsheim, an important collector and member of a prominent European banking family, hung the set of three panels in the Boudoir alongside other French eighteenth–century paintings and embroidered panels. Bute House was decorated with an almost Rothschildean opulence; the Blue Drawing Room, for example, housed Giambattista Tiepolo’s masterpiece Allegory with Venus and Time, now in the National Gallery, London.

When sold in 1871 by Baron Antoine Marie Albert Héron de Villefosse, and again when exhibited by Wildenstein in 1951, they were believed to be the works of Jean Baptiste Le Prince (1734–81) who, along with his master François Boucher, painted a number of turquéries. Indeed the figures in the present work are reminiscent of his style, in particular the facial types of the women in in his rendering of foliage. However, the vitality and realism with which the sheep and dogs are painted in another of this set of three, a panel entitled The Toast, has led to a suggested attribution to the celebrated animal painter Jean-Baptiste Huet (1734-1781), but he is not known to have ever produced grotesque ornament of this type. However, his uncle Christophe Huet (1700-1759) executed a number of schemes made up of several decorative turquérie and chinoiserie panels. His set of four panels painted for the Titon family at their Château d’Ognon, Valois, and now in the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, are particularly close in format to the present panel and its pendants.² The d’Ognon panels feature similar scenes of open air picnics, and comparable blue grisaille framing schemes; particularly striking are the similarities in the treatments of the birds incorporated into the arabesque decoration at the base of the panels, the ducks at the base of the present work are virtually identical to those at the base of the d’Ognon panel entitled La boisson froide.

It seems possible that this panel and its two known counterparts were originally conceived as a set of four, depicting two western, and two oriental subjects. Each panel depicts a pair of lovers; the two others are entitled The Picnic and The Toast and depict the couples in western costume. The vogue for Turkish subjects in France had gained currency in the 1720s following a visit to Paris in 1721 of the Ottoman ambassador, Mehmet Effendi, and was further disseminated in Oriental prints, travel literature, operas and in the paintings and drawings of Boucher, Le Prince, Carle van Loo and Liotard.

 

 

1. The two other panels are now in a private collection.

2. The four d’Ognon panels were sold New York, Sotheby’s, 17 January 1992, lot 58, and are now in the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. See Masterpieces from East and West from the Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham 1993, pp. 108–111, reproduced.