Ahmanson Buys a French Portrait for Huntington
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| Antoine-François Callet, Portrait of the Comte de Cromot, Superintendent of the Comte de Provence, at an Easel, Accompanied by his Two Daughters-in-law, 1787. Gift of The Ahmanson Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens |
The seated subject, Jules-David Cromot du Bourg (1725-1786), was a finance superintendent and amateur artist. The landscape he's working on is a separate canvas attached to the portrait. Painted and signed by Cromot himself, it makes the whole a sort of posthumous collaboration. Cromot died the year before his portrait was finished.
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| Detail of landscape |
It's a triple, or even quadruple portrait. The two young women are the wives of Cromot's sons. The one with a red ribbon in her hair has been identified as Guillaudieu de Plessis on the basis of another portrait, by Antoine Vestier, that is coincidentally now in the Norton Simon Museum. In the Huntington picture, Guillaudieu is holding a rolled red-chalk drawing of a landscape. Christies believed this to represent the model for Cromot's landscape, said to be in the style of a 17-century Dutch artist such as Nicolaes Bercham.
Behind the three figures, the oval portrait-within-the-portrait represents the Comte de Provence, brother to Louis XVI and future king Louis XVIII (after Napoleon). It was he who commissioned Cromot's portrait, as the inscription on the fictive frame indicates ("Donné par Mr. frère du Roi au Grand Surintendant de ses finances").
Antoine Callet is best-known for his extravagant portrait of Louis XVI. Existing in numerous copies, that became Louis XVI's defining image, much as Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV was for his great-great-great-grandfather. Callet is hardly to be found in American museums, despite the fact that Benjamin Franklin arranged for the U.S. Congress to acquire a full-length version of Callet's Louis XVI (and a Vigée Le Brun Marie Antoinette as well). Both paintings were lost in the Capitol's 1814 insurrection—by the British.
The Callet is the fourth major Ahmanson Foundation gift to the Huntington, following purchases of a paintings by Thomas Cole, Goya, and Vigée Le Brun. It furthers a goal of adding portraits from Continental schools to complement the Huntington's British pictures. Comte de Cromot is to go on view this fall.
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| Antoine Vestier, Portrait of Madame de Cromot de Fougy, 1786. Norton Simon Museum |
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| Detail of women, with Madame de Cromot de Fougy at left |
Comments
> Jan. 2023 for $201,600.
> ...the fourth major Ahmanson
> Foundation gift...following purchases
> of paintings by Thomas Cole,
> Goya, and Vigée Le Brun. It furthers
> a goal of adding portraits from
> Continental schools to...the
> Huntington's British pictures.
A bit more than $200k? In the world of art auctions, that's bargain-basement territory. However, better that than the Ahmanson Foundation not assisting any local cultural resource at all.
In the meantime, LACMA is trying to be a contemporary art museum, so old stuff from Europe is so passe, so yesterday. Besides, all its new galleries with windows require sculptures, not dull, antiquated paintings.
I read from this the implication that sculpture is inferior to paintings. I could not disagree more. The most sublime exhibits, to my mind, combine paintings and decorative arts, including sculptures, especially when the decorative arts themselves are featured in the paintings. The MFA Boston, Met and Frick Collection have been doing this to triumphal success.
The new LACMA could have hundreds of vitrines to showcase decorative arts along the windows side of its gallery. It's an opportunity to expand our appreciation of the breadth of Western art.
> that sculpture is inferior to paintings.
Actually, I was being sarcastic. The reduced floor space of the Geffen Galleries may turn out as not nearly as obvious as the reduced wall space will be. All the areas facing the outer wall presumably will be much less flexible than if they had solid walls instead of glass.
The atrium of the old Ahmanson Gallery didn't have issues with sunlight, yet openings that looked out into it still formed display areas with limitations. The new Geffen building may be a version of that but probably on a much bigger scale.
As for Thomas Kinkade, I hope the new Lucas museum will be able to maneuver the gap between overly abstract-splotch-type artworks and overly starving-artist/pre-Raphaelite-type artworks.