Date: 06-04-2008
Owning Institution: The Louvre
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010    
Subject: 19th Century  18th Century      

Louis La Caze (1798-1869) might not be a household name, but he was one of the most exceptionally perceptive and generous art collectors of his time. On his death, he left no fewer than 583 paintings to the Louvre, including Frans Hals’s alluring La Bohemienne, Rembrandt’s moody and reflective Bathsheba, Watteau’s unsettlingly monumental portrait of an awkward clown, Gilles, and  a host of other masterpieces. The La Caze bequest remains, by some distance, the single most significant donation in the history of France’s principal museum.

La Caze’s achievements as a collector were second only to those of his exact contemporary, the Fourth Marquess of Hertford, whose enormous range of acquisitions – extending beyond painting to the decorative arts, to gold and silverware, to arms and armour and much more besides – still forms the backbone of the magnificent Wallace Collection, at Hertford House in London’s Manchester Square. La Caze and the Marquess had much in common, including a pronounced taste for the art of eighteenth-century France, which had fallen out of fashion after the French Revolution and during the years of Napoleonic rule; and between them they played a crucial role in the mid-nineteenth-century revival of interest in a school of art long tainted by association with the decadence and aristocratic aloofness of the ancien regime. So when the authorities at the Louvre decided to put on an exhibition in honour of their great benefactor, La Caze, and were looking for a touring venue in London, it made perfect sense for them to choose the Wallace Collection.

“Masterpieces from the Louvre: The Collection of Louis La Caze”, is a considerably smaller version of “La Collection La Caze”, which was originally shown at the Louvre itself between April and July of last year. The display comprises just seventeen pictures, most of them French, so inevitably many of the greatest paintings in the bequest are missing. There is no Gilles, no Bohemienne, no Bathsheba. But this is, nonetheless, an enthralling exhibition – a thought-provoking exploration of a fascinating and fruitful chapter in the history of taste.

To see paintings collected by La Caze in the context of the Wallace Collection is to understand the very different motives that animated the two men. They might have competed for the same pictures, but their tastes were worlds apart. Their methods were different too. With immense wealth at his disposal  and an army of agents working on his behalf, the Marquess generally outgunned La Caze at major auctions. He could afford to pay a small fortune for pictures such as Hals’s Laughing Cavalier or Fragonard’s The Swing – still probaby the two single most famous paintings in the Wallace Collection – whereas La Caze had to be more enterprising wih his comparatively limited resources. The Frenchman would occasionally pay a large amount for a particular painting, but he preferred to scout out bargains at the lower end of the market. He bought several of his Chardin still lives – including the exquisite Still Life with a Basket of Grapes, a Silver Goblet and a Glass Bottle, of 1725-30, which is in the present exhibition – for next to nothing, and always remained proud of his eye for a bargain.

La Caze’s taste was more edgy and, in the context of the middle years of the nineteenth century, considerably more avant-garde than that of his English rival. The Marquess was a rich English francophile who sought to recreate, through his accumulation of light-hearted Rococo paintings, the carefree atmosphere of untroubled privilege and sexual licence which he associated with France before the Revolution. La Caze was a doctor by training, a member of the bourgeoisie able to indulge his love of art only because of the generous allowance given to him by his father, who was a wealthy stockbroker. His instincts were not aristocratic, but philanthropic. He liked the rustic simplicity of Chardin’s still lives and was drawn, too, to the same painter’s quietly idealistic depictions of solid, middle-class virtue – exemplified by Saying Grace, a picture of the early 1740s.

Another of the hallmarks of his taste was a pronounced sympathy for the underdog and the outsider. The most celebrated of his acquisitions on show at the Wallace Collection is A Young Beggar, by the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Ribera. The Fourth Marquess of Hertford would never have bought this vivid, strikingly monumental depiction of a poor but indomitable street urchin with a club-foot, smiling truculently through adversity. It is a work that calls to mind Flaubert’s infamous fictional doctor Charles Bovary, husband of the ill-fated Emma, who tried to make a name for himself by operating on a boy with a club-foot, with disastrous results. La Caze had sympathy for the plight of the poor and the unfortunate, but was less than sanguine about the power of medicine to help them. The best doctor, he said, was the doctor who knew how little he knew. As well as bequeathing his pictures to the Louvre, La Caze set up a prestigious prize for medical research into the cause of popular epidemics – having himself specialised, at great personal risk, in the treatment of cholera and typhoid. That prize would be later be won by numerous distinguished physicians and scientists, including Pierre Curie, discoverer of radium.

Although La Caze’s character remains shrouded in mystery he seems to have been something of a freethinker. He enjoyed the company of artists and writers, and briefly trained in the atelier of Girodet, one of the more gifted pupils of Jacques-Louis David (the exhibition includes a murky self-portrait by La Caze himself, which suggests the benignity of his temperament, and indicates his limited abilities as a painter). He knew Theodore Gericault and admired Eugene Delacroix, the two greatest French painters of the Romantic period, and may have been advised by Theophile Thore, one of the most remarkable art historians of the nineteenth century – the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the rehabilitation of Frans Hals and the rediscovery of Vermeer. In later life La Caze held open house every Sunday morning, welcoming a stream of younger painters into the purpose-built museum that he had added to his house in the Rue du Cherche-Midi. Among his guests were the young Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet, to whom he gave much support and encouragement. In fact, La Caze served on the jury of the Paris Salon that agreed, controversially, to accept Manet’s scandalous depiction of a Paris prostitute, Olympia – another example of his taste for paintings of those living poised, uncomfortably, on the margins of society.

But it was La Caze’s collection, and what one might call his moral attitude to art, that had the greatest influence on a younger generation of French painters and writers. He had an unerring eye for pictures that pulse with life, that seem to preserve the long-dead past in all its alien vitality. He found that quality not only in genre paintings, but in portraits of the aristocracy – a fine example, in the present show, being Guillaume Voiriot’s wonderfully vivid and sketchy Portrait of an Unknown Lady, painted in around 1760-70. The journalist Paul Mantz, who knew him well, wrote a touching article about La Caze for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1870, just after the collector’s death: “He always looked for the truth and possessed, alongside numerous works of irresistible authenticity, a number of disquieting pictures, full of a sense of troubling mystery. He liked to go to those works with his visitor, questioning them, and trying to decode their most obscure enigmas.”

La Caze also had a precocious taste for sketchy, impromptu painting. He collected works by such painters as Boucher and Fragonard – the “fantasy portraits” of the latter, in particular – that most of his contemporaries disregarded as merely unfinished. It was partly for that reason that his museum became a necessary place of pilgrimage for the most radical artists of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Manet copied the sketchiest of La Caze’s Chardins, the blurriest of his Fragonards. Degas too treated the La Caze museum as a kind of school, an unconventional academy for someone interested in the painting of modern life.