François-Hubert Drouais (1727–1775), Portrait of Mlle Doré, c. 1758, Oil on canvas, 68.6 × 61 cm, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
François-Hubert Drouais (1727–1775), Portrait of Mlle Doré, c. 1758, Oil on canvas, 68.6 × 61 cm, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
François-Hubert Drouais was one of the leading portraitists of Louis XV’s France, admitted to the Académie Royale in 1758 and patronised by the court and aristocracy. Trained by Charles-André Van Loo (1705–1765) and François Boucher (1703–1770), he absorbed the polish of academic classicism and the elegance of Rococo decoration, but developed a more restrained and sober manner that made him distinctive in the crowded Parisian portrait market.
His portraits are marked by refined surfaces, meticulous rendering of fabric and lace, and sitters shown in fashionable contemporary dress rather than elaborate allegory. This sets him apart from Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), who specialised in mythological masquerade, and from his teacher Boucher, whose portraits are lush and decorative. Unlike Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), whose art leans toward moralising sentiment, Drouais also kept emotions muted, favouring aristocratic composure.
The result is a signature style of elegant naturalism: Rococo grace pared of excess, intimacy without sentimentality, and fashion refined into dignity. Works like Mlle Doré exemplify this balance — a portrait at once charming and restrained, poised at the point where Rococo refinement begins to anticipate Neoclassical sobriety. In this, Drouais can be seen as a transitional figure: his restraint and clarity look forward to the cooler discipline of painters such as Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), while still rooted in the Rococo world of aristocratic elegance.
References
Bailey, C.B. (2002) Patriotic taste: collecting modern art in pre-revolutionary Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press
François Lemoyne (1688 – 4 June 1737),Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, 1737, Oil on canvas, c. 180.5 x 148 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
François Lemoyne (1688 – 4 June 1737), Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, 1737, Oil on canvas, c. 180.5 x 148 cm, The Wallace Collection, LondonFrançois Lemoyne (1688 – 1737),Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, 1737, Oil on canvas, c. 180.5 x 148 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
A winged old man grips a young woman by the wrist and pulls her upward. She is nude, luminous, and passive in his hold, her body turning with the movement rather than resisting it. Below her, two figures crowd the lower half of the canvas: one wears a mask over her face and elaborate, deceptive clothing; the other is twisted inward, her own body the object of her attention, as though she is consuming herself from within. The old man’s wings are spread wide and his posture is one of effort, not ceremony. He is not presiding over a conclusion. He is in the middle of an extraction, and the two figures below have not released their hold.
This is the standard cast for an allegory of Time rescuing Truth from Falsehood and Envy, a subject with precedents in works by Guido Reni (1575–1642) and possibly a garden sculpture by Thomas Regnaudin (1622–1706) at Versailles, both understood as touchstones of the Grand Siècle that French painters of the early eighteenth century were still measuring themselves against (Wallace Collection). The nudity of Truth carries a convention running back through the Renaissance, signifying transparency and freedom from concealment; the mask of Falsehood is its direct counterpart. The programme is optimistic in its declared meaning: time vindicates truth, envy destroys only itself, and the outcome is not in doubt. Except that in Lemoyne’s hands it plainly is. Falsehood and Envy occupy the foreground with a solidity and proximity that the composition does not resolve, and the eye keeps returning to them because they are given as much pictorial weight as the act of rescue above. Time is pulling upward. They are still there.
That tension between the declared allegory and what the paint actually does sits differently once you know what was happening in the room where the picture was made.
François Lemoyne (1688–1737) had entered the Académie de peinture et de sculpture at thirteen, won the Prix de Rome in 1711, and spent his career in deliberate pursuit of a single ambition: to establish himself as the natural successor to Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) and the leading history painter of his generation. He was not alone in the claim. Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) was competing for the same position with equal determination, and the 1727 contest organised by Louis-Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, duc d’Antin (1665–1736), director of the Bâtiments du Roi, ended in a shared first prize of five thousand livres that left neither man satisfied. Lemoyne’s answer was the ceiling of the Salon d’Hercule at Versailles, worked on from 1733 to 1736, drawing on what he had studied in Pietro da Cortona’s (1596–1669) ceiling at the Palazzo Barberini during two trips to Italy, and which, when unveiled, drew praise from Voltaire (1694–1778) and Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury (1653–1743). The appointment as Premier Peintre du Roi to Louis XV (1710–1774) came immediately afterwards. He was forty-eight, and had reached precisely the position he had been building towards for three decades.
By the spring of 1737, however, something had come apart. The death of his wife, the accumulated exhaustion of the Versailles years, and a temperament that contemporaries consistently described as anxious and difficult to steady all figure in the accounts, though none of them resolves the question cleanly (Williams, 2015). What the archival record does establish is that his deterioration had become visible to those around him, and among those who noticed was François Berger (1684–1747), a financier and contrôleur général who had been his patron since 1722, and who knew both his paintings and the man behind them with the closeness of a long friendship. On the evening of 4 June 1737, Berger came to the lodgings on the rue des Bons-Enfants intending to take Lemoyne out of the city. He knocked at the bedroom door and heard groaning from inside. When it opened, Lemoyne had already put his sword through himself repeatedly. On the easel stood this painting, the last thing he had completed, made for the man now standing in the doorway (Williams, 2015).
The picture had been commissioned as a pendant to a Bather Berger had acquired from Lemoyne in 1723–24, and the subject was in all likelihood Berger’s own choice rather than the painter’s, as commissioning patrons in such arrangements typically determined the programme (Bailey, 1998). The comte de Caylus (1692–1765), antiquarian, man of letters, and active member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, reflecting on the work after Lemoyne’s death, found nothing in it to betray the painter’s state of mind and called it one of his most beautiful cabinet pictures (Wallace Collection). Perhaps. But the painting shows truth mid-rescue, falsehood and envy undefeated in the foreground, and an outcome that the composition conspicuously refuses to settle. Knowing what stood on that easel the evening Berger walked through the door does not explain the picture, but it makes that refusal considerably harder to set aside.
References
Bailey, C.B. (1998) ‘François Berger (1684–1747): Enlightened Patron, Benighted Impresario’, in Bonfait, O., Gérard Powell, V. and Sénéchal, P. (eds) Curiosité: études d’histoire de l’art en l’honneur d’Antoine Schnapper [Curiosity: Studies in Art History in Honour of Antoine Schnapper]. Paris: Flammarion.
Wallace Collection (n.d.) Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, François Lemoyne, P392. London: Wallace Collection. Available at: https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org (Accessed: 15 January 2025).
Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), Portrait of Manon Balletti (1740–1776), 1757, Oil on canvas, 54 × 47.5 cm, The National Gallery, London
Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), Portrait of Manon Balletti (1740–1776), 1757, Oil on canvas, 54 × 47.5 cm, The National Gallery, London
The elegance of Nattier’s work, with its soft pastel tones and flattering light, contrasts with the real emotional depth of Manon’s situation. Her relationship with Giacomo Casanova never led to marriage, and the disappointment of their romance lingered. She eventually married another man, a choice possibly born of practicality rather than passion, and one that marked the end of her dramatic entanglement with the infamous lover.
Nattier’s portrait thus poignantly reflects the disparity between outward appearances and the emotional turmoil within.
The rose is both a decorative element and a more profound metaphor, suggesting the duality of beauty and love—exquisite but often fragile and transient, much like the emotions that defined Manon Balletti’s life.
The poised and graceful exterior of Manon Balletti belies a life shaped by the intense but ultimately unfulfilling love she experienced with Casanova—a story as compelling and complex as any great love drama of its time.
In the summer of 1732, a group of French painters and sculptors arrived in Stockholm, the result of negotiations Carl Hårleman (1700–1753) had conducted in Paris over the preceding winter on behalf of the Swedish crown (Royal Court of Sweden, n.d.). Among them was Guillaume-Thomas-Raphaël Taraval (1701–1750), a Paris-born painter trained under Claude Audran III (1658–1734), who had been recruited specifically to bring the new French taste, what contemporaries called the goût nouveau, to the rebuilding of the Royal Palace. The recruitment was not an isolated gesture. It belonged to a pattern stretching back to the previous generation of French craftsmen brought to Stockholm by the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger (1654–1728) after 1693 (Hinners, 2012). Tessin’s first generation of French recruits had its work largely undone by catastrophe: the medieval Tre Kronor castle burned down on 7 May 1697, destroying most of what had already been completed, and construction of its Baroque successor stalled for lack of funds during the Great Northern War before resuming in earnest only in 1727. Taraval’s generation arrived into that resumption, five years into a rebuilding effort that needed, once again, craftsmen capable of the latest Parisian style. A second wave of French sculptors followed across the 1730s, 1740s and into the 1760s, recruited under broadly the same arrangement of generous pay and the promise of a career; thirty in total over this period (Michel, 2015).
The room now known as the West Octagonal Cabinet, one of a pair of small corner rooms flanking the Bernadotte Gallery in the palace’s state apartments, is among the more direct results of the 1732 recruitment. Its ceiling was painted by Taraval in the Rococo idiom he had brought from Paris. Taraval’s ceiling paintings at the palace are airy and festive in character, a quality that follows directly from his training under Claude Audran III, whose own decorative style favoured light grotesque ornament, pale grounds and figures set against open sky rather than the dense, weighted compositions of the preceding Baroque generation. Given the room’s octagonal plan and modest dimensions, a ceiling on this scale followed the conventional Rococo format for a small cabinet: a central oval or octagonal field, framed by painted or stuccoed rocaille ornament, with figures disposed loosely around its edge rather than massed in a single dense scene, the kind of composition built to be glanced up at from a seated conversation rather than studied as a programme.
Rooms of this scale and type served a function quite different from the palace’s larger ceremonial spaces. Cabinets, in the vocabulary of European court architecture, were not designed for audiences or formal reception but for retreat, conversation, and the display of small prized objects, a category that encouraged a more intimate and personal decorative idiom even when executed with the same technical sophistication as the grander rooms nearby. The eastern counterpart to the West Octagonal Cabinet, on the opposite side of the Bernadotte Gallery, served in this more functional role as well, used for the formal reception of newly arrived foreign ambassadors presenting their credentials, while its decorative programme drew on a different set of allegorical associations suited to a room originally assigned to the queen’s apartments (Royal Court of Sweden, n.d.). Together the two cabinets represent a category distinct from the palace’s state rooms: spaces built for private use but finished with the same craftsmanship that defined Sweden’s emerging Rococo court style.
Because the palace contains more than six hundred rooms spanning several centuries of redecoration, the rooms that survive substantially unaltered from this first eighteenth-century building campaign carry a particular kind of evidential value. The grander ceremonial spaces were periodically reworked to match later fashions, as happened across the nineteenth century under King Oscar II (1829–1907), but the smaller and less frequently used cabinets escaped most of this revision, leaving them as comparatively direct evidence of the decorative thinking that guided the palace’s reconstruction in the years immediately following 1727.
Guillaume-Thomas-Raphaël Taraval (1701-1750), Allegory of Victory through Wisdom ? , 1730s, Royal Palace of Stockholm, The West Octagonal CabinetGuillaume-Thomas-Raphaël Taraval (1701-1750), Allegory of Victory through Wisdom ? , 1730s, Royal Palace of Stockholm, The West Octagonal CabinetGuillaume-Thomas-Raphaël Taraval (1701-1750), Allegory of Victory through Wisdom ? , 1730s, Royal Palace of Stockholm, The West Octagonal CabinetGuillaume-Thomas-Raphaël Taraval (1701-1750), Allegory of Victory through Wisdom ? , 1730s, Royal Palace of Stockholm, The West Octagonal Cabinet
References
Hinners, L. (2012) De fransöske handtwerkarne vid Stockholms slott 1693–1713: Yrkesroller, organisation, arbetsprocesser. Doctoral dissertation. Stockholm University. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/47039902 (Accessed: 28 April 2024).
Michel, A.-S. (2015) ‘Une communauté d’artistes et d’artisans français à l’étranger: le cas des sculpteurs au château royal de Stockholm au XVIIIe siècle’, 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 12, pp. 117–131. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7557/4.3528 (Accessed: 28 April 2024).
Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789), Dutch Girl at Breakfast, c.1756, Oil on canvas, 46.8 × 39 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (on short-term loan to the National Gallery, London)
Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789), Dutch Girl at Breakfast, c.1756, Oil on canvas, 46.8 × 39 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (on short-term loan to the National Gallery, London)
Jean-Étienne Liotard, the Genevan painter better known as le peintre turc, was one of the most distinctive artistic personalities of the eighteenth century. Famous for wearing an Ottoman caftan and long beard, he cultivated an eccentric public image that matched his independence of style. Though celebrated primarily for his luminous pastels, he also produced a small number of oils, among which Dutch Girl at Breakfast holds a special place.
The painting portrays a young woman delicately lifting the lid of a coffee pot, her gesture quiet yet deliberate. The subject points to the growing allure of coffee as an exotic and costly commodity in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, while the calm domestic setting evokes seventeenth-century Dutch interiors. Liotard adopts the clarity, intimacy, and close observation of Vermeer (1632–1675), Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684), and Caspar Netscher (1639–1684), while tempering it with the polish and lightness associated with French Rococo taste. The resulting blend is at once archaic in its homage and modern in its restraint.
The framed picture on the back wall, plausibly derived from Hendrick Cornelisz van Vliet’s (1611–1675) church interiors, suggests a more specific link with Delft. The Rijksmuseum has proposed that Liotard’s brief stay there, where his cousin served as pastor of the Huguenot church, may have provided the occasion for the work. Such quotations reveal his conscious dialogue with Dutch pictorial traditions, underscoring his role as a cosmopolitan mediator of artistic lineages.
Liotard prized this canvas, retaining it in his possession for nearly two decades before it was acquired by William Ponsonby, 2nd Earl of Bessborough (1704–1793). After remaining in Britain for over two centuries, it was purchased by the Rijksmuseum at Sotheby’s in London in 2017.
The Music Room, Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam. Design and ornament by Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt (1685–1751), Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt II (1709–1755), Johann Christian Hoppenhaupt (1719–1785), and Johann August Nahl (1710–1781); Completed 1747; Materials: wood, plaster, glass
The Music Room, Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam. Design and ornament by Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt (1685–1751), Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt II (1709–1755), Johann Christian Hoppenhaupt (1719–1785), and Johann August Nahl (1710–1781); Completed 1747; Materials: wood, plaster, glass
Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) composed around 120 flute sonatas during his lifetime, many of them opening with adagios. He performed almost every evening when in residence at Sanssouci, and the room where he played, the Music Room (Konzertzimmer), was decorated accordingly: it is the most elaborately ornamented interior in a palace already thick with ornament. Completed in 1747, less than two years after the palace’s architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff (1699–1753) broke ground on the hilltop site, the room was the product of several hands, not all of them willing ones.
The earliest and most inventive contributor was Johann August Nahl (1710–1781), a sculptor and decorator who had trained under his father, the court sculptor Johann Samuel Nahl (1664–1727), before spending formative years in Paris (1731–1734), where he studied the work of the leading French ornamentists, and in Rome, Strasbourg, and the episcopal workshops of the Palais Rohan. Frederick summoned him to Berlin in 1741, and by 1745 Nahl held the post of Surintendent des Ornements, responsible for the decorative programmes of all the royal building projects. He worked at Charlottenburg, the Berlin Stadtschloss, the Potsdam City Palace, and the early stages of Sanssouci. But in 1746 Nahl left Prussia, apparently after a serious quarrel with the king. The Oxford Companion to Western Art puts it plainly: he fled to Switzerland to escape the working conditions Frederick imposed. He settled near Bern and never returned to Prussian service, going on instead to produce his most celebrated work, the tomb of Maria Magdalena Langhans (1751–1752) in the church at Hindelbank, a monument Goethe later made a special journey to see.
Nahl’s departure left the Music Room incomplete, and the commission passed to the Hoppenhaupt brothers, sons of the Merseburg sculptor and architect Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt (1685–1751), who had served as court sculptor to the Dukes of Saxe-Merseburg but never worked in Berlin himself. His elder son, Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt the Elder (1709–after 1755), had trained in Dresden and Vienna before following his brother to Berlin in 1740. It was this Johann Michael, not his father, who executed the woodcarving in the Music Room between 1746 and 1747, carving the walls, doors, and the elaborate frames surrounding both the paintings and the mirrors. His younger brother Johann Christian Hoppenhaupt (1719–1778/86) was appointed Directeur des Ornements in Nahl’s place, and Johann Michael worked under his direction. Because the brothers collaborated closely and almost none of their work is signed (as was common practice in the eighteenth century), individual attributions depend on building accounts and surviving drawings. Johann Michael also published approximately eighty ornamental designs during his final years in Prussia, covering wall and ceiling decoration, furniture, clocks, chandeliers, pulpits, and carriages, which were etched between 1751 and 1755 by the Berlin illustrator Johann Wilhelm Meil (1733–1805) and distributed by the Augsburg engraver Johann Georg Hertel. These printed sheets carried the Frederician Rococo idiom to courts and workshops beyond Brandenburg.
The room itself plays a series of visual games with the boundary between indoors and out. The ceiling is decorated with a fantastical garden trellis hung with vines, springing from each corner of the room. On the inner wall, mirrors are set within gilded trellises overhung with festoons of flowers, so that the reflected garden light from the three arched windows opposite appears to pass through a second, imaginary pergola. The walls carry paintings by Antoine Pesne (1683–1757), Frederick’s long-serving court painter, with subjects drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most popular source of mythological imagery in mid-eighteenth-century decoration. Gilded carvings in wood and plaster, depicting musical instruments, floral garlands, and putti, cover every available surface. The effect is not restrained. It is, in fact, deliberately overwhelming, though the vocabulary remains light: shells, scrolls, tendrils, flowers, the asymmetric C-curves and S-curves of mature rocaille. The ornament is the room.
What makes the Music Room unusual is its relationship to the person who used it. Frederick’s apartments at Sanssouci were, by his own insistence, arranged according to personal taste rather than court protocol, and the term Friderizianisches Rokoko (Frederician Rococo) was coined to describe the result. Frederick sketched his requirements for decoration and layout himself, and craftsmen such as Nahl, the Hoppenhaupts, the Spindler brothers (who specialised in marquetry), and Johann Melchior Kambly (1718–1783) interpreted those sketches into finished work. The Music Room was not simply a decorative scheme commissioned from specialists. It was a room shaped, at least in outline, by the man who intended to play the flute in it every evening, and who cared more about the adagio he was composing than about following French or Bavarian fashion. Johann Christian Hoppenhaupt’s later contribution to the palace, the Voltaire Room (1752–1753), designed from Frederick’s own sketches, takes this personal involvement further still: lemon-yellow lacquered panels covered with polychrome carvings of apes, parrots, cranes, storks, fruits, and garlands. An earlier decorative scheme in the same room, featuring silver floral motifs, was removed to make way for it; a fragment survives in the bed alcove.
Adolph Menzel’s painting The Flute Concert at Sanssouci (1852) shows Frederick in this room, apparently mid-cadenza, with a gathering of friends, family, and court musicians, including Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), the composer Johann Gottlieb Graun (1703–1771), and the flute virtuoso Johann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773), looking on. Menzel painted the scene a century after the fact, and his reconstruction is more atmosphere than archaeology. But the essential point holds. The Music Room was not built for state occasions or for impressing ambassadors (the Neues Palais would serve that purpose two decades later). It was built for chamber music among friends, in a palace whose very name, Sans Souci, promised the absence of care. Whether a king who fought three major wars, drove his best decorator out of the country, and composed 120 sonatas while running a military state was ever genuinely carefree is another question. But the room, at least, was designed to make it look as though he were.
References
Berckenhagen, E. (1972) ‘Hoppenhaupt, Johann Michael’, in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 9. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, p. 619
Eggeling, T. (1996) ‘Hoppenhaupt’, in Turner, J. (ed.) Grove Art Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Jordan, M. (2001) ‘Johann August Nahl’, in Brigstocke, H. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Kreisel, H. (1970) Die Kunst des deutschen Möbels. Spätbarock und Rokoko [The Art of German Furniture: Late Baroque and Rococo]. Munich: C.H. Beck
Streidt, G. and Feierabend, P. (1999) Prussia: Art and Architecture. Oldenburg: Könemann
The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN
French (Paris), from the former royal library on the rue de Richelieu (Bibliothèque du Roi, later Bibliothèque Nationale); maker not documented. Grand staircase balustrade, forged iron and gilt bronze, c. 1720–1741. The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, London . Wrought iron, cast iron, wood; Height: 0.915 m, Length: 26.448 m
The great staircase at Hertford House, in the Wallace Collection, rises in two marble flights beneath a top-lit ceiling, carried on a balustrade of forged iron and gilt bronze made in Paris in the first half of the eighteenth century. Its panels are worked into deep acanthus scrolls set with gilded sunflowers, cornucopiae, and small flat discs modelled as coins, and a crowned cartouche of interlaced Ls, the royal cipher, marks the centre.
The balustrade is popularly called the ironwork of John Law’s (1671–1729) Banque Royale of 1719, and the name is easily explained. The building on the rue de Richelieu had briefly housed Law’s bank before the King’s Library took it over, and the staircase kept his name in Paris long after his fall. The ironwork itself was made for the library, and the Wallace Collection’s own catalogue records it as a balustrade of forged iron and gilt bronze from the Bibliothèque Nationale, the later name of that royal library (The Wallace Collection, 1910).
Law’s venture in the building lasted barely two years. A Scottish gambler and monetary theorist, he had bought the hôtel de Nevers, part of the old Palais Mazarin, in 1719 to house the Banque Royale and the Mississippi Company, his scheme for financing the French state through paper money and shares, and for a few months the shares carried Paris into a speculative fever. The bubble burst through 1720; by December the shares were worthless, the bank had suspended payment, and Law had fled France. The Crown took the palace back, and the King’s Library moved in soon afterwards.
The bank’s own decoration did not outlast him. Its boardroom ceiling, an allegory of the Mississippi scheme painted by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (1675–1741) in 1720, was removed by about 1728, when the Bibliothèque du Roi took over the galleries. The library was fitted out across the following two decades, first under Robert de Cotte (1656–1735), then under Jacques V Gabriel (1667–1742), with the interiors installed by Jules-Robert de Cotte (1683–1767) (Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.d.a). An older attribution called the ironwork Louis XIV in style; the documented fit-out belongs to the reign of Louis XV (1710–1774). That campaign also accounts for the coins. The library held the royal Cabinet des Médailles, the king’s collection of coins, medals and antiquities, opened to the public in 1741 as the first museum in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.d.b). Coins worked into the balustrade of a building that housed the king’s coin collection need no banker to explain them.
The ironwork reached London through a demolition. The hôtel de Nevers, the wing that had held Law’s bank and then the King’s Library, was largely pulled down around 1860 in Henri Labrouste’s (1801–1875) reconstruction of the site (Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.d.a), and its grand staircase was broken up; Sir Richard Wallace (1818–1890) acquired part of the balustrade, recorded in the museum’s founding catalogue as coming from the Bibliothèque Nationale. He took the lease of Hertford House in 1871, remodelled it between 1872 and 1875, and built the present double staircase around the ironwork (The Wallace Collection, n.d.c). Lady Wallace (1819–1897) left the collection to the nation in 1897, and the house opened as a museum in 1900.
The staircase hall is among the largest and most celebrated spaces in the house, hung with major rococo paintings by François Boucher (1703–1770). Above the flights are The Rising of the Sun and The Setting of the Sun, painted in 1752–3 as full-scale models for tapestries commissioned by Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), in which Apollo, emblem of the French kings, stands in for Louis XV (The Wallace Collection, n.d.d). The collection holds two earlier canvases as well, Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs and The Rape of Europa, painted around 1732–4 for the billiard room of a Paris lawyer and used to draw in prospective clients, the pictures that first made Boucher’s name as a history painter (The Wallace Collection, n.d.e). The ironwork of the king’s library and the paintings made for the king’s mistress reached London by separate routes, and the collecting of the Hertford family and Sir Richard Wallace gathered them into this one room.
Bibliothèque nationale de France (n.d.b) Le Salon Louis XV [The Louis XV Salon]. Available at: https://www.bnf.fr/fr/le-salon-louis-xv (Accessed: 15 June 2023).
Buchan, J. (2018) John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century. London: MacLehose Press
Murphy, A.E. (1997) John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Neuman, R. (1994) Robert de Cotte and the Perfection of Architecture in Eighteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
The Wallace Collection (1910) Catalogue of the Furniture, Marbles, Bronzes, Clocks, Candelabra, Majolica, Porcelain, Glass, Jewellery, Goldsmith’s and Silversmith’s Work, Ivories, Medals, Illuminations, Miniatures, and Objects of Art Generally, in the Wallace Collection. 6th edn. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Available at: https://archive.org/details/catalogueoffurni00wall (Accessed: 15 June 2023).
