Abstract
This article concerns six generations of the Silvestre family: a succession of artists, royal drawing masters, and art collectors whose social ascent began in the late seventeenth century in parallel with the Bourbon Monarchy and continued after its fall. In this article, we show how the Silvestres legitimized a path of social mobility from seventeenth-century artisans to nineteenth-century aristocrats by narrating and documenting the family’s history in three texts—two catalogues raisonnés that recorded the Silvestre art collections and a family biography that traced the dynasty through the French Revolution. By establishing and advancing the family’s reputation or crédit, the Silvestres built a narrative bridge that carried them across the revolutionary divide.
Over the course of a month in the winter of 1811, the art collection of Jacques-Augustin Silvestre was auctioned off in the Hôtel de la Rochefoucault on Paris’s Left Bank. The 1,352 lots of paintings, drawings, prints, and objets de curiosité were the product of more than a century of collecting by four generations of the Silvestre family, comprising what was said to be the oldest art collection in private hands in post-Revolutionary France. 1 The collection was the material representation of a Silvestre dynasty that had risen to impressive heights in parallel with that of the Bourbons—as well as its major financial asset (See Appendix, figure A1). The heirs, Augustin-François Silvestre and his nephew Augustin-Henry Bonnard, were hoping to settle the debts they had accrued following the Revolution of 1789.
Selling the family legacy, however, did not close the door on that past. In this article, we show how the Silvestres undergirded and legitimized a path of social mobility from seventeenth-century artisans to nineteenth-century aristocrats through narrating and documenting a family history of artists, collectors, drawing masters, and royal servants. Through the production of this history, the Silvestres established and advanced the family’s crédit: that discursive link between the moral and the material which historian Clare Crowston has shown to be at the heart of the Old Regime. “The French attached not one but multiple closely interrelated senses to the word credit (or crédit),” she explains. “They used it to describe the informal workings of influence and reputation in politics, social life, religious faith, and cultural production.” Talent, taste, and service maintained over time were the key components of the Silvestre family’s crédit, but these interconnected values were never entirely separate from financial success, security, and integrity. As social, political, and economic regimes rose and fell, the Silvestres engaged in “the constant conversion of one kind of credit into another,” enriching the family’s reputation over the course of six generations. This process of continuity and conversion extended the Silvestres’ crédit well into the nineteenth century, building a bridge that carried them across the revolutionary divide. 2
In what follows, we first outline the story of the Silvestre family in the long eighteenth century and then focus on three texts out of which a meaningful family history was constructed in the nineteenth century: a catalogue raisonné published in advance of the auction of Jacques Silvestre’s collection in 1811; a second catalogue raisonné produced for the sale of the collection of Jacques’s son, François, at his death in 1851; and a family history in the guise of an art historical monograph written in 1868 by François’s son, Edouard.
The Old Regime and the Silvestres’s Revolution
The rise of the Silvestres was similar to that of other families who benefited from the expansion of royal offices intended to create a new aristocracy loyal to the Bourbons. In 1662, Louis XIV named Israël Silvestre dessinateur and graveur du Roi. Six years later, Silvestre was awarded the brevet of drawing master for the royal pages, and in 1673 Louis XIV created for him the post of royal drawing master. The Silvestre dynasty of artists, teachers, and collectors was bracketed by this post: Israël Silvestre was France’s first royal drawing master, and his great-grandson, Jacques Silvestre, who was still holding the brevet when the monarchy was abolished in 1792, was its last. 3
In recognition of his work as an engraver, Louis XIV also awarded Israël Silvestre “the honor of lodging with the other well-respected artisans in the gallery of his château of the Louvre designated for this purpose.” 4 The Louvre apartment brought the Silvestres into the world of the cultural elite of artists, artisans, and savants: what the historian of science Bruno Belhoste has called “a vast caravanserai, housing painters, sculptors, architects, engravers, writers, and scientists,” as well as their various academies. 5 On a practical level, a residence in the Louvre allowed the Silvestres to engage in the practice of engraving and the pleasure of collecting while they pursued a strategy of upward mobility through royal service. After the death of Israël Silvestre in 1691, his eldest son, Charles-François, and then his eldest son, Nicolas-Charles, divided their time between Versailles, where they taught the royal pages and royal children to draw, and the Louvre, where they practiced the art of engraving, attended meetings of the academy, sold prints, and built a collection of old master drawings, prints, and paintings. With each generation of Silvestres and Bourbons, royal favor was reaffirmed through the renewal of brevets that guaranteed the succession from father to eldest son, both of the Louvre apartment and of the post of royal drawing master.
Also passed down from father to son were the skills of the engraver and draftsman, the activities of buying and selling prints, and the art collection. Israël Silvestre’s uncle Israël Henriet had been the printer for the most important artists of his day. When he died in 1661, his nephew inherited both the business (which he brought with him to the Louvre) and a virtually complete set of plates and engravings of Jacques Callot and Etienne La Belle, to which his own drawings, plates, and engravings added additional luster. 6 Fine drawings and engravings were the point of origin for the Silvestres’s professional and connoisseurial expertise, and they formed the backbone of the family art collection.
As the emoluments and rewards of the royal drawing master increased over the years, the art collection grew as well. The collection inventoried at Israël’s death in 1691 was already notable: Noël Coypel, first painter to the king, was called in to estimate the value of the paintings; the esteemed engraver and print dealer Pierre Mariette was consulted for the prints. 7 Seven years later, Germain Brice made special note of the collection in the entry he wrote on Charles-François Silvestre in his Paris guidebook: “Draftsman whose cabinet is decorated with a very beautiful ceiling painted by Boulogne and several excellent paintings; it is he who is teaching the Duke of Burgundy and the Dukes of Anjou and Berry how to draw.” 8 Already, the main components of the family crédit were in place: taste manifested in collecting, talent manifested in drawing and teaching, and service to the royal family.
Charles-François’s son, Nicolas, made the cultivation of taste through collecting his main occupation. In 1734, at the age of only thirty-five, he gave over his duties as drawing master of the royal pages to his fourteen-year-old son, Jacques; soon Jacques took on the rest of his father’s duties as well. Nicolas retreated to the Louvre, the company of other artists, and what Pierre-Jean Mariette (grandson of Pierre Mariette), called his “insatiable thirst” for the acquisition of prints and drawings—a thirst he would not have been able to satisfy had his former pupil, the Dauphin, “not, as it was often claimed, bailed him out and paid his bills.” 9 The inventories made after Nicolas’ death in 1767 show that the collection had grown considerably by then. In the Louvre apartment were 130 paintings, many framed presentation drawings, and a variety of other objects including medals, enamels, porcelains, and bronzes. In a house he had furnished for his mistress in Valenton, about twenty kilometers from Paris, there were another 80 paintings, as well as almost all the drawings and prints. By the end of his life Nicolas had retired there, living the life of a gentleman, surrounded by the collection of prints and drawings that reflected several generations of Silvestre taste, artistic talents, and the generosity of their royal masters. 10
After his father’s death, Jacques continued to teach and collect art, but he had long since abandoned the artistic practice on which the family’s distinction and fortune had been based. 11 Instead, Jacques added to the family’s wealth, privileges, and honors by building strong patronage ties with the children and grandchildren of Louis XV. Soon after Louis XVI took the throne in 1774, he ennobled his former drawing master as chevalier of the Order of Saint Michel, the oldest chivalric order in France, which Louis XIV had revived to create a new nobility of talent and service loyal to the crown—especially writers, artists, and magistrates. In granting Jacques this honor, the king recognized his personal merit but even more, “the services of his family who have always been worthy of us and our predecessors, and who remain distinguished in the art of painting in which several of them achieved the greatest fame.” 12 Like other forms of crédit, that of the Silvestre family gained currency as a function of time, what Crowston calls “the notion of an uninterrupted current or track.” 13 Sustaining repute and artistic authority over multiple generations increased the conversion value of their crédit and provided a means of social elevation. The noble particle that Jacques was now entitled to use and pass on to his children marked the culmination of a century of the Silvestre family’s steady progress in social ascent.
Jacques then secured for his son the succession to the position of royal drawing master and, following family tradition, sent him off to Rome to learn his trade. 14 Before François’s training was complete, however, the succession was withdrawn in favor of a protégé of the governess of the royal children. 15 François was granted a royal pension of 1,500 livres to compensate for the retracted brevet, but this individual pension could not compensate the family for the loss of a dynastic career in royal service established over the course of a century and four generations. To sustain the family trajectory, a new branch was grafted onto the family tree. In 1782, François was granted the succession to his maternal grandfather’s post: librarian to the king’s brother, the Comte de Provence, known as Monsieur. 16 (This would prove to be a lucky improvisation when Monsieur ascended to the throne as Louis XVIII in 1814.)
Now twenty years old, François Silvestre moved into the family apartment in the Louvre. He was asked to prepare a catalog of the library entrusted to him, which included a substantial number of scientific works. “In order to be in a better position to understand them and to be able to work on his own account toward the progress of the applied sciences,” a eulogist later wrote, Silvestre “gave himself over to the study of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and natural history. Welcomed with kindness by the celebrated scientists of that time, he devoted himself completely to the interests of science.” 17 As François forged ahead on this new career path, his father established new ties to the Orléans branch of the royal family through the marriage of François’ sister, Sophie, to the chevalier de Bonnard, tutor to the sons of the Duc de Chartres. 18 When Bonnard died in 1784, Sophie and her two young sons moved back to Versailles to live with her father, bringing with them the substantial dowry the Duc de Chartres had provided to facilitate the marriage. 19
When the monarchy fell in August 1792, all the income the family had built up through the acquisition of brevets, honorific offices, marriages, and pensions was lost overnight, along with the hard-won noble particule: Jacques de Silvestre was again plain Jacques Silvestre. By 1795, he was reduced to requesting a certificate of indigence, declaring that “he possessed no more for all his fortune than 264 livres of revenue from 4000 livres that he had used for food and maintenance.” 20 The art collection, which remained with François in the family’s apartment in the Louvre, was not mentioned.
After Thermidor, the family regrouped in the Louvre. The household now included François’s wife, Constance Julie Garre, and soon their two children: Adèle, born in 1798, and Edouard, in 1800. Three months after the birth of Adèle, however, Sophie and her younger son died of pneumonia, and not long after Edouard’s birth, François and Julie separated; they divorced in April 1802.
21
A month later, twenty-one-year-old Henry Bonnard took up his first posting as an engineer in the French mining corps, leaving behind the small ménage of his uncle, grandfather, niece, and nephew. He was in Saarbrucken, on the left bank of the Rhine, in 1805, when François wrote to say that the family would have to vacate the Louvre to make way for the future museum. “I do not yet know where we are going to live,” he wrote, I would like my father to have a reasonably pleasant place so that he won’t miss the one he has been forced to leave after … 86 years. This is practically the only thing I think about. We are very difficult to house because of all our stuff. My father wants to sell his art collection. He has talked to me about this several times, and I am no longer trying to dissuade him, first because we have waited in vain for a better time to sell for the last fifteen years, and so he won’t worry about it anymore, and [second], because finding room for this collection is one of the main difficulties in finding a suitable place to live.
22
When Jacques Silvestre died four years later at the age of eighty-nine, François was finally forced to liquidate the only asset his father had managed to hold on to: his enormous art collection. The proceeds would be divided equally between him and his nephew Bonnard. They hired François-Léandre Regnault-Delalande, the foremost expert on prints and drawings, to prepare a catalog and organize the sale, but the size of the collection and Regnault’s thoroughness meant that it would be another eighteen months before the auction took place. 25 Not until the following August was François finally able to report that Regnault had finished cataloging the prints, drawings, and paintings and was sending the first sheet of the catalog to the printer. “Meanwhile, he will look over the rest and catalog the objects, curiosities, and perhaps in an appendix, my collection. That will depend upon whether he sees any advantage in profiting from the occasion to sell it.… Whatever happens, I see at least six weeks for printing and two months between the publication and the sale.” 26
A week after its scheduled opening date of February 28, 1811, the sale finally began. A month later, Bonnard reported to an uncle in Burgundy: “The sale ended two days ago, and it did not do as well as we expected. I think that after the commission is paid, a sum more or less equal to that which I owe against my mother’s dowry will be left. Thus, I’ll be free, but I won’t come away with anything.” 27
The Catalogue Raisonné as Family Biography
The lackluster results of the auction must have been all the more disappointing, given the monumental effort and expense of the sale catalog and the central place it accorded the collection in the history and identity of the Silvestre family. The 555-page Catalogue raisonné d’objets d’arts du cabinet de feu M. de Silvestre (Figure 1), published by Regnault-Delalande a few months in advance of the sale, situated the value of the collection in the crédit of the Silvestres, established through a family history that began with Israël Silvestre in the seventeenth century and ended with Jacques de Silvestre, to whom Regnault restored the noble particule of which he had been stripped by the Revolution. 28
Title page, Catalogue raisonné d’objets d’arts du cabinet de feu M. de Silvestre, Paris, 1810. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (1811 Feb. 28 PaReS).
The publication identified and formalized the Silvestres’s immaterial assets of talent, taste, and royal service through the documentation of a collection of fine art, acquired and maintained—like the family’s reputation—over an extraordinary period of time. The function of crédit in the catalogue raisonné was in fact reciprocal; the Silvestres’s personal characteristics endowed the works of art they owned with particular and personal meanings, while the collection certified the family’s taste and social standing in tangible terms. By weaving the values of credit through nearly every aspect of the Silvestre catalogue raisonné, Regnault produced a historical narrative that was preserved and mobilized by later generations of the family even after the collection itself was dispersed. 29
The sale catalog was an ideal site through which to establish the family’s significance, as the dynamics of the art market depended upon analogous systems of associative value. Catalogs were structured to perform this task by opening with an introductory notice or foreword describing the life of the collector, followed by an avertissement or preface detailing the highlights of the collection and the list of objects or lots on offer, sorted by medium and artist or national school. The remarkable stability of this format throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests the efficacy of this biographical approach to selling art. Over the course of the eighteenth century, slight modifications to the textual entries devoted to each lot reinforced the importance of credit in the assessment of works of art: artists’ names were shifted to the top of each entry, set prominently apart from the rest of the text, while details of ownership history or provenance began to be included as part of the description of a work of art. 30 Every object was located between two poles of associative meaning—the reputation of the artist and that of the owner—which anchored the value of a collection. Through the alchemy of credit, the catalogue raisonné translated these meanings into a market value that could be cashed in through a public sale.
Notice sur Jacques-Augustin de Silvestre
Regnault established the terms of the Silvestre family’s crédit in the first sentence of his introductory Notice sur Jacques-Augustin de Silvestre. Yet rather than beginning with the life of Jacques himself, as was standard practice, Regnault reached back in time to position the collection as the product of not one but four successive collectors, each of whom had served as drawing master to the French royal children. To emphasize the longevity of the collection, the primary characteristic that set it apart from any other, the notice took the form of a family history that began with the owner’s great-grandfather: The study of the fine arts requires particular dispositions for the different arenas of which it is composed; it would be audacious to wish to pursue all the arts at once, but it is sufficient to dominate one area particularly well in order to achieve an elevated rank among artists. It is by distinguishing himself in the domain of drawing that Israël Silvestre (to whom the Silvestre family owes, in a sense, its renown) acquired his great reputation.
31
In light of this family legacy, Regnault positioned Jacques’s artistic proclivity as an inevitable, even biological imperative. Finding “too many commendable examples in his family not to follow the career in which his ancestors had acquired such a reputation,” Jacques was encouraged by his father to develop his “natural talent for the study of drawing, and to cultivate the love of painting which had become hereditary in his family.” 33 Regnault interpreted Jacques’ assumption of his father’s teaching duties at the age of fourteen as evidence of this talent. He attested to Jacques’s success as a teacher in terms that emphasized the crédit it produced through his ability to “inspire in his august students the taste for the fine arts that several of them maintained all their lives.” 34 In so doing, Jacques increased his own crédit by imbuing his royal pupils with the Silvestre taste on which it was based. Once the children were duly formed, Jacques requested the king’s permission to go to Rome to “perfect” his own art and taste. 35 In securing it, he received royal approval for what had become a family tradition, like the renewal of the family brevets. Upon his return, Jacques took on a new role for the royal children, becoming the “advisor and arbiter of all their decisions related to works of art.” 36
The linear narrative of building and improving the family art collection was paralleled by Jacques’s own trajectory from artist and teacher to connoisseur and royal advisor, professional and social achievements that Regnault took pains to record. He concluded the notice with the fall of the monarchy and the collapse of Jacques’s career, decrying the injustice by which the Revolution stripped the scion of this great family of everything but this very collection, which he has catalogued only so that it can be sold. 37
The Taste of Collecting
Rather than relegating family history solely to the biographical notice, Regnault returned to the lives of the Silvestres in his preface (avertissement), positioning the personal and historical circumstances of the family as the primary lens through which to interpret the works of art he presented. After asserting that the Silvestre collection was so well known that one could dispense with praising it, he then explained the matchless combination of factors that shaped the Silvestre cabinet in terms of the crédit of the family that built it: This collection, the first that was built in France, was started by Israël Silvestre around 1690 [sic] and continued by Charles-François, Nicolas-Charles, and Jacques-Augustin de Silvestre, his son, grandson and great-grandson, who became its successive owners. The talent which gave them the positions they occupied, the gifts of fortune with which they were favored, the bonds of friendship that united them with the most celebrated artists of the century, and the endless opportunities to acquire precious items with which they were presented over such a long period of time, everything seems to have come together to enrich it.
38
The iconic status of the Raphael became all the more apparent within the lot descriptions that followed, showing how social aspirations were encoded in the cataloging of the collection. While the majority of the catalog entries included basic identification information along with a short description of the work’s aesthetic qualities and exhibition or provenance history, Regnault went much further in his treatment of the Raphael. After describing the picture’s subject matter, he inserted another footnote in order to discuss the finished painting to which the Silvestre oil study related: Raphael’s St. Michael Vanquishing Satan (1518; Figure 2), the jewel of the former royal collection, then housed in the Musée Napoléon (now the Musée du Louvre).
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483-1520). Saint Michael striking down the Demon, called The Large Saint Michael. Oil on canvas, 268 × 160 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (Inv. 610). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. ©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
In this substantial, two-paragraph footnote, Regnault situated Raphael’s large-scale masterwork as the apex of Renaissance art. We learn that Charles Le Brun gave a lecture about it at the Academy in 1667, while Paul Lamazzo, a Milanese painter, encouraged other artists to make a pilgrimage to see it in order to study the figure’s ideal proportions, which “set the standard for the most perfect imitation of nature.” Regnault further underscored the painting’s importance by positioning it within scholarly discussions about its classical models, and concluded by reviewing debates regarding its early provenance. He noted that Vasari believed Raphael had painted it specifically for François I, while Pierre Dam suggested—incorrectly—that it was a gift to the king from Pope Clement VII. 40
This extensive accounting of Raphael’s St. Michael Vanquishing Satan did not provide information about the painting actually for sale in the Silvestre auction. Instead, by insinuating proximity to the royal collection under the auspices of documentation, Regnault enhanced the value of the work of art by linking the family’s history to art historical and royal prestige. Associating an oil sketch owned by the Silvestres with an enormously celebrated masterwork from the royal collection reinforced the analogy between the two paintings and the two families to which they belonged. 41
In addition to its aura of nobility, the Raphael St. Michael established the superior taste of the collector, passed down, as we have seen, from Israël, who acquired it, to his descendants who perhaps were shaped by it. The Italian Renaissance had long been situated as the origin of modern art, with Raphael in particular credited with reinvigorating the status of painting through the introduction of new standards of likeness and sophistication, as the chevalier de Jaucourt explained in the article on modern painting in the Encyclopédie. 42 A collection strong in works of art from Italy established the prestige of the collection and the social standing of the person who assembled it. This is demonstrated by art dealer Pierre Rémy, who wrote in his 1756 preface to the catalog of the Duc de Tallard’s collection: “paintings of the great Masters of Italy have always been regarded as the Masterpieces of the Art of Painting. They alone are able to secure for a collection the esteem of true Connoisseurs.” 43
Despite the high status of Italian masterworks from an art historical perspective, however, beginning in the 1760s the French art market seemed to favor paintings from the Low Countries. Between 1789 and 1820, Italian pictures made up no more than 9 to 15 percent of total sales, in comparison to Dutch and Flemish works which garnered 35 to 50 percent of the market and consistently commanded the highest prices. 44 The prominence accorded the Raphael St. Michael in the catalog distinguished the elevated, informed taste of the Silvestres from the capricious values of the art market, even though the collection itself reflected those values fairly well, at least in terms of the paintings, of which sixty-two were French, thirty-five Flemish, thirty-two Dutch, and only twenty-one Italian. The rhetoric of the catalog defied those values by privileging those upon which the crédit of the family, and by extension its collection, was based. The tragedy of its going on the market at all was the contradiction at the heart of the catalog and could be explained only by the calamity of the Revolution. It was Regnault’s job to establish the value of the objects based on those of the family forced to sell them, rather than those of the market into which they were reluctantly introduced.
Beyond the elevated taste denoted by the Raphael St. Michael, it was the drawings, and especially Italian drawings, that gave the Silvestre collection its particular character. The family’s focus on Italian drawings reflected not only the art historical prestige of such works but also a domain of the Silvestres’s expertise that derived from the travel, training, and professional identities that had defined the family for over a century—terrain they alone occupied at the intersection of artistic practice, royal service, and connoisseurship. Indeed, it was on the basis of the drawings he made in Italy that Israël Silvestre established his reputation as an artist and came to the attention of Louis XIV. As Mariette contended, he documented his travels so well that “one could, as it were, follow him step by step, and find oneself alongside him every place he went.” His drawings, and the engravings he later made based on them, such as the charming View of the Capitoline Hill in Rome from the East (Figure 3), “became effectively an account of his travels,” that gave a better idea of the places he visited than “all the descriptions found in books, however exact they may be.” 45
Israël Silvestre, View of the Capitoline Hill in Rome from the East, mid- to late seventeenth century. Etching, sheet: 4 13/16 × 9 3/4 inches. (12.2 × 24.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917, www.metmuseum.org.
Drawings had been of interest to collectors since the Renaissance, but, as Kristel Smentek has shown, only in the eighteenth century did they become fundamental to the process of connoisseurship. As “purer, less mediated expressions of an artist’s characteristic manière than paintings,” drawings were considered a more reliable basis for attributions and art historical taxonomies. 46 Of the 1,352 total lots in the Silvestre sale, 1,168 lots were works on paper, of which 515 were drawings. 47 The Silvestres collected widely, acquiring works on paper by old masters such as Michelangelo and Rembrandt, French contemporaries like Fragonard and Oudry, and the work of their own students, such as Alexandre-Jean Noël, who studied with both Jacques and his father Nicolas in the 1760s. 48 The collection also held drawings by three generations of Silvestres, further blurring the boundary between the practice of collecting and the documentation of the family’s own history.
Collections of drawings, particularly those put together by artists, were perceived as being less oriented to public appeal and the requirements of the market, qualities that substantiated their aesthetic, rather than financial, merits. Mariette spoke persuasively about the advantages of an artist’s collection in the foreword to his catalog of the collection of Charles-Antoine Coypel, first painter to the king and director of the Royal Academy. “Freed from the tyranny which fashion and caprice exert on the majority of men,” he explained, “artists notice only that which conveys faithfully the true character of beauty.” The works of art selected by an artist thus “teach [the viewer] to make stylistic distinctions and to place each object in the class and level to which it belongs. If an honest fortune supports the views of the artist, his collection will be enriched by the very best pieces; few will be as perfect, or as instructive.” 49 Wealth was necessary to build such a collection, but its value lay within the realm of integrity and connoisseurship, not the market. In these elite circles of aesthetic appreciation, an artist’s collection of drawings garnered interest both because the medium offered a more direct experience of the artist’s hand and because the artist-collector was associated with a particularly discerning eye, privileging objects of aesthetic or instructional interest. 50
The association of drawings with pedagogy demonstrated a further connection between the Silvestres and their collection. From Germain Brice, we know that Charles-François Silvestre opened his collection to visitors; 51 Regnault similarly emphasized Jacques’s keenness to make his collection of drawings useful to others, both to cultivate skills of connoisseurship and as an expression of generosity. He notes that it was “always open to artists and amateurs;” if a visitor expressed the “slightest desire to copy some pieces from it,” Jacques was only too eager to “lend them for an unlimited time, always considering himself to be indebted to the person who allowed him to render this service.” 52 The anecdote artfully brings the expertise of the artist and drawing master into the service of noble generosity, thus bridging the social worlds and identities cultivated by Jacques Silvestre through his collection of drawings. Whether such discursive acts also enhanced the monetary value of the drawings is impossible to know, but in the long run they contributed to the family’s crédit in the social economy of post-Revolutionary France by documenting the ineffable noble qualities of those who collected them.
The Importance of Provenance
As Sophie Raux has shown, formal interest in documenting the ownership history of works of art emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, following the pioneering work of Mariette on the catalog of Crozat’s drawings. 53 In 1783, François-Charles Joullain published the first compendium on provenance, the Répertoire de tableaux, dessins et estampes, Ouvrage utile aux Amateurs, partly in order to track the relationship between value and ownership in a volatile and expanding art market. By the early nineteenth century, provenance was considered a standard aspect of an auction entry, so it is not unusual that Regnault included these details whenever possible in his catalog of the Silvestre collection. He described an ink and wash drawing of a Madonna and child by Frederico Barocci as having belonged previously to the collections of Victoria, Crozat, and Jullienne, and traced a sanguine drawing of the Virgin holding a rose to the collections of Coypel and Tallard, even providing the catalog numbers from those previous sales for further confirmation. 54 In some cases, provenance details provided an engaging historical narrative for the object in question. One entry tracked a pair of pastel drawings by Rosalba Carriera from their origins in Italy through their purchase “long ago” by Cardinal de Polignac who brought them to France, and their subsequent entry into the Pasquier and Tallard collections in the eighteenth century. 55
A notable history of ownership translated into tangible value on the French art market, encouraging experts like Regnault to prioritize these details over aesthetic descriptions of works of art. In his entry for a gouache drawing by Correggio, known by its nickname, the “Madonna of the Rabbit,” Regnault began with two brief sentences praising “the grace, lightness, and intelligence of execution of this subject,” noting that the “contours are delicately rendered, and [that] each part is articulated by its form and local color, detached from the areas that surround it without the aid of any lines.”
56
He quickly moved on to quote at length the description of the work from the 1756 catalog of the Duc de Tallard sale. There, the drawing was characterized in terms of the history of the French collectors who owned it: the renowned theorist Roger de Piles, the distinguished history painter Antoine Coypel, and the prominent amateur, the Duc de Tallard: This beautiful work originally comes from the celebrated collection of Monsieur de Piles. This famous connoisseur, who has written so well on painting, and who joined practice with theory, thought so highly of this drawing that he did not believe it possible to show a greater mark of the friendship that existed between him and the late Monsieur Antoine Coypel than to bequeath it to him in his will. Indeed, it merits in many respects the same esteem as the most beautiful paintings by Corregio. This excellent master appears to have painted it with enough care to satisfy whichever amateur it was who ordered it. We don’t believe that one can find another of the same quality anywhere. The late Duc de Tallard acquired it from the sale of Monsieur Coypel.
57
The inclusion of provenance details in the Silvestre catalogue raisonné corroborated the historical and financial worth of the collection in familiar and publicly agreed-upon terms of crédit. Yet drawing attention to provenance served a secondary benefit for the Silvestre collection, since the provenance of an item could often be established simply by reference to the particular Silvestre who had acquired it. This internal provenance distinguished the collection from all others and increased the perceived value of individual items in it, framing the text and emerging from the individual entries for which provenance was asserted. In his entry for Raphael’s Head of St. Michael, for example, Regnault interrupted the description of the painting to incorporate the family’s acquisition of it into the account: “A head of St. Michael; study by Raphael for the subject in which this great master presented St. Michael casting off Satan. This precious work, in which some slight variations in the hair and the pose may be found, was brought back from Italy by Israël Silvestre. It is painted on paper and mounted on wood.” 58
Provenance also revealed the hidden dynamics of a collection constructed over the course of multiple generations. For example, in the lot descriptions devoted to Correggio’s drawings, a sanguine drawing of the Virgin and Child, noted as purchased from the Lempereur sale in 1773, is sandwiched between drawings acquired from the Duc de Tallard sale twenty years earlier. 59 Nicolas-Charles Silvestre, who died in 1767, most likely acquired the drawings from the Tallard sale, while his son Jacques was responsible for the Virgin and Child. Thus, while the surface impression of the catalog presented the collection as an atemporal whole, beneath it the narrative of family history laid out in the biographical notice could be captured in the fragments of discrete entries. Accounts of internal provenance emphasized the personal connections between individual Silvestres and particular objects; not just the Raphael that Israël Silvestre acquired in Italy, but a painting of Bacchus and Ariadne by Felix Tibaldi that we are told was “painted for the late M. [Jacques] de Silvestre,” and two landscapes by Claude-Joseph Vernet likewise described as being made for Jacques in Italy. 60
The attention to provenance shows that the value of the collection lay first in transmission—of objects, taste, expertise, and wealth—from one generation to the next. But the crédit the family accumulated over time provided an additional dynamic by which the collection grew in both size and significance. References to provenance reiterated the link between the family’s social ascent and the collection they built, in a continuous cycle of transmitted and converted credit that, it was hoped, would translate into cash at the 1811 auction. While the sale was less successful on this front than François Silvestre and Henry Bonnard had anticipated, the narrative captured in the accompanying publication established the family’s crédit in persuasive terms, documenting their achievements in perpetuity for the benefit of subsequent generations of Silvestres. 61
1811–1851: The Collection of Augustin-François de Silvestre
On paper, the Silvestre collection was dispersed in its entirety in 1811. The table des prix, a list of the auction results printed after the sale, provides prices earned for every lot in the catalog. 62 This included François’s own fledgling collection, just under 100 paintings, drawings, prints, and albums that appeared as an appendix to the 1810 catalogue raisonné. 63 The collections of father and son were listed separately because the proceeds of the sale of Jacques Silvestre’s cabinet had to be divided between the two heirs, each of whom was required to purchase any works he wished to keep. François would receive all of the proceeds of the sale of his own collection.
An annotated copy of Regnault’s catalog for the Silvestre sale reveals that François bought at least two of the lots: a series of four landscapes by Brueghel, and the very first lot, a painting by Étienne Aubry entitled Les Adieux de Coriolan à sa femme (Coriolanus’ Farewell to his Wife; Figure 4). 64 Aubry had been Jacques Silvestre’s student; in fact, he was practically a member of the family. In 1764, he represented the godfather at the baptism of Jacques’s daughter Sophie; in 1777, Jacques sent fourteen-year-old François to Rome under the supervision of his former pupil. 65 The purpose of the trip was twofold: the boy would complete his artistic education, and Aubry would realize his ambition to be accepted as a history painter by steeping himself in classical models. Things turned out quite differently for François, as we know, but also for Aubry, who died six months after his return to France. Coriolanus’ Farewell to his Wife was the sole history painting Aubry completed in Rome, and it was well received upon his return to Paris.
Étienne Aubry (French, 1745–1781), Les Adieux de Coriolan à sa Femme au moment qu’il part pour se rendre chez les Volsques. (Coriolanus Taking Leave of his Wife to Join the Volscians in their Attack upon Rome). Oil on canvas, ca. 1780. Purchase with funds given in honor of Helen Leidner Chaikin by her daughter Joyce Chaikin Ahrens, Class of 1962. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts (2014.32). Photograph Laura Shea.
Reporting on the Salon in which the Coriolanus was shown two months after the painter’s death, the Mémoires secrets wrote that is was “justly admired” for its “true color, a wise composition, a clear effect, and above all excellent classical taste. One can only regret such an artist, for whom this painting was his début as a history painter, and dead at 36 in his native city.” 66 Jacques acquired the picture soon after his student’s untimely death. 67
Although the Coriolanus may have been a settlement of Aubry’s financial debt to him, it clearly also meant much more than that to Jacques, as a note found in his papers after his own death almost thirty years later suggests: My son returned from Rome with M. Aubry in the month of December 1780, after a three-year stay in Italy. Aubry died six months after his return. A few days before his death we closed out our affairs together. He owed me five thousand livres that doubtless will never be paid me, but this is a small misfortune in comparison with his loss, which I will regret always for as long as I live.
68
Coriolanus’ Farewell was not among the paintings in the 1851 sale, but at least twelve of the most important works of art from Jacques Silvestre’s collection were listed in the catalog of his son’s collection. 72 These include Correggio’s esteemed Madonna of the Rabbit, Peter Paul Rubens’ drawing The Fall of the Damned, and the iconic Raphael Head of St. Michael, the latter given prime position as lot number one in the new catalog. Since his name does not appear as buyer of these works in annotated copies of the 1810 catalog, it appears that François either bought the objects back later or acquired them from his father’s auction by employing dealers to bid on his behalf, a common practice that allowed an heir to buy in the collection without suggesting the impression of a failed sale to the public. 73
Bonnefons’s spare descriptions make it impossible to confirm how many of the other lots derived from the 1811 sale, but there are striking similarities between the collections of father and son: both included landscape paintings by Paul Pannini, an Adoration of the Shepherds by Corneille Poelemburg, a pen and ink drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, and an Ascension of the Virgin by Castiglione, as well as drawings by Israël, Louis, and Charles-François Silvestre. 74 If François did not acquire these pictures directly from his father’s sale, he clearly pursued work that was resonant of family taste.
Bonnefons de Lavialle highlighted this continuity between the two collections in his catalog entries. Only the important works of art from the family collection were accompanied by textual commentary in Bonnefons’ lot descriptions, and these texts were drawn almost entirely from Regnault’s 1810 catalog. In his entry for the Raphael Head of Saint Michael, for example, Bonnefons eliminated Regnault’s extensive account of the finished masterwork to which the Silvestre study related, but he copied verbatim the final paragraph from the earlier catalog that tied it to Israël Silvestre: “A head of St. Michael, study by Raphael, for the subject in which this great master represented St. Michael vanquishing the demon. This precious piece in which one finds some minor changes in the hairstyle and composition was brought back from Italy by Israël Silvestre. It is painted on paper and mounted on wood.” 75 For Rubens’ Fall of the Damned, Bonnefons simply reproduced Regnault’s description, adding only that the drawing came from the collection of Israël Silvestre to reiterate the continuity between François’s collection and that initiated by his illustrious forebear. 76
This interpretation of François’s collection as the perpetuation of the Silvestre family legacy was advanced within the catalog’s introductory texts as well. François is presented as coming from a family “known for more than two centuries for their taste and practice of the arts,” whose collection formed the noyau [heart or kernel] of the present sale.
77
Bonnefons could not position François—whose own career of public service culminated in more than a decade as head of the Bureau of Agriculture in the Ministry of the Interior—as an artist or drawing master whose expertise was cultivated through practice, so he focused on the continuity of taste that defined his illustrious family. Dealing delicately with the unexpected withdrawal of the brevet of royal drawing master Bonnefons declared: From the artist he had been up to then, M. de Silvestre became the most enlightened amateur, the most skilled at researching and discovering riches that could be added to the collection of paintings and drawings, the precious heritage transmitted by Israël Silvestre to his descendants, ceaselessly augmented by their efforts and placed, in the opinion of connoisseurs, in the first rank of artistic collections by the perfection of the taste of Jacques-Augustin Silvestre.
78
Bonnefons reinforced this account of François’ elevated social status by focusing more on the family’s association with the Bourbon monarchy than on the Silvestres’s artistic talents and achievements. The title page of the catalog set the tone for this approach by identifying the owner of the collection by the title that had been bestowed on him by Charles X in 1826: Baron de Silvestre (Figure 5). 80
Title page, Catalogue. Collection de tableaux, dessins anciens, … objets de curiosité … qui composaient le cabinet de M. le Bon de Silvestre, Paris, 1851. Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library (December 11, 1851 [Dec. 04, 1851]).
Since François’s title was technically invalid at the time of the sale—along with all titles of nobility following the Revolution of 1848—its inclusion here suggests that a connection to the aristocracy still registered value on the art market. Within the catalog, Bonnefons further underscored François’s proximity to the monarchy by describing him as the “former reader and librarian of Louis XVIII and Charles X.” He then placed François in a lineage that began with Louis XIV’s drawing master, Israël Silvestre, and continued through his son Charles-François, tutor to the sons of Louis XIV: the Duc de Bourgogne, “cherished disciple of Fénelon and the great hope of the throne of France;” the Duc d’Anjou, who “later became Philip V of Spain;” and the Duc de Berry. 81 Although the dynasty of royal drawing masters had come to an end with Jacques, a footnote informed the reader that Jacques’ grandchildren were still in possession of a set of drawings made by these princes for their tutor, royal gifts that would preserve materially the Silvestre family’s connection to the French monarchy. 82
Through these various rhetorical strategies, Bonnefons produced a narrative of continuity in which François Silvestre not only inherited and perpetuated the family’s crédit but elevated and enhanced it through his own ties to the restored monarchy. This narrative of consistent and ongoing improvement was very similar to the one employed by Regnault in his description of the Silvestre collection sold in 1811, yet there are significant differences between the collections that these texts elide. The 1810 catalog represented four generations of collecting during which time tastes and acquisition priorities shifted and evolved. By presenting the collection as the product of shared—indeed inherited—taste, Regnault imposed coherence on the Silvestre cabinet that it may never have had. The inclusion of François’s “starter” collection as an appendix to the 1810 catalog challenges the idea of simple dynastic succession in which each Silvestre in turn picked up where his father left off. Like Jacques and François, earlier Silvestre fathers and sons probably collected simultaneously and separately, the collections merging only at the father’s death. The continuity in taste asserted by both Regnault and Bonnefons was thus an idealization that concealed particularities in collecting choices as well as the dynamics of collecting practice itself, which includes selling as well as buying. The result, as put forward in the 1810 catalog, is the perception of a single collection embodying an idealized “Silvestre” dynasty and taste, continuity that bolstered a straight line of uninterrupted and ever-accumulating Silvestre credit.
A comparison between the 1810 and 1851 catalogs shows that François actively promoted this ideal and chose, over the course of the nineteenth century, to acquire art in this spirit. While his collection was smaller than his father’s and oriented toward paintings and drawings rather than drawings and prints, many of the same artists and subjects are represented, in addition to the key family objects acquired from his father’s collection. Notably missing from the collection is art contemporary to the period in which he was buying; the nineteenth century is represented only by a pen drawing attributed to Ingres and an 1827 watercolor by Pierre-Alexandre Wille (known as Wille fils), an artist who exhibited in the 1770s alongside Aubry. 83 There are practical reasons for this—François’s professional art training ended in 1780, and thus his access to artists and knowledge of contemporary art was much more limited than that of his forebears—but it also suggests the conscious desire to acquire works of art legitimized by the taste he was purported to have inherited. 84 Through the process of acquiring works of art owned or admired by his family, François preserved the family’s identity and extended its legacy, and his own role within it, into the mid-nineteenth century.
Information about Certain Painters and Engravers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
“Due to my advanced age and the poor state of my health, I have decided to make a testament, more to make suggestions and advise my two children who will of course inherit my property, than to lay out unalterable wishes,” François Silvestre wrote in his own shaky hand in May 1851, four months before his death. He wanted to explain to his children the meaning of this inheritance and how he hoped they would handle it. He apologized for not yet having cleared up all his debts. “The main satisfaction that I will take to the grave,” he wrote, “is that of leaving to my children a greater fortune than I received from my parents,” despite the difficulties presented by a half century of social and political turmoil. He urged Adèle and Edouard to do the same for their children. By his accounting, he had inherited a total of 236,673 francs and was leaving to his children 653,700. However, this estimate was based on his own valuation of his art collection at 100,000 francs—almost as much as his father’s much larger one had brought in and four times what the collection brought at auction seven months later. 85
François had encouraged his children not to put his collection up for sale, but they did so anyway. 86 And yet, just as François had held on to remnants of his father’s collection forty years earlier, Edouard took steps to preserve his own version of the family legacy: he kept the family portraits and the two drawings made by the Bourbon princes, none of which had ever been put up for sale, as well as a few drawings and engravings by Israël Silvestre. Then, in 1868, he published a history of his family under the title, Renseignements sur quelques peintres et graveurs des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Israël Silvestre et ses descendants (Figure 6).
Title page, Renseignements sur quelques peintres et graveurs des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Israël Silvestre et ses descendants, Paris, 1869. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (N6853 .S5 S6).
Edouard’s idea to write a family history may have been spurred by his contact with L. E. Faucheux, a librarian who published the first catalogue raisonné of the prints of Israël Silvestre in 1857. In the biographical notice that serves as introduction to his catalog, Faucheux acknowledged Edouard’s generosity in sharing family documents with him. 87 Faucheux also acknowledged an 1852 publication by M. E. Meaume, Recherches sur quelques artistes lorrains: Claude Henriet, Israel Henriet, Israël Silvestre et ses descendants, whose title Edouard adapted to his own purposes by omitting the reference to Lorraine and the Henriets to focus his book—just as Regnault and Bonnefons had done—squarely on the Silvestre dynasty that began with Israël. 88
Regnault’s catalog was an important source for Meaume. 89 While he seems not to have had access to the documents Edouard shared with Faucheux a few years later, Meaume included François among the descendants of Israël Silvestre and echoed Bonnefon’s claim that although he had “abandoned his artistic studies” for the natural sciences, the Silvestre sensibility lived on in him, and that he continued to demonstrate “a pronounced taste for the arts.” Although Edouard had not demonstrably inherited that taste, Meaume still saw in him “a worthy heir to the virtues of his ancestors.” 90
Professionally, Edouard had followed the path advocated by his father, studying at the Ecole Polytechnique and then entering public service as a captain in the artillery. 91 However, by the time of his father’s death, his profession was given simply as “propriétaire,” and he had recently joined the administrative council of a charitable organization of which his father was a founding member. 92 His cousin followed more closely his uncle’s vision for the future: Henry Bonnard achieved a successful career in state service, election to the scientific society his uncle had founded in 1788, and then to the Institut (to which Silvestre had been elected in 1806), and the Légion d’honneur in 1834—thirteen years after his uncle was awarded it. 93 Edouard earned none of these honors, but he did inherit his father’s crowning achievement, the title of “Baron de Silvestre,” which had been restored, along with all other noble titles, by Louis Napoleon, and set himself the task of writing and preserving a family history to explain it, undergird it, and give it the luster it deserved. Thanks to Edouard, succeeding generations of Silvestres would be able to show the world that their title of nobility was backed by crédit earned through talent, taste, and service to the French monarchy going back to Louis XIV.
“Several biographers have written sketches of Israël Silvestre and his family,” Edouard wrote in his preface to the Renseignements, “but, not having in their hands all the documents relevant to their work, they have, despite their research and their talent, made certain mistakes which I have thought it necessary to rectify. It will be by sticking to the authentic documents in my possession that I will make known, to the degree that it is possible, what concerns Israël Silvestre and his descendants, all of whom cultivated the arts.” 94 He then assured the reader that he would not discuss the oeuvre of Israël Silvestre or its artistic merits, deferring here to Faucheux, but he would enrich the biographies of his lesser-known descendants with the elements of a catalogue raisonné, “indicating their principal productions, both those which are known to me, and which I possess in large part, and those which I have not yet seen, but which are mentioned in the specialized works that discuss them.” And here he acknowledged both Meaume and Prosper de Baudicour, a collector who published a catalogue raisonné of eighteenth-century French painter-engravers in 1859. 95 Edouard concluded his preface by reiterating that all the “titles, brevets, and diverse documents which will be found at the end of this sketch in chronological order, are for the most part unpublished, and have been copied, I repeat, from the originals which I have in my hands and which bear the signatures of the people, princes or ministers, who signed or countersigned them.” 96
Regnault had documented the family history by cataloging the works of art that filled the Silvestre apartment in the Hôtel de la Rochefoucault when Jacques died in 1809; Edouard now laid the archival foundation of that history by cataloging the documents that had accumulated over the course of the same 150 years that Silvestres were collecting art. For Edouard, collecting art, like making or teaching it, was now only family history. In writing the Renseignements, he preserved the artistic legacy of the Silvestres through documenting and writing that history before all personal memory of it was lost with his death and that of his sister Adèle, who had known their grandfather Jacques as small children and spent their earliest years surrounded by his art collection. 97
The purpose of Edouard’s preface was to establish both his aims and his authority as heir to the Silvestres about whom he was writing. He made no claim either to artistic sensibility or to taste. Instead, he presented himself as a gentleman who was consulted by experts and connoisseurs because he was descended from these other Silvestres and was the guardian of their legacy, both documentary and artistic. The Renseignements, like the catalogues raisonnés before it, aimed to establish a definitive version of that legacy in the same way that other aristocrats might record the military campaigns and battles in which their ancestors demonstrated their nobility and loyalty to the crown. Edouard corroborated the artistic past of his ancestors in order to build upon it a future in which art, in the form of family portraits, was itself primarily documentary, while asserting the continuity of succession on which all claims to nobility necessarily rested. Lineage and merit established over the course of two centuries, supported by voluminous documentation signed by kings and their ministers, would establish that the Silvestres’ claims to nobility were both earned and deeply rooted in the Old Regime, delayed until 1826 only by the misfortune of the Revolution. 98
The building of the art collection is one of the threads that run through Edouard’s narrative. He paid little attention to the works that comprised it, but he made sure to associate it with “the liberality of the princes” the family served. 99 When he came to the career of his grandfather, Edouard deferred to Regnault, quoting in particular the long passage in which Regnault discussed the respect shown to Jacques by his royal pupils. 100 Later, however, he emphasized a crucial moment in Jacques’s life that Regnault had skipped over entirely: the death of his second wife and the decision to marry a third time at the age of forty-three. What motivated him to remarry, according to Edouard, was the desire to leave to a son “the riches of that general respect that his talents and the pleasantness of his character had earned and brought to him.” 101 Edouard’s own father, of course, was the product of that third marriage, which thus preserved the Silvestre crédit and dynasty. Similarly, Edouard interpreted the tragedy of the Revolution not just in terms of Jacques’s own losses, but in the loss of his hopes and dreams for his son. Edouard passed over quickly the misfortune of the sale of the family art collection without comment or casting blame. 102
When Edouard died in 1881, he left his own testament.
103
To his daughter Fanny, he bequeathed a portrait of her sister, Emma, who had died two years earlier, and a set of decorative objects from Emma’s room. To his son Franz, he left all the family papers, charging him to share with his sister any that might interest her. He asked his two children to divide up as they wished the family photos, but left to his son “all the
The Silvestre art collection now exists only through the catalogs produced to facilitate its sale, and many of the objects that comprised it—including the Raphael oil study—can no longer be traced. 104 For Edouard, family historian, the essential works of art were the family portraits and the two drawings given by the royal princes to their Silvestre drawing master, objects that served most directly to guarantee the Silvestres’s noble status. 105 Should another revolution ensue—as indeed it did only a couple of years after the Renseignements were published—the crédit the family had earned over the course of two centuries, and the title that rested upon it, would be secure. The work of documentation carried out by Regnault-Delalande, Bonnefons de Lavialle, and Edouard de Silvestre was successful in reinvesting the values represented by the art collection back into the family itself and producing a family history securely grounded in artistic achievement, royal service, and educated taste. Rather than marking revolutionary rupture through the memorialization of loss, these three texts laid a foundation deep in the Old Regime on which to build family success in a changing world.
Footnotes
Appendix
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Burton Fredericksen, Darius Spieth, and Scott Allan for their generosity in sharing with us crucial documents and especially their deep knowledge of the arcane field of the history of art sales and catalogs. We benefited greatly from the discussion of an early draft of this article by University of Michigan’s Eighteenth-Century Studies Group and from comments provided by Charles Talbot and the two anonymous peer reviewers of the manuscript itself. Our thanks also to Mia Jackson and Hannah Williams, animators of the conference, “The Louvre before the Louvre: Artists, Artisans, and Academies,” held at the Wallace Collection (London) in July 2013, in which some of the material here was first presented.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by a Rackham Spring/Summer Research Grant from the University of Michigan. Funding for illustrations was provided by the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan.