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拍品專文
First documented in 1735, the Beit Kermesse has long been heralded as one of the jewels in the Teniers oeuvre and one of the most successful treatments of the artist’s most popular subject. Its provenance alone is testament to its enormous appeal, passing successively through some of the greatest French Old Master collections of the 18th and early 19th century, from the Marquis de Brunoy, to Antoine Dutarte, Lucien Bonaparte and the Comte de Pourtalès. Alfred Beit bought the Kermesse in 1894 from John Walter, of Bearwood, on the trusted recommendation of his advisor Wilhem von Bode. A beautifully preserved, multi-figural work painted on copper, it remains today perhaps the most important Kermesse by Teniers still in private hands.
Von Bode dated the picture to the first years of the 1640s, a dating which has since been maintained by all scholars including Margret Klinge. In the 1640s, Teniers reached the pinnacle of his career, developing a more colourful palette, a richer rendition of detail and the use of increasingly elaborate compositions. At the same time, the theme of the multi-figural, Brueghelian Kermesse took on central importance in the artist’s output, allowing for the fullest expression of his talents and range. Teniers’s fixation with the subject has been associated with his close links to the Brueghel family, forged in 1637 by virtue of his marriage to Anna, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). According to Klinge, the marriage ‘undoubtedly contributed to his artistic preoccupation with the work of his father-in-law, who had died in 1625, for by marriage he came into possession of paintings and drawings by various members of the Brueghel family including Pieter Bruegel the Elder’.
The debt to the Brueghel dynasty in all of Teniers’s treatments of village festivities is incontrovertible. Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s numerous versions of the Wedding Dance and various Kermesses laid down a clear precedent for Teniers, although the latter brings the subject up to date with contemporary protagonists and often with recognisable settings, as in the present work, which is staged at the gates of the city of Antwerp with the cathedral’s unmistakable spire visible in the distance. Teniers may have been influenced to a greater degree by the more original and more highly refined output of his late father-in-law, by works such as the Sunday Village Fete, of 1612 (fig. 1; Munich, Alte Pinakothek). Teniers does not adopt the elevated viewpoint and diagonal axis so favoured by Jan Brueghel, but his delicate rendering of trees and the landscape, his use of colour and adoption of certain figure motifs do reveal a clear debt to his wife’s father. Teniers also adopts the same positive character created by the rural scenes of Jan Brueghel the Elder. The Teniers view of rural life is entirely positive, with peasants, as in this example, depicted freely enjoying themselves on a summer’s day. While the mood is celebratory and a few of the protagonists may have over-indulged themselves (one staggering reveller can be seen being helped on his way home at the gateway), their behaviour is under control and not overly coarse or threatening.
It is probably no coincidence that Teniers’s earliest dated Kermesse is from the same year as his marriage into the Brueghel family in 1637 (Madrid, Museo del Prado). In terms of composition there are many parallels to be drawn between the Prado picture and the present work, with the principal action taking place in left half of the foreground with peasants dancing to a musician in an elevated position outside an inn, with the landscape in view on the right. This basic structure was used in varying formats for all of the artist’s ensuing treatments of the theme during the 1640s. These comprise many of Teniers’s most famous works – the Kermesse before the Half-Moon Inn, 1641 (fig. 2; Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie); the Kermesse, 1646 (fig. 3; St. Petersburg, Hermitage), the Kermesse, 1648 (fig. 4; Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle); and the Kermesse, 1649 (Buckingham Palace, The Royal Collection). The Beit picture holds a key place within this esteemed group and, significantly, is the only one amongst them painted on copper.
The Provenance
The Beit Kermesse was first recorded in the posthumous sale of the collection of the Haarlem burgomaster Johan van Schuylenburch in 1735. Like many of the best pictures to appear at auction in Holland at this time, the painting was purchased for the buoyant Parisian art market, where it re-appeared three decades later, in 1766, in the famous Montmartel cabinet. The intervening years witnessed a watershed moment in the history of taste, during which an elite of vanguard of highly influential collectors, such as the Comtesse de Verrue, Jean de Jullienne and the Duc de Lassay, championed the goût hollandais in Regency France. Following their lead, discerning amateurs started to move away from the histrionic and ponderous grande manière promoted by Italian painting and institutionalised by the French Academy in the previous century. The naturalism, spontaneity and unrivalled technical brilliance of the Dutch Golden Age painters seemed infinitely more appealing in comparison, and their pictures’ relatively modest dimensions made them much better suited to eighteenth-century French interiors. Amongst the 17th century Dutch and Flemish artists who became fashionable amongst these new French collectors, Teniers was perhaps the most sought after of all. The influential art dealer Gersaint alluded to this in 1744: ‘[Teniers’s] works are those which are the most universally beloved; the true connoisseurs seek them to admire their beau faire, which each time appears new to them’. According to Gersaint, no worthy collection was complete without the acquisition of a Teniers. The artist’s enormous popularity was further disseminated by the numerous engravings – such as that produced by Le Bas in 1775 after the Beit Kermesse – made after his works, which were widely distributed and passionately discussed in cultivated circles. Prices for Teniers’s best works soared throughout the century, eliciting a thriving industry of copies and pastiches (for a more detailed account of the passion for Teniers’s work in eighteenth-century France, see P. Michel, Peinture et Plaisir: Les goûts picturaux des collectionneurs parisiens au XVIIIe siècle, Rennes, 2010, pp. 197-99). Of Teniers’s broad range of genre subjects, it was the Kermesses that commanded the highest prices, while his paintings on copper, which allowed for the most vivid appreciation of his refined handling, were held in especially high regard. Seen in this light, the success of the Beit picture at the Montmartel auction is unsurprising.
Born a commoner, Jean Pâris de Montmartel, Marquis de Brunoy (fig. 5) experienced a meteoric rise to power and became treasurer and banker to King Louis XV. Famously, Montmartel was also Madame de Pompadour’s godfather and a persistent rumour suggested that she was his illegitimate daughter. Along with some of his contemporaries such as Paul Randon de Boisset, Pâris de Montmartel embodied a new kind of collector emerging from the world of finance, whose considerable wealth and predilection for northern pictures were deemed responsible for the dramatic rise of the prices for Flemish and Dutch art. Teniers’s Kermesse appears in the inventory of Montmartel’s Parisian residence, drawn up after his death in 1766 (published by Dubois-Corneau, op. cit., p. 336). Valued at 4,000 livres, it was the most prized possession of this reputed cabinet. Along with the rest of the collection, the Beit Kermesse was inherited by Jean’s son Armand-Louis, a rather rakish and extravagant character. Following his father’s death, Armand-Louis’s uncontrolled spending led him to be dispossessed of his inheritance by his family, who sought legal action against him. The family estate of the Château de Brunoy, famous for its magnificent gardens and jeux d’eau, as well as Montmartel’s collection of pictures was sold as a result. Auctioned in 1776 for a remarkable 6,000 livres, the Beit Kermesse achieved one of the five top prices at the Montmartel sale.
The painting was purchased there by the dealer Quenet on behalf of the great connoisseur Antoine Jean-Baptiste Dutartre. In his role as Trésorier des Bâtiments du Roi, Dutartre was entrusted with the crucial mission to overlook the building and renovation process of the king’s residences both in and outside of Paris. As such, he became acquainted with a host of artists and architects who spurred Dutartre on to form a collection of pictures of his own. He purchased works at many of the most important Paris sales in the second half of the 18th century: namely, in addition to the Montmartel auction, that of Lalive de Jully, Lempereur, Blondel de Gagny, Randon de Boisset and Prince de Conty. Only 33 paintings graced the walls of Dutartre’s cabinet, and the collector famously refused to increase the number of his pictures on the basis that he would only accept masterpieces. These included: Francesco Albani’s Neptune and Amphitrite (Fontainebleau, Château), Rubens’s Landscape at Sunset and Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs (both London, National Gallery, the latter now believed to be a work by the young van Dyck). Of all these treasures, it is Teniers’s Kermesse that achieved the highest price at Dutartre’s posthumous sale in 1804, selling for an astonishing 16,150 francs.
The Dutartre sale marked the last great acquisition made on the Parisian art market by Lucien Bonaparte (fig. 6), Napoleon’s rebellious and erudite brother, before leaving France for Italy at the end of March 1804. A leading political figure during the French Directoire and the architect behind the coup that brought his brother to power in 1799, Lucien Bonaparte was also the most important and ambitious collector of his day, exhibiting the bulk of his pictures at the elegant Hôtel de Brienne in Paris, which he had acquired in 1802. In 1804, for reasons both political and personal, Lucien fell out with his brother and decided to set off to live in exile in Rome. He took his entire art collection with him, and the Beit Kermesse appears in an inventory, drawn up in June 1804, upon Lucien’s installation in the Palazzo Lancellotti ai Coronari, in the ‘Primo Sallone’ [sic.] hanging alongside Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of Giovanni della Volta with his Wife and Children (London, National Gallery), Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Book (New York, Metropolitan Museum) and Velázquez’s Portrait of a Lady with a Fan (London, Wallace Collection). In 1808, a new inventory of Lucien’s gallery – which had by then been moved to the Palazzo Nuñez, near Piazza di Spagna – was drawn up. Teniers’s Kermesse now hung in the ‘Stanza XIV’ along with Sofonisba Anguissola’s Chess Game (Poznan, Muzeum Narodowe). In comparison with the previous collections that had held the Kermesse, Lucien’s tastes were more eclectic: beyond Netherlandish art, he seemed to have been interested in gathering an encyclopaedic collection, to reflect almost every school of painting, with such diverse masterpieces as Bronzino’s Portrait of Lodovico Capponi (New York, Frick Collection), Nicolas Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents (Chantilly, Musée Condé), Guido Reni’s Saint Cecilia (Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum), and Gerrit van Honthorst’s Christ before the High Priest (London, National Gallery).
During the few years that Lucien spent in Rome, financial difficulties started to trouble him due to his prolonged dispute with his all-powerful brother. This prompted his dramatic decision in 1810 to emigrate and seek his fortune in America. The selling of his collection, which stayed in Rome, was intended to finance his new life there. However, on his way to Philadelphia, Bonaparte and his family were captured at sea by the British and held in London until 1814. In 1812, during his semi-captivity in the English capital, a catalogue of engravings was published entitled Choix de gravures à l’eau-forte d’après les peintures et les marbres de la galerie de Lucien Bonaparte, recording the most important works in his collection – including the Beit Kermesse, clearly in anticipation of a sale. Released after the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Lucien returned to Rome. Still cash-stricken, he consigned his collection for sale in London in 1815 with the lawyer-turned-art dealer William Buchanan, who in his Memoirs of Painting later reminisced about the Teniers: ‘It is one of those subjects in which this master was always so successful, and where he bestowed every effort of his genius and pencil, being so congenial to his own taste and feelings. The various groups of figures in this picture are well placed, full of spirit and highly finished […] Was valued at 800 gns.’ However, Buchanan’s sale was not a success and Lucien’s collection was eventually dispersed at auction the following year.
The Beit Kermesse is subsequently documented in yet another fabled collection, that of James-Alexandre de Pourtalès, a Swiss banker and diplomat residing in Paris (fig. 7). Pourtalès started buying pictures in the 1800s when Lucien Bonaparte’s collection was considered an exemplar throughout Europe. He is known to have owned a copy of the compilation of engravings after works from Lucien’s collection published in 1812 and, in addition to the Beit Teniers, he acquired seven other ex-Bonaparte pictures including the two Bronzinos mentioned above. The reputation of the Pourtalès collection caught the attention of the most prestigious art lovers in Europe, such as the King of Prussia and the Duchess of Berry, who both famously paid a visit to Pourtalès’s gallery on Place Vendôme in Paris in 1818 and 1819 respectively (L. Langer ‘Les tableaux italiens de James-Alexandre, Comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier’, Le goût pour la peinture italienne autour de 1800, prédécesseurs, modèles et concurrents du cardinal Fesch, Ajaccio, 2006, pp. 261-75).
The history of the Beit Kermesse’s passage through the Pourtalès collection reflects another shift in taste, as appetite for the goût hollandais started to wane in France in the first decades of the 19th century. The picture was part of a group of 27 Flemish and Dutch paintings that Pourtalès decided to part with in 1826 in order to focus his attention on Italian pictures. These included masterpieces such as Pieter de Hooch’s Interior with a Woman Drinking with two Men and a Maidservant, Willem van de Velde’s glorious A Dutch Yacht Saluting (both London, National Gallery), Jan van Huysum’s Flowers in a Vase (London, Wallace Collection) and Paulus Potter’s Piebald Horse (Los Angeles, Getty Museum). The sale of these paintings to an English art dealer caused a certain amount of national sorrow among the French artistic élite: reminiscing about the en bloc sale a few decades later, Emile Galichon lamented in words that seems to make direct reference to the Beit Teniers: ‘Soon even, [Pourtalès] derived no more pleasure from entering with Ostade and Teniers in smoky cottages, or from following these painters in dimly lit inns or in the middle of kermesses. He therefore delivered in one single day […] twenty-seven Dutch and Flemish masterpieces to an English merchant’ (E. Galichon, ‘La Galerie Pourtalès III, Les Tableaux Italiens’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 18, 1865, p. 6). In a letter from 1842 to the bibliophile Paul Lacroix who was offering him a Potter for sale, Pourtalès elucidated the reasons for such a change in his personal tastes: ‘I have not been collecting Flemings for about fifteen or twenty years. At this time, I had a quite beautiful collection of pictures from this school but I parted with it to make room for pictures from higher [i.e. Italian] schools and which would be more in harmony with my collection of antiques – for which I have a predilection’ (cited in L. Langer, op. cit., 2006, p. 264).
Von Bode dated the picture to the first years of the 1640s, a dating which has since been maintained by all scholars including Margret Klinge. In the 1640s, Teniers reached the pinnacle of his career, developing a more colourful palette, a richer rendition of detail and the use of increasingly elaborate compositions. At the same time, the theme of the multi-figural, Brueghelian Kermesse took on central importance in the artist’s output, allowing for the fullest expression of his talents and range. Teniers’s fixation with the subject has been associated with his close links to the Brueghel family, forged in 1637 by virtue of his marriage to Anna, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). According to Klinge, the marriage ‘undoubtedly contributed to his artistic preoccupation with the work of his father-in-law, who had died in 1625, for by marriage he came into possession of paintings and drawings by various members of the Brueghel family including Pieter Bruegel the Elder’.
The debt to the Brueghel dynasty in all of Teniers’s treatments of village festivities is incontrovertible. Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s numerous versions of the Wedding Dance and various Kermesses laid down a clear precedent for Teniers, although the latter brings the subject up to date with contemporary protagonists and often with recognisable settings, as in the present work, which is staged at the gates of the city of Antwerp with the cathedral’s unmistakable spire visible in the distance. Teniers may have been influenced to a greater degree by the more original and more highly refined output of his late father-in-law, by works such as the Sunday Village Fete, of 1612 (fig. 1; Munich, Alte Pinakothek). Teniers does not adopt the elevated viewpoint and diagonal axis so favoured by Jan Brueghel, but his delicate rendering of trees and the landscape, his use of colour and adoption of certain figure motifs do reveal a clear debt to his wife’s father. Teniers also adopts the same positive character created by the rural scenes of Jan Brueghel the Elder. The Teniers view of rural life is entirely positive, with peasants, as in this example, depicted freely enjoying themselves on a summer’s day. While the mood is celebratory and a few of the protagonists may have over-indulged themselves (one staggering reveller can be seen being helped on his way home at the gateway), their behaviour is under control and not overly coarse or threatening.
It is probably no coincidence that Teniers’s earliest dated Kermesse is from the same year as his marriage into the Brueghel family in 1637 (Madrid, Museo del Prado). In terms of composition there are many parallels to be drawn between the Prado picture and the present work, with the principal action taking place in left half of the foreground with peasants dancing to a musician in an elevated position outside an inn, with the landscape in view on the right. This basic structure was used in varying formats for all of the artist’s ensuing treatments of the theme during the 1640s. These comprise many of Teniers’s most famous works – the Kermesse before the Half-Moon Inn, 1641 (fig. 2; Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie); the Kermesse, 1646 (fig. 3; St. Petersburg, Hermitage), the Kermesse, 1648 (fig. 4; Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle); and the Kermesse, 1649 (Buckingham Palace, The Royal Collection). The Beit picture holds a key place within this esteemed group and, significantly, is the only one amongst them painted on copper.
The Provenance
The Beit Kermesse was first recorded in the posthumous sale of the collection of the Haarlem burgomaster Johan van Schuylenburch in 1735. Like many of the best pictures to appear at auction in Holland at this time, the painting was purchased for the buoyant Parisian art market, where it re-appeared three decades later, in 1766, in the famous Montmartel cabinet. The intervening years witnessed a watershed moment in the history of taste, during which an elite of vanguard of highly influential collectors, such as the Comtesse de Verrue, Jean de Jullienne and the Duc de Lassay, championed the goût hollandais in Regency France. Following their lead, discerning amateurs started to move away from the histrionic and ponderous grande manière promoted by Italian painting and institutionalised by the French Academy in the previous century. The naturalism, spontaneity and unrivalled technical brilliance of the Dutch Golden Age painters seemed infinitely more appealing in comparison, and their pictures’ relatively modest dimensions made them much better suited to eighteenth-century French interiors. Amongst the 17th century Dutch and Flemish artists who became fashionable amongst these new French collectors, Teniers was perhaps the most sought after of all. The influential art dealer Gersaint alluded to this in 1744: ‘[Teniers’s] works are those which are the most universally beloved; the true connoisseurs seek them to admire their beau faire, which each time appears new to them’. According to Gersaint, no worthy collection was complete without the acquisition of a Teniers. The artist’s enormous popularity was further disseminated by the numerous engravings – such as that produced by Le Bas in 1775 after the Beit Kermesse – made after his works, which were widely distributed and passionately discussed in cultivated circles. Prices for Teniers’s best works soared throughout the century, eliciting a thriving industry of copies and pastiches (for a more detailed account of the passion for Teniers’s work in eighteenth-century France, see P. Michel, Peinture et Plaisir: Les goûts picturaux des collectionneurs parisiens au XVIIIe siècle, Rennes, 2010, pp. 197-99). Of Teniers’s broad range of genre subjects, it was the Kermesses that commanded the highest prices, while his paintings on copper, which allowed for the most vivid appreciation of his refined handling, were held in especially high regard. Seen in this light, the success of the Beit picture at the Montmartel auction is unsurprising.
Born a commoner, Jean Pâris de Montmartel, Marquis de Brunoy (fig. 5) experienced a meteoric rise to power and became treasurer and banker to King Louis XV. Famously, Montmartel was also Madame de Pompadour’s godfather and a persistent rumour suggested that she was his illegitimate daughter. Along with some of his contemporaries such as Paul Randon de Boisset, Pâris de Montmartel embodied a new kind of collector emerging from the world of finance, whose considerable wealth and predilection for northern pictures were deemed responsible for the dramatic rise of the prices for Flemish and Dutch art. Teniers’s Kermesse appears in the inventory of Montmartel’s Parisian residence, drawn up after his death in 1766 (published by Dubois-Corneau, op. cit., p. 336). Valued at 4,000 livres, it was the most prized possession of this reputed cabinet. Along with the rest of the collection, the Beit Kermesse was inherited by Jean’s son Armand-Louis, a rather rakish and extravagant character. Following his father’s death, Armand-Louis’s uncontrolled spending led him to be dispossessed of his inheritance by his family, who sought legal action against him. The family estate of the Château de Brunoy, famous for its magnificent gardens and jeux d’eau, as well as Montmartel’s collection of pictures was sold as a result. Auctioned in 1776 for a remarkable 6,000 livres, the Beit Kermesse achieved one of the five top prices at the Montmartel sale.
The painting was purchased there by the dealer Quenet on behalf of the great connoisseur Antoine Jean-Baptiste Dutartre. In his role as Trésorier des Bâtiments du Roi, Dutartre was entrusted with the crucial mission to overlook the building and renovation process of the king’s residences both in and outside of Paris. As such, he became acquainted with a host of artists and architects who spurred Dutartre on to form a collection of pictures of his own. He purchased works at many of the most important Paris sales in the second half of the 18th century: namely, in addition to the Montmartel auction, that of Lalive de Jully, Lempereur, Blondel de Gagny, Randon de Boisset and Prince de Conty. Only 33 paintings graced the walls of Dutartre’s cabinet, and the collector famously refused to increase the number of his pictures on the basis that he would only accept masterpieces. These included: Francesco Albani’s Neptune and Amphitrite (Fontainebleau, Château), Rubens’s Landscape at Sunset and Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs (both London, National Gallery, the latter now believed to be a work by the young van Dyck). Of all these treasures, it is Teniers’s Kermesse that achieved the highest price at Dutartre’s posthumous sale in 1804, selling for an astonishing 16,150 francs.
The Dutartre sale marked the last great acquisition made on the Parisian art market by Lucien Bonaparte (fig. 6), Napoleon’s rebellious and erudite brother, before leaving France for Italy at the end of March 1804. A leading political figure during the French Directoire and the architect behind the coup that brought his brother to power in 1799, Lucien Bonaparte was also the most important and ambitious collector of his day, exhibiting the bulk of his pictures at the elegant Hôtel de Brienne in Paris, which he had acquired in 1802. In 1804, for reasons both political and personal, Lucien fell out with his brother and decided to set off to live in exile in Rome. He took his entire art collection with him, and the Beit Kermesse appears in an inventory, drawn up in June 1804, upon Lucien’s installation in the Palazzo Lancellotti ai Coronari, in the ‘Primo Sallone’ [sic.] hanging alongside Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of Giovanni della Volta with his Wife and Children (London, National Gallery), Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Book (New York, Metropolitan Museum) and Velázquez’s Portrait of a Lady with a Fan (London, Wallace Collection). In 1808, a new inventory of Lucien’s gallery – which had by then been moved to the Palazzo Nuñez, near Piazza di Spagna – was drawn up. Teniers’s Kermesse now hung in the ‘Stanza XIV’ along with Sofonisba Anguissola’s Chess Game (Poznan, Muzeum Narodowe). In comparison with the previous collections that had held the Kermesse, Lucien’s tastes were more eclectic: beyond Netherlandish art, he seemed to have been interested in gathering an encyclopaedic collection, to reflect almost every school of painting, with such diverse masterpieces as Bronzino’s Portrait of Lodovico Capponi (New York, Frick Collection), Nicolas Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents (Chantilly, Musée Condé), Guido Reni’s Saint Cecilia (Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum), and Gerrit van Honthorst’s Christ before the High Priest (London, National Gallery).
During the few years that Lucien spent in Rome, financial difficulties started to trouble him due to his prolonged dispute with his all-powerful brother. This prompted his dramatic decision in 1810 to emigrate and seek his fortune in America. The selling of his collection, which stayed in Rome, was intended to finance his new life there. However, on his way to Philadelphia, Bonaparte and his family were captured at sea by the British and held in London until 1814. In 1812, during his semi-captivity in the English capital, a catalogue of engravings was published entitled Choix de gravures à l’eau-forte d’après les peintures et les marbres de la galerie de Lucien Bonaparte, recording the most important works in his collection – including the Beit Kermesse, clearly in anticipation of a sale. Released after the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Lucien returned to Rome. Still cash-stricken, he consigned his collection for sale in London in 1815 with the lawyer-turned-art dealer William Buchanan, who in his Memoirs of Painting later reminisced about the Teniers: ‘It is one of those subjects in which this master was always so successful, and where he bestowed every effort of his genius and pencil, being so congenial to his own taste and feelings. The various groups of figures in this picture are well placed, full of spirit and highly finished […] Was valued at 800 gns.’ However, Buchanan’s sale was not a success and Lucien’s collection was eventually dispersed at auction the following year.
The Beit Kermesse is subsequently documented in yet another fabled collection, that of James-Alexandre de Pourtalès, a Swiss banker and diplomat residing in Paris (fig. 7). Pourtalès started buying pictures in the 1800s when Lucien Bonaparte’s collection was considered an exemplar throughout Europe. He is known to have owned a copy of the compilation of engravings after works from Lucien’s collection published in 1812 and, in addition to the Beit Teniers, he acquired seven other ex-Bonaparte pictures including the two Bronzinos mentioned above. The reputation of the Pourtalès collection caught the attention of the most prestigious art lovers in Europe, such as the King of Prussia and the Duchess of Berry, who both famously paid a visit to Pourtalès’s gallery on Place Vendôme in Paris in 1818 and 1819 respectively (L. Langer ‘Les tableaux italiens de James-Alexandre, Comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier’, Le goût pour la peinture italienne autour de 1800, prédécesseurs, modèles et concurrents du cardinal Fesch, Ajaccio, 2006, pp. 261-75).
The history of the Beit Kermesse’s passage through the Pourtalès collection reflects another shift in taste, as appetite for the goût hollandais started to wane in France in the first decades of the 19th century. The picture was part of a group of 27 Flemish and Dutch paintings that Pourtalès decided to part with in 1826 in order to focus his attention on Italian pictures. These included masterpieces such as Pieter de Hooch’s Interior with a Woman Drinking with two Men and a Maidservant, Willem van de Velde’s glorious A Dutch Yacht Saluting (both London, National Gallery), Jan van Huysum’s Flowers in a Vase (London, Wallace Collection) and Paulus Potter’s Piebald Horse (Los Angeles, Getty Museum). The sale of these paintings to an English art dealer caused a certain amount of national sorrow among the French artistic élite: reminiscing about the en bloc sale a few decades later, Emile Galichon lamented in words that seems to make direct reference to the Beit Teniers: ‘Soon even, [Pourtalès] derived no more pleasure from entering with Ostade and Teniers in smoky cottages, or from following these painters in dimly lit inns or in the middle of kermesses. He therefore delivered in one single day […] twenty-seven Dutch and Flemish masterpieces to an English merchant’ (E. Galichon, ‘La Galerie Pourtalès III, Les Tableaux Italiens’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 18, 1865, p. 6). In a letter from 1842 to the bibliophile Paul Lacroix who was offering him a Potter for sale, Pourtalès elucidated the reasons for such a change in his personal tastes: ‘I have not been collecting Flemings for about fifteen or twenty years. At this time, I had a quite beautiful collection of pictures from this school but I parted with it to make room for pictures from higher [i.e. Italian] schools and which would be more in harmony with my collection of antiques – for which I have a predilection’ (cited in L. Langer, op. cit., 2006, p. 264).