Orleans Collection

Jupiter and Io by Correggio, one of the few paintings to leave the Orleans Collection before the French Revolution. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

The Orleans Collection was a very important collection of over 500 paintings formed by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, mostly acquired between about 1700 and his death in 1723.[1] Apart from the great royal-become-national collections of Europe it is arguably the greatest private collection of Western art, especially Italian, ever assembled, and probably the most famous,[2] helped by the fact that most of the collection has been accessible to the public since it was formed, whether in Paris, or subsequently in London, Edinburgh and elsewhere.

The core of the collection was formed by 123 paintings from the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden, which itself had a core assembled from the war booty of the sacks by Swedish troops of Munich in 1632 and Prague in 1648 during the Thirty Years War.[3] During the French Revolution the collection was sold by Louis Philippe d'Orléans, Philippe Égalité, and most of it acquired by an aristocratic English consortium led by Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. Much of the collection has been dispersed, but significant groups remain intact, having passed by inheritance.[4] One such group is the Sutherland Loan or Bridgewater Loan, including sixteen works from the Orleans Collection,[5] in the National Gallery of Scotland, and another is at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. There are twenty-five paintings formerly in the collection now in the National Gallery, London, which have arrived there by a number of different routes.[6]

The collection is of central interest for the history of collecting, and of public access to art. It figured in two of the periods when art collections were most subject to disruption and dispersal: the mid-17th century and the period after the French Revolution.[7]

  1. ^ Louis-François Dubois de Saint-Gelais, 1727. Description des tableaux du Palais Royal avec la vie des peintres à la tête de leurs ouvrages, Preface. Reprinted 1737 and 1972 (Geneva). The descriptions are online at the Getty Provenance Index - choose Archival documents, and search with Orleans Collection in "Owner's name".
  2. ^ Watson, 202, and Penny, 461 and Reitlinger, 26
  3. ^ Penny, 463
  4. ^ Penny gives a concise history of the collection in a few thousand words, with special reference to the paintings in the National Gallery. Watson covers the history from Prague to London in 175 pages; his book is the history of the Frick Veronese. From their bibliographies, there do not appear to be any full listings in English of the collections of Rudolf, Christina or the Dukes of Orléans, still less ones with current locations.
  5. ^ Penny, 466
  6. ^ Penny, 461 lists 25, though for example the National Gallery catalogue for the Flemish School (Martin, 1970) lists other Orléans provenances that are not certain in the "Index of Previous Owners". There are also, in 2008, at least two further ex-Orleans paintings on loan to the National Gallery, a Guercino and the Gentileschi Finding of Moses, for which see below.
  7. ^ Watson discusses both periods in "Interludes" at the end of his Parts 2 and 5. Reitlinger's Chapter 2 deals with the latter period.