Napoleon gave it to Josephine! (The art object, I mean)

Princely taste, indeed. The Empress Clock, a spectacular ormolu mounted automaton singing bird vase clock, was made for the Empress Josephine in 1805.

The case of this clock is attributed to Claude Galle, (1759-1815), a bronzier and gilder working in Paris. No other bronzier in Paris obtained as many royal commissions as Galle. After the French Revolution, Galle continued to produce numerous pieces for Napoleon Bonaparte, including an order for the Chateau of Saint-Cloud. In the early C19th, Galle participated in the refurnishing of ALL the royal palaces, including Napoleon's residences in Italy.

By this time, the Galle firm had become one of the largest in Paris, with 400 workers. Their craftsmen made this sort of case for clocks of course, but also for ewers and vases.

The Empress clock, made in Paris in 1805, 82 cm high

The clock & automaton maker was Jean Francois DeBelle. DeBelle was a pupil of the great horologist Robert Robin and became a master in 1781. He seems to have been an unorthodox artisan, working outside the guilds, but popular for his fine work. He was court clock-maker to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette until their 1793 execution. DeBelle apparently went into hiding during the revolution, but his life improved with the establishment of the First Republic.

Sotheby’s believes that DeBelle’s talents were bought to the notice of the Emperor Napoleon when he supplied two vase clocks to his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples and Spain. Similar to Josephine’s clock except for the singing bird, the other two vase clocks are now in Madrid National Museum.

In any case, Napoleon and Josephine were married in 1796 and were crowned Emperor and Empress of France in 1804. In 1805 Napoleon asked DeBelle to make an automaton clock as a gift to the Empress and one year later the clock was delivered. She must have loved it since the clock remained with her at Malmaison, following her divorce from the Emperor. After her death in 1814, her property went to the children of her first marriage, Eugene and Hortense. And DeBelle supplied the Emperor Napoleon with many art objects for the Grand Trianon, where Napoleon later lived there with his next wife Marie Louise of Austria.

Clearly both artisans received commissions from European nobility.

The Empress Clock was tall (82cm) and made of a rich range of materials - the Sotheby’s catalogue mentions ormolu on the bronze, painted brass, steel, glass and stained peacock feathers. The tapered body was painted to resemble veined marble, the upper section and neck applied with finely chased mounts representing Arts and Science. The enamel dial within a frieze of rams and cornucopias was flanked by crisply cast eagles attacking serpents, which formed part of the scroll handles.

When the clock struck, an automaton bird appeared, flapped its wings and opened its beak - its breast feathers trembling - as it selected one of three tunes played by pipe organ. DeBelle ingeniously concealed the movement that operates both upper and lower automata sections of the clock.

No wonder the clock sold for £825,000 (USA $1.3 million) in July 2011.

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Now a lovely comparison, smaller but from the same era.

DeBelle mantel clock, made in Paris c1806, 37 cm high

Richard Redding Antiques in Zurich had a very fine Empire gilt and brown patinated mantle clock of eight day duration, signed on the white enamel dial Lefevre suc De Belle à Paris. The dial had Roman numerals and outer Arabic numerals for the days of the month and a fine pair of gilt brass hands for the hours and minutes. The blued steel pointer was used for the calendar.

The movement with anchor escapement, silk thread suspension, striking on the hour and half-hour with an outside count wheel. The architectural case had a stepped rectangular top with overlapping stiff leaf cornice and the dial was surmounted by an egg-and-dart moulded arch terminating in Apollo masks and stylised branch and dragon spandrels. The glazed panel was used for viewing the pendulum bob flanked by husk-festooned torchères, the sides with arched glazed panels surmounted by triangular pediment mounts and flanked below by amphora. The whole object was placed on a stepped base, centred by an applied mount with vase, dragons and flanking rosettes, on bun feet.

Hotel Lutetia Paris - Belle Epoque or Art Deco?

Paris' Hotel Lutetia, built in 1910, is now over 100 years old. From the first details of the 1907 commission, the facade was supposed to set the tone and reflect the hotel’s prestigious character. Note the elaborate sculpture created by Léon Binet and the stained glass windows. Slightly decadent, to be sure, and very Belle Epoque.

This ornate building is located on 45 Blv Raspail in the 6th Arrondissement. Undoubtedly pre-World War One visitors would have loved the Saint-Germain-des-Pres district, the River Seine, Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower. In fact 1910 was the very year that the hotel's neighbour, Le Bon Marche department store, began selling classy fashions to those who could afford them.

Hotel Lutetia, Saint-Germain-des-Pres

In its own historical documents, the hotel records that the famous brasseries and cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, such as Le Procope, Le Lipp, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, became a melting pot of intellectual debate. Café society started in the late C19th and continued to blossom in the C20th. This Left Bank area become the centre for Bohemian literary, musical and artistic types, including Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Dancer Josephine Baker, who moved to Paris in 1925 to perform at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, made Hotel Lutetia her second home. Picasso painted Guernica in his atelier in Rue des Grands Augustins. Baldaccini César's sculpture of Gustave Eiffel was added to the hotel interior, to stress the connection between the hotel and its Saint-Germain-des-Prés artiness.

Eventually the good times came to an end in Paris. The French government evacuated Paris in June 1940 and Hotel Lutetia was one of the hotels requisitioned by the Gestapo during Germany's occupation of the city. Hotel Lutetia was not the only famous hotel taken over by the German forces - Hotel Meurice on the Right Bank, for example, was the site allocated to the German military. I am not familiar with this murky part of the Lutetia’s history, so I recommend you read Quazen. After Paris was liberated, the Lutetia clearly had a more optimistic and helpful role to play; it became a centre for family searches and reunions.

Hotel Lutetia, Deco bar and lounge today

Eventually the Lutetia returned to its real role in history as a splendid hotel.

In the late 1980s, designer Sonia Rykiel opened a boutique in the building, and supervised a major redesign of the interior, restoring the splendid Art Deco of earlier decades. Athletic, naked Deco women in bronze hold up lamps; the Lalique crystal chandeliers are classy; and plush red velvet furniture looks intimate. Hundreds of art objects were placed throughout the hotel’s public spaces and 231 rooms.  And like the Radisson Blu Le Dokhan’s Hotel in Paris, cabinets displaying Louis Vuitton accessories are placed alongside the reception desk.

The centenary celebrations in 2010 were very colourful! Now only one question remains. The hotel was opened for business in 1910 and Art Deco was not popular until 1925 and throughout the 1930s. So what did the interior of Hotel Lutetia really look like, in its original state?

Gold art objects in revolutionary France - Vachette

Before the French Revolution (1789–99), each gold or silver object was stamped with a] a maker’s mark, b] a charge mark, to say the piece had been declared to the tax authorities and c] a discharge mark, to say that the tax had been paid. The amount of tax charged was of course a function of the weight of the piece. A fourth mark, the warranty, certified the silver content in the object. The warranty took the form of a letter that changed each year, enabling the buyer to determine the precise year of manufacture.

Vachette, gold box, 1789, 8 x 5 cm, Bonhams

The goldsmith guilds, makers of luxury goods, had been suppressed during the French Revolution. So after peace and normality returned to French life, gold and silver makers had to regain consumer confidence. The new warranty mark was an administrative mark replacing the charge and discharge marks used in pre-Revolutionary times. The Gorgon head mark in a circular reserve was a warranty mark, used to assure buyers that the maker had paid tax on the object and to guarantee that there had been no collusion between the assayer and the tax collector. The Michelangelo head facing right on one side of an object was the silver standard or assay mark for Paris, used until 1838 for 950 silver.

Let me examine one of the last of the pre-revolutionary pieces (dated Paris 1789), marked before the First French Republic was declared in 1792. A gold and moss agate snuff box from Bonhams was made in rectangular form with canted corners. The cover was mounted with a central circular forest agate panel within a fluted and guilloche frame, flanked by panels of engine-turning within a border. The sides had similar engine-turned panels separated by pilasters, and the base was decorated with bright-chased and matted acanthus and feather scrolls. This exquisite object was tiny.

The 1789 snuff box was made by Adrien-Jean-Maximilien Vachette (1753-1839) with Vachette's pre-revolutionary maker's mark, the charge and discharge marks of the Paris warden, and a Paris mark. Fortunately we know quite a lot about Monsieur Vachette from Sotheby’s. He was born in 1746, the 15th child of his tax collector father. The young man completed 8 years apprenticeship and was registered as a master in Paris in 1779. His pre-revolutionary style emphasised classical clean lines and pilasters/flat columns.

Vachette, tortoise-shell box, post 1819, 8 x 6 cm. Photo credit V & A.

Vachette was one of the lucky artists. He disappeared during the years of The Terror and successfully resumed his profession in 1805, entering into various lucrative partnerships until his death in Paris in 1839. The V & A has an exquisite tortoise-shell box, mounted in gold and set with a miniature portrait of Monsieur de Pontchartreux. The maker's mark for AJM Vachette was signed on the rim as you would expect, but this time there were post-revolutionary Paris marks for 1819-38. Vachette’s tortoise-shell box was also small.

It is clear from the auction houses and museums that Vachette was a prolific artist, concentrating on what he knew best – small gold boxes. So that begs an important question. Did Vachette do his own decorative art works on the lids of his boxes? Assuming he did not, which other artists were responsible for the circular agate panel on the snuff box? and the painted portrait miniature of Monsieur de Pontchartreux?

Vachette, gold snuff box, 1805-9. Photo credit V & A

The Victoria and Albert does have a snuff box where the details of the painting are known. The chased and engraved gold work has glazed miniatures top and bottom, and lapis lazuli on the side panels. But note that the minatures had been painted in 1752 and 1753 by Antoine de Marcenay de Ghuy (1724-1811), a French painter and engraver. The miniature on the cover depicts the Bay of Naples while the view on the base shows Tivoli, near Rome.

Where had these two miniature landscape paintings been, between 1752 and 1809?

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One painter decorator was very well known. Jean-Baptiste Isabey 1767–1855 went to Paris as a young man, to became a pupil of the incomparible Jacques-Louis David. Later patronised by Josephine and Napoleon, Isabey arranged their royal coronation ceremonies and prepared drawings for the publication intended as the official record of the day's events.

Napoleon snuffbox, 1812,
gold by Moulinié, Bautte et Moynier and painted by Jean-Baptiste Isabey
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Examine a 1812 gold snuff box that had Napoleon Bonaparte stamped all over it. I love the portrait done by Jean-Baptiste Isabey. Here Isabey painted Napoleon in the coronation regalia he wore when he crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I. Surrounded with a border of alternating Napoleonic stars and bees, the emperor was sporting a gold diadem and royal cross. The snuff box itself, lushly composed of three different tones of gold, was not crafted by a French firm. Instead the job was sent to the Swiss firm: Moulinié, Bautte et Moynier.

Jacques-Félix Viennot also made French snuff boxes out of gold in the Empire era. A rectangular box with canted corners was particularly interesting because the cover and base had panels of an engine-turned cube pattern. For extra contrast, the borders were engraved with foliage on a matted ground. In the central oval is a fine portrait of Napoleon in coronation robes, painted by Isabey. The snuff box (made from 1804 on) is normally in Fondation Napoleon in Paris. Just for winter 2012 this small gold box will be located at the National Gallery of Victoria for the Napoleon: Revolution to Empire exhibition. 

Modern women in Belle Epoque Paris

Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers, an exhibition of drawings from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, is on view at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane from March- 24th June 2012. The famous French artists of the late C19th and early C20th who celebrated the changing roles of women during the Belle Époque included Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Vuillard, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin and the occasional woman artist like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. For a complete list of artists whose works were included in this exhibition, see QAG.

It is not coincidental that so few women artists are represented in the Modern Woman exhibition. Since the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not admit women until 1897, all the female art students in Paris had to find an alternative, less prestigious school that would accept them. Or, if their families had plenty of money, some women students were able to study privately with an established male artist. Fortunately Académie Julian, founded by Rodolphe Julian in 1868, accepted women; but even there the male students and female students were trained separately.

Worse still was the constant chaperoning that women artists had to endure. Berthe Morisot mother’s totally banned her from going to unsuitable places (eg dances, winebars, cabarets, the beach) and chaperoned her when she went to suitable places. Artist Marie Bashkirtseff was forbidden from participating in Paris’ cultural night life, never being exposed to the wonderful events that male artists used as themes for their own art works.

Folies Bergère poster by Leonetto Cappiello, 1900. Musee d’Orsay

What holds the various artists and styles together? Firstly, as the gallery points out, modern artists increasingly moved away from idealised representations of the female figure. In particular the artists abandoned the idea of the female as a goddess, virgin or idealised allegorical figure.

Secondly the artists stopped focusing largely on aristocratic or wealthy women, and started looking at ordinary women from every part of society. The artists seemed interested in women’s family lives, in working roles and enjoying leisure time activities. Ordinary women in city streets, coffee shops and cabarets!

For art to be truly modern, it had to reflect its own era. So the gallery’s third aim was to show French society going through a radical change in political, social and artistic life. For those who had a reliable income, life was musical, optimistic and colourful. Women didn't have the vote yet, but their lives were becoming more valued and meaningful. Science and medicine were improving rapidly.

Of course in 1900 they didn't know that industrial-strength massacres were just around the corner (in 1914).

Toulouse-Lautrec, Woman at her Toilette, 1896. Musee d’Orsay

It is no surprise that the drawings for the Brisbane exhibition came from Musée d'Orsay, housed in the former Orsay Railway Station in Paris. The works were selected from the 10,000 drawings of d'Orsay's graphic arts collection, a collection visited by millions of people each year. If any one city was going to sum up all that was special about late C19th culture… it was Paris.

I agree with Angela Goddard, curator of Australian Art in Brisbane. The image of woman, in all its ambiguity and diversity, became the face of modernity. And in the unrehearsed immediacy of these drawings, we can glimpse a sense of the fleeting sensations that characterised La Belle Époque.

A number of reviews have noted that this exhibition concentrates on drawings rather than the larger works in oils by Renoir and his colleagues. Thus, they suggest, we are provided with a more intimate portrait of the people and times, and especially the changing roles of women. Is this true? Are drawings more intimate by definition?

What I did not like was the apparently intimate title Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers. These women were definitely not the daughters of the artists, a fact that becomes clear from some rather sexy images of women getting undressed, lying in bed and washing in the bath. The models in the art works may have been someone's daughters and lovers, but to the viewer they were ordinary, modern women, going about their daily life in bustling Paris. And surely that was the entire aim of the exhibition.

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Tissot, Sunday at the Luxembourg Gardens. Private collection

In one of those super feats of timing, Fashion Is My Muse is currently displaying the art works of James Tissot. Tissot left London for Paris in 1882 and reintroduced himself to his countrymen with an ambitious and provocative series of 15 pictures entitled La Femme à Paris. La Femme á Paris showcased the modern Parisian woman during the very period of rapid change that the Brisbane exhibition was interested in, the late C19th. Tissot’s series illustrated women from a range of income levels and occupations, rendered in precise detail using high key colours. Hopefully these Tissots are in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Mona Lisa - stolen in 1911 and retrieved

Mona Lisa was always a special painting. Leonardo da Vinci began the painting in Italy in 1503, but then when he moved to France in 1516 for the last few years of his life, he sold it to his host, King Francois I. The king placed his treasure in the Louvre where it safely rested and enthralled the crowds for centuries. Note the date when the picture went to France - 1516; it will be important!

Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, between 1503-16

Then in August 1911, a crisis occurred – France’s beloved Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Guards who noticed that the painting was missing assumed it had been removed to be photographed. Once museum officials realised the truth, the Louvre was shut down. Dozens of police arrived to question the staff, re-enact the crime and dust for fingerprints. All employees, past and present, were interrogated and fingerprinted, including the eventual thief. But they were all cleared.

The French border was sealed, and departing ships and trains searched. By the time the museum re-opened nine days later, the theft was front-page news around the world. What could have happened? Jennifer Rosenberg noted that some Frenchmen blamed the Germans, believing the theft a ploy to demoralise their country. And some Germans thought it was a ploy by the French to distract French citizens from international concerns.

Richard Lacayo noted that the newspaper Paris-Journal was offering a reward for information about the crime. A petty thief said he had previously worked as secretary for Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who was Picasso's constant supporter in the public skirmishes over modern art in the French press. Before long, the thief had implicated Apollinaire. When police arrested Apollinaire, he admitted under pressure that the thief had sold the pilfered works to none other than Picasso. Thinking they had found their way into a crime ring that might be behind the Mona Lisa case, the police then questioned Picasso. Picasso was Spanish citizen and any serious criminal problem could get him deported. And he had reason to be worried, since he almost certainly had dealt with the thief in the past. However there was no evidence against Picasso.

Presumbly it was thought that that modernist enemies of traditional art might have taken the Mona Lisa. But why - to destroy it? to make an art historical-political point?

Vincenzo Peruggia, police documentation, 1913

Two years went by before the real thief was discovered and then only because the man acknowledged his part in the theft. An Italian petty criminal called Vincenzo Peruggia had moved to Paris in 1908 and had worked at the Louvre for a time. He was no criminal master mind but apparently he walked with the painting under a smock and quietly took it to his lodgings in Paris.

Peruggia travelled to Florence by train the following month, taking the Mona Lisa in a trunk with a false bottom. Eventually in Florence he took the painting to an art gallery where the owner, Alfredo Geri, persuaded him to leave it for expert examination. In 1913, the Italian police could finally arrest the thief.

According to Richard Cavendish, Peruggia apparently believed that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Florence by Napoleon. The thief never planned to damage or destroy the painting; he believed that he was only doing his patriotic duty, by returning the painting to its true home in Italy. In fact Peruggia's patriotic rationale really DID make him a hero in the Italian press. And many Italians really did joyously welcome the masterpiece home at the Uffizi and the Borghese Galleries, Villa Medici, Farnese Palace and the Brera Museum. But we need to remember that Mona Lisa had never been part of Napoleon’s art collection, so I wonder why Peruggia’s gaol sentence was relatively minor.

modern security for Mona Lisa, the Louvre

After the painting’s triumphal tour of Italy, the Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre and has mostly remained there, in its rightful spot, ever since. Security these days is, needless to say, rather tight.

French Colonial Architecture in Algiers

Charles Célestin Jonnart became the French governor in Algeria in 1903. For him, the authority of French colonisation needed to be reflected in the architecture of Algier’s most important buildings, places with which the French administrators, business people and Pieds Noirs ex-pats could identify.

Architects J Voinot and M Tondoire were asked to design a public postal and telephonic institution that would serve this part of the French empire. Normally I suppose a post office would not thrill the hearts of citizens and tourists, but this building really was the centre of turn-of-the-century modernity. And to show you how central to the French empire this building was to be, you could have once found a Joan of Arc statue near by (although it was later moved to France).

Grand Post Office, Algiers

I cannot find anything about Voinot and Tondoire, but I can see what remains of their taste. The massive building, monumental and glist­ening white from the outside, took eight years to complete. It has a large cupola, two imitation minarets, the principal frontage which included three arches, a gallery on high, broad marble staircase, stalactites and engraved stucco. The ceiling of the prin­cipal room was and remains an architectural jewel. Even the main mailbox, used since people starting mailing letters here 100 years ago, retains its lovely floral mosaics.

Mailbox with mosaic surrounds

Was this French architecture or Algerian? What are we to make of the original inscription: “God is victorious”? This neo-Moorish taste was definitely intended to appeal to the Muslim community, with the added hope of bringing the two communities closer together at the turn of the century. Presumably Charles Jonnart had no inkling of the bitterness Algerians would increasingly feel about French control of their country.

Grand Post Office, central hall

In the interwar period, néo-Moorish designs became somewhat obsolete. But the Grand Post Office remained the dominant monument in Algiers' landscape, a symbol of early French colonial control. The most useful blog I found was Algeria Travel, for example the post on Algiers.

Napoleon - military leader with a great eye for science

Italy had already been conquered as past of France’s revolutionary wars, so in July 1798 General Napoleon Bonaparte could turn his attention to the next target nation. He landed in Egypt with a massive invasion fleet - 400 ships and 54,000 sailors and soldiers! Although the invasion of Egypt was not hugely successful militarily, I am interested in a specific aspect of the campaign.

Napoleon in Egypt, painted later by Jean-Leon Gerome 

Even before leaving Paris, Napoleon had already decided that he was going to pour resources into studying Egypt. Although it was a time of war, Napoleon commissioned 150 scientists and scholars to sail to Egypt with the fleet! The French General was not a scientist himself, but he seemed as interested in studying Egyptian antiquity as he was in military success and colonisation. Was his goal, perhaps, to enhance France's cultural prestige?

The Institut d’Égypte was a learned academy in Cairo, specifically formed by Napoleon to carry out research during his military campaign. The Institute and its scholars were divided into four sections: maths, natural history, politics and the arts. Drawn from the Commission of Sciences and Arts, the members didn’t have to meet in any fleabag hotel. The Institute was housed in an elegant palace near the waters of the Nile, so they could do their thinking and debating in a delightful garden setting.

Institut d’Égypte Cairo

The International Napoleonic Society showed how the Institute soon became the focal point for all of the scientists’ work in Egypt. Naturally it provided physical space for scholarly discourse but it also provided a bureaucratic structure to organise their data. And scholars in Egypt were not intellectually isolated - the Institute also corresponded with learned bodies in France, like the National Institute.

How much influence did Napoleon have over the work done by the Institute? It is difficult to tell, since the scholars valued their academic independence and presented papers on the topics that fascinated them. But it seems inevitable that Napoleon made suggestions. Appropriately the scientific papers that the members  presented were printed in Mémoires sur l'Égypt, the Institute’s official forum. Years later and back in France, as we'll see, these scientific papers were republished in the Description de l’Égypte.

Linda Hall Library of Science in Kansas City is another mine of information. As their Napoleon and the Scientific Expedition noted “meticulous topographical surveys were made, native animals and plants were studied, minerals were collected and classified, local trades and industry were scrutinised. Ancient Egypt was discovered — the temples and tombs of Luxor, Philae, Dendera and the Valley of the Kings. Each of these sites was measured, mapped, and drawn”, recording it all in meticulous detail.

First meeting of the Institute of Egypt in Cairo 1798, from Description de l’Égypte État moderne v. 1. Photo credit to the Linda Hall library exhibition.

Of course scientific expeditions had travelled to distant climes before 1798, but most of the earlier findings seemed to remain in the closed lecture theatres of universities and museums. On this occasion, either Napoleon or his scientists decided that their discoveries belonged to the whole world, via exhaustive publication. Thus each plant found and each tomb opened was documented in text, measurements and sketches.

It took a few years to complete their ambitious task in Egypt, the final meeting of the Institut d’Égypte in Cairo being held in March 1801. Soon after, the scientists (and soldiers?) sailed home.

In early 1802, under the orders the French Minister of the Interior and by decree of Napoleon, a commission was established to manage and publish the large amount of data. Hundreds more artists and technicians were added to the team, helping to collate, double check, write up and prepare engraving of the original findings. At first the team collated articles by members of the Institut d’Égypte in Cairo, but soon members of the Scientific and Artistic Commission who had not been part of the Institute contributed their data as well.

Description de l'Égypte, first books published 1809

The first test volumes of engravings were presented to Emperor Napoleon in January 1808 since he was the patron and source of inspiration for the project. The first nine volumes of the Description de l'Égypte appeared in published form in 1809. It took almost 20 years to process and publish the rest of the data; in total 37 huge books had been published by 1828. Linda Hall Library suggested that never before had a single country inspired such a monumental encyclopaedia of depth and splendour.

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The Institut d’Egypte, one of Cairo’s most precious scholarly archives, was destroyed by arson in Dec 2011. The building housing the Institut d’Egypte pre-fire was built in the early C20th and was therefore not the building founded by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1789. However it contained a unique treasure trove of 200,000 rare books, manuscripts and illustrated documents, now largely destroyed.

Institut d’Égypte Cairo, destroyed Dec 2011



Since this post was written, I noted that History Today magazine published an article called "Calamity in Cairo". Jonathan Downs wrote: As the blaze took hold protesters and soldiers alike ran into the burning building to rescue what they could while the fire brigade fought its way through the anarchy of the Cairo streets, only to arrive far too late. In the end some 30-40,000 works were saved. However the toll was heavy: the Atlas of Lower and Upper Egypt of 1752 is gone, as is the Atlas of the Old Indian Arts and the Atlas Handler, a German publication of 1842 from Muhammad Ali’s collection, thought to be the only remaining copy in the world. The most lamented casualty, however, was the unparalleled work of Napoleon’s savants themselves: Cairo’s own copy of the gigantic 20-volume Description de l’Égypte went up in flames.

All is not lost for the Institute, however, as Sheikh Sultan al Qassimi, governor of the Emirate of Sharjah, announced he would bear the cost of the building restoration personally and donate some of his own rare acquisitions to it. Neither is this the end for the Description, as several copies do exist in Britain and France; indeed it could become a further bridge to the old colonial European powers in the debate for artefact repatriation, exchange and joint ownership.



New art galleries: Alicante in Spain, and three in France

Spain

Alicante is the capital of the Spanish Province of Alicante, in the south of the country near Valencia. The population of this Mediterranean port is about 340,000.

Like Holon in Israel, I suspect Alicante is a small city trying to market itself as a cultural centre. Two interesting sites have existed in the town for a long time. Firstly the Archaeological Museum, located in a renovated old Alicante hospital of San Juan de Dios. Exhibits include valuable finds from the Paleolithic era found in different sites in and around Alicante. Secondly Gravina Fine Arts Museum houses the art collection of the Alicante County Council, from the Middle Ages until 1900. The museum is located in a C17th building that was specifically converted for Gravina.

Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain.
See the modern extension to the right of the original 17th century building.

Now another important museum has opened. Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art is in the Old Quarter of town. It houses a major collection of C20th art, based largely on the works donated by Eusebio Sempere; his entire private collection of modern art! Here I am at a slight disadvantage since I was in Alicante for only a short time, don’t know much about Eusebio Sempere and I am much stronger academically on art painted before 1930.

From what I can find, Eusebio Sempere (1923-85) was born in Alicante and did his training in the visual arts locally, at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos de Valencia. In 1948 he moved to Paris with a scholarship to continue his studies. There he established contact with avant-garde artist like Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picasso, Matisse and Klee. His favourite technique became the silkscreen, often using abstract and geometric elements. In 1960 he moved to Madrid. In 1964, Sempere had an exhibition in the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York.

Casa de La Asegurada (1685) is the oldest and most baroque civil building in Alicante. The building has had a long and varied history - it has previously been a granary and a business school, but since 1977 has been home to a contemporary art gallery which houses one of the most important C20th art collections existing in Spain today. Donated by local artist and sculptor, Eusebio Sempere, the art objects includes paintings, sculptures, mixed technique and lithographs by Spanish artists like Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. The collection also includes non-Spanish artists like Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky.

The museum was closed for major extension works and re-opened in 2011. Although the gallery walls are stark, this museum is worth visiting as it is located within Alicante's old architecture, opening onto the Plaza Santa María. And the museum is located next to the Santa Maria Basilica, a C14th gothic church built above an Islamic mosque. Most importantly the museum competes with Madrid, offering access to famous contemporary art works. And best of all, entry is free.

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Now to France.

Musee Bonnard, in Le Cannet, France 

Opened in June 2011, Musee Bonnard will be a treat for art history fans of Pierre Bonnard  (1867–1947). For the last 25 years of his life, Bonnard lived in the Cote d'Azur village of Le Cannet near Cannes, the perfect place for an artist who celebrated Mediterranean light. His sunlit rooms and gardens, filled with his wife Marthe and sundry relatives and friends, shined with intense colour. The opening exhibition starred 40 of his paintings, including Late Impressionist-Nabi landscapes and still-life paintings with textured surfaces.

Musee Lalique opened in July 2011. Immediately following the First World War, René Lalique (1860-1945) chose to build his factory in Wingen-sur-Moder, a village in northern Alsace. Today this is the only place where Lalique crystal is still produced, so it is sensible that a museum dedicated to his artwork, from small jewellery to large architectural looking objects, be located in Wingen.

Lalique art objects, Wingen-sur-Moder, France

Two-and-a-half hours southeast of Paris, in the part of Champagne that borders Burgundy, is a lovely little village where Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and his family spent 30 years of their happiest summers. Since February 2011, art pilgrims and visitors to Essoyes have been able learn about the life of the family in Renoir's studio, Du Côté des Renoir, and enjoy the landscape from vantage points where the artist painted. Visitors can also pay homage at his grave site in the local cemetery.

Du Côté des Renoir, Essoyes, France



History is weird - the Hiram Bingham story

On 24/4/2010, I wrote a post about the American Varian Fry: hero and rescuer of thousands. Varian Fry (1907–67) was a journalist. While working as a foreign correspondent for an American paper, Fry visited Berlin in 1935 and was very distressed by Nazi violence against Jewish citizens.

He went to Marseilles as an agent of the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee, in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis. At first Fry only had a rather small pot of money and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by the Gestapo. But soon anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists and musicians were begging for his help.

Despite the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, Fry and his small group of volunteers hid refugees in a safe home until they could be smuggled out. 2,200 people were taken across the border to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the USA. Others he helped escape on ships leaving Marseilles for the French colony of Martinique. He was an absolute hero, a truly moral man who became the first American ever to be recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem.

A year and a half later, on 2/9/2011, I was writing about a totally different continent and a totally different era: Machu Picchu in Peru - luxury exploration. Hiram Bingham III (1875–1956) was the American explorer who revealed the remains of the Inca citadel, Machu Picchu, in July 1911. He had traced Simon Bolivar’s footsteps, including the historic trade routes through Venezuela, Columbia, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, funded largely by his wife, an heiress to the Tiffany jewellery fortune.
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Hiram Bingham III, in Peru, 1911.

Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, is one of the most famous examples of Inca architecture and is located 112km from Cuzco, 2,350 ms above sea level. The ruins, probably built in the mid-C15th by the Inca Emperor, are surrounded by lush jungle. The ruins are situated on the eastern slope of Machu Picchu in two separate areas - agricultural and urban. The latter includes the civil sector (dwellings, canals and sophisticated irrigation systems) and the sacred sector (temples, mausoleums, squares and royal houses). The Machu Picchu citadel combines stunning natural scenery with a historic treasure trove, and is now recognised as one of the New 7 Wonders of the World.

Hiram Bingham III has often been cited as a possible model for the Indiana Jones character. His book Lost City of the Incas became a bestseller upon its publication in 1948.

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What did these two apparently disparate history posts have in common? The Bingham name! The most important task for Varian Fry was obtaining the visas needed for the artists, writers and academics. He could not have succeeded without Hiram Bingham IV (1903-1988), an American Vice Consul in Marseilles who fought against US State Department anti-Semitism. Like the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, Bingham was personally responsible for issuing thousands of legal and illegal visas.

Hiram Bingham IV, in France, 1941.

Note the stamp was issued in 2006. 

As it turned out, the Hiram Bingham who was the American vice-consul in Marseilles was the son of the discoverer of Machu Picchu. Though young Bingham has also been singled out for his help to artist Marc Chagall, Nobel prize winner Otto Meyerhoff and writer Lion Feuchtwanger, it was probably even more impressive that he provided assistance to a number of obscure refugees who would have otherwise been doomed.

The Varian Fry Institute has proposed to Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem that Hiram Bingham IV be honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations. The Institute also nominated five other colleagues who were working in Marseilles until 1941 of whom I shall mention only one.

Charles Fernley Fawcett also worked with Varian Fry. Fawcett was the groom in a series of six bigamous and bogus marriages, helping six Jewish women to get out of internment camps where they too faced certain death. Another truly moral hero of our times.

Oscar Wilde in Paris: insensitive or nasty?

Was Oscar Wilde anti-Semitic? One character in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890 was a greasy, monstrous theatre manager, Mr Isaacs. Isaac’s Jewishness was so unsympathetically presented by Wilde that the reader felt sickened. What was worse, Wilde had written the character Dorian Gray as a vicious anti-Semite who attacked the theatre manager over and over again.

Wilde in London, in the great days pre-gaol

But I had forgotten about Mr Isaacs and Dorian Gray until reading “Oscar Wilde, Captain Dreyfus' Reluctant Hero” written by Eddie Naughton in 2009. No longer able to write, and living down at heel in Paris, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) survived for three years after he was released from wretched imprisonment in Britain.

Wilde's arrival in Paris coincided with the infamous Dreyfus trial of 1894 and its fall out, including the nasty role of Count Ferdinand Esterhazy (1847–1923). Wilde first met Esterhazy in a Paris cafe, and immediately the two men were drawn to each other. Wilde was fascinated by this unkempt, tubercular crook while Esterhazy pounded his new friend with relentless outbursts against Jews in general and supporters of Dreyfus in particular.

Count Ferdinand Esterhazy, the true spy in the Dreyfus Case

While Captain Dreyfus was shackled to the bed on disease-ridden Devil's Island, Esterhazy had been secretly unmasked as the real traitor by an intelligence officer, Colonel George Picquart (1854–1914), who was promptly court-martialled by the French and sent to prison for revealing secret documents. The French army elite preferred to see an innocent Jewish officer rotting in a hellhole than have their establishment boat rocked.

But it was Esterhazy's confession to Wilde at a dinner one night that brought the whole Dreyfus affair to a head. Along with Wilde and Esterhazy were an anti-Semite English journalist, Rowland Strong, and a pro-Semite young Irish bohemian poet, Chris Healy. At the behest of the pro-Dreyfusards, an indifferent Wilde prompted Esterhazy during his usual delirium about Jews into blurting out that it was he, Esterhazy, who'd been selling secret military intelligence to the Germans. Esterhazy proudly shouted that he put Dreyfus in prison, and all of France couldn’t get him out! Oscar Wilde’s reluctant role, according to Naughton, was in “outing” the real traitor, Esterhazy. As it happened, Wilde cared little for the pro-Dreyfusards.

Not so Chris Healy, who immediately made contact with French writer Emile Zola.  At this time Zola was serving a prison sentence for libel after publishing his famous J'accuse, a devastating indictment of the French government, army and courts and their role in the framing of Captain Dreyfus. Zola tried to contact Wilde, but Wilde refused to co-operate with him. Why? Apparently because Zola had refused to sign a petition on behalf of Wilde at the time of his own conviction in Britain. Zola contacted other sympathetic journalists, and eventually they exposed and destroyed the corrupt cover-up that had been built around the Dreyfus case.

13 Rue des Beaux Arts, Wilde's last residence

Healy left Paris soon after this and never saw Wilde again. Wilde died alone and penniless in the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris.

Dreyfusian France is a subject I know very well, so I had ask myself if Naughton had the entire story? I soon found “A Tale of Two Scandals” by Nigel Jones. After parting from Alfred Douglas in Italy in late 1897, an unemployed, impoverished Wilde returned to Paris in early 1898, during Emile Zola’s trial over the J’accuse article. The political firestorm following Captain Dreyfus’ imprisonment and Emile Zola’s guilty verdict threatened the very survival of the Third Republic. Frenzied mobs, howling anti-Semitic hatred, were supported by the army, government, Catholic church and most of the press.

Jones certainly knew that the apparent villain of the affair, Count Esterhazy, was a crappy soldier, boastful, malicious, a gambler, drinker and womaniser. However Jones tended to believe the Esterhazy was really a double agent, deliberately planted on the Germans, rather than a true traitor. Even if Jones was correct, would that have made any difference to Wilde’s attitudes?

Oscar Wilde’s intimate friendship with Esterhazy seems bizarre to us. Wilde had himself been a persecuted martyr and victim of a viciously punitive homophobic morality in Britain. Surely liberal, socialist Wilde would have been on the side of the innocent man, not aligning himself with the forces of reaction, Church power and punitive right wing politics. Yet if Esterhazy had been innocent, Wilde suggested, the British author would have had nothing to do with the Frenchman. Thus Wilde was being paradoxical, provocative and ironic in his denunciation of Capt Dreyfus, not specifically anti-Semitic.

Esterhazy didn’t care. He saw himself and Wilde as the two greatest martyrs of humanity; Captain Dreyfus was a pushy, German-speaking Jew who, if he did not spy for Germany, probably wanted to.

In the end, Wilde contracted cerebral meningitis, was baptised into the Catholic Church in 1900 and died in poverty. Zola was asphyxiated in Paris in 1900. Commander George Picquart, the hero of the entire sordid affair, was freed from gaol and made a minister in the Clemenceau government. He died in 1914. Esterhazy escaped to Britain where he received a pension cheque every month from France and lived out his life in splendid comfort in Hertfordshire. He died in 1923.

What was the difference between Naughton’s and Jones’ attitudes to Oscar Wilde? Naughton saw Wilde as disinterested in the Dreyfus affair, so his role in exposing Esterhazy was accidental and reluctant. Jones saw Wilde as vitally interested in the Dreyfus affair and in Zola, so his role was intentional, paradoxical and in the end very risky.

Jones gave a reference to J Robert Maguire, “Oscar Wilde and the Dreyfus Affair” in Victorian Studies, vol 41, #1. I haven’t located the journal yet, but note that Maguire wrote the article way back in 1997. This story has been around for 15 years!

Wilde's tomb, Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

Napoleon, The Briars and the Melbourne connection: The Balcombe family

Earlier this year I published a post about Napoleon's house in exile, on St Helena Island and noted that sections of the Napoleon’s island House Museum were crumbling and in urgent need of repair. An appeal has been launched by the Foundation Napoleon to rescue the house, its grounds and its woods, hopefully attracting tourists and historians back to St Helena.

What I didn’t know and didn’t mention in that post was that there was a connection between Napoleon Bonaparte, St Helena Island and Melbourne. His intended prison home, Longwood, was not finished by the time he arrived on the island in December 1815. So Bonaparte had to stay with the merchant and Purveyor for the East India Company William Balcombe (1779-1929). The prisoner lived in a garden pavilion on the family estate, The Briars, and according to all reports, Napoleon became particular friends with the family's youngest teenage daughter Betsy.

Betsy’s friendship with the “enemy” did not endear the Balcombes to the governor of St Helena. But it seems more likely that William was suspected of being an intermediary in clandestine correspondence with Paris. In either case, William Balcombe decided to return to Britain in 1818 with all his family. Napoleon, as it happened, died soon after.

An excellent blog called Reflections on A Journey to St Helena was very useful. It discussed why the Balcombe family lived in very straitened circumstances back in England and why the governor of St Helena might have eventually removed his objections to Balcombe's juicy new preferment, a government post as Colonial Treasurer in New South Wales in 1823.

The Briars 1842, Balcombe homestead near Melbourne

The Balcombe family eventually settled in Australia in 1824. William died after only a few years while still Treasurer (in 1829), leaving his widow with a handsome land grant but no pension. She returned to London to plead her case and the Colonial Office gave her money to return to Sydney, together with promises of government posts for her sons.

William’s son Alexander Balcombe (1811-77) took up lots of land at Mt Martha just outside Melbourne in 1840. He and his wife were creating a large family, so they quickly built a rough-hewn slab house, and called it The Briars. The 1842 Briars homestead, one of the oldest pastoral properties on the peninsula outside Melbourne, recalled The Briars home on St Helena Island.

The family prospered and Mrs Balcombe moved to East Melbourne sometime in the 1850s, first into a prefabricated house that used British materials and an Indian design. Then the Balcombes built a new and large house in East Melbourne c1857 which they called East Court. Alexander Balcombe must have been dividing his time between town and country. He settled down to pastoral pursuits and the life of a country squire, was appointed a magistrate in 1855 and was first chairman of the Mount Eliza Road Board from 1860 on.

Napoleon's own furniture, in The Briars museum near Melbourne

In another remarkable connection, Dame Mabel Balcombe Brookes (1890-1975), Australia’s most famous society and charity leader, was the granddaughter of Alexander Balcombe. She was the president of every charitable and cultural organisation in Melbourne. And she married well. Her husband Norman Brookes won Wimbledon in both the singles and doubles, and was later appointed commissioner for the Australian branch of the British Red Cross in Cairo. After the war ended, Norman resumed his previous employment at Australian Paper Mills Co. Ltd, becoming chairman in 1921. He too led a blessed life.

But it was Dame Mabel’s connection with Napoleon that most interests me here. In her older age, she wrote St Helena Story and had the book published in 1960. She wrote of her family's substantial collections of furniture, objets d'art, books and relics of Napoleon. She even purchased the freehold of the pavilion that Napoleon had occupied on her great-grandfather's estate on St Helena, and presented it to a grateful French nation in 1960.

Dame Mabel Brookes’ city home, East Court, had some of the furniture used by Napoleon on St Helena, a teak table used by both Wellington and Napoleon, a writing desk bearing Napoleon's kick marks on the lower panels and the Frenchman’s death mask. The Briars homestead near Melbourne is now a museum where visitors can see the Dame Mabel Brookes Napoleonic Collection. It includes furniture that Bonaparte shared upon his stay with the Balcombes, plus some of his hair, papers, letters, a legion d'honneur medal and artworks.

The St Helena Story 1960, a book written by William Balcombe's great grand daughter

I was interested to see a reference to Betsy Balcome Abell's book To Befriend an Emperor: Betsy Balcombe's Memoirs of Napoleon on St Helena, Welwyn Garden City, Ravenhall, 2005. Betsy, the little girl who had been so kind to Prisoner Napoleon, was the great aunt of our other author, Dame Mabel Balcombe Brookes.

The link between Napoleon Bonaparte, The Briars on St Helena Island, William Betsy and Alexander Balcombe, The Briars in Melbourne and Dame Mabel Brookes' Napoleonic Collection is irresistible. The Briars homestead-museum is open daily.

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The connection between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Australian politician Michael Kroger is less persuasive, but the timing (for my blog post) is sublime.  My Napoleon Obsession noted that Kroger collected a vast array of Napoleonic objets d'art in his Melbourne home, taking decades to amass imperial eagles, candelabras, clocks, vases, paintings, furniture and military paraphernalia. In October 2011, all these precious Napoleonic objects went up for auction in Paris. And left Melbourne for good.

Buyers of Napoleonic artefacts at the Paris auction did not seem to have been deterred by the Euro’s recent difficulties. A clock in Levanto marble, with rich gilt and bronze decoration, sold for €22,000. A watercolour pennant design for Napoleon's 2nd Artillery sold for €39,000. A post-abdication portrait of Napoleon, by the school of Delaroche, made €39,000.

Portrait of Napoleon, by the school of Delaroche, painted 1845 or after

Other collectors of Napoleonic artefacts existed, of course, including collectors I had written up in this blog. The Napoleon Room in Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, for example, was large enough to accommodate the sprawling 22-piece acanthus-tailed griffin suite of furniture designed for the Emperor's uncle, Cardinal Fesch. All the furniture and artefacts in the Napoleon Room were bought by Lord Lever specifically because of their associations with the French Emperor, although many of these associations have subsequently been brought into question. 

Leo and Gertrude Stein, salonieres or collectors?

When Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was 3 years old, the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English from childhood. Her father then moved the family back to the USA in 1879 but died suddenly in 1891, so the oldest brother Michael had to sustain the whole family.

Another brother, Leo Stein, moved back to Europe, painting and immersing himself in art in Florence. In 1903 Gertrude also moved back to Europe. She eventually ended up in Paris, with Leo, at a painting studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus on the left bank. Their large independent income, which Michael and his wife Sarah sent each month, made a bohemian life-style in Paris easy to sustain.

How did the Leo and Gertrude Stein become so knowledgeable about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy an early work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson took both Steins under his wing in Florence.

I have lectured many times on the Steins as cultural salonieres, but the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is now suggesting that the family was more important as art collectors. I may change my mind, but I doubt it.

Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, San Francisco Museum of Art

In 1905 Leo and Gertrude saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse at a crucial point in his art development. It was at a time when he and other avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press. Soon the Steins were visiting the Matisses socially.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s, who had turned a pharmacy into an informal art gallery. Soon after, the first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background, a rose-period nude of a girl. Then the Steins bought some works of Renoir, two Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and some Cézanne water colours.

The friendship with the Matisses cooled only when Gertrude developed a much greater interest in Picasso. But all was well since it was actually Michael and Sarah Stein who continued to collect Matisses in particular.

Etta and Claribel Cone were two wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimore women. Etta inherited her wealth at 27, giving her a handsome yearly income to spend. The Steins and Cones all travelled to Florence in1905 where Bernard Berenson introduced the Cones to art by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and Friesz. The Steins took Etta to meet Picasso at his studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and persuaded Etta to buy Picasso drawings whenever that artist was short of funds.

Back left: Leo and Gertrude Stein, back right = Sarah and Michael Stein, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, c1905.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905/6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his apartment over the Seine, and both sisters bought as many paintings and drawings as they could afford. Gertrude also sold the Cones a number of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a group portrait by Marie Laurencin that showed several of the regulars of the Stein salon, including Picasso.

Baltimore ultimately benefitted from the Cones' collecting.

27 Rue de Fleurus became the first real and permanent home for the Steins, and one that Gertrude remained in for 40 years. This is where the Steins provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris. They inspired, supported and, most importantly for the modernists, they bought art. Their home became known as a salon, with paintings covering all the wall space in their home. Works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne and others overflowed into every room of the household. Artists, writers and critics became frequent callers, for the Saturday night art parties.

Michael and Sarah Stein also held open house on Saturday nights, near the younger Steins, and the participants could move easily fromone home to the other. These evenings enabled the young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable collections of paintings by good artists. Their salons functioned as galleries.

Picasso, Nude on a Red Background, 1906, Musée de l'Orangerie Paris

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By this time Stieglitz was well acquainted with the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne, and began to actively negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their massive art collection in his gallery. Other young modernist painters eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurençin, Robert Delaunay, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire, frequented their salon.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was prepared to associate her reputation with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris frequently visited in the 1910s, finding Stein accepting of the more radical art styles that other people tended to reject out of hand.

For the newly arrived young Jewish artists from Eastern Europe, starving in their Paris garrets, the Steins’ salons filled with food and drink were also much appreciated. The Steins and Cones might have all been secularist Jews, but they went out of their way to help young Jewish artists arriving weekly from Eastern Europe, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani.

The fact that all the Steins, the Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas all spoke Yiddish or German as their mother tongue must have helped the young Eastern Europeans integrate, during their first difficult years in Paris. And, let me repeat, the endless supply of food and wine!

Alice B Toklas decided to sail from the USA to Europe and while in Paris, she was invited to a Saturday night party at #27. Toklas was soon besotted. She soon became a regular visitor and began going to the galleries and theatre with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into the rue de Fleurus household and became Gertrude's right hand woman, secretary, reader and critic.

But several years after Alice arrived, there was a family rupture. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a fan of Cubism. Gertrude and Alice visited Pablo Picasso at his studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Les Demoiselles was the work that marked the beginning of the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912, Gertrude and Alice took all the Picassos, Leo the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes. Leo moved to Italy, permanently!

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas in their art salon, rue de Fleurus.

The Steins had established the first “museum” of modern art. But the salon wound down with war breaking out in 1914, when Gertrude and Alice moved to Spain. However Gertrude still befriended people like writer Ernest Hemingway and designer Jean Cocteau. And Gertrude was still in close contact with Claribel Cone who happened to be in Munich when WWI broke out.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel rented a large apartment in the same building as Etta’s and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. The excellent Cone collection of art eventually entered the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Claribel Cone died in 1929, Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

The recent San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important and difficult-to-assemble paintings that haven’t been together since pre-WW1 Paris. The Stein collection had been divided and subdivided constantly among relative, friends, dealers and collectors. Gertrude and Leo traded back pictures to acquire new ones, a practice that made it difficult to track down their possessions. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein salon and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I am convinced the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, but in the long term less successful as collectors of art.

I hope people fascinated with the Paris salon saw The Steins Collect Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde exhibition at the San Francisco MoMA, May - September 2011. Second best would be getting hold of the catalogue.