In a small gallery at the entrance to the sixteenth-century Dutch rooms, the National Gallery has turned the wheel of collecting full-circle. The select and intimate display centres on François-Hubert Drouais’s striking full-length portrait of the Comte de Vaudreuil. No matter that only four of the nine Dutch and Flemish paintings in this exhibit once formed part of Vaudreuil’s collection (the others belonged to contemporary Parisian collectors): these paintings, back within the painted gaze of one of their earliest collectors, offer the viewer a rare glimpse at the preferences and priorities of late eighteenth-century collecting. Petite though it is, this display provides a fascinating and innovative context for the National Gallery’s collection: a symbiotic shedding of new light, both on the seventeenth-century paintings, hung, as they would have been historically, by ‘size and symmetry’ rather than chronology, and on the Comte de Vaudreuil himself. Although his outstretched arms point to a map that depicts his place of birth, one can’t help but think that he might also have employed such an enthusiastic gesture for his paintings. 

Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil (1740–1817), was born in 1740 in the French colony of Santo Domingo, to which he proudly gestures in Drouais’s portrait. His father was governor of the West Indian colony and the wealth generated by the family’s sugar plantations allowed Vaudreuil not only to purchase a military commission, alluded to by Drouais in the armour that sits conspicuously at the comte’s feet, but also to commence his career as a connoisseur and collector. Having served in Germany during the Seven Years War, Vaudreuil established himself at the French court, where his close alliance with Marie-Antoinette’s favourite, the Duchesse of Polignac, made him a figure of importance and intrigue. His collection, which included Poussin’s Bacchanalian Revel before a Term (now also in the National Gallery), was one of the finest in pre-Revolutionary Paris.  

Drouais’s portrait is undoubtedly the star of this modest show. Especially alongside its smaller companion paintings, its bold gesture and sheer size arrest the gaze. Drouais’s evident delight in texture – the sumptuous velvet, gold brocade, ermine trim – gives a feel for the kind of wealth this collection is predicated on and for the rich interiors it would once have adorned. We are used, in the context of an exhibition, to reading elements of biography or a stimulating anecdote about sitters in gallery labels, and perhaps a longer, fuller account in an accompanying catalogue. Yet there is something quite different about seeing that sitter juxtaposed with objects of his own desiring; collected, coveted works that, through their material presence on an adjacent wall, give a much more vivid, more personal account of a collection than a description of the same. (It should be noted that Vaudreuil would ultimately sell this collection, in 1784, in order to redirect his attention and finances towards contemporary French painting.) By the same token, it is easy to forget, in our nationally and chronologically-arranged museums, the resonances that paintings had at different times and the complexity of their histories. Provenance, in a gallery context at least, is often a secondary concern: this exhibition, by contrast, privileges a particular moment of provenance, reinstating and reminding us of an important episode in these paintings’ afterlives. 

An inevitable aspect of such a display is that the works on display gain a collective, rather than individual, importance. The unusual hang was certainly noticed by visitors passing through, and this is perhaps the biggest problem with this exhibition: location. An octagon where four walls form not only doorways but important thoroughfares, Gallery 15 does not do justice to the thoughtful and thought-provoking display that is on show within it. The paintings themselves may be small, but, as with Willem van de Velde’s Dutch Ships in a Calm and Aelbert Cuyp’s A Herdsman with Five Cows by a River, they present huge expanses of blue sky and pale sun; even the more populated genre scenes, for example Nicholaes Berchem’s Peasants by a Ruined Aqueduct, speak to a tranquillity and contemplation that the gallery itself does not achieve. The other disappointment with this display is its size, offering a tantalizing glimpse – but no more than a glimpse – into a fascinating slice of history. Having surveyed Gallery 15’s ten paintings, the visitor is instructed to seek out Gallery 33, where, at some remove, they can view Henri-Pierre Danloux’s The Baron de Besenval in his Salon de Compagnie. Painted in 1791, it depicts the Baron in a salon, surrounded by works of the same Dutch masters – van de Velde, Cuyp – as they have just seen. Beautiful and touching as Danloux’s painting is – by 1791 its subject’s world had been ravaged by the Revolution and his expression acknowledges it – it feels a rather unsatisfactory end. The Comte de Vaudreuil: Courtier and Collector is an intriguing idea, carefully executed, but the visitor leaves wishing its premise could have been enacted more fully. 

 

‘The Comte de Vaudreuil: Courtier and Collector’ was at The National Gallery, London, from 7 March to 12 June 2012.