Notwithstanding his more or less decorative magnificence, however, this monarch was at times a hard bargainer, and like Isabella d’Este, knew how to take advantage of needy or impecunious clients. His transactions with Jabach to buy from him the finest art collection in France are scandalous, nor can these transactions be solely attributed to Colbert, who was for a long time the go-between in this affair. Jabach was a German by birth and Parisian by election, a rich banker, the director of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, intelligent and a most passioned art collector. With great care and expense he had formed the finest collection of his time. Later, through business reverses, his unbounded liberality to artists and the extravagant prices he paid for his masterpieces, Jabach finally found himself forced to part with his collection, and entered into negotiations with Louis XIV who knew its immense value. Dealings dragged on for a long time, and every day Jabach was more pressed by his creditors. Notwithstanding his necessitous condition he rebelled at the absurd price offered and wrote to Colbert to beg the king to treat him “as a Christian, and not as a Moor.” Finally Louis XIV, the Roi Soleil, though in this affair a planet certainly that did not shine in generosity, gained his point and for the absurdly paltry sum of 200,000 livres became the owner of the renowned Jabach collection, composed of no fewer than 101 paintings, a great many of them masterpieces, and 5542 drawings. It is sufficient to say that in this Jabach collection were works by Leonardo da Vinci, the Saint John, the “Concert champêtre” by Giorgione—one of the few authentic works of this master—the Entombment of Christ, the Pilgrims of Emmaus and the Mistress of Titian by Titian, all of which now belong to the Louvre Museum.
With a king who played the connoisseur and collected objects of art and virtu, no gentleman of the French court would acknowledge indifference towards art, or be without a certain hobby of his own, collecting some one thing in particular, being in fact what is generally defined as a specialist.
Speaking of “La Mode” in his Les Charactères, La Bruyère lashes the collecting craze of his time without mercy. His Chapter XIII treats of fads and fashions, and in it he tells of the ridiculous freaks of collectors and cleverly points out how utterly deprived of genuine meaning were the artistic pursuits of such amateurs.
Nevertheless, with its good sides and its bad, the epidemic spread, and not only in France, but in other countries as well. We will, however, confine our study of this epoch to France as for the purposes of this brief résumé of the collecting craze France was ahead of the other countries, and thus by the side of the wise and genuine lover of art, possessed all the other degrees of Collectomania.
Though conforming to fashion, every one has his own views on the matter, so that there are dreamers and speculators on all kinds of antiques, but painting is given the preference.
“Pictures are bullion,” writes the fat Coulanges to his cold-blooded and well-behaved cousin, Mme. de Sévigné, “you can sell them at twice their price whenever you like.” In fact during one of his journeys to Italy, Coulanges, who had caught the collecting fever, made a considerable sum of money in buying and selling pictures, so much money that it spoilt his taste for, as a chroniclist says, “The treasure, which he saw piled up at the Hotel de Guise awoke in him more expensive tastes.” His wife, Marie-Angelique du Gue-Bagnol, collected raretés curieuses. Mme. de Sévigné tells us of her delight when she saw in her cousin’s house a looking-glass that had been owned by Queen Marguerite.
At this epoch the art and curio market comprised all sorts of odd characters and, as might be expected, the subject gave ample food to writers and chroniclers for skits. La Bruyère is not alone in making sport of the obsessed art collector and crazy curio-hunter. From Molière to the Italian Goldoni the antiquary and his victim are capital subjects. Poetry also contributes its sarcasm. In France some of the minor and justly obscure poets are very useful in the reconstruction of our milieu. There are even chronicles written in verse.
For instance, Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV, goes to see Caterine Henriette Bellier de Beauvais, the first lady of the bedchamber of the queen dowager Anne of Austria, a lady who is evidently collecting art. The poetical chronicle at once informs the public that:—
Mercredi, notre auguste Reine
Fut chez madame de Beauvais
Pour de son aimable palais
Voir les merveilles étonnantes
Et raretés surprenantes....
We will spare the reader the description of the collection given in a sort of litany of praise, a sequence of lines like the following:—