"'Vive l'amateur!': the Goncourt House Re-visited"

4. Vive l’amateur! The Goncourt house revisited

ANDREW MCCLELLAN

Ma volonte est que mes dessins, mes estampes,mes bibelots, mes livres, enfin les choses d’art quiont fait le bonheur dema vie n’aient pas la froidetombe d’un musee et le regard bete du passantindifferent et je demande qu’elles soient touteseparpillees sous les coups de marteau ducommissaire priseur et que la jouissance quem’a procuree l’acquisition de chacune d’ellessoit redonnee pour chacune d’elles a un heritierde mes gouts.

Edmond de Goncourt (1897)1

Reproduced at the head of the catalogue that accompanied the posthum-ous sale of the Goncourt brothers’ celebrated collection in 1897,Edmond de Goncourt’s testament is both epigraph and epitaph, follow-ing a life of passionate engagement with objects. As he bids adieu to theworld, Goncourt takes a final swipe at the institution that stood opposedto his identity and practice as a collector: the public museum, which heperceived as emblem and engine of bourgeois ascendance and ano-nymity. In recent literature the metaphor of the museum as mausoleumis associated with the avant-garde and left-leaning museum critics, andso it perhaps comes as a surprise to find it embedded here, in theproclamation of a notoriously conservative private collector. One mightwell wonder what this overlap has to say about elitist tendencies in theavant-garde, but for my purposes Goncourt’s acerbic quip serves as apoint of departure for a brief examination of the Goncourt collection inthe context of the rise of public art museums. Edmond’s defiancehighlights longstanding tensions between the private and public realmsof collecting with consequences for the critical fortunes of the rococo arthe championed.

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1. Collection des Goncourt: dessins, aquarelles et pastels du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1897), frontispiece.Reproduced in Edmond de Goncourt, La Maison d’un artiste, ed. Pol Neveux (Paris, 1931),vol.2, p.332. In his journal dated 3 April 1887, Edmond wrote: ‘Pour les objets que j’aiposedes, je ne veux pas apres moi de l’enterrement dans un musee, dans cet endroit oupassent des gens ennuyes de regarder ce qu’ils ont sous les yeux. Je veux que chacun demes objets apporte a un acquereur, a un etre bien personnel, la petite joie que j’ai eue enl’achetant.’

Prominent historians have noted the connection between the birth ofthe public museum around 1800 and the development of privatecollecting in the following century. ‘By inventing the public museum’,writes Anne Higonnet, ‘the French Revolution also strengthened theopposite idea of the private art collection.’2 Krzysztof Pomian has notedthat the arrival of public museums freed private collections from peda-gogic responsibilities and normalising conventions to become ‘sansreserve, une expression de la personnalite du collectionneur’.3 If privatecollections became more idiosyncratic, they nevertheless shared a com-mon desire not to function like, or be confused with, a public museum.An important addition to this argument is to recognise that the publicmuseum to which nineteenth-century collectors reacted was itself apurposeful negation of private collections of the ancien regime, whichinflected much subsequent collecting by individuals with the quality of a‘rococo echo’. The taste for eighteenth-century art among nineteenth-century collectors should be attributed in part to the desire to revive thelost ethos and elegance of the pre-Revolutionary amateur. Recreating thatworld entailed the self-conscious pursuit of private pleasures and elitemodes of consumption, objects with an evocative provenance, unexpec-ted juxtapositions of art, and the role of personal taste and fate incollecting, all of which ran counter to the emerging norms of the publicmuseum.The transition from private to public unfolded during the eighteenth

century as a phenomenon of the European Enlightenment. Growingmiddle-class interest in art fuelled increased cultural tourism, collectingand the rise of the art market, art exhibitions and criticism. In responseto public demand, princely art collections formed over the previouscentury were made more accessible to the public and re-organised intonational schools, among them those of the kings of France.4 In the lastdecades of the ancien regime the government of Louis XVI planned apublic museum in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre which included amethodical ordering of art, an emphasis on large, moralising history

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2. Anne Higonnet, A Museum of one’s own (Pittsburgh, PA, 2009), p.7. Higonnet further statesthat personal collection museums were ‘born out of opposition to the national ormunicipal encyclopedic museum. Encyclopedic museums were the action and collectionmuseums the reaction’; see p.9.

3. Krzystof Pomian, ‘Collections: une typologie historique’, Romantisme 112 (2001-2002),p.18. A collection communicates not only an individual’s ‘savoir et son gout mais aussi sesnostalgies, ses reves, ses fantasmes’.

4. See The First modern museums of art: the birth of an institution in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, ed. Carole Paul (Los Angeles, CA, 2012); Edouard Pommier (ed.), Les Museesen Europe a la veille de l’ouverture du Louvre (Paris, 1995); and Thomas Gaehtgens and LouisMarchesano, Display and art history: the Dusseldorf Gallery and its catalogue (Los Angeles, CA,2011).

paintings and commemorative public sculpture, standardised pictureframes, and an absence of furniture and decorative objects.The defining public character of art museums was made all the clearer

in contrast to the thorough articulation of private space in paintings,portraits, architectural treatises, decorative prints, and fiction across theeighteenth century. The private interior, in particular, was theorised andillustrated in key texts by Germain Boffrand, Le Camus de Mezieres,Jacques-Francois Blondel and Jean-Francois de Bastide as a sign of thepatron’s identity. ‘Judge the character of the master for whom the housewas built’, wrote Boffrand, ‘by the way in which it is planned, decoratedand distributed.’5 The home offered a setting for the intimate pursuits ofreading, conversation, art appreciation, seduction and more, but asBoffrand makes clear private interiors were also on public display;through a profusion of words and images, domestic spaces as well asthe activities they framed were widely known. Guidebooks and salescatalogues were a further source of information about private artcollections. Typical was a guidebook summary of Blondel de Gagny’swell-known gallery, which featured paintings, marble tables, porcelain,lacquer, gilt-mounted decorations, bronze and marbles sculptures: ‘Allthese beautiful things, arranged in a knowledgeable and by no meansconfusing way, produce such a surprising effect that the observer iscompletely riveted and can hardly bear to leave this place, this sanctuaryof so much beauty.’6 In a city of glittering hotels particuliers, a novel publicinstitution required a distinct identity of its own.It was strange, therefore, that when the Louvre museum first opened

in 1793 at the height of the French Revolution its contents and arrange-ment bore a distinct resemblance to aristocratic galleries of thediscredited ancien regime. Pressed for time and eager to show off thewealth of material appropriated by the new republic, museum organisershastily prepared a decorative, eclectic arrangement of paintings, sump-tuous marble tables and vases, bronze sculptures, ornamental clocks andporcelain. The exhibition drew quick and pointed criticism from leadingRevolutionaries. Jacques-Louis David denounced it as a ‘vain assemblageof luxurious and frivolous objects’, while Gabriel Bouquier saw in it

894. ‘Vive l’amateur!’ The Goncourt house revisited

5. Quoted by Meredith Martin, ‘The ascendency of the interior in eighteenth-centuryFrench architectural theory’, in Architectural space in eighteenth-century Europe: constructingidentities and interiors, ed. Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin (Farnham, 2010), p.28.On the performative, public role of eighteenth-century interiors, see Katie Scott, TheRococo interior.

6. Annibale Antonini,Memorial de Paris et de ses environs, ed. G. T. Raynal (Paris, 1749), p.210,quoted by Bettina Dietz and Thomas Nutz, ‘Collections curieuses: the aesthetics of curiosityand elite lifestyles in eighteenth-century Paris’, Eighteenth-century life 29 (Autumn 2005),p.57. On Blondel de Gagny and French collecting, see Colin B. Bailey, Patriotic taste:collecting modern art in pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven, CT, and London, 2002).

echoes of ‘luxurious apartments of satraps and the great, the voluptuousboudoirs of courtesans, the cabinets of self-styled amateurs’.7 Within ayear the Louvre was cleared – tellingly, the word used at the time was‘purified’ – of its private trappings and reorganised to take on thecharacter of a public institution. This meant removing paintings thatwere seen to embody the decadent, effeminate taste of the Regency andthe reign of Pompadour.8 In the process of ‘epuration’, workers alsobroke a Japanese vase, which was recorded in the Louvre’s books as nogreat loss to the arts.9

Within a decade of opening, the decontaminated Louvre had becomea public spectacle and popular tourist destination, a place to experienceart and also a confluence of different classes and nationalities affordedby few other spaces of social engagement (see fig.4.1, p.91). Not all werehappy with the burgeoning success of the public museums. For seriousart-lovers, the crowds and alienating atmosphere of the museumundermined modes of appreciation and rituals associated with eliteconsumption. Elite amateurs responded to change by resisting the emerg-ing culture of museums and cultivating private spaces as a refuge.Likening the museum to a mausoleum, the museum’s new critics be-moaned not only a diminished experience for the beholder but also theloss of integrity – of ‘poetical’ effect – in works of art subjected to analtered viewing environment. Beginning in the 1790s, Quatremere deQuincy and others likened works of art to living plants that die in theprocess of being transplanted to a museum.10 Complaints about thealienating effects of museums became commonplace in the museum age,culminating in Paul Valery’s lament ‘Le probleme des musees’ (1923),given greater currency through Theodor Adorno’s famous essay ‘ValeryProust Museum’. For the ‘seignorial’ Valery, Adorno writes, the museum

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7. Quoted by Andrew McClellan in Inventing the Louvre: art, politics and the origins of the modernmuseum in eighteenth-century Paris (Berkeley, CA, 1999), p.106, 108. Shifting attitudes duringthe Revolution are signalled inWatelet and Levesque’s popular dictionary where the tastefor opulent displays of fine arts and luxury goods is summarily dismissed: ‘C’est tropsouvent une sorte de vanite, reellement puerile, qui preside a leur choix & a leurarrangement’, Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Levesque, Dictionnaire des artsde peinture, sculpture et gravure (Paris, L.-F. Prault, 1792), vol.2, p.390.

8. McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, p.106.9. La Naissance duMusee du Louvre, ed. Yveline Cantarel-Besson (Paris, 1981), vol.1, p.19: ‘Dans

le deplacement [...] des objets mediocres de la gallerie du Museum, un des vases du Japon[...] a ete casse au moment de l’enlevement; [...] les arts n’ont rien perdu del’aneantissement de cette production japonaise.’

10. A.-C. Quatremere de Quincy, Lettres a Miranda, ed. Edouard Pommier (Paris, 1989), p.114-15. Also Louis-Pierre Deseine, Opinion sur les musees (Paris, 1803), p.7: ‘les monumens desarts sont comparables a certaines plantes indigenes que la transmigration tue’. For otherswho shared these views, see Rene Schneider, Quatremere de Quincy et son intervention dans lesarts (Paris, 1910), p.196.


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denies the ‘feudal’ pleasures of art while the demands of classificationand public utility stand in the way of pleasure.11 In effect, museums arewhere art of the past goes to die. Great pictures ‘kill’ those around themcompeting for attention, says Valery: ‘Nos tresors nous accablent et nousetourdissent.’ Museums make us more erudite but also more superficialand less appreciative of the marvels of art: ‘Venus changee en docu-ment.’12

For those who resisted the process of museumification (which Adornonoted was ‘irreversible’), private collections offered orphaned works anew home and restored ‘aura’ through the vivifying caress of thededicated lover of art. Goncourt was fond of quoting his fellow collector,Barbet de Jouy, who insisted: ‘N’enlevons aucune œuvre d’art a lacirculation, c’est retirer leur vraie vie a ceux qui les aiment fermement;eux sauront les conserver est les mettre en valeur.’13 A sentiment laterreprised by Walter Benjamin: ‘L’interieur est le lieu de refuge de l’art, etson veritable habitant est le collectionneur. C’est lui qui se charge de latransfiguration des objets.’14 Although collectors’ homes and museumswere similarly alien for many works of art (as Adorno also noted),15 aredeeming difference lay in the attention paid to objects by collectorsand their charmed circle of acquaintance, the way objects weredisplayed, interpreted and consumed.Arguably no one filled the role of collector and amateur with more

zeal than Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896; see fig.4.2, p.93).16 Theformation and arrangement of his collection in his house in Auteuilwas the work of a lifetime, a labour of love and homage to his brother,Jules (who died in 1870, two years after moving with Edmond to Autueil),and the values of the ancien regime (see fig.4.3, p.94). More than a bufferbetween the self and the world, as all collections are, Goncourt’s collec-tion was an extension of himself, a work of his creative imagination andvehicle of his fantasies, as well a vital archive and inspiration for hisfiction and historical writing.Although the Goncourt collection was dispersed at public auction

according to Edmond’s wishes, it was amply documented for posterity in

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11. Theodor Adorno, ‘Valery Proust Museum’, in Prisms, translated by Samuel and ShierryWeber (Cambridge, MA, 1983), p.176.

12. Paul Valery, ‘Le probleme des musees’ (1923), in Œuvres, vol.2 (Paris, 1960), p.1293.13. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.332.14. Quoted by Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection, p.118.15. Adorno, ‘Valery Proust Museum’, p.184: ‘Even if [works of art] hung in their old places in

the castles of aristocrats, they would be museum pieces without museums.’16. In her recent study of eighteenth-century amateurs, Les Amateurs d’art a Paris au XVIIIe

siecle (Seyssel, 2008), Charlotte Guichard is careful to separate amateurs from collectors,pointing out that one could be an art-lover without owning a collection. Goncourt wasboth.


Figure 4.2: Felix Bracquemond, Portrait of Edmond de Goncourt (1882), etching, first state, TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase Jacob H. Schiff Bequest. Photo # TheMetropolitan Museum of Art.

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Figure 4.3: Fernand Lochard, LaMaison des Goncourt a Autueil (June 1886),photograph on albumen paper, BnF, Departement des Estampes. Photo# BnF.

impressive sales catalogues, commissioned photographs, and in hisextraordinary book La Maison d’un artiste, first published in 1881.In La Maison d’un artiste, Edmond takes the reader on an evocative tour

of the house and collection while imparting his values as a collector alongthe way. Those values are elaborated on in an important postscript to alater edition of the book by his disciple Pol Neveux. Neveux ends hisappreciation of Goncourt by recalling the first visit he paid to thecelebrated house. Having just read Bastide’s La Petite Maison (1758),Neveux was so struck by the resemblance that he half expected to bewelcomed ‘entre ces lambris et ces guirlandes par les heros du roman, lemarquis de Tremicour et Melite, sa conquete’.17 After a brief discussionof Watteau’s drawing technique, the tour began:

Il s’arretait devant chaque œuvre d’art et il me la presentait avec un salut dela main, un joli petit geste aristocratique affable qui le faisait se redresserd’avantage. Quelques mots d’explications rapides et precis, detaches d’unebelle voix grave, presque lointaine et ou se dissimulait l’emotion, un brefrecit de l’achat, une courte anecdote et puis, m’oubliant, il se recueillaitsoudain a la poursuite d’un souvenir ou d’un songe. Visibles de lui seul desreflets de son existence s’etiraient sur les glaces, les vernis et les patines.18

Goncourt would surely have appreciated Neveux’s account since LaMaison is in effect a verbal transcription of a tour of the house in thecompany of the collector. The book begins in the vestibule where aneclectic array of Japanese and Chinese objets d’art is described in detail,engrossing the reader-visitor in a seductive multi-sensory realm ofGoncourt’s fashioning. Among the Asian bibelots was ‘une merveillefrancaise’, a bas-relief by Clodion of a nymph and satyr (seen in FelixBracquemond’s etching; see fig.4.2, p.93), which Goncourt bought at anauction where it had been incorrectly catalogued. The next two rooms –the Salle a Manger and the Petit Salon – are devoted to the eighteenthcentury. In the first, the decorative arts dominate: the walls are hung withtapestries after designs by Huet and Le Prince, but it is the two large gilt-bronze wall lights that prompt, by their ‘feuillage rocaille’ and the ‘richeserpentement contourne’ of their forms, Goncourt’s first evocation ofthe ‘beautiful’ and ‘free’ workmanship, the ‘large facture’, thatconstituted for him the essence of the style rocaille.19 In the second isgathered his large collection of French drawings. No attempt is heremade to recreate a rococo interior. The decoration, in which iscombined glossy black woodwork, scarlet cotton wall-hangings and the


17. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.331.18. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.331.19. On le style rocaille, see Colin Bailey’s essay, ch.8 in this volume.

‘audace’ of a red ceiling, serves rather to secure the drawings’ aestheticautonomy by contrast of this intense, bold background and the palecolours of eighteenth-century art paper, and by the opposition of theimposed symmetrical grid of the display and the undisciplined profusionof gestural marks in the drawings exhibited: Boucher’s ‘desordrepittoresque’, the ‘fouillis’ of his landscapes, Lajoue’s ‘dessin verveux ettordu’, Eisen’s ‘contour fluide et joliment contourne’, the ‘concreteexuberance’ and ‘dessin turgide’ of Meissonnier and Fragonard’s poeticalfantasies projected onto ‘les taches de la plus belle couleur’ of his washdrawings. Listed alphabetically by artist, each drawing in the impressive140 pages of descriptive catalogue has its own entry, some of whichfeature not only digressions on the artist but also details of the circum-stances of its acquisition.The Grand Salon (see fig.4.4, p.97) that followed was home to his best

things, the ‘plus heureuses trouvailles de ma jeunesse’: eighteenth-cen-tury gouaches, terracottas, tapestry, porcelain. Edmond notes, possiblyeven enjoys, the irony in his purchase of some of these ‘pretty’ thingsthanks to ‘le succes d’un noir roman realiste’ – Germinie Lacerteaux (1865).At all events, he introduces to the ensemble his prize bronze Japanesevase (prominently featured in J.-F. Rafaelli’s portrait of 1888) in orderthat, by virtue of its ‘originalite’ and ‘force’ the rococo rest should notcloy. The Grand Salon led to the staircase, which he identified as a goodlocation to display significant works of art. Interestingly, he gave pride ofplace to an engraving by Nicolas Tardieu after Watteau’s Pilgrimage toCythera, the masterpiece of the ‘le grand poete du XVIIIe siecle’.20 Ahumble reproductive print, Watteau’s Pilgrimage nevertheless signifiedthe Rococo as well as the imaginative release triggered by collecting andappreciation.21 Echoing Watteau’s voyagers to the isle of Aphrodite,visitors to Goncourt’s house were taken on a pilgrimage both backwardin time to the ancien regime and to the distant Far East propelled by a loveof art, ‘l’oubli du moment dans l’assouvissement artistique’.22 InGoncourt’s house, Venus was never merely a document.

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20. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, L’Art du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1881), vol.1, p.3.21. Watteau’s painting as an emblem of the Rococo for the nineteenth century is discussed by

Anne Higonnet; see below, p.156. Watteau’s painting entered the Grande Galerie duLouvre in 1864. Before that it had languished in the Musee special de l’ecole francaise atVersailles, where it had been since 1799. See Launay, Les Freres Goncourt, p.171.

22. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.1, p.9. On Goncourt’s cultivation of interior life in relation totime, modernity and progress, see Silverman, Art nouveau in ‘fin de siecle’ France. Fellowaesthete Robert de Montesquiou captures the immersive effect of the house in his‘Offrande a Edmond de Goncourt’: ‘Sage auquel nous devons la Maison d’un artiste /Qui nous dit le Japonmieux que nul voyageur / Sans l’avoir jamais vu!’; quoted by Pety, LesGoncourt et la collection, p.135.Montesquiou is the subject of the essay byMeredithMartin inch.6 of the present volume.


Figure 4.4: Fernand Lochard, Grand Salon de la maison des Goncourt (July1883), photograph on albumen paper, BnF, Departement des Estampes.Photo# BnF.

The staircase led upstairs to a suite of rooms more private but no lesssaturated with art and history: cabinets full of more French drawings andSevres porcelain, Asian ceramics and netsuke, swords and ivories; and hisstudy (see fig.4.5, p.99) containing a remarkable collection of eighteenth-century documents – autograph letters and manuscripts, books (forexample, Bastide’s La Petite Maison, described in detail), auction cata-logues and ephemera, including public announcements and pamphletspertaining to the theatre, dance and opera, dress, coiffure and cuisine,prostitution, hospitals and cemeteries – ‘en un mot, [...] tout le papierornamente que le dix-huitieme siecle a fait a son image [...]. Ces riens, cespasses de circulation, touchees et retouchees par des mains d’autrefois, etqui ont de la crasse d’une humanite disparue, qui me parlent plus hautque les documents de la froide et grande Histoire.’23 Admired, collectedand valued not for the authorial mark of art upon them but for theanonymous trace of history that ran through them, these ‘riens’ enabledthe re-creation of a distinct ‘style de vie’, one rococo in an expansivesense, in so far as it assigned priority to refinement, sociability and the‘joli’. The piece de resistance upstairs in Goncourt’s bedroom (see fig.4.6,p.100) was an immense bed, ‘une merveille de sculpture’, ‘un de ces litsmonumentaux dans lesquels le dix-huitieme siecle mettait a l’aise et lanaissance et lamort de l’homme’.24 It wasmoreover the bed purported tohave been used by the princesse de Lamballe, confidante and accusedlover of Marie-Antoinette, during her visits to the chateau deRambouillet. Goncourt purchased the bed from a dealer in a nest ofantique shops near the Bastille which he called ‘le musee du rococo’.25 Itwas a quintessential Goncourt object involving salvage from the obscur-ity of bric-a-brac and sublimation of sexual desire through collecting.26

The height of feminine elegance, the bed from Rambouillet affordeddaily consummation of his fantasy of la femme au dix-huitieme siecle andprepared him to ‘accueillir la Mort en delicat’.27

Goncourt’s registered his opposition to the rise of public museumculture through his writings, the creation of his highly idiosyncratichouse museum, and the cultivation of his persona as an amateur

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23. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.148. The description of the cabinet de travail accounts foralmost half of the book. Goncourt reproduces many of the documents concerning artistsmuch in the manner of the scholarly Archives de l’art francais, which began in 1851.

24. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.163.25. Quoted by Michel Beurdeley and Michele Maubeuge, Edmond de Goncourt chez lui (Nancy,

1991), p.49.26. On this subject see Tom Stammers, ‘Scavenging Rococo’, ch.3 of this volume.27. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.168. See Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection, p.99-104, on

Goncourt’s object fetish, especially objects associated with women; also Silverman, Artnouveau in ‘fin de siecle’ France, p.35.


Figure 4.5: Fernand Lochard, Cabinet de travail de la maison des Goncourt (May 1886), photographon albumen paper, BnF, Departement des Estampes. Photo# BnF.

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Figure 4.6: Fernand Lochard, Chambre a coucher de la maison des Goncourt (July 1883), photographon albumen paper, BnF, Departement des Estampes. Photo# BnF.

d’autrefois.28 As Pamela Warner has argued, the house in Auteuil wasstaged for show as a domestic interior as much for daily living.29 Like theeighteenth-century hotel particulier, the contents and aesthetic of theinterior were made public through texts and visual images. The displaydefied museological conventions with its unusual wall colours andcoverings, the unexpected and playful juxtapositions of different media,and the mixing of French and Asian objects. Private collections, regard-less of their quality, could earn his disapproval if displayed with insuf-ficient personal taste. Following a visit to the famous Cernuschicollection in 1875, he wrote in his journal: ‘Le riche collectionneur adonne a sa collection le milieu a la fois imposant et froid d’un Louvre; iln’a pas su lui donner le milieu hospitalier et plaisant d’une habitation.’30

A marked contingency in display reflected the serendipity of thecollection’s formation. Crucial to Goncourt’s narrative were the el-ements of chance and the chase that define personal collecting. Theobjects that got away haunted Goncourt, yet he accepted that his losseswere others’ gains; chance and competition heightened the thrill ofdiscovery and possession. La Maison is sprinkled with recollections ofearly finds among the brocanteurs of Paris, of a Watteau brought from ‘unvendeur de fleches de sauvages et de tetes d’Indiens boucanees’,31 of aBoucher that eluded his grasp: ‘Ils sont nombreux et de belle qualite, lesBoucher, en ma maison d’Auteuil, et cependent il m’en manque un,auquel je pense de temps en temps, comme on pense a une femme qu’unrien stupide vous a empeche de posseder.’32 The Boucher in question wasa pastel portrait of madame de Pompadour that he found in a shop onthe quai Voltaire and that had once belonged to the eighteenth-centurycollector, J.-C. Gaspard de Sireul. He and the dealer failed to settle on aprice, but at night he couldn’t sleep, the vision of the pastel floatingbefore his eyes. The next morning he ran back to the shop only to find itgone, sold to an Englishman whose ‘vinegary’ wife refused to part with it.


28. Goncourt’s recuperation of pre-Revolutionary amateurs and collectors was supported byfellow historians, notably Charles Blanc, Le Tresor de la curiosite (Paris, 1857-1858); EdmondBonnaffe, Les Collectionneurs de l’ancienne France: notes d’un amateur (Paris, 1873) ; and L.Clement de Ris, Les Amateurs d’autrefois (Paris, 1877).

29. Pamela Warner, ‘Framing, symmetry and contrast in Edmond de Goncourt’s aestheticinterior’, Studies in the decorative arts (Spring/Summer 2008), p.44: ‘More than merecommodious places for living, these rooms stage visual encounters with beautiful andrefined objects.’

30. Quoted by Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection, p.127. He added that Cernuschi’s collectionseemed unhappy displayed against ‘the brick-colored background favoured by ourmuseums; Edmond de Goncourt, Paris and the arts, 1851-1896: from the Goncourt Journal,ed. and translated by George J. Becker and Edith Philips (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1971),p.156.

31. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.1, p.31.32. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.1, p.49.

The elements of chance and fate embedded in a private collection and itspresentation differed fundamentally from the ideal of plenitude inpublic museums. In museum displays art historical gaps areacknowledged only when they are filled and the life history of objectsis suppressed. Wall labels typically acknowledge an object’s donor butrarely disclose the where, when, and how of its provenance.Goncourt celebrated ‘private’ art forms and associated modes of

appreciation not possible in public museums – drawings and terracottasculptures made for close scrutiny, bibelots that nestled in the palm of ahand, the look of objects illuminated by candlelight. He faulted the greatcollector of Asian art, Henri Cernuschi, for ignoring things made, forexample, of ivory, carved wood or chasedmetal that were the province of‘l’amateur de haut gout’.33 Edmond identified the sense of touch as thesign of the true art-lover: ‘L’homme qui prend un objet avec des doigtsindifferents, avec des doigts betes, avec des doigts qui n’ont pasl’enveloppement amoureux, cet homme n’est pas un passionne d’art.’34

Frequent re-arrangements of his objects further signalled the hand of thecollector. And he extolled the pleasures of studying drawings whilesmoking opium-laced cigars. Proximity to objects and the luxury ofsmoke exude from Felix Bracquemond’s delicately etched portrait ofEdmond (see fig.4.2, p.93), a work whose own tactile and tonal qualitiesreward close viewing. According to Pol Neveux, he treated his objects‘comme des etres vivants, comme des enfants, comme desmaıtresses avecun perpetual souci de leur securite, de leur mise en valeur, de leurtoilette’.35 The intimate and mutually animating relationship betweenamateur and his collection was undone by the public museum, for whichreason Edmond and Jules recoiled at the thought of ‘l’etude en commundans ces grands laboratoires publics, ou tout appartient a tous, ouchaque chose leur semble humiliee, salie, defloree au milieu d’uneatmosphere de pedanterie et de sottise’.36

In the comfort of la maison des Goncourt, works of art were also caressedby words. Art was to be protected not only from crude hands and thebrute gaze of an indifferent public but also from offending speech. ‘Cequi entend le plus de betises dans le monde est peut-etre un tableau dumusee’, he famously remarked.37 By contrast, in the sanctum of his home,his treasures witnessed many gay evenings enlivened by his circle of


33. Quoted by Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection, p.131.34. Quoted by Launay, Les Freres Goncourt, p.43.35. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.328.36. Goncourt, La Maison, vol.2, p.329. Carol Duncan writes incisively about the ‘ideal bour-

geois’ visitor promoted by the public museum, whose ‘interests and needs [are] verydifferent from those of the courtier and aristocratic visitor implicit in older displays ofart’. Civilising rituals: inside public art museums (New York, 1995), p.49.

37. Edmond de Goncourt, Idees et sensations (Paris, 1887), p.94.

artists, writers and bons vivants. The air was charged with memories andanecdotes retold, and by the voices of the objects themselves. Hesurrounded himself with original letters and quotidian documentsfrom past artists and writers as if to summon their voices into play.Toward the end of his life, Edmond became fascinated by the potential ofthe phonograph to capture the live texture of voice, something he hadtried to do graphically in his journal, in which he records snippets ofconversation and notes the speech mannerisms of his friends.38

Goncourt’s efforts to give voice to the past calls to mind StephenGreenblatt’s essay ‘Resonance and wonder’. Greenblatt’s paradigm ofcompeting display strategies contrasts resonance, the desire to conjurein the viewer the historical milieu whence objects came, and wonder, the‘power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, toconvey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention’.39

Goncourt’s house is the epitome of resonance and it was fashioneddeliberately against the backdrop of an emergent modern museologywith its emphasis on masterpieces, streamlined displays, stable tax-onomies and public pedagogy. To quote Greenblatt further, resonance‘pulls the viewer away from the celebration of isolated objects andtoward a series of implied, only half-visible relationships and questions’,including: ‘What were the feelings of those who originally held theobjects, cherished them, collected them, possessed them?’40 Further,the very term ‘resonance’ suggests the quality of voice, ‘the intimationof a larger community of voices and skills, an imagined ethnographicthickness’. Wonder, by contrast, through cultivation of the gaze, cutsthrough ethnographic thickness and ‘stills all murmuring voices’. To readGoncourt’s La Maison, and by extension his journal, is to be confrontedby an intense ‘ethnographic thickness’, a host of murmuring voicesrelayed through themass of anecdote enveloping his objects, the recalleddinner parties, the eclectic assortment of documents quoted in their richparticularity, not to mention the voice of Goncourt himself as narratorand tour guide. As scholars have noted, Goncourt’s house did notattempt to recreate an eighteenth-century interior with the objectiveaccuracy of later museum period rooms, or even personal collectionmuseums like that of Moıse de Camondo (1860-1935).41 Goncourt neverlets us forget the determining role of his own eye and hand in themakingof his house at Auteuil. Although he was a devotee and scholar of the


38. Jean-Louis Cabanes, ‘Les Goncourts phonographes’, in Les Goncourt dans leur siecle: un sieclede ‘Goncourt’, ed. J.-L. Cabanes et al. (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2005), p.29-41.

39. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and wonder’, in Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics ofmuseum display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC, 1991), p.42.

40. Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and wonder’, p.45.41. Pamela Warner stresses this point in ‘Framing, symmetry and contrast’.

ancien regime, perpetuating the values of the old world amateur entailedcreating a collection that reflected his personal taste rather than anersatz space approximating what someone else might once have crafted.The critic Gustave Geoffroy paid Goncourt the highest compliment

when he described his house as ‘une creation originale, sans precedent etsans imitation possible’.42 The collection would live on throughGoncourt’s words and photographs but the logic of Goncourt’s collectingpractice, specified in his will, demanded that he recirculate his cherishedtreasures so that kindred spirits could form collections of their own.Other collectors of the period chose to preserve their life’s work forposterity by donating their collections to museums or creating museumsof their own.43 Those who built personal collection museums preservednot just their singular taste and vision but also an ethos of collecting andconsumption at odds with the culture of public museums.The different alternatives were much on the minds of those

determining the fate of the collection of Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890), one of the greatest collectors of eighteenth-century art. Followingthe collection’s bequest to the British nation in 1897, the question washow best to display permanently his extraordinary and eclectic assem-blage of Old Master paintings, furniture and decorative arts, arms andarmour, which had long been installed as a personal collection atHertford House in the centre of London. Should the collection bebroken up and distributed among existing national museums, or perhapshoused intact in a new building adjoining the National Gallery? The finalconsensus was to leave it in situ in Hertford House to retain the quality ofa ‘palace of a great collector with his collection just as he wished it’.44 Anearly public guide to the collection remarked:

That a man of his aesthetic temperament and long association with art in allforms should have objected to consigning his possessions to the cases of amuseum, where they would be mere items in a huge and more or lesscoherent gathering from all parts of the world, is not in any way surprising:he was an enthusiast, and he wished to inspire ameasure of his enthusiasm inthe people for whose benefit his bequest was made.45

A contemporary review expressed gratitude that the collection hadescaped ‘being displayed in that mechanical manner which makes the


42. Gustave Geoffroy, ‘La maison des Goncourts’, La Revue des arts decoratifs 12 (1891), p.146.Geoffroy concludes (p.151): ‘les Goncourts reunis, et, depuis, M. Edmond de Goncourttout seul, ont su donner a cette Maison d’Auteuil une physionomie particuliere etsignificative, semblable a leur individualite intellectuelle et artiste’.

43. See Higonnet, A Museum of one’s own; and Duncan, Civilizing rituals.44. Quoted by Barbara Lasic, ‘‘‘Splendid patriotism’’: Richard Wallace and the construction

of the Wallace Collection’, Journal of the history of collections 21 (2009), p.178.45. A. L. Baldry, The Wallace Collection at Hertford House (London, 1904), p.14.

average museum so depressing’.46 Still others compared theWallace withthe John Jones Collection of eighteenth-century European decorativearts, which had recently been left to the South Kensington Museum.47

Critics noted how alienated that collection looked arrayed in glass casesand deprived of a domestic milieu, and more generally how incompat-ible luxury products of the ancien regime prized by collectors for theiranti-modern associations seemed in a museum dedicated to furtheringmodern industry.Across the Atlantic in Boston tension between the aesthetic ideologies

of public and private collecting guided the formation of the IsabellaStewart Gardner Museum, which opened in 1904. Recalling theGoncourt house as well as the Wallace Collection, Gardner created ahighly personal and ‘resonant’ museum with idiosyncratic displays,period interiors, autograph letters and personal mementoes, and aneclectic mixture of fine and decorative arts from different periods andcultures.48 The effect was all the more striking contrasted with the newBoston Museum of Fine Arts, which had opened nearby in 1909 as themodel of a progressive new public museum, with neutral galleries, thelatest in lighting technology, a collection divided between masterpiecesfor the general public and a study reserve for scholars, new educationprograms, and amenities to reduce visitor fatigue. Among Gardner’schief advisors was Matthew Prichard, who encouraged Gardner to makeher home a place where works of art mingle with and are animated byconversation, music, gardens, cafes, even animals, and above all by MrsGardner herself. Prichard accompanied Gardner, together with ClaudePhillips, keeper of the Wallace Collection, on a visit to French museumsin 1906. Commenting on the Louvre while en route to the Prince deConde’s personal museum at Chantilly, Gardner wrote: ‘I feel about [theLouvre] and many museums as I did about the Prado – if only I couldtake hold! Some things are so wonderful – and yet so badly presented –and such a lot of not good. Poor Museums! Strength of mind they doneed – and taste.’49


46. Henry C. Shelley, The Art of the Wallace Collection (London, 1913), p.vi. Also see ClaudePhillips, ‘The Wallace Collection’, Art journal (January, 1901), p.1; and Frank Rutter, TheWallace Collection (Boston, MA, 1913), p.14.

47. On the Jones Collection at South Kensington, see Anthony Burton, Vision and accident: thestory of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, 1999), p.123-24.

48. On Gardner’s museum and its display strategies, see Higonnet, AMuseum of one’s own. AlsoLinda J. Docherty, ‘Collection as creation: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court’, inMemory and oblivion: proceedings of the twenty-ninth International Congress of the History of Art, ed.Wessel Reinink and Jeroen Stumpel (Dordrecht, 1999), p.217-21.

49. Letter from Isabella Stewart Gardner to Henry Swift, 11 August 1906, Isabella StewartGardner Museum Archives. My thanks to Linda Docherty for sharing this letter with me.

For all that Gardner planned her museum as the antithesis of a civicmuseum, it is important to underscore one crucial overlap: Gardneravidly pursued museum-quality masterpieces and singled them outwithin her collection by means of fixed chairs placed in front of them(what Anne Higonnet calls ‘observation posts’). To the extent she useddisplay to convey the ‘arresting sense of uniqueness’ in her prize objects,she pursued ‘wonder’ as well as ‘resonance’ and thus effected somethingof a compromise between public and private collections.Conversely, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, public

museums accommodated ‘resonance’ through the re-creation of historicperiod rooms, none more popular than those of the eighteenth century,and by accepting private collections displayed as one in separate roomsor wings (notable examples include Camondo Collection at the Louvre,the Altman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and theWaddesdon Bequest at the British Museum).50 In the end, however, bothgestures ran counter to the priorities of museum curators whose pro-fessional identity rested increasingly on the selection and focused displayof masterpieces, in other words, on the generation of ‘wonder’. Museumsprefer to collect selectively with an eye to fillings gaps in their masternarratives of period and school, while period rooms fell from favourbecause they were considered deleterious to the proper viewing of singleworks of art.51 Modern curators sided with the eighteenth-centurypainter Charles Natoire who bemoaned the ‘thousand difficult con-straints’ of the rococo interior which left his work to be ‘looked uponless as paintings than as some sort of furniture that can be linked to everyother bizarre element of the room’.52

The austere ‘white cube’ aesthetic that was perhaps the most pervasiveproduct of modern museology created a display environment inhospi-table to both rococo art and the resonant trappings associated withprivate collections.53 Personal collection museums continued to be builtthrough the twentieth century and have surged in recent years; yet,


50. A 1923 floor plan of the Louvre shows the museum stretching at its periphery toaccommodate important collections – Camondo, Rothschild, Thomy Thiery, Caillebotte,Schlichting and Chauchard. Interestingly, when the great collection of Louis La Cazecame to the Louvre, the catalogue was divided by schools though the paintings weredisplayed ‘aux gouts et aux habitudes de M. La Caze’, in other words with calculatedjuxtapositions; Notice des tableaux legues au Musee imperiale du Louvre par M. Louis La Caze(Paris, 1870).

51. On the debate over period rooms, see Andrew McClellan, The Art museum from Boullee toBilbao (Berkeley, CA, 2008), and ‘The period room debate and the making of America’spublic art museums’, Visual resources 21, special issue, ed. Sally Anne Duncan (September2005).

52. Quoted by Hyde, Making up the Rococo, p.192.53. See Brian O’Doherty, Inside the white cube: the ideology of the gallery space (Berkeley, CA, 2000).

owing to the guiding influence of curators, advisors and architects underthe sway of modern museological principles, we find progressively lessdifference between those collections and their public counterparts.Today, major private collectors compete with museums for the samecanonical artists and use the same architects to build their collectionmuseums. In fundamental respects the most important modern personalmuseums, such as the Menil in Houston, the Norton Simon in Pasadena,or the Kimball in Fort Worth, to name only three, are public museumswrit small. In many cases, little besides a portrait in the lobby or a nameover the door remains to signal ties to a founding collector. At the sametime, however, the post-modern turn to installation and performanceart, immersive experience and relational aesthetics in defiance of thewhite cube provides an opening to examine afresh and revalidate therococo aesthetic (if not the social world it supported). The fancifulinstallations of Yinka Shonibare and spaces of Mark Dion, Damien Hirstand others parallel efforts at some public museums to create new andmore sympathetic contextual exhibitions of eighteenth-century art.54 Allthe while, the Wallace, Gardner, Frick and other personal collectionmuseums have never been more popular, leaving us to regret thatEdmond followed through on his final wish to dismantle the Maisondes Goncourt and cast his collection to the winds.


54. Shonibare is the subject of Sarah Wilson’s essay in the present volume, ch.15.

"'Vive l'amateur!': the Goncourt House Re-visited"

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