The year of her Crozat triumph, Catherine wrote Voltaire: “You are surprised by my purchase of paintings; I would do well perhaps to buy less at the moment, but lost opportunities are never recovered.”1 Before the Crozat uproar had subsided, Catherine seized another French opportunity.
At a public auction in Paris, Catherine snatched eleven paintings for 440,000 livres from her nemesis, Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul. Considered one of the most refined connoisseurs of the time, Choiseul had amassed a trove of paintings, furniture, and Sèvres porcelain. Among his artworks were some one dozen paintings from the collection of Pierre Crozat, part of the inheritance of his wife, who was none other than Louise-Honorine Crozat.
Like her first acquisition of pictures that was originally earmarked for Frederick the Great, Catherine’s main motivation was revenge. As she’d had done with the Prussian King, Catherine enjoyed humiliating the man she dubbed “the coachman of Europe.” For a dozen years, Choiseul was the king’s de facto prime minister, the most anti-Russian statesman of the ancien régime. During his tenure, French and Russian foreign policies were at constant odds. Soon after Catherine seized power, Louis XV wrote: “The object of my policy towards Russia is to remove her [Catherine] as far as possible from the affairs of Europe. Everything which can plunge her into chaos and make her return to obscurity is advantageous to my interests.”2
Choiseul hailed from an old noble family that had fallen on hard times. Through intrigue and skill, Choiseul became the most powerful person in France after the king, amassing a great fortune along the way. He owed his success to Louis XV’s official mistress, Madame de Pompadour. As an ambitious army brigadier, Choiseul earned Pompadour’s support by intercepting love letters between the king and his cousin’s wife. The grateful marquise rewarded Choiseul by securing his appointments as ambassador to Rome and Vienna, followed by promotions to minister of foreign affairs, minister of war, minister of the navy, and minister of the colonies.
Described as “a wonderful mixture of selfishness and charm and recklessness and exquisite taste,”3 Choiseul’s ability to combine hard work with cheerfulness endeared him to Louis XV who asked him on one occasion what he did to be so loved. “The recipe is very simple your Majesty,” Choiseul replied, “it consists in being very fond of myself.”4 In December 1750, Choiseul wed Louise-Honorine Crozat de Châtel, the beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter of Louis-François Crozat, Marquis de Châtel, nephew and heir of the art collector Pierre Crozat (Louise-Honorine’s deceased older sister, Antoinette Eustachie, had been Choiseul’s mistress). After going to court to secure her father’s large inheritance, Louise-Honorine became one of France’s wealthiest women. Along with her great uncle’s famed Hôtel Crozat on the rule de Richelieu, she inherited part of his fortune and several of his 17th-century Italian paintings, including Tintoretto’s Judith and Holfernes (Prado, Madrid).
The newlyweds settled into Pierre Crozat’s former residence. Thanks to his wife’s fortune, Choiseul lived like a king. Though loving at first, Choiseul proved bad husband material. In addition to a string of mistresses, he bad-mouthed his wife behind her back. Contemporaries described Louise-Honorine as a devoted spouse and cultivated woman, appreciated at court and esteemed by Louis XV. After meeting her in Paris, the charmed Horace Walpole called her “the most amiable and most honest little creature who has ever come out of a fairy egg.”5
Around 1750, Choiseul began adding to his wife’s paintings. Describing his collecting strategy, Choiseul wrote a colleague: “my taste is not for the mediocre . . . I should prefer one beautiful picture to ten ordinary ones.”6 Over the next twenty years, with the help of the art dealers like Basan and Boileau, he assembled one of Europe’s finest collections of Dutch and Flemish paintings. Choiseul competed with Catherine at the Gaignat and de Julienne auctions in Paris and bought numbers of works in Holland. By 1770, he owned ten Wouwermans, eight Rembrandts, seven Teniers, six Berghams, five Ter Borchs, and five Metsus along with numerous Ruisdaels and Steens. Choiseul displayed his most prized works in Pierre Crozat’s glass-roofed octagonal study.
In 1754, Choiseul was named French ambassador to Rome. “He wore a splendid costume, trimmed with silver and embroidered with gold and a coat with gold lace of unprecedented magnificence,” wrote an observer of the new envoy’s procession at the Vatican.7 In 1756, at their Rome residence in the Palazzo Cesarini, Choiseul and Louise-Honorine met visiting French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who painted pendant portraits of the couple. The Duc de Choiseul remained a patron of Greuze, acquiring four more of his paintings. Choiseul also helped launch the career of painter Hubert Robert, the talented son of his valet.
During Choiseul’s term in Rome, the city was a gathering place for antiquarians, archeologists, and artists. Encouraged by his friend Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, archeologist and keeper of the king’s antiques cabinet, Choiseul also began collecting antiquities. In 1757, as ambassador to Vienna, Choiseul earned Marie Antoinette’s admiration by engineering the Austrian Alliance, sealed by her marriage to the future Louis XVI. In 1758, after a series of political setbacks including the humiliating defeat of French army at Rossbach, Louis XV and the Marquise de Pompadour withdrew from decision making and reinstated a ministerial government. Choiseul joined the royal council as minister for foreign affairs. Before long, Choiseul consolidated his power with promotions to minister of war, minister of the navy, and secretary of state.
In 1764, Choiseul ordered a cornelian intaglio engraved with his arms and set in a ring with a swivel bezel from Aubert, the celebrated Parisian jeweler. That same year, Madame de Pompadour died, and Choiseul unsuccessfully plotted to replace her as Louis XV’s official mistress with his sister, the Duchesse de Grammont. Instead, Jeanne Bécu, Madame du Barry, snagged the vacancy. In 1766, in an effort to weaken Catherine, Choiseul convinced Turkey to declare war on Russia. By strengthening the traditional cordon sanitaire (buffer states) of Sweden, Poland, and Turkey, Choiseul’s plan was to isolate Catherine from the rest of Europe. But Catherine had other plans. Determined to expand Russia, she announced to France’s ambassador: “We shall no longer follow anyone’s lead. I have money and the finest army in the world.” In 1771, Catherine predicted to Voltaire: “This war will win Russia a name for herself.”8 Choiseul’s strategy backfired; the Russo-Turkish War proved a huge coup for Russia and its ambitious empress.
Madame du Barry never forgave Choiseul for promoting his sister as royal mistress. On a rainy Christmas Eve in 1770, Louis XV handed his powerful minister a pink slip, banishing him from Paris. Without income from his official appointments, Choiseul went from multimillionaire to relative poverty overnight. Undaunted, Choiseul continued to live beyond his means at Château de Chanteloup, his fify-bedroom château on the Loire in central France. A dramatic ten-tier cascade emptied into the large semi-circular lake used for boating excursions. Choiseul’s household numbered 400 servants—50 in livery and 350 in the kitchens and marble stables (for the pedigree Swiss cattle and pigs). Each day at noon, a six-person ensemble gave concerts at which Choiseul often played the flute, and his wife the clavichord. Guests arriving by gilded coaches along an elegant avenue of elms compared the mansion to Versailles. Choiseul hung the Italian paintings from Pierre Crozat’s collection in the great picture gallery in one of the château’s two long wings.
“Gallantry without delicacy was his constant pursuit,” wrote Horace Walpole about Choiseul’s notorious private life.9 A dedicated womanizer, Choiseul’s long-term mistress was the beautiful, witty Countess de Brionne. Widowed at twenty-seven when her husband, Louis Charles of Lorraine, Count of Brionne, was killed during a hunting accident, she became Choiseul’s mistress, following him in exile at Chanteloup, where the duke installed her in her own apartments. Despite her husband’s numerous infidelities, Choiseul’s long-suffering wife professed to idolize him and tried to erase his debts by selling her diamonds and other assets. When Louis XV relieved Choiseul of the post of colonel general des Suisses, an office he thought was a life appointment, he was forced to reduce staff and sell the diamonds and his beloved paintings.
The April 1772 auction created a sensation. Held over four days at Choiseul’s home on rue Neuve Grange-Bateliere, the sale surpassed expectations, bringing in 443,174 livres for some 115 paintings. At the time of the sale, Melchior Grimm observed that Choiseul’s cabinet “was less that of a connoisseur of art than an amateur who has his paintings scattered throughout the different rooms of his home for his personal enjoyment. His choice excluded all serious, sad, tragic and devout subjects, of high style, and consequently all the Italian paintings; he limited himself to the naiveté and realism of the Flemish school, and to the galanterie and mignardise of the French school.” For this reason, Grimm concluded that Choiseul’s taste would not be highly regarded by posterity.10 Russian vice-chancellor A. M. Golitsyn paid 107,904 livres for eleven paintings—nearly a quarter of the entire amount realized by the sale.11 Choiseul’s adversary Madame du Barry bid successfully on a couple of paintings, including Greuze’s portrait of a girl with a black dog for 7,200 livres. Pierre Crozat’s splendid Hôtel also sold that year, and was demolished shortly after.
When Louis XVI succeeded his grandfather in 1774, he allowed Choiseul to return to Paris. With his political career over, Choiseul speculated in real estate unsuccessfully. Despite selling his wife’s inheritance, her magnificent diamonds, the Hôtel Crozat, and his art collection, Choiseul died deeply in debt at age sixty-five. In 1786, Chanteloup was sold to the Duc de Penthièvre, a grandson of Louis XIV and grandfather of Louis Philippe (the property changed hands several times in the 19th century; its Chinese pagoda is all that survives). After spending a year in jail during the French Revolution, the Duchesse de Choiseul ended up in a convent. Between artworks and Chanteloup, Choiseul squandered her enormous fortune; she died in Paris in December 1801 in relative poverty.
The majority of the Choiseul pictures arriving at the Hermitage were Flemish and Dutch. Popular 17th-century Flemish genre painter David Teniers the Younger was represented by two Village Festivals—among twenty-three of the artist’s works amassed by Catherine (today the Hermitage owns thirty-three Teniers).12 Among the arrivals from Paris were Deer Hunt by Philips Wouwerman, The Doctor’s Visit by Gerard Dou, and Portrait of Susanna Fourment and Her Daughter by Anthony van Dyck (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Along with the Netherlandish works came two charming Spanish pendants—Boy with a Dog and its companion Girl with Fruit by baroque painter Bartolomé Estaban Murillo (c. 1655–60). These joined Catherine’s two other Murillos—Rest on the Flight into Egypt from the Jean de Gaignat collection in 1768, and the newly acquired Holy Family from Pierre Crozat.
The youngest of fourteen children of a Sevillan barber and his wife, Murillo was orphaned at age ten and adopted into his aunt’s family. With the exception of a visit to the court of Madrid in 1658, where he saw works by Velazquez, Murillo spent his entire life in Seville. Murillo’s celebrity coincided with Seville’s decline—a plague in 1649 killed half the city’s population; famine and riots followed in 1651 and 1652. Though Murillo became Seville’s leading religious painter, it’s his small genre scenes of urchins and homeless children that endeared him to collectors. The scenes were likely inspired by Murillo’s own family of nine children (four of whom survived) as well as his parish, where many children eked out a living running errands and selling fruit. The charm of Boy with a Dog is the relationship between the laughing boy with the crew cut and his pet. Murillo put a cheerful spin on his subject, showing him outdoors amid ruins, a nostalgic reminder of the fleeting state of childhood. After his death, Murillo’s sentimental style was so popular that Spain’s king tried unsuccessfully to stop the export of his works.
The Crozat and Choiseul bonanzas were a hard act to follow, but Denis Diderot put the icing on the cake in 1772 with a pair of landscapes by Nicolas Poussin. After learning that Hubert de Brienne, Marquis de Conflans, had lost his shirt at cards, Diderot bought the paintings for 3,000 livres. In 1758, Louis XV rewarded Conflans’s distinguished naval career by naming him a marshal of France. But the following year, Conflans was disgraced after leading the Duc de Choiseul’s failed scheme to invade Scotland. Diderot’s opportunistic buy added to Catherine’s Poussin collection that included Descent from the Cross (Heinrich von Brühl) and J. A. Aved’s Tancred and Erminia and Rinaldo and Armida. With their classical imagery, Poussin’s highly intellectual paintings held great appeal for Catherine.
Dubbed the “French Raphael” by contemporaries, admired by artists such as Cezanne, Poussin is widely regarded as France’s finest 17th-century painter. Born into a ruined noble family from Normandy, Poussin spent most of his career in Rome, painting historical, mythological, and biblical subjects for patrons like Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. In the 1640s, Poussin began setting his heroes in nature, portrayed as majestic and powerful. Drawn from Metamorphoses by Ovid, Poussin’s favorite ancient author, Landscape with Polyphemus (1649) depicts the tragic story of unrequited love against a seemingly peaceful setting of mountains, woods, and streams. After being rejected by the sea nymph Galatea, the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus withdraws to a mountaintop at the center of the picture to play out his grief on a flute “made of a hundred reeds.” In Landscape with Hercules and Cacus (c. 1659) from Virgil’s Aeneid, slain monster Cacus lies at the feet of Hercules outside the den where he’d hidden the hero’s stolen cattle. Nymphs watch the drama from the bank of the Tiber below. Similar in size, the two landscapes were considered companion pieces in Catherine’s day; today they are dated a decade apart.
Catherine chose her art scouts brilliantly. With the Crozat, Choiseul, and Conflan acquisitions in Paris, Denis Diderot, Dmitry Golitsyn, and François Tronchin had quickly put her picture gallery on the map. “In the space of a few years,” writes Pierre Cabanne, “the author of La Religieuse ravaged the county’s artistic capital more effectively than an occupying army could have done.”13