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Caffiéri, Philippe (Paris)  

Jean-Dominique Augarde

(b Paris, Feb 19, 1714; d Paris, Oct 8, 1774).

French bronze-caster, collector and designer, son of Jacques Caffiéri. He succeeded his mother as Marchand Doreur Privilégié du Roi in 1743. Trained by his father, and an associate in his business from 1747, he continued the workshop and succeeded his father as Sculpteur et Ciseleur Ordinaire des Bâtiments du Roi. In 1754 he was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc, Paris, and on 16 January 1756 became a master bronze-caster and chaser. Under his direction the Caffiéri workshop continued to prosper by working for a prestigious clientele, and Philippe became wealthy. He was able to form a collection that included drawings and paintings by Rembrandt, David Teniers (ii), Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Chardin, François de Troy (ii), Louis Lagrenée, Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard and sculptures by Jacques-François-Joseph de Saly, Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Michel-Ange Challe.

Caffiéri rejected the Louis XV style in which his father had worked, favouring instead the richly decorative technique of black patination with gilding, which he used particularly for Neo-classical works. Both his own works and those carried out under the supervision of various architects show his freely interpreted versions of canons of the ‘Greek style’, which lack the often dogmatic stylistic vocabulary apparent in the work of some of his contemporaries. After ...

Article

Courtauld family  

Stephen Clarke

English family of silversmiths, industrialists, collectors, and patrons, of French origin. The family originated from the town of St Pierre on the Ile d’Oléron off La Rochelle. They arrived in London a few years after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and between 1708 and 1780 three generations of Courtauld silversmiths were registered at the Goldsmiths’ Company. Augustine Courtauld (c.1686–c. 1751) was apprenticed to Simon Pantin in 1701 and, after becoming a freeman of the Goldsmiths’ Company in 1708, he started a business as a plateworker in Church Court, off St Martin’s Lane in London. The majority of his work is of high quality, for example a silver tea-table (1742; St Petersburg, Hermitage) and the state salt of the Corporation of the City of London (1730; London, Mansion House). Augustine’s brother Pierre Courtauld (1690–1729) registered a mark in 1721...

Article

Delafontaine, Pierre-Maximilien  

Marie-Claude Chaudonneret

(b Paris, c. 1774; d Paris, bur Dec 3, 1860).

French painter, bronze-founder and collector. He was born into a family of bronze-founders. He studied in Jacques-Louis David’s atelier and on David’s arrest in 1794 accompanied him on his way to prison and with 16 of his fellow students signed an address to the National Convention calling for his master’s release. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1798 both the full-length Portrait of a Man Skating, or the portrait of Bertrand Andrieu (Paris, Hôtel de la Monnaie), a rather stiff and awkward treatment of the subject in comparison with, for instance, Gilbert Stuart’s Skater (1782; Washington, DC, N.G.A.), and the Deluge (Gray, Mus. Martin), inspired by the poems of Salomon Gessner (1730–88) (the episode in which Phanor carries the fainting Semira). Delafontaine considered this painting to be his masterpiece. At the Salon of 1799 he showed the portrait of Alexandre Lenoir, a somewhat gauche, full-length depiction of the creator of the Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, Louvre). The portrait of ...

Article

Einhard  

D. A. Bullough

[Eginhard; Einhart]

(b c. ad 770; d 837).

German patron, writer, and possibly metalworker. He married Emma, sister of Bernharius, Bishop of Worms, and they possibly had a son, Hussin. He received his early education at Fulda Abbey, where he wrote documents between 788 and 791, although he was not ordained or professed as a monk. He then moved to the court at Aachen, which had recently been established, to continue his studies under Alcuin (c. 735–804) and others. His most notable product was the Life of his patron Charlemagne, written in the late 820s. It was after Charlemagne had died that his son Louis the Pious elevated Einhard to the post of private secretary. It was in this post and under Louis’s patronage that he wrote the Vita Karoli Magni, which is still one of the principal sources for much of our knowledge of Charlemagne. Contemporaries recorded his small stature and lively conduct, and his nickname Be(se)leel, after Bezaleel, the worker in precious metals in Exodus 31:2–5....

Article

Festetits, Samuel, Graf von  

(b 1806; d 1862).

Austrian collector. A wealthy landowner, he lived primarily in Vienna, where he was part of the circle of the medallist Johann Daniel Böhm (1794–1865) and the dealer Georg Plach. As an art patron, he was a founding member c. 1850 of the Österreichische Kunstverein. His collection consisted mostly of paintings, drawings and prints by Italian, Netherlandish, Dutch and German Old Masters (e.g. Jacob van Ruisdael’s Wooded Landscape; Vienna, Österreich. Mus. Kst & Ind.), which were acquired from such major collections as that of Balthasar Speth in Munich and those of Adamovic, Graf Georg Apponyi, Baranowsky, Hess, Lechi and Böhm in Vienna. In addition, he also bought important pictures from Italy, including a 14th-century altarpiece from a vestry in Lucca. The collection was sold in 1859 (Vienna, Artaria & Altmann, 7 March) and included 162 paintings. Plach appears to have acquired all of the remaining pictures, although more than 40 paintings from the collection entered the gallery of ...

Article

Giraud, Jean-Baptiste  

Pascal Griener

(b Aix-en-Provence, June 21, 1752; d Bouleau, Seine-et-Marne, Feb 13, 1830).

French sculptor and writer. He worked for a goldsmith in Paris before devoting himself to sculpture, in which he was self-taught. Thanks to an allowance from an uncle who had adopted him, he was able to study sculpture in Italy in the early 1780s; there he struck up a friendship with Jacques-Louis David. On his return he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in Paris in 1788, and was received (reçu) as a member in the following year. On coming into a fortune, he returned in 1790 to Italy, where he lived until 1793, chiefly in Florence, Rome and Naples. He brought back with him what was the richest collection in France of plaster casts after antique sculpture, which he exhibited to the public at his house in the Place Vendôme, Paris. When, in 1796, Napoleon plundered some of the best-known antique sculptures of Rome, Giraud protested about their removal....

Article

Hoare family (i)  

English family of bankers, patrons and collectors. The foundations of the family fortune were laid by Richard Hoare (1648–1718), a goldsmith who set up a banking business in 1672 at the sign of the Golden Bottle, 37 Fleet Street, London. He was knighted in 1702 and elected Lord Mayor of London in 1712. Of his 17 children, his son Henry Hoare the elder (1677–1724) continued the banking business and in 1717 bought property at Stourton, Wilts, thus initiating the family’s connection with the Stourhead estate; he commissioned Colen Campbell to replace the existing building with a Palladian villa (1721–4). This was duly bequeathed to his son Henry Hoare the younger, called the Magnificent, who was responsible for laying out the garden at Stourhead and for building up a notable collection of paintings; he also inherited a partnership in the bank. Henry’s son died while on a Grand Tour in Naples in ...

Article

Lempereur, Jean-Denis, II  

Anne Leclair

(b Paris, 1701; d Paris, 1779).

French collector, goldsmith, draughtsman and engraver. He was a member of a Parisian family of goldsmiths. In 1756 he became an alderman of the city of Paris, an appointment that conferred nobility. He was a great connoisseur who numbered among his friends artists, art dealers and art lovers, including Edmé-François Gersaint, Jean-Georges Wille and Pierre-Jean Mariette, with whom he collaborated in publishing a work on Edme Bouchardon’s equestrian statue of Louis XV (Paris, Place Louis XV; destr.). On Mariette’s death, the King urged Lempereur to purchase for him the whole of his famous collection (see Mariette, Pierre-Jean); the negotiations broke down, but Lempereur did succeed in buying 1300 drawings (Paris, Louvre).

Lempereur himself also gathered together a superb collection of works of art (1218 items, sold 24 May 1773). The greater part of the drawings from Italy and the Netherlands (such as those by Raphael and ...

Article

Marquand, Henry G(urdon)  

Lillian B. Miller

(b New York, April 11, 1819; d New York, Feb 26, 1902).

American businessman, philanthropist, and collector. Born into a family of silversmiths, he first worked in real estate in New York and then moved into banking and investment. In 1874, together with his brother Frederick and other investors, he purchased the St Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railroad; from 1875 to 1881 he served as its vice-president and in 1881 as president, and he continued to serve as director of this railroad and its later parent organization, the Missouri Pacific, until his death.

Marquand was a member of the original group of 50 prominent New Yorkers who met in 1869 to plan the organization of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to raise an endowment. After he had retired in 1881, he was able to devote his energies to civic activities, primarily to the successful development of the Metropolitan. From 1882 to 1889 he served as its treasurer, and from 1889...

Article

Harley Preston and Lin Barton

In 

Article

Susse  

Linda Whiteley

French family of bronze-founders, bronze-casters, dealers, publishers, paper merchants and artists’ suppliers. Jean Susse (1726–1809) was a cabinetmaker in Paris. His two sons Nicolas Susse and Michel-Victor Susse (b Paris, 1782; d Paris, 1853) went into partnership in 1806, opening a shop for fine writing-paper in the Passage des Panoramas, Paris. By 1816 they had also begun to sell artists’ materials and in 1827 they opened a further branch at 31, Place de la Bourse. Their business brought them into contact with several artists whose work they occasionally bought or took in exchange. Paul Gavarni owed his first success to drawings and paintings he exhibited at the Galerie Susse. The business soon became one of the best known in Paris for the sale and hire of contemporary paintings, to which the brothers added the publishing of artists’ manuals. Michel-Victor Susse’s eldest son, Victor Susse (b...