GENERAL DESCRIPTION
This lively oil sketch is a precious record of the fashionable salon of the wealthy banker and patron of the arts Pierre Crozat, at whose residence artists, musicians, and men of letters regularly mingled with some of the richest members of Parisian society. This painting was conceived as one of a pair. Its pendant (now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich) depicts a similar scene of musical enjoyment, situated in Crozat's Parisian residence on the rue de Richelieu.
Nicolas Lancret is usually considered the artistic heir to Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), whose images of reverie gave exquisite expression to the refined sensibility of the French rococo. Although Lancret treated many of the same gallant subjects as his mentor Watteau, Lancret's acute observation of aristocratic dress and comportment lends his art a more tangible weight.
Excerpt from
DMA label text.
NOTES
c. 1719-1720
General Description: no author or text source shown in TMS.
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former number according to education doc- T43007.25
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PROVENANCE:
Rosenberg brought home this painting in 1995 from the Sotheby’s New York sale of the estate of Robert Dows Brewster. [2]
...Brewster, himself a painter, was a native of New York, his grandfather one of the founders of Standard Oil. He lived in a brownstone in Manhattan...
...remained with Lancret and passed at his death to his widow, who survived him by forty years. They formed a part of the sale of her estate held seven months after her death, on April 5, 1782, at Hôtel de Bullion, Paris. The catalogue was prepared by expert Pierre Rémy. Described as “concerts dans les salons, dont l’un orné d’architecture” (concerts in salons, one decorated with architecture), the Crozat sketches were sold together under lot 12 to Rémy himself for 37 livres. [17, page 61]
Pierre Crozat was a wealthy financier who entertained many ofthe most notable artists, musicians, and connoisseurs of the day at his chateau. Rather than depicting an actual event, Nicolas Lancret captures a feeling for the excitement of attending one of these famous musical parties.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
Lancret is usually considered the artistic heir to Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), who was the inventor of the category of painting known as the fete galante. Untranslatable in English, the fete galante is epitomized by Watteau's 1717 reception piece to the Royal Academy, Pilgrimage to the Isle ofCythera. Now in othe Louvre, this painting depicts fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen of the court in a dream-like landscape, departing for a mythical place of courtly love. Lancret, although not a formal pupil ofWatteau, made a careful study of the master's pictorial poetry. Upon Watteau's premature death in 1712, Lancret was uniquely positioned to fill the demand for such images of reverie. Although critically overshadowed by the nearly mythical proportions ofWatteau's reputation, Lancret developed his own unique style of painting, in which Watteau's fantastic vision of aristocratic leisure was made more concrete through the artist's keen observation of contemporary aristocratic comportment and cultural life. A Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat's Chateau at Montmorency is an exquisite example of Lancret's singular achievement. The subject, an afternoon of musical entertainment at the country estate of the wealthy banker and lover of the arts, Pierre Crozat, must have had special
significance for Lancret: Crozat was an early supporter and patron of Lancret's selfproclaimed mentor, Watteau.
It is exactly the particularizing attention to details of dress and demeanor seen in this painting that distinguishes the art of Lancret. The painting is most likely not a literal portrait or documentary record of any specific occasion. However, it abounds in the kind of rich detail that cannot but derive from observed reality. While the figure's summarily treated faces and bodies are of a recognizable type favored by the painter for such highly finished oil sketches, the elegant costumes and rococo architecture are almost certainly
taken from life. As such, the painting is a precious record of the excitement of life in the Crozat household, where artists, musicians, connoisseurs, and men of letters regularly mingled with some of the wealthiest members of Parisian society. As was often the case
in the art of Lancret, this painting was conceived as one of a pair. The pendant (now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich) depicts a similar scene of musical enjoyment, this time situated in Crozat's Parisian residence on the Rue de Richelieu.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 36.
LANCRET:
One of the really delightful pictures in the Rosenberg Collection is also by a contemporary follower of Watteau, Nicolas Lancret: Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat’s Château at Montmorency (see fig. 40, p. 58). It’s just a tiny picture, very sketchily done, one that shows the oval salon in the country house of Pierre Crozat outside Paris. Crozat was one of the great art collectors of all time. He had the most amazing collection, thousands of drawings and a great collection of about five hundred Old Master paintings, many from the Venetian School (Giorgione, Titian, etc.). Crozat was also a great patron of contemporary art, and Watteau lived with him for a time. Lancret’s painting is an imaginary scene. The room is true, but the figures are generic. A man plays a cello and a woman sings, while people are sitting around, giving a sense of the diversions open to the aristocracy, or the very wealthy, at the time. It’s one of the little gems in the collection and an important record of social life in France. (16-17)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat’s Château at Montmorency (facing page and fig. 40, p. 58), a graceful and finely painted glimpse into the cultured milieu of early eighteenth-century France, was made by one of the foremost chroniclers of that time and place, Nicolas Lancret, who lived from 1690 to 1743. [1]
...Lancret’s importance as an artist and this painting’s charm and beauty make the canvas an ideal addition to the fine group of eighteenth-century paintings amassed by Rosenberg. There are, however, other factors that make this work especially suited within the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation Collection, factors having to do with its previous owner and its subject. These two components add to the serendipity of the addition of this particular painting to this particular collection, and it is these components that will be discussed in this essay.
Rosenberg, too, viewed himself as someone who formed his collection not only for his own pleasure but also with an eye toward furthering the study and appreciation of the underappreciated field of the arts of eighteenth-century France, as well as with an eye toward the public exhibition of the collection and the eventual movement of that collection into the public sphere. He thought about these things constantly, thought about his purchases with public accessibility in mind, thought about his legacy in the broadest terms. Adding to the synchronicity, this painting shared at different times by Brewster and Rosenberg depicts a scene in the home of their philosophical forebear, if you will, a man named Pierre Crozat. [3]
In the Rosenberg painting, a concert is being held in a private location; there is no stage but rather intimate seating for performers and audience alike (fig. 40). We see a graceful oval room, a radiating-parquet floor, and large arcade windows that look out onto a garden. We can make out a jet d’eau among a froth of leaves. Late afternoon sun streams into the chamber. The room itself, grand in scale and holding its crowd of small figures quite comfortably, is lined with Doric columns and niches for full-length figural sculptures. The sculpture of a female figure is on the left. A group of musicians, a singer and several players, is clustered at center, anchored by a harpsichord and surrounded on both sides by an elegant assembly of spectators. The sketchy quality, especially in the agile placement of highlights and the deft touch in the abstract faces, gives this small work a scintillating vitality. It has long been recognized that the settings of the Rosenberg painting and its companion, Concert in the Paris Hôtel of Pierre Crozat, a painting now in Munich (fig. 41), are the two residences of Crozat and that the paintings are mementos of the concerts held there.13
The Rosenberg painting depicts the oval salon of Crozat’s country home in Montmorency, north of Paris near Saint-Denis, a salon that indeed opened onto views of the garden and included niches for standing sculpture. This château was designed by Cartaud for Crozat in 1709 on property once owned by Charles Le Brun, who painted so much of Versailles for Louis XIV. The gardens were laid out by André Le Nôtre, the garden architect of Versailles. Cartaud’s château for Crozat was modeled loosely on sixteenth-century Roman palazzos, which is not surprising, given Crozat’s admiration for all the Italian arts; architecture was no exception.
something quite rare for Lancret: the portrayal of actual contemporary events. As we have seen, the Crozat paintings describe well-known concerts in their real venues.
The subjects give us another indication of a possible purpose. At that time, avenues to patronage were as difficult to come by as exhibition venues, especially for a genre artist. The Regency was ending and a new monarchy beginning, with unforeseeable consequences for future art purchases and commissions. It is quite likely that Lancret (not a wealthy man) painted these four scenes on speculation, part of a strategy aimed both at the court and at the newly powerful financial elite.
By reproducing recognizable contemporary locations, Lancret firmly relocated the fête galante from Watteau’s pastoral southern Italian landscapes to present-day France, to a new realm of beauty, music, and poetry. In Crozat’s concerts, contemporary elegant Parisians enjoy the pleasures of music in actual spaces dedicated to the arts, both scenes the very essence of a new court of Enlightenment...Building on the framework of the fête galante, Lancret inserted genuine sites, sculpture, design elements, and events not to assist in the creation of a dream world (such as one might find in the art of his great forebear Watteau) but to enhance the contemporary and create a wonderful internal tension....Thus it is both fitting and serendipitous that Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat’s Château at Montmorency, so indicative of the power of enlightened patronage, so resonant of a titanic shift in eighteenth-century art, and so reflective of the excellence of that art, should find a home with Robert Dows Brewster, then Michael Rosenberg, and through his Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art.
Excerpt from
Mary Tavener Holmes, "Nicolas Lancret and a Tale of Three Collectors," 53-66 in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1719-1720
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
Lent by the Micheal L. Rosenberg Foundation
AUDIO ASSETS
13312236: UMO Pierre Crozat and Michael L. Rosenberg: Kindred Spirits?
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
- Alte Pinakothek, Munich~View the pendant to this painting, Lancret's Concert in the Salon, c. 1738.
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
- Music historian Michael Greenberg has asserted that this painting contains one of the earliest extant pictorial representation in French art of the double bass, an instrument not introduced in Paris until the beginning of the eighteenth century and one that Crozat was known to own.
- Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived in the Parisian suburb of Montmorency, where the depicted chateau is located, from 1756-1762.
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General Description
This lively oil sketch is a precious record of the fashionable salon of the wealthy banker and patron of the arts Pierre Crozat, at whose residence artists, musicians, and men of letters regularly mingled with some of the richest members of Parisian society. This painting was conceived as one of a pair. Its pendant (now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich) depicts a similar scene of musical enjoyment, situated in Crozat's Parisian residence on the rue de Richelieu.
Nicolas Lancret is usually considered the artistic heir to Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), whose images of reverie gave exquisite expression to the refined sensibility of the French rococo. Although Lancret treated many of the same gallant subjects as his mentor Watteau, Lancret's acute observation of aristocratic dress and comportment lends his art a more tangible weight.
Excerpt from
DMA label text.
Fun Facts
- Music historian Michael Greenberg has asserted that this painting contains one of the earliest extant pictorial representation in French art of the double bass, an instrument not introduced in Paris until the beginning of the eighteenth century and one that Crozat was known to own.
- Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived in the Parisian suburb of Montmorency, where the depicted chateau is located, from 1756-1762.
Archival Resources
Web Resources
Notes
c. 1719-1720
General Description: no author or text source shown in TMS.
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
former number according to education doc- T43007.25
Checked Piction
PROVENANCE:
Rosenberg brought home this painting in 1995 from the Sotheby’s New York sale of the estate of Robert Dows Brewster. [2]
...Brewster, himself a painter, was a native of New York, his grandfather one of the founders of Standard Oil. He lived in a brownstone in Manhattan...
...remained with Lancret and passed at his death to his widow, who survived him by forty years. They formed a part of the sale of her estate held seven months after her death, on April 5, 1782, at Hôtel de Bullion, Paris. The catalogue was prepared by expert Pierre Rémy. Described as “concerts dans les salons, dont l’un orné d’architecture” (concerts in salons, one decorated with architecture), the Crozat sketches were sold together under lot 12 to Rémy himself for 37 livres. [17, page 61]
Pierre Crozat was a wealthy financier who entertained many ofthe most notable artists, musicians, and connoisseurs of the day at his chateau. Rather than depicting an actual event, Nicolas Lancret captures a feeling for the excitement of attending one of these famous musical parties.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
Lancret is usually considered the artistic heir to Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), who was the inventor of the category of painting known as the fete galante. Untranslatable in English, the fete galante is epitomized by Watteau's 1717 reception piece to the Royal Academy, Pilgrimage to the Isle ofCythera. Now in othe Louvre, this painting depicts fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen of the court in a dream-like landscape, departing for a mythical place of courtly love. Lancret, although not a formal pupil ofWatteau, made a careful study of the master's pictorial poetry. Upon Watteau's premature death in 1712, Lancret was uniquely positioned to fill the demand for such images of reverie. Although critically overshadowed by the nearly mythical proportions ofWatteau's reputation, Lancret developed his own unique style of painting, in which Watteau's fantastic vision of aristocratic leisure was made more concrete through the artist's keen observation of contemporary aristocratic comportment and cultural life. A Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat's Chateau at Montmorency is an exquisite example of Lancret's singular achievement. The subject, an afternoon of musical entertainment at the country estate of the wealthy banker and lover of the arts, Pierre Crozat, must have had special
significance for Lancret: Crozat was an early supporter and patron of Lancret's selfproclaimed mentor, Watteau.
It is exactly the particularizing attention to details of dress and demeanor seen in this painting that distinguishes the art of Lancret. The painting is most likely not a literal portrait or documentary record of any specific occasion. However, it abounds in the kind of rich detail that cannot but derive from observed reality. While the figure's summarily treated faces and bodies are of a recognizable type favored by the painter for such highly finished oil sketches, the elegant costumes and rococo architecture are almost certainly
taken from life. As such, the painting is a precious record of the excitement of life in the Crozat household, where artists, musicians, connoisseurs, and men of letters regularly mingled with some of the wealthiest members of Parisian society. As was often the case
in the art of Lancret, this painting was conceived as one of a pair. The pendant (now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich) depicts a similar scene of musical enjoyment, this time situated in Crozat's Parisian residence on the Rue de Richelieu.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 36.
LANCRET:
One of the really delightful pictures in the Rosenberg Collection is also by a contemporary follower of Watteau, Nicolas Lancret: Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat’s Château at Montmorency (see fig. 40, p. 58). It’s just a tiny picture, very sketchily done, one that shows the oval salon in the country house of Pierre Crozat outside Paris. Crozat was one of the great art collectors of all time. He had the most amazing collection, thousands of drawings and a great collection of about five hundred Old Master paintings, many from the Venetian School (Giorgione, Titian, etc.). Crozat was also a great patron of contemporary art, and Watteau lived with him for a time. Lancret’s painting is an imaginary scene. The room is true, but the figures are generic. A man plays a cello and a woman sings, while people are sitting around, giving a sense of the diversions open to the aristocracy, or the very wealthy, at the time. It’s one of the little gems in the collection and an important record of social life in France. (16-17)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat’s Château at Montmorency (facing page and fig. 40, p. 58), a graceful and finely painted glimpse into the cultured milieu of early eighteenth-century France, was made by one of the foremost chroniclers of that time and place, Nicolas Lancret, who lived from 1690 to 1743. [1]
...Lancret’s importance as an artist and this painting’s charm and beauty make the canvas an ideal addition to the fine group of eighteenth-century paintings amassed by Rosenberg. There are, however, other factors that make this work especially suited within the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation Collection, factors having to do with its previous owner and its subject. These two components add to the serendipity of the addition of this particular painting to this particular collection, and it is these components that will be discussed in this essay.
Rosenberg, too, viewed himself as someone who formed his collection not only for his own pleasure but also with an eye toward furthering the study and appreciation of the underappreciated field of the arts of eighteenth-century France, as well as with an eye toward the public exhibition of the collection and the eventual movement of that collection into the public sphere. He thought about these things constantly, thought about his purchases with public accessibility in mind, thought about his legacy in the broadest terms. Adding to the synchronicity, this painting shared at different times by Brewster and Rosenberg depicts a scene in the home of their philosophical forebear, if you will, a man named Pierre Crozat. [3]
In the Rosenberg painting, a concert is being held in a private location; there is no stage but rather intimate seating for performers and audience alike (fig. 40). We see a graceful oval room, a radiating-parquet floor, and large arcade windows that look out onto a garden. We can make out a jet d’eau among a froth of leaves. Late afternoon sun streams into the chamber. The room itself, grand in scale and holding its crowd of small figures quite comfortably, is lined with Doric columns and niches for full-length figural sculptures. The sculpture of a female figure is on the left. A group of musicians, a singer and several players, is clustered at center, anchored by a harpsichord and surrounded on both sides by an elegant assembly of spectators. The sketchy quality, especially in the agile placement of highlights and the deft touch in the abstract faces, gives this small work a scintillating vitality. It has long been recognized that the settings of the Rosenberg painting and its companion, Concert in the Paris Hôtel of Pierre Crozat, a painting now in Munich (fig. 41), are the two residences of Crozat and that the paintings are mementos of the concerts held there.13
The Rosenberg painting depicts the oval salon of Crozat’s country home in Montmorency, north of Paris near Saint-Denis, a salon that indeed opened onto views of the garden and included niches for standing sculpture. This château was designed by Cartaud for Crozat in 1709 on property once owned by Charles Le Brun, who painted so much of Versailles for Louis XIV. The gardens were laid out by André Le Nôtre, the garden architect of Versailles. Cartaud’s château for Crozat was modeled loosely on sixteenth-century Roman palazzos, which is not surprising, given Crozat’s admiration for all the Italian arts; architecture was no exception.
something quite rare for Lancret: the portrayal of actual contemporary events. As we have seen, the Crozat paintings describe well-known concerts in their real venues.
The subjects give us another indication of a possible purpose. At that time, avenues to patronage were as difficult to come by as exhibition venues, especially for a genre artist. The Regency was ending and a new monarchy beginning, with unforeseeable consequences for future art purchases and commissions. It is quite likely that Lancret (not a wealthy man) painted these four scenes on speculation, part of a strategy aimed both at the court and at the newly powerful financial elite.
By reproducing recognizable contemporary locations, Lancret firmly relocated the fête galante from Watteau’s pastoral southern Italian landscapes to present-day France, to a new realm of beauty, music, and poetry. In Crozat’s concerts, contemporary elegant Parisians enjoy the pleasures of music in actual spaces dedicated to the arts, both scenes the very essence of a new court of Enlightenment...Building on the framework of the fête galante, Lancret inserted genuine sites, sculpture, design elements, and events not to assist in the creation of a dream world (such as one might find in the art of his great forebear Watteau) but to enhance the contemporary and create a wonderful internal tension....Thus it is both fitting and serendipitous that Concert in the Oval Salon of Pierre Crozat’s Château at Montmorency, so indicative of the power of enlightened patronage, so resonant of a titanic shift in eighteenth-century art, and so reflective of the excellence of that art, should find a home with Robert Dows Brewster, then Michael Rosenberg, and through his Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art.
Excerpt from
Mary Tavener Holmes, "Nicolas Lancret and a Tale of Three Collectors," 53-66 in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1719-1720
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
Lent by the Micheal L. Rosenberg Foundation
AUDIO ASSETS
13312236: UMO Pierre Crozat and Michael L. Rosenberg: Kindred Spirits?
VIDEO ASSETS
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