Boîtes romantiques / Rubens / A German at the court of Louis - Lot 146

Boîtes romantiques / Rubens / A German at the court of Louis XIV Boîtes romantiques - Nécessaires et autres jolis riens (2007) Tea, coffee, chocolate, toiletries, visits, whist, crochet: there's a box for every activity, every moment of the day. Organized into thematic chapters, enamelled with quotations from the newspapers of the time, as well as from the works of Balzac, Eugène Sue, Musset, Flaubert, Maupassant and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the book explores the daily life of the bourgeoisie during the reign of Charles X and Louis-Philippe. Reflecting a world sensitive to elegance and the charm of idleness, these objects also reflect the excellence of Parisian production. Manufactured mainly in the Palais-Royal district or in the Marais using precious materials such as exotic woods, ivory and mother-of-pearl, these "little pieces of furniture" benefited from industrial advances: mechanical sawing, steam presses. They were marketed in the elegant stores that sprang up around the Bourse and on the Chaussée d'Antin. The whole of Europe wanted to own these "articles de Paris", symbols of tasteful luxury. Jérôme Coignard is an art historian and journalist. Editor of Connaissance des Arts magazine, his books include On a volé la Joconde (Adam Biro), Style colonial (Le Chêne), Palais romantiques des dernières cours d'Europe (Gallimard), and the new Guide du Musée des Arts décoratifs. Rubens, des camées antiques à la galerie Médicis (2018) this book highlights a decisive element in the interpretation of the pictorial cycle to the glory of Marie de Médicis now preserved in the Louvre: antique cameos, these engraved stones of extraordinary finesse and quality, provided a model and a source of inspiration as he invented a new iconography. In Rubens, des camées antiques à la galerie Médicis, Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc, a specialist in the history of painting in the 17th century, and Évelyne Prioux, a specialist in the arts of antiquity, have combined their expertise to highlight a key element in the interpretation of the work of Pierre Paul Rubens (1577-1640): antique cameos, these engraved gems of extraordinary finesse and quality, were for the artist, whose activity was essentially placed under the sign of history painting, a substitute model in the face of the almost complete disappearance of antique painting in his time. And this model is the implicit source of one of his most famous cycles, the Galerie Médicis, the spectacular suite of twenty-four pictures painted for Queen Marie de Médicis for the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris (now in the Musée du Louvre). To understand it, we must be willing to travel not only between Antiquity and the 17th century, but also between painting and engraved stones, between very large and very small formats, between the world of creation and that of the collection of precious objects. Rubens in fact collected antique engraved stones with remarkable discernment, offering a complex political iconography at a time when he was himself confronted with a new exercise: the original invention of a pictorial cycle to the glory of Marie de Médicis. While there were existing conventions for the epic celebration of a king (battle scenes, triumphs, etc.), that of a queen required the invention of an entirely new iconography. Rubens accomplished this task in striking fashion. Un Allemand à la cour de Louis XIV - De Dürer à Van Dyck, la collection nordique de Jabach (2013) Everhard Jabach (1618-1695) was one of the greatest collectors of his time. A merchant-banker from a powerful Cologne family, he moved to Paris at an early age, where he linked his destiny to that of the French monarchy by becoming a major player in Colbert's economic policy. The sale of his sumptuous collection to Louis XIV in 1662 and 1671 marked the inaugural act of a truly royal collection of paintings and drawings.