At Jacquemart-André

As you know, Charles Garnier won a competition to design the Opéra de Paris, rightly known today as the Palais Garnier. Henri Parent came second.

Parent is not as well known but you may have seen one of his finest creations: the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. In the early 1870s he converted the private home of Édouard André(1833–1894) and Nélie Jacquemart(1841–1912) to display their art collection. The museum ranks alongside, sometimes above, the Frick, Kenwood House, the Wallace Collection and other examples around Europe. I have visited many times. As it happens it is only a thirty minute walk west from Palais Garnier.

On Saturday I went particularly to see a magnificent temporary exhibition of paintings and some sculpture on loan from the Galleria Borghese. Scipione Borghese was an avid and unscrupulous collector – the Andrés were the former, most definitely not the latter – but it is somehow fitting that a 17th and a 19th century collection should be juxtaposed. Frankly, the combination is too much to take in and too much to write about. If you have not been, tant pis it closed yesterday.

I’d like to tell you briefly about this fresco painted by Tiepolo in about 1750 for the Villa Contarini and its owner, Vincenzo Pisani, a Venetian big-wig of the day. The family must have fallen on hard times because it was bought by the Andrés at the end of the 19th century and brought to Paris and its new home on their staircase. I had walked past it on previous visits without taking it in. First one must ponder on the difficulty of moving a fresco and wonder how much of Tiepolo’s work survives, not least after a restoration at the end of the 20th century. But cast such doubts aside and look. It depicts the about to be Henry III being received by the Contarini family at Villa Contarini in 1574. The bride leaning against a pillar is not Henry’s wife, Louise de Vaudemont, (he married in 1755) so maybe Vincenzo Pisani’s own wife, Lucrezia Corner, creating a playful double time frame.

Whatever, one of the most arresting features is the young man in the bottom right corner with a dog. His legs literally dangle out of the fresco through a gap in the real marble pediment setting the tone for the fresco’s trompe l’oeil and perspective imagery. I’m not sure I know what’s going on but it is an arresting composition even if it had never arrested me before.