7.3 Innovative Auction Catalogues
The Tallard sales catalogue had an innovative structure, since Rémy had divided the paintings according to schools, which were subsequently more or less arranged chronologically. In the auction catalogue of the collection of Joseph-Antoine Crozat, marquis de Tugny (1696-1751) from June–July 1751, Pierre-Jean Mariette had already applied a similar approach.1 The Italian paintings were subdivided into the Florentine, Sienese, Roman, Parmese, Milanese, Bolognese, and Venetian schools, followed by a few Neapolitan, Genovese and Spanish paintings; apart from these schools there was the Netherlandish school (école des Pais-Bas), which included both North and South Netherlandish masters, but also German painters such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528); the French school was represented at the end of the catalogue of paintings. It is hardly coincidental that the first Dutch sales catalogue in which paintings were ordered in such a systematic way, was the one of the artist-art dealer Gerard Hoet, who had been so familiar with the structure of the Tallard catalogue. Hoet’s collection or trading stock was auctioned after his death on 25 August 1760.2 The catalogue was also arranged according to ‘national’ or regional schools. The Tallard catalogue must have served as an example.
Does the structure of the Tallard auction catalogue reflect the way the paintings had actually been displayed in the collector’s house? From a contemporary description by Antoine-Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville we can deduce that paintings from various schools were not separated but mixed, possibly in order to compare the quality of paintings of different geographical origin.3 The walls were probably densely hung with paintings — as a kind of decorative and symmetrical mosaic.4
An overall systematic arrangement of art works according to a chronological order and a classification into schools only slowly developed as a new standard in the second half of the 18th century, especially in the Holy Roman Empire. The installations of the princely, royal or imperial collections in Dresden, Düsseldorf, Potsdam, Kassel and Vienna, to name but a few, were thoroughly reorganised during the 1740s–1780s, which would have a lasting impact on the way museums around the world displayed their collections of paintings throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.5
Notes
1 The Crozat-Tugny sales catalogue, June–July 1751 (Lugt 762). Stuffmann 1968, p. 34. Pomian 1990, p. 139.
2 See the Hoet sales catalogue, 25 August 1760 (Lugt 1109). Korthals Altes 2003A, pp.170–175.
3 Dezallier d’Argenville 1752, pp. 208–214.
4 For a similar display of the Jullienne collection (based on an album from c. 1756): Vogtherr 2011, p. 60.
5 Spenlé 2004. Walz 2004, esp. p. 129. Savoy 2006 and Savoy 2015. Gaehtgens/Marchesano 2011- Lange/Trümper 2011. Meijers 2015.