[Manuscript drop-titles]: Catalogue des Tableaux de Madame la Comtesse de Verrue dont la Vente a....
20 pp. 8vo, 19th-century brown half-cloth & marbled boards (spine a trifle rubbed), title on spine, spine gilt. [S.l.: 1737].
One of the very rare contemporary manuscript sale catalogues of the painting collection of the comtesse de Verrue (1670-1736), one of history’s greatest collectors of art as well as books. It is annotated with nearly all prices and a few buyers’ names. According to Lugt, there are no known printed catalogues of this sale of paintings — most likely never printed — and the Getty Provenance Index records 14 extant manuscript copies, all in institutional libraries, except this example.
“Verrue, may be best known today as Alexandre Dumas’s fictive dame volupté, a sobriquet she reputedly created and one that has too easily obscured her crucial role in the art world of early eighteenth-century Paris. She had the social confidence to renounce the traditional pattern of collecting that Crozat had eagerly embraced and turned from ‘serious’ Italian paintings to ‘petits sujets,’ bucolic landscapes, and amorous mythologies, primarily by painters of the Northern and French schools. Like Crozat, she shaped a remarkable and widely admired dwelling that was central to her identity and famous during her lifetime. The importance of each house was enhanced by the way it functioned. Each became a key site of artistic discourse, a place where art lovers and artists assembled, and a locus for assessing competing systems of value, where distinctive outlooks were forged, defined, and absorbed.”–Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art (2012), p. 2.
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