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The Jacquemart-Andre Museum
by:
Rachel Kaplan
When the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay are on strike or closed for a national holiday, is there any place you can visit in Paris besides the Luxembourg Gardens and the Eiffel Tower? Yes, indeed there is, and what's more, it's the kind of place that is both awesomely beautiful and delightfully entertaining.
Now that's a tall order for an art museum, but then again, since the Jacquemart-Andre Museum was refurbished and brought back to life six years ago, it's been the talk of the international art world. And even those die-hard Parisians who have never stepped foot in the Louvre, love the Jacquemart-Andre if only because it boasts the only restaurant where you can eat beneath an original Tiepolo ceiling.
A house museum on the Boulevard Haussmann, whose 5,000 works of art and antiquities range from Ancient Egypt to the Italian Quattrocentro to the Dutch School of Old Master painting and the Rococo of Boucher, Fragonard and Greuze, the Jacquemart-Andre is definitely in a class by itself. The sumptuous edifice, built between 1869 and 1875 by the architect Henri Parent (second runner-up after Charles Garner to the Paris Opera), was commissioned by Edouard Andre, the sole heir to a colossal banking fortune. It was so colossal that in 1871 he and Baron Rothschild paid up, in a single week, five billion francs in gold as a war indemnity to Chancellor Bismarck, a pay-off that prevented the Prussian Army occupying Paris.
As an ardent Bonapartist and a one-time member of the Imperial Guards, after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, Andre retired from public life to amass one of the greatest art collections in France. The locale for his residence, a fifteen-minute walk from the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de l' Etoile, had been transformed into one of the French capital's most desirable sectors during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III and his master town planner, Baron Georges Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine. Andre's neighbours were the leading personalities of the day, including Prince Eugene, Princess Mathilde (the Emperor's cousin), his half-brother the Duc de Morny, and bankers Rothschild, P￩reire and Fould.
When the Second Empire fell in 1870, Andre devoted the rest of his life to amassing his art collection, organising the museum that one day would become the Museum of Decorative Arts, and publishing the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, still one of the world's most prestigious art publications. Thanks to his stupendous personal fortune, he had at his disposal twice the annual art budget of the Louvre.
Although built almost a century after the demise of the Ancien Regime, the Andre mansion was designed by an architect keen to create an aristocratic residence within a modern city. He succeeded admirably in doing so, devising a style known as 'Louis XVI-Empress' in homage to the Empress Eugenie, who revived the cult and fashions of Marie-Antoinette at her court.
The first remarkable feature of Henri Parent's design is that he created the only mansion that is not built at the same level as the Boulevard Haussmann, but is elevated by means of an embankment so that it can be seen from a distance. Instead of being aligned with the neighbouring buildings, it is recessed from the street, which adds to the mansion's palatial exclusivity, especially on a street known for its uniform monotony.
Parent paid particular attention to the mansion's entrance. Even today, visitors must follow a covered ramp that goes from the Boulevard Haussmann to a semi-circular inner courtyard, which reveals the faade's grand entrance and monumental portico flanked by two Venetian lions.
While the museum's archives reveal nothing of the owner's intentions concerning the mansion's layout and interior design, the overall result is quite atypical for the period. Instead of private apartments on the upper floors and reception rooms on the courtyard level, the Andre mansion's ground floor features an antechamber, sitting room, dining room, ballroom, veranda, winter garden and monumental staircase. While no single area is large enough to accommodate more than a thousand people, Parent devised an ingenious solution to enlarge the reception areas when large numbers of guests had to be accommodated. Moveable partition walls were activated by hydraulic jacks concealed in the basement, thus creating a single large room out of the antechamber, rotunda ballroom and main hall.
However, the most unusual feature of the Andre mansion is without a doubt its grand staircase, which was moved to the end of the right wing in the winter garden. Parent, who was keen to emulate the grandeur of the three-story staircase in the Palais Garnier, endowed the Hotel Andre with a magnificent double-spiral staircase supported by two marble columns. The day after it was inaugurated, the press unanimously applauded the residence as an unrivalled masterpiece, citing Parent's daring design.
By the time the Andre mansion was completed, its owner had become known as a serious patron of the arts and collector. Drawn to contemporary art as a young man, he had purchased works by such recognised talents as Ingres and Delacroix, but also acquired art by Orientalists and landscapists of the Barbizon School, thus revealing a certain eclectic taste. He had become interested in Far Eastern art, recently introduced to Europe through the Universal Expositions. Moreover, he had acquired notable eighteenth-century works by Boucher, Fragonard, Chardin and Nattier-which only a few years earlier had been denigrated as decorative and superficial.
Judging by a youthful portrait in the museum's entrance, Edouard Andre cut a dashing figure in the Imperial Guards, and like many of his class, was reputed to lead the life of a cosmopolitan roue, often to his family's distress. By 1881, his austerely Protestant father and step-mother made it clear that it was high time that he settle down, particularly since he was starting to be plagued by gout.
Instead of proposing to a socially and financially endowed heiress, Andre married a self-made woman, a portrait painter named Nelie Jacquemart, whose father had been a steward on the country estate of Rose de Vatry, one of the wealthiest widows in France. The childless Rose had taken Nelie under her wing. Recognising her protegee's artistic talent, Rose sent her to study first with Leon Cogniet in Paris and later in Rome at the Villa Medici. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts was closed to women until after World War I.
Nelie began earning her way at 19, drawing for L'Illustration, one the leading weeklies of the time, and later, dedicating her talents to making mainly society portraits of the Orleanist aristocracy who made up the social sphere of Madame de Vatry. Oddly enough, she had painted her future husband's portrait in 1872, a work that now hangs in the boudoir where the couple once enjoyed breakfast and tea.
By the time Edouard Andre proposed, Nelie was close to forty, had a flourishing artistic career and a handsome establishment of her own. Yet, as independent as she was, she must have been tempted by the prospect of a blank cheque that would permit her to make the Grand Tour at least six months of the year, and bring back a staggering array of objects, the finest that money could buy at the time. In fact, crates of antiques from abroad continued to arrive several months after her death.
While the Andre family may have demurred at the prospect of a daughter-in-law who was neither beautiful nor wealthy, a visit to the museum demonstrates that Edouard was most astute in his choice of bride. It is abundantly clear that without her artistic knowledge, he would never have amassed the collection of Italian Renaissance masterpieces by Botticelli, Uccello, Mantegna and Bellini. Moreover, at her behest he built up a stunning collection of Old Masters, including three fine paintings by Rembrandt, three by Van Dyck, and one unforgettable portrait by Frans Hals, that he painted when he was 80 years old.
Although the Andre mansion was finished when N￩lie moved in, the excellent audio guide reveals how as the couple grew physically and emotionally closer over the years, which compelled them to alter their living quarters' layout and design. The upstairs gallery-once intended to be Nelie's studio-was arranged to hold their Italian treasures, and Nelie's original sleeping quarters were changed, so that she could be closer to her increasingly infirm husband. The house archives reveal that it was she who was responsible for handling all tradesmen, painters, cabinet-makers and art dealers, no small feat at a time when most women were still regarded as chattel.
Her husband must have been grateful because he made her his sole heir, which allowed her to travel to the Far East and amass an exceptional collection of Indian and Oriental antiquities and furnishings. She in turn abided by the wishes of his will, continuing to enrich the collection of the Jacquemart-Andre Museum so that it now is one of the great showplaces of the world.
Thanks to private management, we can now eat in the Andre dining room Botticelli and Uccello salads under a Tiepolo ceiling, in which the artist and his pet monkey look down fondly at their new admirers. Happily satiated with art, French food and wine, it is not hard to imagine that the host and hostess, Edouard and N￩lie, are still very much in residence. |
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Figure 1
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Figure 2
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Figure 3
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Figure 4
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Figure 5
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Figure 6
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