A couple of smaller Parisian museums: Cognacq-Jay, and Zadkine

Before and after attending the radiology congress which was the principal purpose of my trip to Paris, I got to visit a couple of smaller but delightful museums.

The Musée Cognacq-Jay, located in the district known as the Marais, is devoted to the art of the 18th century and houses the collection acquired between 1900 - 1927 by Ernest Cognacq, founder of the Samaritaine department store, and his wife Marie-Louise Jay. In addition to a fine collection of paintings and sculpture, the collection includes porcelain, furniture, silver, snuffboxes, and other decorative items, all beautifully displayed in the Hôtel Donon, a house from the late 16th century.

Among other things, I was pleased to see a small selection of paintings by the Venetian painters Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Francesco's son Giacomo, and by imitators. I'm rather keen on Francesco Guardi, who was the subject of my MA dissertation. I had not seen this collection before, and it was interesting to have similar works by artists of varying quality displayed sided by side.

The big, famous museums like the Louvre, or the Musée D'Orsay are of course wonderful places to visit, but smaller museums have their appeal too, and in a different way. The grand museums are so large that it's impossible to see more than a small sample of their collections in a single visit. with smaller museums, it's usually possible to take a more leisurely perambulation through the displays, and I find that the smaller scale of the rooms creates a more relaxed framework in which to view the exhibits. In great tourist cities like Paris, the lesser-known museums also tend to be less crowded, which is a great bonus, I find.

During our visit to the Musée cognac-Jay, there was also an exhibition about the history of tea, coffee and cocoa in the 18th century, which was informative and enjoyable.

Among the exhibits, this 18th century menu offering a few "English" dishes: Rosbiff and several variants of Beef-stake.

In the courtyard, a pop-up café offered Espresso Tonic: espresso in tonic water.

Unlikely as it might seem, this is rather nice, but if you make it yourself, pour the coffee very slowly and carefully into the tonic, or the whole thing will froth up all over the table, as I found.

The other, even smaller museum I visited was the Musee Zadkine, contaning works by the sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1890 - 1967), and housed in his former studio. The street entrance is rather inconspicuous, and it's easy to walk right past it, as I did.

Zadkine was born in Russia. Sent to Sunderland in England to study English, he began to attend art classes, and moved to London in 1906 where he studied sculpture. In 1909 he moved to Paris where he spent the rest of his life, apart from a period of exile in New York during the second world war, and he was friends with Appolinaire, Picasso, Brancusi, and Eileen Gray.

The museum houses examples of his work from the start of his career, right up to those produced towards the end of his life. These are situated both inside the building, where the white walls and natural light set them off marvellously, as well as in the small garden.

Admission is free, but there is an audioguide in French or English for 5 Euro. Apart from discussing the background and context of the sculptures, it also it describes how the works were made, and aspects like the subtle application of pigment to what I took to be unfinished wood or stone, which I found particularly interesting. Audioguides can be variable in their quality, but I thought this one was well worth the money.

I enjoyed the visit immensely, much more than I did an earlier visit to the better-known and larger Rodin museum. I think I rather prefer Zadkine to Rodin, in fact.

Musée Cognacq-Jay
8 Rue d'Elzevir, 75003 Paris
http://www.museecognacqjay.paris.fr (in French only)

Musée Zadkine
100 bis, rue d'Assas, 75006 Paris
http://www.zadkine.paris.fr/en

Both museums are open 1000 - 1800 daily except Mondays and Public Holidays

Guardi (and Canaletto) at the Wallace Collection

Having recently made arrangements for a trip to Venice later this year in November, I found myself distracted by thoughts of things Venetian, and the painters who depicted the city. 

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697 - 1768), better known as Canaletto, is the best known and most prolific of the painters of views of Venice, and his pictures will be familiar to many from book covers, CD covers, decorative items and all manner of packaging.

Canaletto (1697 -1768). Venice: the Riva degli Schiavoni. c 1740 - 1745. Oil on canvas. 58.2 x 93.5 cm. Wallace Collection

His main market were the young English aristocrats who visited Venice as part of the Grand Tour, that 18th century equivalent of the gap year undertaken by the young toffs of the period as part of their education, in which, accompanied by a tutor, they visited the great European capitals and centres of culture to round off their education as gentlemen and have a bit of fun as well, before returning to England to do the things that aristos of the period did.

In an age before photography and holiday snaps, if you wanted a visual reminder of your once-in-a-lifetime tour of the continent, then you needed a painting, and if it was Venice, then Canaletto was your man. There were other Venetian view painters, of course, many of whom were extremely accomplished, but none of them were as successful.

Which brings us to Francesco Guardi (1712 - 1793), the last of the great view painters of the Venetian Republic. The son of a painter, and one of three brothers who were also painters, he became a view painter and no doubt sought to emulate Canaletto's commercial success, but despite some major commissions, he never really made it big, partly due to a decline in foreign tourism, and partly due to changing artistic tastes. He developed a style quite distinct from Canaletto, with architecture  less precisely delineated, and a rather sketchy manner.

Francesco Guardi (1712 - 1793). Venice: San Giorgio Maggiore with the Guiudecca. c.1770s. Oil on canvas. 35.2 x 54.7 cm. Wallace Collection

Although unfashionable during his own time, he became highly regarded from around the middle of the nineteenth century, coinciding with a change in artistic sensibilities, and new developments in art with the emergence of painters like Turner, and later the Impressionists. Perhaps the invention of photography also made a difference to the value placed on strict realism.

I do like and admire Canaletto's pictures, but in many respects Guardi is more more to my taste. Although less polished than Canaletto, his pictures have a sense of movement and vitality which makes many Canalettos seem a bit unexpressive by comparison.

If you want to see paintings by Canaletto and Guardi, you could do worse than to visit the Wallace Collection in London where, in West Gallery I, views of the same locations in Venice by the two artists are displayed together, a rare opportunity to compare works by the two masters.

Wallace Collection

Here are just two examples, the same scene depicted by Guardi and Canaletto.

Francesco Guardi (1712 - 1793). Venice: the Grand Canal with the Riva del Vin and the Rialto Bridge c. 1770. Oil on canvas. 68.5 x 91.5 cm. Wallace Collection

Canaletto (1697 - 1768). Venice: the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Dolfin- Manin to the Rialto Bridge. c. 1740 – 1750. Oil on Canvas. 58.5 x 93 cm. Wallace Collection

A magnificent Guardi, one of his few large canvases, measuring 115 cm x 119.5 cm was sold at Sotheby's in 2011 to an anonymous foreign buyer for £26,697,250,  setting a world record for a Venetian view painting.

I went down to see it prior to the auction. Afterwards, it left these shores for an anonymous location abroad, despite a temporary export bar. It's a lovely painting and it's sad that we won't be able to see it again. You can watch the auction in this video.

Francesco Guardi died in 1793. Four years later, on 12 May 1797,  the 1100 year old Venetian Republic came to an end when it surrendered to Napoleon. His son Giacomo was a view painter as well, although less talented than his father, and in subsequent years, other great artists would come to Venice to paint the city, but Francesco Guardi was the last great view painter of the Republic.

I wonder whether, in this rather gloomy age of ours, with the threat of rising sea levels, global warming and general uncertainty about the future of our civilisation, the pictures of Guardi with their rather wistful feeling might have a renewed appeal to contemporary viewers.


The Wallace Collection
Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN
http://www.wallacecollection.org

P.H Lee. MA dissertation 2011, Open University
What is the place of Francesco Guardi in the tradition of Venetian view painting, and how does his changing reputation relate to social, economic and cultural factors in Venice and Europe? (unpublished)