New paintings at Waddesdon Manor
The collections at Waddesdon have been enhanced by the recent acquisition of four major paintings, by Callet, Chardin and Panini, described here by Juliet Carey.
Juliet Carey, Monday, 25th August 2008
According to contemporary accounts, there was a ball after the cantata, but this was not the one shown in the second Waddesdon painting, which evokes a more elaborate fancy-dress event held on the evening of Wednesday 24 November. Giovanni Refinni recorded the clothes in fascinated detail.6 Several women wore military-style outfits; the wife of the Venetian ambassador a Tyrolean peasant dress. The masquerade costumes were enriched with silver lace and jewels, gold brocade and rare furs. In the painting, the duc de Nivernais is about to begin the opening dance with the wife of the Venetian ambassador. In the foreground, red-coated servants are moving among the guests with food and drink on silver salvers. Several figures are dressed as characters from the commedia dell’arte and might have stepped out of a fête galante by Watteau. Seated on the floor in the bottom corners are men in ragged clothes, evoking the city outside the palace.
In Britain, Panini is more familiar as a painter of Roman views for Grand Tourists and capricci of antiquities. These newly-acquired paintings are magnificent examples of another genre he made his own: the depiction of court and civic festivities, adopted from print culture and elevated into large and crowded oil paintings full of bustle, glitter and modernity. They expand our understanding of Panini’s role in the creation of France’s image abroad and complete a spectacular series of paintings made for the French enclave in Rome that encompasses theatrical and sacred interiors and ephemeral festival decoration manipulated by a master of spatial illusionism.7 Panini’s brother-in-law Nicolas Vleughels (1668-1737), director of the French Academy in Rome, probably first brought him to the attention of the French. In 1729 Panini was commissioned by Cardinal Melchior de Polignac, French ambassador to Rome, to paint the preparations for a fête in Piazza Navona and the cardinal visiting St Peter’s basilica to mark the birth of the Dauphin in 1729 (both Musée du Louvre, Paris) and the already-mentioned performance in the Teatro Argentina to celebrate the marriage of the Dauphin and Dauphine, parents of the baby in whose honour the duc de Nivernais’s largesse was so lavishly extended. Had the little duc de Bourgogne lived, he would have succeeded his grandfather as King of France. However, he died when he was 10 and his younger brother became Louis XVI.
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