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Lot Essay
The present tureen is one of Balzac' masterpiece in the Louis XV naturalistic rococo. Modelled on the six Penthièvre-Orléans tureens, it was probably commissioned by the comte d'Eu in April 1763 and was subsequently inherited by the duc de Penthièvre upon the death of his cousin the comte d'Eu in 1775. The Penthièvre-Orléans service partly survived the French Revolution and the tureen found its way to Ireland where it entered the collection of Henry Magan and his wife the heiress Elizabeth Georgina Loftus.
Tureens and pots-à-oille were Balzac’s masterpieces, but very few have survived, apart from the present lot, another similar and the six tureens from the Penthièvre-Orléans service, now in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a private collection. All share the same aesthetic characteristics; a serpentine outline, bold naturalistic motifs and distinctive ovolo borders.
THE PENTHIÈVRE-ORLÉANS SERVICE
Edmé-Pierre Balzac is best known for creating the major pieces of the celebrated Penthièvre-Orléans Service, the sole survivor of the numerous magnificent French Royal dinner services.
This once vast service was the work of three celebrated craftsmen, the royal goldsmith Thomas Germain, who worked on it from 1727 until 1735, Antoine-Sébastien Durand, who worked on it from 1750 until 1759 and finally Edmé-Pierre Balzac who completed the service in the years 1757 to 1760. It is now known that the service was initially commissioned in 1757 by Henry Janssen, a wealthy English gentleman believed to have been a privateer in Louis XV’s navy, however, in 1759 Janssen was ordered like many to surrender the service as part of the confiscation of silver intended to sponsor the Seven Years Wars, but he still had to pay for the fashioning, casting and chasing. He approached the comte d’Eu whom he knew and he convinced him to take the service, paying the melt value and settling an annuity on Janssen.
Upon his death the comte d’Eu left “all his plate and associated objects” in his will to his cousin the duc de Penthièvre, Louis-Charles de Bourbon (1701-1793) ( Archives Nationales Mss., MC XXXV 785, 13 July 1775). The service amounted to about 1,230 kg. (Pierrefitte, Archives Nationales Mss., 300 AP (I) 56B, no. 202; 300 AP (I), 65, no. 5 and 8) was seized by the Revolutionaries between December 1793 and July 1795 and all royal attributes and arms were removed. Part of it was melted, however the larger elements, les pièces de forme, were saved and these remaining pieces were ultimately returned to the Duke’s sole heir, his daughter, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon (1753-1821), duchesse d’Orléans, in 1814. She bitterly complained of the missing elements and, without naming him, accused Henry Auguste, who had fled to England in 1809 loaded with silver, of having melted the service, although she could not be sure if all had been melted. (Pierrefitte, Archives Nationales Mss., 300 AP (I), 56B, no. 196). Upon the Duchess’ death in 1821 the service passed to her son Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, who instructed Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot to add his arms and create a number of inner liners. In 1848 after the abdication of Louis-Philippe the service was used during his exile in Britain at his residence Claremont. It eventually passed to his son, Louis, duc de Nemours (1814-1896), remaining in the family until the middle of the 20th century.
FROM THE COUNT OF EU SERVICE
As recorded in the previous text, the comte d’Eu had had to surrender some of his silver to be melted to sponsor the Seven Years Wars and, whilst he acquired Janssen’s service, he also commissioned a service from Balzac in April 1763 weighing 880 marcs and that was to be completed by Auguste (M. Debris, op. cit., p. 48).
This tureen may be the one commissioned by the Comte d’Eu described as "une terrine et son plat ". This single tureen and its stand would subsequently enter the Penthièvre service upon the death of the comte d’Eu. It is probably the one listed in the 28 April 1794 inventory of the silver seized at the Hôtel de Toulouse (the Paris residence of the duc de Penthièvre) “deux étuis sous le No 5 renfermant deux pots à oille ovales montés sur leurs quatre pieds avec leurs quatre doublures et couvercles dont un surmonté d’un chou-fleur..” (Bibliotheque Nationale Français, Mss. fr. 7786, fol. 111) [two cases under number 5 with two oval pot à oille on four feet, with liners and covers, one with cauliflower finial]. It is interesting to note that the Balzac Penthièvre tureen (OA 11363 ) dated 1757-1759, with the stag finial and now in the Louvre, has a stand dated 1763.
THE COUNT OF EU
Louis-Charles de Bourbon, comte d’Eu, was born in 1701, the second son of the duc de Maine, son of King Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan, and Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé. His father had been entrusted by King Louis XIV as guardian of the young King Louis XV and commander of the King’s household troop to limit the power of the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, but was finally ousted in 1791. The young comte d’Eu eventually regained King Louis XV’s trust and became one of his intimates. After an illustrious military career, he retired to Eu, spending his days hunting, with sporadic official visits to Versailles. He died on 13 July 1775 without issue.
EDME-PIERRE BALZAC
Edmé-Pierre Balzac was born in 1705 in Gien, south of Paris, where he started his apprenticeship aged 14 under Jacques Bompart. He was a journeyman for many years until he was able to purchase a “privilège d’orfèvre à la suite de la cour” in 1739, that allowed him to become master in Paris and enter his first mark. In 1749 he was able to convert this status to that of master “au titre de la déclaration sur les pauvres du corp de l’orfèvrerie”, sponsored by Guillaume Loir, which was less costly annually. In 1739 he married Elisabeth-Philippine Penel, goddaughter of the Dowager Duchesse d'Orléans and her son Philippe d'Orléans.
Balzac was one of the most prolific goldsmiths whose lifetime production amounted to nearly 19 tons of silver (M. Debris, op. cit., p. 25). Balzac worked on some of the most significant services of the time; he supplied 112 dishes for the Orloff Service ordered by Empress Catherine of Russia in 1770.
Surviving documents show that Balzac was a technical innovator; in 1755 he earned a certificate from the Academy of Sciences for fashioning silver on a lathe using a special technique that eliminated the need for solder. In 1766, he invented a machine to stamp table silver with threaded borders (machine á imprimer les couverts á filets). This invention must have been a success, as in 1771 Balzac filed a lawsuit against a former workman for copying the machine. Despite these numerous commissions and technical innovations, Balzac was beset by financial difficulties throughout his career. He continued working until 1774 with his name appearing sporadically in the registers, but by 1777 he is mentioned as “absent”. He died in 1784 near his childhood home.
THE HISTORY OF THE TUREEN
The journey of this tureen remains a complicated one after the revolutionary confiscations of 1793. It certainly appears in the 1794 inventory of the Penthièvre silver. However, whether it was returned to the Duchess of Orléans or whether it was taken by Henry Auguste to England, when he fled France in 1809, remains to be proven. Certainly at some point after 1809 (Auguste’s flight to England) and 1814 ( the restitution) and before 1821 (death of the Duchess of Orléans), the tureen was acquired by William Henry Magan (1790-1840) of King's County, Ireland. Indeed the engraved coat-of-arms records his marriage to the heiress Elizabeth Georgina Loftus in 1817. According to The Story of Ireland: A History of an Ancient Family and Their Country, by W. M. T. Magan, 1983, "The Magan family reached the peak of its material prosperity in the person of William Henry Magan the Elder of Clonearl, sometimes known as William Henry the Magnificent. At the age of twenty-seven he married, in 1817, a considerable heiress. Together they owned very large tracts of the best grasslands in Ireland, and other valuable properties, including one hundred and sixty-five arcres of Dublin . . . . They built and staffed a great house, and filled it with treasures." Clonearl, a neo-classical Georgian country house on the Magan family land near Daingean, Offaly, burned in 1846; however, the Magans kept other houses, including a Dublin townhouse at 77 St. Stephen's Green and the Loftus country house, Killyon Manor.
William Henry Magan died in 1840, leaving the estate to his first son, William Henry "the Younger," who died aged 42 years old. The Magan fortune then returned to his mother, Elizabeth Georgina Loftus Magan. She managed the estates until her death in 1880. She designated her only surviving child, Augusta Elizabeth Magan (1825-1905), as her heir. Augusta, eccentric and unmarried, mismanaged the estates and left them in shambles when she died in 1905 without an heir. Her will specified that her cash, investments, personal possessions, and household contents were to be sold, with the proceeds going towards the building of hospitals. Accordingly, the entire contents of both the Dublin townhouse and Killyon Manor were auctioned in Dublin in 1906, but the houses were in such disarray that "every passage and every room to which access could be gained was packed with parcels and packages of all descriptions; the litter on the main stairs and vestibule was almost knee deep" (W. M. T. Magan, op. cit., p. 273). Unable to catalogue or even itemize the property, the auctioneers sold entire rooms as single lots, the furnishings unseen by the purchasers until after the sale. It is possible that this Balzac soup tureen was part of this 1906 auction.
By 1919, the tureen had found its way to Paris, having joined the acclaimed collection of Georges Hoentschel (1855-1915), a connoisseur and architect-decorator who built an important personal art collection and advised other major collectors of his day, most notably Julius Wernher (1850-1912) of London and Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, and the American financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913). Hoentschel's own collection focused on two periods: the medieval and the 18th century, each displayed in galleries on separate floors of his house on boulevard Flandrin in Paris. In 1906 Pierpont Morgan bought three-quarters of Hoentschel's collection and numerous objects from this transaction are today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. The Morgan Alcove, a French period room in the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan, belonged to Hoentschel, who had assembled very fine boiseries as settings for his French furniture and decorative arts (MMA 07.225.147). One of the best medieval pieces that Hoentschel sold to Morgan is the 15th-century bronze sculpture, "L'Ange du Lude," which stood in the rotunda of the Morgan Library until it was acquired by the Frick Collection in 1943. The present tureen remained with Hoentschel's personal collection, which was sold in three separate auctions by his estate over a four-month period in the spring of 1919.
Tureens and pots-à-oille were Balzac’s masterpieces, but very few have survived, apart from the present lot, another similar and the six tureens from the Penthièvre-Orléans service, now in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a private collection. All share the same aesthetic characteristics; a serpentine outline, bold naturalistic motifs and distinctive ovolo borders.
THE PENTHIÈVRE-ORLÉANS SERVICE
Edmé-Pierre Balzac is best known for creating the major pieces of the celebrated Penthièvre-Orléans Service, the sole survivor of the numerous magnificent French Royal dinner services.
This once vast service was the work of three celebrated craftsmen, the royal goldsmith Thomas Germain, who worked on it from 1727 until 1735, Antoine-Sébastien Durand, who worked on it from 1750 until 1759 and finally Edmé-Pierre Balzac who completed the service in the years 1757 to 1760. It is now known that the service was initially commissioned in 1757 by Henry Janssen, a wealthy English gentleman believed to have been a privateer in Louis XV’s navy, however, in 1759 Janssen was ordered like many to surrender the service as part of the confiscation of silver intended to sponsor the Seven Years Wars, but he still had to pay for the fashioning, casting and chasing. He approached the comte d’Eu whom he knew and he convinced him to take the service, paying the melt value and settling an annuity on Janssen.
Upon his death the comte d’Eu left “all his plate and associated objects” in his will to his cousin the duc de Penthièvre, Louis-Charles de Bourbon (1701-1793) ( Archives Nationales Mss., MC XXXV 785, 13 July 1775). The service amounted to about 1,230 kg. (Pierrefitte, Archives Nationales Mss., 300 AP (I) 56B, no. 202; 300 AP (I), 65, no. 5 and 8) was seized by the Revolutionaries between December 1793 and July 1795 and all royal attributes and arms were removed. Part of it was melted, however the larger elements, les pièces de forme, were saved and these remaining pieces were ultimately returned to the Duke’s sole heir, his daughter, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon (1753-1821), duchesse d’Orléans, in 1814. She bitterly complained of the missing elements and, without naming him, accused Henry Auguste, who had fled to England in 1809 loaded with silver, of having melted the service, although she could not be sure if all had been melted. (Pierrefitte, Archives Nationales Mss., 300 AP (I), 56B, no. 196). Upon the Duchess’ death in 1821 the service passed to her son Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, who instructed Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot to add his arms and create a number of inner liners. In 1848 after the abdication of Louis-Philippe the service was used during his exile in Britain at his residence Claremont. It eventually passed to his son, Louis, duc de Nemours (1814-1896), remaining in the family until the middle of the 20th century.
FROM THE COUNT OF EU SERVICE
As recorded in the previous text, the comte d’Eu had had to surrender some of his silver to be melted to sponsor the Seven Years Wars and, whilst he acquired Janssen’s service, he also commissioned a service from Balzac in April 1763 weighing 880 marcs and that was to be completed by Auguste (M. Debris, op. cit., p. 48).
This tureen may be the one commissioned by the Comte d’Eu described as "une terrine et son plat ". This single tureen and its stand would subsequently enter the Penthièvre service upon the death of the comte d’Eu. It is probably the one listed in the 28 April 1794 inventory of the silver seized at the Hôtel de Toulouse (the Paris residence of the duc de Penthièvre) “deux étuis sous le No 5 renfermant deux pots à oille ovales montés sur leurs quatre pieds avec leurs quatre doublures et couvercles dont un surmonté d’un chou-fleur..” (Bibliotheque Nationale Français, Mss. fr. 7786, fol. 111) [two cases under number 5 with two oval pot à oille on four feet, with liners and covers, one with cauliflower finial]. It is interesting to note that the Balzac Penthièvre tureen (OA 11363 ) dated 1757-1759, with the stag finial and now in the Louvre, has a stand dated 1763.
THE COUNT OF EU
Louis-Charles de Bourbon, comte d’Eu, was born in 1701, the second son of the duc de Maine, son of King Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan, and Anne-Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé. His father had been entrusted by King Louis XIV as guardian of the young King Louis XV and commander of the King’s household troop to limit the power of the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, but was finally ousted in 1791. The young comte d’Eu eventually regained King Louis XV’s trust and became one of his intimates. After an illustrious military career, he retired to Eu, spending his days hunting, with sporadic official visits to Versailles. He died on 13 July 1775 without issue.
EDME-PIERRE BALZAC
Edmé-Pierre Balzac was born in 1705 in Gien, south of Paris, where he started his apprenticeship aged 14 under Jacques Bompart. He was a journeyman for many years until he was able to purchase a “privilège d’orfèvre à la suite de la cour” in 1739, that allowed him to become master in Paris and enter his first mark. In 1749 he was able to convert this status to that of master “au titre de la déclaration sur les pauvres du corp de l’orfèvrerie”, sponsored by Guillaume Loir, which was less costly annually. In 1739 he married Elisabeth-Philippine Penel, goddaughter of the Dowager Duchesse d'Orléans and her son Philippe d'Orléans.
Balzac was one of the most prolific goldsmiths whose lifetime production amounted to nearly 19 tons of silver (M. Debris, op. cit., p. 25). Balzac worked on some of the most significant services of the time; he supplied 112 dishes for the Orloff Service ordered by Empress Catherine of Russia in 1770.
Surviving documents show that Balzac was a technical innovator; in 1755 he earned a certificate from the Academy of Sciences for fashioning silver on a lathe using a special technique that eliminated the need for solder. In 1766, he invented a machine to stamp table silver with threaded borders (machine á imprimer les couverts á filets). This invention must have been a success, as in 1771 Balzac filed a lawsuit against a former workman for copying the machine. Despite these numerous commissions and technical innovations, Balzac was beset by financial difficulties throughout his career. He continued working until 1774 with his name appearing sporadically in the registers, but by 1777 he is mentioned as “absent”. He died in 1784 near his childhood home.
THE HISTORY OF THE TUREEN
The journey of this tureen remains a complicated one after the revolutionary confiscations of 1793. It certainly appears in the 1794 inventory of the Penthièvre silver. However, whether it was returned to the Duchess of Orléans or whether it was taken by Henry Auguste to England, when he fled France in 1809, remains to be proven. Certainly at some point after 1809 (Auguste’s flight to England) and 1814 ( the restitution) and before 1821 (death of the Duchess of Orléans), the tureen was acquired by William Henry Magan (1790-1840) of King's County, Ireland. Indeed the engraved coat-of-arms records his marriage to the heiress Elizabeth Georgina Loftus in 1817. According to The Story of Ireland: A History of an Ancient Family and Their Country, by W. M. T. Magan, 1983, "The Magan family reached the peak of its material prosperity in the person of William Henry Magan the Elder of Clonearl, sometimes known as William Henry the Magnificent. At the age of twenty-seven he married, in 1817, a considerable heiress. Together they owned very large tracts of the best grasslands in Ireland, and other valuable properties, including one hundred and sixty-five arcres of Dublin . . . . They built and staffed a great house, and filled it with treasures." Clonearl, a neo-classical Georgian country house on the Magan family land near Daingean, Offaly, burned in 1846; however, the Magans kept other houses, including a Dublin townhouse at 77 St. Stephen's Green and the Loftus country house, Killyon Manor.
William Henry Magan died in 1840, leaving the estate to his first son, William Henry "the Younger," who died aged 42 years old. The Magan fortune then returned to his mother, Elizabeth Georgina Loftus Magan. She managed the estates until her death in 1880. She designated her only surviving child, Augusta Elizabeth Magan (1825-1905), as her heir. Augusta, eccentric and unmarried, mismanaged the estates and left them in shambles when she died in 1905 without an heir. Her will specified that her cash, investments, personal possessions, and household contents were to be sold, with the proceeds going towards the building of hospitals. Accordingly, the entire contents of both the Dublin townhouse and Killyon Manor were auctioned in Dublin in 1906, but the houses were in such disarray that "every passage and every room to which access could be gained was packed with parcels and packages of all descriptions; the litter on the main stairs and vestibule was almost knee deep" (W. M. T. Magan, op. cit., p. 273). Unable to catalogue or even itemize the property, the auctioneers sold entire rooms as single lots, the furnishings unseen by the purchasers until after the sale. It is possible that this Balzac soup tureen was part of this 1906 auction.
By 1919, the tureen had found its way to Paris, having joined the acclaimed collection of Georges Hoentschel (1855-1915), a connoisseur and architect-decorator who built an important personal art collection and advised other major collectors of his day, most notably Julius Wernher (1850-1912) of London and Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, and the American financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913). Hoentschel's own collection focused on two periods: the medieval and the 18th century, each displayed in galleries on separate floors of his house on boulevard Flandrin in Paris. In 1906 Pierpont Morgan bought three-quarters of Hoentschel's collection and numerous objects from this transaction are today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. The Morgan Alcove, a French period room in the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan, belonged to Hoentschel, who had assembled very fine boiseries as settings for his French furniture and decorative arts (MMA 07.225.147). One of the best medieval pieces that Hoentschel sold to Morgan is the 15th-century bronze sculpture, "L'Ange du Lude," which stood in the rotunda of the Morgan Library until it was acquired by the Frick Collection in 1943. The present tureen remained with Hoentschel's personal collection, which was sold in three separate auctions by his estate over a four-month period in the spring of 1919.