Revealed: a legendary art collection that has remained unseen for decades

In 1918, Arthur Georges Veil-Picard was described by the eminent art dealer René Gimpel as the ‘premier art lover in Paris’. Veil-Picard ’s hôtel particulier at 63 Rue des Courcelles, in the 8th arrondissement, housed an astonishing collection. It featured standout works by the likes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Hubert Robert — and amounted to one of the finest private holdings of 18th-century French art in the world.

Veil-Picard — who had professional success both as a banker and as director of the Pernod absinthe distillery — was self-taught, relying on a discerning eye and a passion for his period of choice. He amassed his collection in the early decades of the 20th century. Following his death in 1944, almost all the works were kept within his family — until now. On 25 March 2026, highlights from the collection will be offered in Chefs-d’oeuvre de la collection Veil-Picard at Christie’s in Paris.

One such highlight is Fragonard’s heart-warming picture The Happy Family. It features a father returning home and being lovingly reunited with his wife and their baby daughter, who is asleep in a cradle. The artist adopted a brown and gold palette indebted to Rembrandt, and a composition marked by a strong diagonal (from bottom left to top right) which unites all three of the scene’s main figures.

The painting has not been displayed publicly for several decades — something that can be said for the vast majority of works in the collection. In the case of Watteau’s Standing man holding a guitar under his left arm, one might even call it a rediscovery: the work has not been exhibited in public since the mid-19th century, and was listed in the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings (published in 1996) as belonging to an ‘inaccessible private collection’.

Executed in black and red chalk, it depicts an actor playing the part of Mezzetino in a commedia dell’arte performance — a rich source of material for Watteau throughout his career. The man wears breeches, a slashed doublet and a plumed beret. With a guitar tucked under his arm, and his head tilted slightly back and to the side, he exhibits a proud bearing.

Pictures in the Veil-Picard collection achieved the curious distinction of being both hidden from view and universally celebrated. They were known to scholars through black-and-white reproductions in art-history books. ‘Now, however, these works can finally be restored to colour!’ declares Pierre Etienne, international director of Old Master Paintings. Works will be on public view at Christie’s in Paris from 20 March.

Among them will be a pair of paintings by Hubert Robert of the famous 18th-century salonnière, Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin. An important figure in the French Enlightenment, Geoffrin hosted regular salons attended by leading artists, authors and intellectuals.

In 1771, she commissioned Robert to paint two pictures of her in her Paris home: An artist presents a portrait to Madame Geoffrin and Madame Geoffrin’s lunch. She is respectively seen examining a painting that is being shown to her on an easel, and listening calmly to a reading by one of her servants.

Robert’s wife, Anne-Gabrielle Soos, is the subject of another work in the collection: a delicate portrait in pastel by Marie-Suzanne Roslin. She gazes dreamily into the distance, her cheeks subtly flushed, and with the hint of a smile on her face.

Roslin was one of only 15 female artists admitted to France’s Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture between its founding in 1648 and its dissolution in 1793 (there were more than 500 male members). Her career, one of great promise, was cut short by her premature death aged 38.

The academy forbade posing by female models — which is to say, live modelling had to be done by men. Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s drawing L’académie particulière depicts a way that was found around that protocol: a nude woman reclines before an artist at work in his own studio.

Veil-Picard owned 10 drawings by Saint-Aubin, attracted in part by his sense of humour — in the case of L’académie particulière, a Peeping Tom gleefully puts his head through an open window to admire the scene, unbeknown to either artist or model.

Born in 1854, Veil-Picard hailed from the city of Besançon in eastern France. As a young man, he moved to Paris, where he ran Maison Pernod Fils (purchased with his brother Edmond Charles in 1888) and developed his art collection.

He did the latter with little professional guidance, preferring to trust his own instinct and eye. In the process, he acquired works that had belonged to highly esteemed collectors before him, such as François Hippolyte Walferdin and Count James-Alexandre de Pourtalès-Gorgier.

Collectively, the works owned by Veil-Picard illustrate the joviality, freedom, pleasure and subtle sensuality associated with France in the 18th century. Take another painting by Fragonard, The Little Coquette: its subject, a young woman resting her hands on the corner of a table, looks up at us with a complicit expression. Her face, bathed in golden light, conveys a hint of playful insouciance.

A final artist worth mentioning is Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger. Represented in the upcoming sale by a number of drawings, he was officially employed to produce engravings that documented court festivities and ceremonial events. These engravings were disseminated to promote French royal grandeur.

Works in the Veil-Picard collection include two preparatory studies that Moreau the Younger produced for prints to mark the birth of the Dauphin Louis Joseph, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, on 21 October 1781.

One drawing captures the arrival of the Queen’s carriage at Paris’s city hall on the Place de Grève, witnessed by a large number of spectators. The other depicts a dramatic fireworks display held in the same square, before an even greater crowd, that evening. Louis Joseph, the heir to the throne, would die of tuberculosis in 1789, aged just seven, on the eve of the French Revolution.

Veil-Picard himself died in Paris in 1944 — by which point in the Second World War, his art collection had been confiscated by the Nazis, owing to his Jewish roots.

Thanks to the Allied forces’ Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section — a group tasked with recovering looted cultural items, and better known as the ‘Monuments Men’ — Veil-Picard’s works were restituted to his family after the war.

Two paintings by Fragonard were subsequently donated to the Louvre (Renaud dans les jardins d’Armide and L’Etable), but the collection remains almost entirely intact to this day. Renowned as it is, it is one that has been discussed far more than it has been seen.

Chefs-d’oeuvre de la collection Veil-Picard will be on view at Christie’s in Paris, 20-25 March 2026

Learn more about Restitution at Christie’s