CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

The collection of the Musée du Petit Palais–Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris is made up of works commissioned and purchased by the City of Paris since the 1880s. Following the destruction of an initial nucleus of the municipal collection—housed in the Hôtel de Ville—in the fire of 1871 and the events of the Commune, the City gradually reconstituted a collection by accumulating projects relating to municipal decorative initiatives and commissioning works from living artists. However, it was the providential gift of the Dutuit brothers—bequeathed to the City of Paris rather than to their hometown, Rouen—that helped to fill the museum, which opened on 11 December 1902 under the name “Musée de la Ville et de la Collection Dutuit.” The museum was installed in the Petit Palais, a showpiece of eclectic architecture by the architect Charles Girault and part of the comprehensive urban planning project undertaken for the Great Exhibition of 1900, which included the Grand Palais (opposite) and the Pont Alexandre III. The Petit Palais was to host a “Retrospective of French Art from its Origins to 1800.” Following this major exhibition, the building embarked on its vocation as “Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris,” providing the Dutuit collection, comprising 20,000 works including 12,000 prints, with a setting equal to its ambitions.

With this founding gift, the City of Paris acquired a remarkable collection of historical art but also secured financial revenues that would enable it to pursue a serious acquisitions policy (using the income from the legacy). Eugène and Auguste Dutuit (the role of their sister Héloïse in building the collection remains obscure) were men of private means whose fortune derived from their father’s success in the textile industry. During the course of their travels, they developed avid interests in antique art (Auguste, 1812–1902) and old prints (Eugène, 1807–1886) and soon became discerning collectors. Whereas Auguste sought to develop a painting career, frequenting the studio of Thomas Couture and living for an extended period in Rome, Eugène was a prominent local citizen, admitted to the bar, who played an active role in Rouen’s political life. But it was together and in a spirit of complementarity that they developed a collection destined one day to be both “accessible” and “useful.” While conceived encyclopedically, one of the main strengths of the collection, thanks to the highly assured taste of the two art lovers, was Flemish and Dutch art. In his Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes (Handbook of the print lover), Eugène Dutuit tells of his encounter in Amsterdam in 1826, aged 19, with Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp, noting that “the profound impression it made on [the two brothers] has never diminished.” This initiatory shock seems to have fired Eugène’s passion for Dutch art, both collecting it and studying it—above all in his Œuvre complet de Rembrandt, whose three volumes were published between 1883 and 1885. However, it was Auguste who traveled to Ghent in 1840 to bid in the public auction of Rembrandt’s Self-portrait in Oriental Attire, now an emblematic work in the collection (fig. 1). This was one of the first paintings they bought, and was considered by Eugène to be “one of the most precious” of Rembrandt’s youthful works. Moreover, this panel from Rembrandt’s early career is the artist’s only full-length self-portrait.

Comprising some fifty paintings, the Dutch collection, in reality the preserve of Eugène, was formed by the Dutuit brothers during the period 1840–60. Genre scenes play a prominent role, with numerous small-format works in a miniaturist style encapsulating what Tzvetan Todorov called “in praise of everyday life,” in which Dutch artists of the seventeenth century specialized. One of them, Adriaen van Ostade, is the artist best represented in the Dutuit collection, with three magnificent watercolors and his entire output of etchings. It is amusing to detect in Auguste’s painting Man with a Pipe a clear allusion to the indecorous pose adopted by Adriaen van Ostade’s Smoker.

The Gallant Conversation by Gerard ter Borch, a recurring tableau of male–female relations; the two delicate and closely framed paintings by Gabriel Metsu, the “woman’s champion” (Todorov) depicting a woman at the virginal and a woman at her mirror; The Sweeper (fig. 2) by Pieter Janssens Elinga, a specialist in intimate domestic scenes and inventor of the “perspective box”; and Jan Steen’s The Little Alms Collector, based on a Pentecost procession, are some of the extremely refined gems of this “quiet” painting.

In this same vein of “frozen time” paintings there is a curious piece that continues to resist attribution: a small painting showing a woman at an easel (fig. 3) with her back turned toward us as she concentrates on her own work in progress. This has traditionally been seen as a depiction by Jan Miense Molenaer of his wife Judith Leyster at work.

Northern landscapes are also well represented, with examples by artists such as Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema, whose Water Mills (fig. 4) is one of the finest examples¹ by the “painter of mills”—as are seascapes by Allaert van Everdingen and Willem II van de Velde. Furthermore, the collection also contains some beautiful expressions of animal painting, often set within a landscape, by Philips Wouwermann and Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem.

Above all, it is fascinating to consider the Dutuit collection as a coherent whole that sets great store, and in a unique way, by the complementarity of media. Within this whole are graphic works that closely reflect the paintings. Thus in 1842, Eugène Dutuit acquired a drawing by Adriaen van de Velde depicting Mercury, Argus and Io (fig. 5), a ricordo of a painting purchased in 1876 (fig. 6). Eventually, he also bought a print after the painting by Jean Pelletier, no doubt with the intention to complete the group. No “simple” collector, Eugène Dutuit, author of the Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, deserves to be considered a true connoisseur, possessing a remarkable level of erudition and expertise, thereby endowing the Dutuit collection of the Petit Palais with an unrivaled quality in which fakes and copies are rare.

The Dutuit brothers’ taste is reflected equally clearly in the prints and drawings room of the Petit Palais. In 1902, they bequeathed to the City of Paris 12,000 prints, 300 drawings, and a rich bibliographical collection numbering 800 works. These works, collected above all under Eugène’s aegis, are distinguished by their unrivaled quality, their rarity, and their remarkable provenance. The northern schools dominate, with the complete works of Schongauer, Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, and, most importantly, Rembrandt.² More than 350 etchings and a dozen drawings by the artist echo the Self-portrait in Oriental Attire. The outstanding masterpiece of this group is The Hundred Guilder Print. This first state print on Japanese paper is exceptional for its wide margins and well established genealogy: it had been given by Rembrandt to his friend Jan Pietersz. Zoomer, and was subsequently owned by Vivant Denon, the first director of the Louvre.

The influence of this founding bequest and the prestige of the institution paved the way for other great collectors and patrons to exercise their generosity, not least the US investment banker Edward Tuck (1842–1938) and his wife Julia Stell (1850–1928), who donated their collection to the museum in 1921. Biased more toward French decorative arts of the eighteenth century, it is nevertheless worth drawing attention to their remarkable contribution to the museum’s collection of Gothic art, in particular with two panels: The Adoration of the Child (between 1475 and 1510) by the Master of the St. Bartholomew Altarpiece, a Netherlandish artist who worked mainly in Cologne, and The Presentation in the Temple commissioned in 1434 from Jacques Daret for the Abbey of  St. Vaast in Arras.

Containing a number of incorrect and even false attributions, a gift by the Argentinian art lover Charles-Vincent Ocampo (1862–1945) in 1930 posed a number of problems but also brought some noteworthy paintings to the museum, such as, on the Flemish side, the important triptych The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian by Jan Sanders van Hemessen (circa 1530), Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Wedding Procession, and some fine Dutch still lifes by Pieter Claesz. and Willem Claesz. Heda.

Finally, the museum’s latest acquisition of Dutch art, in 2013, was a portrait by Abraham de Vries of a man holding a ring (fig. 7). Painted in Paris in 1629 and especially full of life, this work is a fitting addition to the Dutch portrait genre alongside Rembrandt’s Self-portrait in Oriental Attire.

Maïté Metz is Curator of Old Masters at Petit Palais – Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. 

¹ Cited in M.-C. Boucher (2024, p. 116). This work was considered “the finest” landscape by Hobbema at the Van den Meersche sale [of 1791], if not, as for Waagen (1862, p. 210), the most famous.
² On Dutuit and Rembrandt, see Sophie Renouard de Bussierre, Rembrandt. Eaux-fortes (Rembrandt. Etchings), exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais, 19 October  2006–14 January 2007.

Translated from the French by Richard George Elliott