The reception rooms, or the art of entertaining in the Jacquemart-André household

Entertaining, a collector's pursuit

Édouard André, heir to a fortune built in silk and then banking by a Protestant family from the Vivarais, and Nélie Jacquemart, a portraitist of modest origin whom he had commissioned to paint his portrait in 1872, were married in a civil ceremony in Paris on 29 June 1881, after nine years of friendship. The couple had no children and devoted most of their fortune to two linked undertakings: building an art collection and giving themselves the means to display it.

Entertaining is therefore not a sideline to their life as collectors, but its extension. During large evening receptions, partitions mounted on hydraulic jacks would retract between the Grand Salon, the painting gallery and the Music Salon to bring together up to a thousand guests in a single space: the house literally changed shape depending on whether it was living day to day or receiving guests.

1. The staircase — a Venetian palace décor reassembled in Paris

The staircase is not located at the centre of the building, as the classic layout of a private mansion would have dictated, but right at the far end of the suite of rooms, in what was originally a winter garden lit by a glass roof. Marble, stone, iron and bronze mingle there beneath mirrors that double the perspective of the stairwell and visually lighten what is nonetheless a massive structure.

In 1893, the couple bought in the Veneto a set of decorations painted by Giambattista Tiepolo for the Villa Contarini: a wall fresco and a ceiling, mounted on canvas, taken down, transported and then reinstalled in Paris — the operation took eight months and was completed in January 1894, a few months before Édouard André's death. This dismantling of Venetian palace decorations, sold by their owners in the 19th century, was nothing unusual: it was in this way that part of the 18th-century painted decoration of the Veneto left Italy for private collections in Europe and America.

The scene painted at the top of the staircase shows the arrival of Henri III at the Villa Contarini, on the Brenta, in 1574: the king, only just elected king of Poland, hurried across the Veneto on his way back to claim the crown of France after the death of his brother Charles IX, and Venice organised for him one of the most sumptuous receptions of the Renaissance, with a triumphal arch designed by Palladio and decorations painted by Tintoretto and Veronese for his entry into the city. Painted for the family's villa nearly a hundred and seventy years after the event, Tiepolo's fresco perpetuates its memory as a mark of domestic prestige.

2. The Musicians' Gallery — Bernini above the ball

The Musicians' Gallery overlooks the Music Salon: during balls given by the couple, the orchestra played up above, almost invisible to the dancers below. This physical separation between the space of the music and the space of sociability — one dances beneath the music rather than alongside the musicians — is a classic feature of grand Second Empire reception houses.

The bronze bust of Pope Gregory XV found there was not bought by the couple but by Nélie Jacquemart alone, in 1899, five years after Édouard André's death, at a sale held by the dealer Stefano Bardini in London. Bernini made it in 1622, shortly after sculpting the marble bust of the same pope in 1621 — a work that earned him a knighthood from Gregory XV, whose pontificate, begun in February 1621, ended as early as July 1623.

The Paris example was long considered a later replica of the marble bust, now held in Toronto. More recent research reverses that hierarchy: this bronze is thought to be the very first cast, chased by Bernini himself for a Roman collector, which makes it less a copy than a fully autograph work — and the only known example of the bust to have kept its original coat-of-arms base.

3. The Grand Salon — a gallery of busts rather than paintings

The Grand Salon, built as a rotunda, is the room where Édouard André received official guests. Unlike the other salons, it hangs no paintings at all: against a backdrop of gilded panelling, it lines up a series of white marble busts by Coysevox, Lemoyne, Houdon and Michel-Ange Slodtz — a sculpture gallery in the middle of a house otherwise saturated with painting.

The bust of the architect Jacques V Gabriel, by Coysevox, is a posthumous portrait: sculpted in 1711, a quarter of a century after the death of this architect to Louis XIV, with no living model to work from direct observation. The bust of Le Fèvre de Caumartin by Houdon, by contrast, dated 1779, is a portrait made from life — Caumartin, provost of the merchants of Paris, commissioned it from the sculptor at the very start of his career; Houdon exhibited it at the Salon that same year, earning part of his reputation as a realist portraitist from it.

4. The Music Salon — red ballroom and Roman ruins

The Music Salon, the second great reception room, adopts the visual vocabulary of the Second Empire: red hangings, dark wood, a ceiling painted by Pierre-Victor Galland depicting Apollo as protector of the arts. Turned into a ballroom on festive evenings, it welcomed the dancers while the music, as we have seen, came down from the raised gallery.

The paintings that adorn it have changed over the course of the collection's formation. Two of them hang there today: Hubert Robert's Ruined Gallery (1785), a view of a collapsed Roman basilica where light enters through a breach in the vault, a genre the painter practised throughout his career; and Fragonard's Head of an Old Man, a character study with broad brushwork and warm colouring, far removed in its informality from the rest of the room's décor.

5. The Boudoir — two regimes, two portraits

The Boudoir did not always serve this function: the room was originally part of Nélie Jacquemart's private apartment, with its bathroom adjoining her bedroom. A few years later, she wished to be closer to her husband's apartment and had a new space fitted out near him — it was at that point that this room became a boudoir, furnished in Louis XVI style and topped by a Tiepolo ceiling, Allegories of Justice and Peace.

Two portraits face each other here. Count Antoine Français de Nantes, painted by David in 1811, a prefect and count of the Empire, poses in ceremonial dress, the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour prominently displayed — imperial etiquette in all its rigour. Countess Catherine Skavronskaya, painted by Vigée Le Brun in 1790 in Naples, belongs to an altogether different world: Vigée Le Brun was then in exile, having left revolutionary France the previous year, and it was Count Skavronsky, Russian ambassador to Naples, who made her promise to paint his wife's portrait before any other work during her stay. Born Ekaterina von Engelhardt, the countess was a niece — and a close one — of Prince Potemkin; she would later remarry Count Litta.

How much time

If time is short, these five spaces can be covered in a little under half an hour; allow double that to read the labels and spot the details pointed out here.

Staircase — 5 minutes.
Musicians' Gallery — 5 minutes.
Grand Salon — 10 minutes.
Music Salon — 10 minutes.
Boudoir — 10 minutes.

Sources and verification

This article draws on the work notices and visit pages of the official Musée Jacquemart-André website, supplemented by Wikipedia for biographical and historical details.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Musée Jacquemart-André website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.