(soft piano music)
- Hello, I'm Aimee Ng,
curator at The Frick
Collection in New York,
and welcome to another episode
of "Cocktails with a Curator."
In this episode, I have the
pleasure of talking to you
about one of the most beloved
paintings at the Frick,
and that is Ingres's portrait
of Louise de Broglie -
it's spelled de Broglie ("bro-lee"),
but it is pronounced
de Broglie ("breuil") -
better known as the
Comtesse d'Haussonville.
Although technically when
this portrait was painted,
it's signed 1845, she
was still viscountess.
It wasn't until the year later, 1846,
when her father-in-law passed away,
that she became the countess,
Comtesse d'Haussonville.
She's been referred to as the poster girl
of The Frick Collection,
and she's certainly been a cover girl.
The very first color
photograph of her was taken,
of this painting was taken,
along with a number of other
works in The Frick Collection,
for a special issue of "Life" magazine,
an early issue in 1937.
And although the painter Ingres
and his subject Louise de
Broglie are both very French,
and, in fact, this painting
has been referred to
as one of the greatest portraits
of nineteenth-century France,
she was born in Switzerland.
And, in fact, she was buried there
and spent a lot of her life there.
So in order to pay some
tribute to her Swiss origins
and her Swiss roots, I
chose for the cocktail today
one that is centered around absinthe.
And absinthe is a spirit
of very, very high alcoholic content
that was invented in Switzerland
in the middle of the eighteenth century.
It's called "the green fairy" sometimes
because of its green color.
It contains wormwood,
Artemesia absinthium,
which is where it gets its name,
and it has a green tinge to
it because of the green anise
and the sweet fennel that are
also part of the concoction.
Absinthe gained a pretty bad reputation
over the course of the nineteenth century
and into the early twentieth century.
It was thought to cause
madness and hallucination
and these behavioral things, really myths
about its ability to change
a person's personality.
Absinthe was banned in
a number of countries
in the early twentieth century.
So even in its place of
invention, in Switzerland,
it was banned, and for about 100 years.
It was not legal again in
Switzerland until 2005.
The cocktail today is
called a Jaded Countess.
It's an ounce of absinthe,
half an ounce of vodka,
some fresh lemon juice, simple syrup,
strained and topped with champagne.
And I have a twist of
lemon in there as well.
Tomorrow, August 29, is the
birthday of the painter Ingres.
He was born August 29, 1780.
So we toast to him.
(glass clinking)
The painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres was born
in the south of France in
Montauban, which is near Toulouse.
And he was one of the pupils
of Jacques-Louis David,
the leader of the Neoclassical school
over the late eighteenth century,
early nineteenth century,
and Ingres eventually, too,
became one of the leaders
of the Neoclassical school in France,
although he spent a lot
of his time also in Italy.
He aspired to be a history painter,
and this is, for most academic painters,
this was the highest status one could be
in the genre of paintings.
History paintings, these
large-scale narrative scenes
of historical, biblical,
mythological scenes were considered
the highest in the
hierarchy, with portraiture
and other kinds of genre
paintings down below.
This is his "Antiochus and
Stratonice," painted in 1840.
But like many painters,
he had to pay the bills
to some degree by painting portraits.
And Ingres was an extremely
talented portraitist.
Here is his fabulous portrait of Napoleon
enthroned as Emperor Napoleon I.
This is 1806, and this is
in the Musée de l'Armée
in Paris at the Invalides.
And one of his best-known,
I would say, portraits,
among Ingres's best-known portraits,
is "Monsieur Bertin" here, at the Louvre.
Really, really quite majestic.
And it reminds us that
the subject of a portrait
doesn't have to be beautiful
in order for the painting
itself to be beautiful.
By the time Louise de
Broglie approached Ingres
to paint her portrait,
he was in his sixties.
He's very well established in the field.
And he was quite reluctant to
take on portrait commissions.
He just didn't really
want to do them anymore,
these sort of, you know,
fashionable society portraits.
He didn't really want to do them.
They took away time from making
those wonderful history paintings.
They met in Rome.
He was there as the director
of the Académie de France,
for some time, based in
the Villa Medici in Rome,
and she was there traveling.
Her husband was a politician, diplomat,
and so she lived in a number
of cities around Europe.
She walked into his studio and
he was painting at the time
the "Antiochus and Stratonice" painting.
This is 1840.
And she fell in love with the
painting and really wanted him
to paint her portrait.
And some might see similarities
in the pose of Stratonice,
the female figure at the
left of this composition,
might see some similarities in pose
to what he eventually paints of Louise.
So although Ingres is
turning down most commissions
for portraits at the
time, he agrees to do it.
He agrees to paint her portrait.
Some like to say that it is because
of her unbelievable beauty.
He just couldn't turn it down.
Probably more likely,
and the sense that we get
from some of his letters, is
that there were some patrons
whose social status was so high,
whose power and authority were so strong,
that he couldn't turn them down.
And she was the daughter
of the Duke de Broglie.
He couldn't turn this patron down.
So he agrees to paint her portrait.
The other kind of painting, by the way,
that Ingres is very well known
for is his group of sort of
Orientalizing Turkish
baths and odalisque scenes.
This is his "Grande
Odalisque" at the Louvre,
a very well-known painting.
And they're about the
sort of impossible beauty
of these women.
They're at once extremely precise,
not a brushstroke out of place,
not a single flaw across the skin,
not a hair out of place.
And yet, the anatomy is
impossible, and just one look
at this woman's extremely
long back and backside,
it tells us that she probably
has a few extra vertebrae
than most human beings.
And this tension of precision
but impossible beauty
informs as well some portraits,
and especially his portrait
of Louise de Broglie,
the Comtesse d'Haussonville.
When you look closely at it,
the precision is something
that must be appreciated
through details like
this, or looking up close,
and one of my favorite
details is the sort of
surprising flutter of
these blonde eyelashes
that are each painted in very carefully
but gives the sense
and texture of softness
against those pale blue eyes.
And he studies these details.
He studies her face in several sittings.
It's so funny because it's understood
that when he proposed to
his wife for marriage,
he had never actually met her in person,
but it was so important
that his sitters were there
in the flesh and he studied very carefully
their faces and their appearances.
So it's an interesting sort
of contrast and anecdote
in his life.
This is a drawing that studies
details of her face down
to the arc of her nostril.
There are probably some
eighty drawings that he made
in preparation for the
Comtesse's portrait.
Only under twenty survive today,
and in them they're
playing with composition.
Here she's turned to one side,
he eventually changes
it to the other side.
Playing with costume, with pose.
A lot of thinking and work
getting this absolutely right.
And yet, and yet, the precision is paired
with this impossible anatomy,
and it takes some people
looking at this portrait
for the first time to notice that her arm,
her right arm crossed over her belly
could not possibly have appeared there.
Where would her shoulder have
been if her arm was so low?
And at the same time,
that was a studied detail.
That wasn't something that was a mistake.
Here is a drawing that's actually
in the Frick's collection,
mostly studying the dress,
and in this iteration she has a shawl on,
the way the dress falls,
the way the skirt falls.
But the arms and that very
low, impossible anatomy
is part already of the
design of the composition.
And there is another drawing.
Many of these drawings at the Musée Ingres
in Montauban, his birthplace,
again, carefully studying
the impossible anatomy
of her arms.
He's creating something
for the composition
and it does not have to be
grounded in the reality.
And it reminds us, of course,
that these portraits are inventions.
They are constructed.
It is signed 1845 under his name,
just on the side of that chair.
But the painting is merely an endpoint
of a very, very long process.
This is a painting that he paints
over the course of three years.
They meet in 1840 in Rome,
and he begins painting her 1842 in Paris.
And he carries on, '43, '44,
finally finishes in '45.
These interruptions are caused
by his own other projects
for other people, her travel schedule,
as well as a whole pregnancy and birth
and the newborn months
that happen over the course
of those three years, in 1844.
Three years go by from the
inception to the final product.
She's aged three years.
She begins at age 24,
she, at the end of it, is 27.
You know, so many iterations
take place through drawings
and yet the final product
and the composition
is sort of structured in order to give
a sense of ease, an instant.
We've interrupted her
at a very casual moment
where she's just returned from the opera.
So there's a yellow shawl
just thrown onto the chair
next to her.
On the mantel behind her, she's
dropped her opera glasses,
those black, small binoculars.
Her evening handbag in
bright blue is just draped,
sort of tossed and draped on the
gilt bronze-mounted porcelain.
The reflection in the mirror
allows us to see more of her,
sort of that lovely
plaited hair behind her
with a comb that's just set in
as if it's just about to be taken out.
Her hair is going to
come down for the night.
And the detail that goes into conveying
the sense of decoration on the porcelain.
And I'm just going to draw us
in a little bit closer to see
the articulation of the lace of her dress.
Now, how slender his brushstrokes,
his paintbrush had to
be in order to convey
every stitch basically,
every line of that lace.
And one criticism of
Ingres during his life
was that he was rather Gothic.
And what that meant was,
it was a reference to
the early Northern Renaissance artists
like Jan van Eyck whose
paintings were so, so very tight
and very, very precise.
It was a criticism that
was given to Ingres.
Although I don't think that everybody
thought that was necessarily a bad thing.
I certainly don't.
Just another detail of her jewelry:
gold bracelet and ring
embedded with just a small bit
of turquoise, in France,
pierre turque, "Turkish stone."
It was believed to have some
origin in Turkey, obviously,
the idea of the East.
Probably mined or probably taken
from Egypt or Persia, now Iran.
And just to give you a sense
of the wonderful snake-formed ring
with the turquoise embedded in the head
and the top of the neck.
These rings were fashionable,
and the fashion was
called "à la Cléopâtre,"
as in "of Cleopatra."
The small joke being, of course,
that Cleopatra is killed
by the bite of a snake.
His painting is so precise
that so many of these objects
could be identified, and a
number of them that had belonged
to the Comtesse d'Haussonville
were brought together
in an exhibition held at The
Frick Collection in 1985.
This is a photograph of the
exhibition and installation
around the painting at the exhibition
organized by the Frick's
very first chief curator,
the late Edgar Munhall.
So a number of her objects
were brought together
as well as representative objects.
So cartes de visite, for
example, that were lying
on the ledge of the mantel.
These were visitor cards
that were left by people
who visited while she was out,
the little corner turned
up to show that she was out
when the visitor came by.
And so a nice collection of
these objects brought together
to bring the world
of Louise, Comtesse
d'Haussonville, to life.
And it seems like we have
a window into her world,
but we don't know that much about her.
I mean, we know from the painting
that she's very beautiful,
she's young, she's wealthy,
and she very much likes opera.
We know more about her
through biographical things
like her own writings.
And we know that she loved opera.
She, in fact, was an artist
herself in a certain way.
She made a number of
drawings inspired by opera.
She also played the piano.
She had piano lessons
with Frédéric Chopin,
who, of course, was a Polish
émigré who came to Paris
and made much of his
livelihood giving piano lessons
to wealthy young French
women like Louise de Broglie.
And she was also a prolific writer.
She was the granddaughter of
an extremely important writer,
Madame de Staël, who was
exiled under Napoleon
and, in fact, spent most
of her time in exile
in the family château in Switzerland.
This is Coppet.
It's still there.
As of a little while ago, one
could still take public tours,
although it is a private château still.
And this is the château
that Madame de Staël
held many salons in.
It was a cultural fixture
in European circles.
This château is inherited
by Louise de Broglie
at a certain point in her adult life.
Louise publishes a number of
books, mostly biographies,
for example of Lord Byron,
another one of the Irish
revolutionary called Robert Emmet,
who was executed for high
treason under the British crown.
Just, you can see from the title page,
if you can read that text, her
name doesn't appear on this
or any of the books she publishes.
She was forced, to some
degree, by her husband
to publish anonymously.
And in the case of the
book of Robert Emmet,
one can kind of see why.
Her husband was a politician and diplomat
and, you know, her writing a book
about an Irish revolutionary
who was executed for treason
probably would not have been good
for him and his circles
and would have attracted
some public scrutiny.
It's in her personal writings, though,
that we get a better sense of who she is,
and in terms of a darkness
to her personality.
She looks so young and beautiful
and fresh in the portrait.
She was rather troubled.
She always lived under the
shadow of her grandmother
as this wonderful author,
and Louise never really acquired
the same kind of status,
not even close, as an author
that her grandmother did.
She was very troubled by,
and never really got over,
the death of her sister at age 14.
This is something that haunted her.
She became preoccupied from a young age
and through her life with death,
with the decomposition of bodies,
with the haunting of her sister.
And she thought a lot about her own body
and her own mortality.
A part of her will later
on in her life specifies
that she would like to be
embalmed if that was possible,
but if cremation was more popular then,
then she would prefer to be cremated
because she found that to be more seemly
and a more poetic treatment of her body.
She struggled with her own beauty.
One of the most famous
quotes that come from
Louise's writings and her personal memoir,
"I was destined to beguile," she wrote,
"to attract, to seduce,
and in the final reckoning
"to cause suffering in all those
"who sought their happiness in me."
There is a late description of her,
a sort of cruel description by
a man called Prosper Mérimée.
And he describes her about
twenty years after this painting
is made, she's in her mid-forties by then,
and he writes to somebody describing
the Comtesse d'Haussonville as quite fat
with hardly any hair left.
It's hard to reconcile
that late description
with what we see in front of us.
The same thing happens to Ingres.
In his "Self-Portrait,"
this is at the Musée Condé in Chantilly,
he's about 25 years
old when he begins this
and he's so dashing and young.
There's a late account of him as well,
published during his life,
by Théophile Silvestre,
"A History of Living Painters,"
and it describes Ingres at the age of 75
in, again, some pretty cruel terms.
He's called a "bourgeois little elephant
"put together out of misshapen stumps,
"of an outward vulgarity
that contrasts startlingly
"with the mannered elegance of his works."
Again, hard to reconcile
those late descriptions
with the portraits.
And it reminds us that
portraits are of one moment,
of one part of somebody's life.
There's the portrait and there's the life.
In fact, we have a photograph
of Ingres at the age of 75,
and this juxtaposition with
his younger self-portrait
really brings to life
the sense of paintings
having this creative potential,
this inventive potential,
that early photography really did not.
And it really drives home the point
that life goes on,
that portraits capture a
moment and life goes on.
We don't have a later photograph
of the Comtesse d'Haussonville.
Maybe that's a good thing,
and we remember her just
as Ingres has captured her.
When Ingres completed
this painting in 1845,
he received a ton of praise.
A lot of people loved it.
In fact, one naughty commentator
said to Louise de Broglie,
"Well, Monsieur Ingres must
have been in love with you
"in order to paint you like that."
She loved it.
In fact, when she wrote her
will later on in her life,
she died around the age of 64,
a few years before that
she wrote her final will,
and in a long list of her belongings
that were going to be left
with various family members,
the portrait is the
second thing she lists,
and it's second only
to the château itself,
the château at Coppet.
And she leaves this
painting to her daughter
with the château, and she
requests that the portrait remain
in the château in Coppet.
That's where she's born, where
she ends up being buried,
and the portrait by Monsieur
Ingres would be there.
And it remained there installed
in the main dining room
until the death of her
youngest child, a son, in 1924,
at which point it was sold
to The Frick Collection.
But what a lot of people don't realize is,
although this is an iconic painting
for The Frick Collection,
and for some people represents
The Frick Collection
and its great qualities in painting,
it was not acquired by Henry Clay Frick.
And, in fact, Henry Clay Frick
may never have laid eyes on it.
Frick died in 1919.
And this, just like many of the paintings,
the paintings collection
grew about a third
after the death of Henry Clay Frick,
came into the collection
under the leadership
of Frick's daughter, Helen Clay Frick.
And here's a wonderful
sassy photograph of her
taken in Belgium.
The role that Miss
Frick had in the shaping
of The Frick Collection
as we know it today
is extremely significant,
not very well known.
The painting of Louise came over
to New York City in 1927,
at which point the Frick was
not yet open as a museum.
It was still a private home
because Henry Clay Frick's
widow, and Helen's mother,
Adelaide Frick, still
resided in the mansion
on 1 East 70th Street until 1931.
The museum opened to the public
after her death, in 1935.
Finally open to the public,
Ingres's portrait of the
Comtesse d'Haussonville
goes on public view.
And this opening of The
Frick Collection in 1935
is what is being celebrated
in the "Life" magazine issue of 1937,
her portrait chosen as
the key work to represent
this grand opening of Frick's museum.
What couldn't come to
New York City in 1927
was a bottle of absinthe.
It was banned in the United States in 1912
and did not become legal again until 2007.
So with that in mind, I hope
you've enjoyed your cocktail.
Thank you so much for
joining us on this episode
of "Cocktails with a Curator."
We'll see you next time.
