Looted German Collections and the Transformation of French Portraiture

Napoleonic spoliation of art collections in the German states brought some of the finest exemplars of Northern Renaissance and Baroque painting to France, including dozens of portraits by Hans Holbein, Anton van Dyck, and Rembrandt van Rijn. In 1799, many of these objects were exhibited in Paris, and their influence would resonate among French artists for decades to come. Holbein’s influence on the portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres is one well known example. Yet the impact of these stolen paintings on the development of nineteenth-century French portraiture more broadly needs further investigation. The dramatic shift from the lively, colorful portraits of the eighteenth century to the sober, minimalist portraits of the Restoration and July Monarchy has been attributed to the rise of the bourgeoisie and the anglicization of men’s fashion, but the impact of Dutch, Flemish, and German portraits from these looted collections has been overlooked. Building on the work of Bénédicte Savoy and others, this paper proposes that the sober aesthetic of early and mid-nineteenth-century French portraiture evolved from the stylistic features of these looted works – on the one hand, a tendency towards the monochromatic palettes and plain settings of Dutch and Flemish portraiture, and, on the other, a fascination with the austere contour lines and rich textures of Holbein’s oeuvre. The result of what began as a forcible cultural exchange was a reverse invasion of sorts, in which the visual paradigms of art from the Dutch, Flemish, and German states became an indelible part of French portrait traditions.