ON THE DEATH of Louis XIII in 1643, his widow, Anne of Austria, was appointed regent of France. By then she had probably already decided to settle in the palace that Cardinal Richelieu had bequeathed to the king and his heirs in 1636, a few years before he died. This sumptuous residence, designed by Jacques Le Mercier, was first known as the Palais Cardinal; henceforth it became the Palais Royal. According to the French scholar Henri Sauval, the first to describe the queen’s apartment in c.1656, whose account remains, despite its brevity, the primary source for its original layout, it consisted of a ‘long suite of halls, chambers, cabinets, not to mention the other rooms and redundant parts’, all of them located behind the main building, in the east wing of the palace. Although Sauval gives no precise information about its location, he provides a few clues which are useful in locating the apartment. Praising the wrought-iron balustrade of the balcony, which Le Mercier had installed to ‘brighten’ the apartment, Sauval says that most of the rooms looked onto the garden, which made ‘the bedroom, the cabinets and the galleries the lightest parts of the entire palace’. He adds that the balcony stretched to the end of a gallery constructed ‘perpendicularly’. When compared with other documentary evidence, this statement allows us to locate the queen’s apartment on a plan of 1751 of the first floor of the Palais Royal (Fig.29), which antedates the alterations to this part of the residence by Contant d’Ivry, carried out after 1752. Situated along the north side of the palace, the apartment extended from a large cabinet at the north of the east wing (Anne of Austria’s ‘Grand cabinet’) to a long gallery at the north-east corner of the complex (the ‘petite galerie de la reine’, referred to on the plan as the main ‘bibliothèque’). An intermediate building linked the ‘Grand cabinet’ to the ‘petite galerie’, within which Le Mercier had set a sequence of rooms flanking the garden: a passage, a bedroom with a recess (the ‘chambre grise’), a cabinet (the ‘petit cabinet’), and another passage. Behind these rooms, there were four other chambers overlooking an inner courtyard (marked ‘cour du cardinal’ on the plan): they can be identified from left to right as the ‘cabinet des glaces’ (a small oval room projecting outside), the ‘Cabinet des bains’, the ‘Cabinet des Muses’ and – last but not least – the oratory (marked ‘cabinet’ on the plan). This reconstruction of the queen’s apartment differs noticeably from those previously proposed by other scholars.

‘THIS MR. GILLOT, whose signature is on some of these prints, begins to shine. He works for the Opéra and many people believe that before long he alone will be in charge of the decoration for the performances; it is said he has a taste for ornaments and new costumes.’ This quotation from a letter dated 26th June 1712, written to the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin by his agent in Paris, Daniel Cronström, notes how Claude Gillot (1673–1722) was gaining fame for his work at the Paris Opéra, in particular for his costume designs. Very little is known about the artist’s involvement with the theatre in Paris apart from his attraction to scenes of the commedia dell’arte taken from the théâtres de la foire. His activity as a designer at the Opéra has scarcely been explored, and few drawings survive to document his work there. The identification, presented here, of the sources for a series of four unpublished designs for Turkish costumes in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge MA, provides insight into the artist’s working methods and allows us to place the works chronologically within Gillot’s career.

PREPARATIONS FOR THE international touring exhibition in 2002–04 of the Grenville L. Winthrop Bequest held by the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge MA, provided an opportunity to re-examine Gustave Moreau’s Jacob and the angel (Fig.44), following a request by the exhibition’s international committee to have the painting cleaned for the occasion. The work that ensued not only confirmed that its golden layer of varnish should not be removed or modified but also allowed the examination of a relatively untouched canvas by this artist, noted for his complex and idiosyncratic working methods. In the process, it became possible to reveal more about the painting’s long evolution.

THE EXHIBITION Primatice, Maître de Fontainebleau, recently at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and now in a much-reduced form at the Palazzo Re Enzo e Podestà, Bologna (to 10th April), was prepared with care and represented a great deal of research, but in Paris, where this writer saw it, the display in the austere subterranean galleries beneath the pyramid could not begin to evoke the palatial scale of Primaticcio’s art. It was divided into nine sections, presenting the works in chronological order to illustrate Primaticcio’s long career in France from 1532 to 1570, working principally at Fontainebleau under Francis I (d.1547), Henry II (d.1559), Francis II (d.1560) and Charles IX (d.1574). Yet not one image of the château of Fontainebleau was included, there was no plan to enable the visitor to understand the arrangement of the royal appartements, and only Charles Percier’s watercolours made it possible to comprehend the decorative scheme for the Salle de Bal (cat. no.216). The sophisticated art of Primaticcio was reduced to a series of drawings displayed on a monotonous grey ground, occasionally enlivened by paintings grouped too closely together, with works of real quality hung beside others of little worth. However, such criticism did not diminish the pleasure of seeing some of Primaticcio’s most beautiful drawings and the opportunity to explore some new lines of thought now being pursued, one hundred years after the publication in 1900 of the first monograph on the artist by Louis Dimier, the basis of all subsequent study.

IT IS ALMOST twenty years since THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE published ‘A Great Man’ by J.S. Bussy, a memoir that occupies a unique place in art-historical studies as the only available eye-witness account of what went on behind the public façade of Henri Matisse’s life. Jane Simone Bussy (1906–60), known as Janie, was the daughter of the painter Simon Bussy, one of Matisse’s oldest friends, his near neighbour in the south of France, and his closest confidant in successive professional and personal dramas that threatened to overwhelm Matisse in the 1930s. ‘A Great Man’ was written in 1947 to be read aloud to Bloomsbury’s Memoir Club, and subsequently consulted in manuscript by Matisse scholars after its author’s death in 1960. It is a sharp, witty, irreverent, acutely intelligent and startlingly frank portrait, all the more persuasive because it emphatically reinforces what has long been the standard image of Matisse as dull, conventional, small-minded and impenetrably self-absorbed.

IN 1861 EDMOND and Jules de Goncourt delighted at their discovery of the true identity of Boucher’s wife: ‘Véritablement, presque jusqu’à nous, l’histoire n’a jamais été aux sources. En voici une petite preuve: la date de naissance, la date de mort de la femme de Boucher, tout cela est faux et contraire aux actes civils.’ She had previously been confused with Marie-Françoise Perdrigeon, the wife of a sécretaire du Roi who died on 30th January 1734. The brothers’ discovery led to the publication of Boucher and Marie-Jeanne Buzeau’s marriage certificate in the Saint-Roch parish archives. Following the fire in May 1871 that destroyed the parish records on deposit at the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, archivists and art historians did yeoman service in reconstituting the état-civil of eighteenth-century artists and craftsmen. Marie-Jeanne Buzeau’s baptismal record in the parish of Saint-Nicolas des Champs, Paris, was published in the mid-1870s, as were the parish records relating to her husband’s birth and death, and to the births, marriages and deaths of her children and their spouses. Yet while the Goncourts noted that Mme Boucher was ‘fort vieille’ when she died, they were never able to document her death with an acte de décès. The partial publication of the official correspondence between the marquis de Marigny and the comte d’Angiviller confirmed that as late as May 1785 she was still in receipt of a royal pension; Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein later established that from 1st May 1785 the widow Boucher’s pension was doubled to an annuity of 2,400 livres, implemented by royal edict of 1st December 1786. The archival discoveries made in the mid-1980s by Georges Brunel in the Archives nationales, Paris, brought to light a slew of important documents relating to the fortunes of Boucher and his wife (some of which are discussed in the present article), but none that verified the date or circumstances of Mme Boucher’s death. As a result, biographical entries for Marie-Jeanne Buzeau record her as having been born in January 1716 and living until at least 1786. Publishing the terse documents that relate to her death provides an opportunity to rewrite Mme Boucher’s biography and to collate and verify as much information as possible – published, archival and visual – in order to establish a more accurate account of her life and milieu.