Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles (Jul 2011)
La collection de portraits gravés du roi Louis-Philippe au château de Versailles
Abstract
The collection of the Cabinet des Arts Graphiques at the Château de Versailles possesses a series of seventy five engraved portraits built up by Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans and subsequently King of the French. According to contemporaries it was without a doubt « the finest collection of portrait engravings existing in the world ». Although credit for the collection is often given to Jean Vаtout, First Librarian to the King, it seems that Louis-Philippe himself was principally responsible for this vast project, begun in 1825 only to be interrupted by the revolutionary turmoil of 1848. These volumes, which entered the Versailles collections a century later, contain over sixteen thousand pieces. This series of portraits — one of the rare series still in albums — was comparable in ambition to the great collections — nowadays dispersed — which are the origin of Series N2 in the Département des Estampes et de la photographie at the French National Library. The collection covers a vast chronological panorama from Pharamond, legendary first king of the Merovingian dynasty, down to Louis-Philippe. In this veritable Pantheon of world history, monarchs feature alongside other great figures of the day — ministers, magistrates, churchmen and scientists, men of letters and artists. This remarkable collection, in which a concern for history overrides that of artistic quality, should be understood as a veritable trial run in anticipation of the historical galleries of the Musée de l’Histoire de France, inaugurated at Versailles by the king in 1837. The entire collection of engravings is online on the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles’s image database.
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