HELIOT Laurent (EN)

Biographical article

Laurent Héliot was a Parisian dealer from Burgundy. He was born into a family of modest means on 2 December 1848 in Mont-Saint-Jean, in the Côte-d’Or (AD 21, 3E440/011). His life and career remain a mystery: he often features as a name on a list of dealers or donators. The ups and downs of his career, how he developed a keen eye for objets d’art, and his business remain unexplored. It appears that his business was well established at the end of the 1870s. Indeed, he is not mentioned in the Annuaire-Almanach Didot-Bottin before 1882. That year, he was listed as a dealer in ‘directly imported ancient Chinese porcelain wares’ under the heading ‘Curiosités’ (1882, p. 1068). Although he was described as a buyer of Asian art at auctions as of 1873 (Saint-Raymond, L., 2019), he was described as a ‘valet de chambre’ on the certificate of his marriage to Henriette Depensaz on 29 January 1876 in Paris (AP, V4E/3532). Without a family business to take over, it may have taken him a while to establish his activity. Established at 62, Rue de Clichy in 1882, he remained there until the end of his life. On his invoice headers he describe himself as a dealer in ‘porcelaines d’art et antiquités, meubles, émaux cloisonnés de la Chine’ (‘porcelain and antiquities, furniture, and Chinese cloisonné enamels’, a header he first used in 1885 and at least until 1888). At a time when most of the dealers were eclectic, he was one of the very few to indicate a specialisation in Chinese porcelain wares. He played a significant role with regard to the collector Ernest Grandidier (1833–1912), to whom he supplied almost a third of his collection of ceramic wares (Chopard, L., 2020). Although Héliot highlighted the ‘direct provenance’ of the objects he sold, he was an active bidder in auction rooms and became an increasingly important actor in them (Saint-Raymond L., 2019). At the end of his life, he was an expert in certain sales (Lugt, nos. 65139, 66157, 66177, 65543, 65314, and 64465), acting alone or in the company of other actors in the art market, such as Charles Mannheim. These were modest, but specialised sales: two of them involved the auctions of collections of former diplomats working in China, Messrs Verhaeghe de Naeyer and Lemaire. It is not known if the others were anonymous sales or sales designed to sell off the dealer’s stock. In any case, a Chinese porcelain figure featured at the beginning of the catalogue.

Several French museal institutions purchased objects from Laurent Héliot, who also made donations to their collections. It was perhaps out of a desire to enrich their collections, a gesture of gratitude after major acquisitions, or as a way of establishing his reputation. Héliot also loaned articles for exhibitions held at the Union Centrale (Revue des Arts Décoratifs, 1884–1885, p. 101).

Héliot died on 9 March 1909 in Paris (AP, 9D/110). In memory of their father, his sons, Gaston (1879–1936) and Maurice (1877–?), gave the Louvre a few weeks later a large baluster vase (now in the Musée Guimet, inv. G 5658). It appears that Gaston Héliot had followed in his father’s footsteps (‘Exposition d’art chinois’, Excelsior, 9 June 1914), perhaps helped by his brother. Gaston Héliot, became Vice-President of the Société des Amis du Musée Cernuschi in the 1920s and donated several Chinese objects to the museum in 1922, 1923, and 1924 (Musée Cernuschi archives, CER-HISTMUS.VII).

The collection

Laurent Héliot was not really a collector so to speak; his activities were clearly identified as being commercial by his contemporaries (Koechlin, R., 1930, p. 72). Due to the lack of private archives, it is possible to get an idea of the objects he dealt in by studying some of the collections that have survived and into which they were integrated. He sold Ernest Grandidier Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) porcelain objects. He also purchased some Yuan stoneware, some Song articles, and Japanese porcelain objects dating from the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He also gave him a vase in 1907 (inv. G5506). The Musée Guimet bought some ceramic items and a hard stone article from him, and Héliot gave the institution a Ming vase, a goblet dating from the Qianlong (1735–1796) era, a white vase with incised decorations, a Japanese statuette of a divinity, and two jade plaques (Jubilé du Musée Guimet, 1904, p. 25). The Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs acquired thirty-five Chinese objects dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties between 1886 and 1910 (in particular, twenty-four porcelain objects and eight glasses) and some Japanese objects. Héliot gave the association two porcelain pieces and a glass between 1890 and 1895. He made a significant donation of twenty-five objects to the City of Dijon, in his native region (report drawn up by the museum commission, session of 17 May 1901): bronze Ming altar decorations and Ming and Qing ceramic wares, as well as a small white jade piece. He did not sell pieces to the Musée du Louvre for its Far-Eastern collection, but donated a bronze goblet inlaid with silver and malachite in 1899. The Musée de Limoges also bought some Chinese porcelain objects from him (D’Abrigeon, P., 2013, p. 85). Laurent Héliot provided several objects of an exceptional quality for his clients, and it was in particular thanks to him that a rare celadon coffee pot with a double-headed phoenix (G 5119; Besse, X., 2004, pp. 40–41), dating from the end of the period of the Five Dynasties (907–979) (Zhuo, Z., 2017), was added to the Grandidier Collection. Sold for several hundred francs and attributed at the time to the Kangxi period, it was with this identification that it was integrated into Ernest Grandidier’s collection, which was primarily devoted to Qing porcelain objects. It was in this field that Héliot acted as Grandidier’s intermediary at the Camondo sale in 1893 and which enabled him to acquire the famous vase with its ‘thousand flower’ design from the Qianlong period (G 3344; Besse, X., 2004, pp. 138–139). Héliot also distinguished himself in the field of glass, selling several high-quality pieces to the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, including a blown glass vase with wheel-engraved decorations from the Qianlong era (inv. 7484; Quette, B., 2014, p. 53).