CHAMBLANC Jehannin de (EN)

Biographical article

Jean-Baptiste-François Jehannin de Chamblanc was a scholar and dignitary from Dijon, the last representative of a famous family of lawyers and parliamentarians from Burgundy. After his studies at the Jesuit college in Dijon, then in the city’s law faculty, he became a counsellor at the Parliament of Burgundy at the age of nineteen and held this post during the twenty regulatory years, before devoting his life to compiling and enriching many collections (Des Marches, A.S., 1851, p. 59). Despite his young age—he was only thirty—, he was already known for his knowledge and for being a very cultivated man, and was selected by Gilles Germain Richard de Ruffey (1706–1794), president of the Chambre des Comptes, to become one of the founding members of the literary society that he created in 1752. A widower and childless, he was able to spend his fortune on his collections, creating a library consisting of almost 20,000 volumes, with a particularly large number of illuminated works devoted to the natural sciences that came from all over Europe (he was also a well-known botanist) (Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale (BMD), MS 2480), a collection of prints of almost 25,000 items (BMD, MS 2481), an ensemble of more than 280 pictures—although not all of the same quality—, as well as a very rich collection of minerals and shells, objets d’art (enamels, bronzes, vases, sculptures, porcelains, medals, and intaglio) (AMD, 4 R 1–1). This extraordinary ensemble led him to construct two galleries adjacent to his private mansion located at 33, Rue Chanoine in Dijon, in order to house a library and specialised display rooms (ADCO, J 4894/4 and ADCO Q 427). The first gallery that was constructed—for his library—was complemented by specific adjacent display rooms for the presentation of the Far-Eastern collections, drawings (their organisation and presentation, drawing papers, bindings, etc.), and conducting scientific experiments. Interested in the burgeoning sciences, such as physics and chemistry, he equipped this display room with the most sophisticated equipment, which enabled him to conduct the experiments described in the 330 books devoted to the subjects, stored on the 460 shelves of his libraries (BMD, MS 2480). Adopting an encyclopaedic approach (Chaux-Haïk, A., 2016), he was also interested in foreign and regional languages, and collected numerous dictionaries, devoted to languages that were at the time as exotic as Greenlandic, Chaldean, Huron (the extinct Iroquoian language of the Huron North American Indians), and Tibetan (Chaux-Haïk, A., 2016). The second gallery became a necessity when his library grew to such an extent that new premises needed to be built. In 1762, while his first gallery was being built, he was clearly interested in exotica with the creation of a ‘Chinese display room’, whose decoration and furnishing he oversaw, gradually adding furniture and precious objects from China and Japan, complemented by books and manuscripts, and prints on silk or on paper from China or Indian provinces (AD 21, J 4894/3; BMD, MS 2481). Unwell, he left in 1792 to take the waters in Switzerland, but never went beyond Dompierre, near Fribourg, where he died alone and destitute in 1797 (Quarré, P., 1958). Considered at the time as an emigrant, all his collections were confiscated and sold as public property (AD 21, Q 1023/8) until Guyton de Morveau (1737–1816) intervened to save them from being dispersed. They were subsequently integrated into various museum institutions in Dijon that were emerging (the Musée des Estampes, the municipal library, and the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle) and to which the collections were an essential contribution.

The collection

Jehannin de Chamblanc was a collector who adopted an encyclopaedic approach; he had numerous centres of interest and was famous for his scholarship. A widower and childless, he devoted himself to his true passion for collecting. His immense library, which was organised in an entirely different way to the libraries in the homes of most of the eighteenth-century parliamentarians, reflected his interest in every literary, scientific, and artistic discipline from the past and, above all, from the contemporary era. He followed the fashion for cabinets de curiosités—such as that of Bonnier de la Mosson—, which were arranged in private mansions according to various disciplines, with specially adapted furniture and a specific decor. His lifestyle and the furnishing in his private mansion followed the very latest fashions. He owned several small pictures and Chinese porcelain wares adorned the fireplaces, as was the usual practice amongst wealthy persons in the eighteenth century; such decorative objects were seen as valueless for the nation and sold as national property. But his interest in Far Eastern countries went well beyond the aim of keeping abreast of the latest trends, as ‘chinoiseries’ had gone out of fashion since 1770 (AD 21, Q 1023; BM MS 2480; Cordier, H., 1910; Brunel, G., Wolvesperges, T., Detrié, M. et al., 2007; and Jarry, M., 1981). Between 1762 and 1776, the dates of the beginning and end of the construction of his two galleries (AD 21, J 4894/3), he managed to bring extremely rare objects to Dijon, although it is not known by which means he achieved this. The collector created a ‘Chinese display room’, recreating an entire decor, or at least as he imagined it, with ribbons, feathers, taffetas, and fabrics ‘in gold and silver’ bought from a supplier in Dijon with specially selected figurines on the walls. Two Chinese screens were remarkable: one was a six-leaf screen from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, featuring black lacquer on wood (Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts (MBA), inventory no. CA 2632) with gilded paintings representing a finely executed landscape, surrounded by a wide border of gilded birds, with everything framed by subtle gilt scrolls. The other is an eight-leaf screen in black lacquer varnish on wood, with many coloured subjects (Dijon, MBA, inventory no. CA 1631). On it are depicted the Emperor and his Court, accompanied by female dancers and musicians greeting an important person on a horse. On the left is a landscape in which the king’s wife and her entourage are engaged in various activities. This screen, a very precious piece of work from the end of the sixteenth or from the seventeenth century, is a perfect example of patient and skilled craftsmanship in so-called Coromandel lacquer. Two cabinets, one of which was described as ‘de nacre’ (‘mother-of-pearl’) by the collector, and the other as the ‘golden cabinet’, also furnished this display room. The first, decorated with rich and precious inlays of gilt lacquer and mother-of-pearl, with exclusively vegetal decorations on a black lacquer ground, is characteristic of the namban style, associated with the territorial expansion of the Iberian monarchies in Asia. It dates from the first decades of the seventeenth century. The foreign origins of a piece of furniture, which was difficult to acquire on the market, combined with the rarity of these objects removed by the émigrés during the Revolution, makes this cabinet (Dijon, MBA, inventory no. CA 1648) both rare in French museums and the oldest attested on French territory (Lacambre, G., 2010). The second, referred to by the collector as the ‘golden cabinet’, is also Japanese and is dated between 1640 and 1680 (Dijon, MBA, inventory no. CA 1647). It is a mobile cabinet with naturalistic, ‘picturesque’ decorations, coated mainly in export lacquers in the 1650s, whose preciousness is highlighted by the use of gold on the black lacquer and the finely engraved copper fittings. Several decorative techniques were used to increase the effects (the technique of ‘sprinkled painting’, relief painting, the use of small golden squares, fine golden lines to represent the waves and leaves, and a ‘pear-skin’ lacquer border). Only four other cabinets of this type are held in French museums, one in the Musée Antoine-Lécuyer in Saint-Quentin and three in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, from the collections of de Robien, the president of the Parliament. Aside from these two precious cabinets and two screens, Jehannin de Chamblanc obtained clothing that was stored in a drawer of a marquetry commode in his antechamber (AD 21, Q 1023).

This rich Chinese display room attracted the attention of François Devosge (1732–1811), appointed by the new authorities to evaluate the artistic objects confiscated in this residence. Hence, his jurisdiction extended to all confiscated property from any geographical provenance. In a letter dated 7 March 1798 addressed to the département’scentral administration, he underlined the importance of this clothing, not from an aesthetic perspective, but rather as a ‘Curiosity’ (AD 21, Q 677). Most of them are now held in the Musée de Dijon, where various items of clothing are displayed, such as embroidered silk stockings, two pairs of slippers with pearl and interlaced embroidery, a silk jacket embroidered on the front and back with a landscape depicting pine trees, rocks, and a crane, a silk belt with five embroidered silk purses attached to the belt with silk strings, and a bamboo opium pipe. Devosge recommended (AM Dijon, 4 R 1–1) that nine Chinese paintings should be kept, including eight in the museum and one in the École Centrale, as the others were sold. He retained paintings that would enable him, in a future museum, to present a range of Chinese illustrations that became stereotypes: men and women in their traditional costumes against an appropriate background of landscapes and fabrics and three vases of flowers. Jehannin de Chamblanc’s curiosity was boundless, and he also managed to acquire paintings on paper and silk (BMD, MS 2481). He added them to his inventory of prints, allotting them to two specific families in his highly elaborate and personalised classification system, clearly separated from the engravings produced in European countries whose subject matter was ‘chinoiseries’ drawn and/or engraved by the likes of François Boucher (1703–1770), Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728–1808), and Pierre-Charles Canot (1710–1777). Hence, he created the family of objects entitled peintures et mignatures [sic] indiennes (‘Indian paintings and miniatures’), now held in Dijon’s municipal library. Two themes predominated: representations of Persian or Moghul  dignitaries and representations of métiers. The sixteen paintings on paper with a format most often measuring 340 × 260 mm representing Moghul or Persian dignitaries are paintings characteristic of the Moghul School, belonging to the provincial School of Murshidabad. These types of portrait were highly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The other series of thirty Indian paintings on paper, most of which have a 300 × 450 mm format, is devoted to the representation of métiers, paintings that are part of the tradition of representing castes and métiers in India, a very common genre in eighteenth-century Indian pictorial production. These were often intended for a European clientele that was interested in collecting travel souvenirs. Jehannin de Chamblanc managed to acquire 114 drawings, which he organised in a specific family in his inventory of prints, called the ‘Chinese papers’, representing mandarins, Chinese divinities, scenes from daily life, bouquets of flowers, and birds, the whole ensemble costing around 380 livres (BMD, MS 2481). Almost everything had disappeared when the verifiers turned up during the confiscation. Perhaps five paintings on taffetas currently held in the Dijon Municipal Library (Bibliothèque municipale, BM) may have belonged to this sub-family of works. They are characterised by delicately executed landscapes, the presence or absence of figures, and are extremely refined, and one of them features of highly detailed ideograms. Lastly, paintings on paper in large and medium formats, kept in rolls or otherwise, are also present in this collection, depicting magots and landscapes. Only four large magots, watercolours on paper of an average format of 117 × 61 cm, are held in the BM (BMD, Est 655/1/2/3/4)). The Musée possesses eight gouaches on paper, five guardians with an average format of 77 × 47 cm, and three smaller gouaches (37 × 26 cm) representing a guardian, a mandarin, and a scene with three figures (Dijon, MBA, inventory no. AGSN 165–172). Lastly, six large landscapes with scenes from daily life, four at the Municipal Library and two in the museum, complement this ensemble. We do not have any information about the supply circuits used by the Dijon-based collector, who usually directly obtained the books he sought in Geneva or Holland (BMD, MS 4342). He owned many travel accounts from Far-Eastern countries, along with those written by the Jesuit missionaries, and he acquired Chinese books with illustrations. An experienced botanist, Jehannin de Chamblanc possessed many books in French and English about Chinese gardens, which were highly fashionable at the time (Gournay, A., 1991). He managed, in particular, to acquire a rare Chinese botanical manuscript with its partial translation into Latin, finely adorned with real or fantastical animals (BMD, MS 387 and 387 bis), a work containing 218 sheets. This was a fundamental book about Chinese medicine, but the second volume is missing. This copy may have been made by a European who knew Chinese. Lastly, one hundred lacquer pieces—which were subsequently inlaid into European furniture—, which may have been sold to him by a marchand-mercier, still need to be authenticated. Jehannin de Chamblanc did not simply display¾as decorative pieces in his salons¾porcelains or engravings produced in large quantities to satisfy Western tastes, but rather sought objects created for connoisseurs of Far-Eastern objects that beautifully illustrated the artisanal and artistic genius of these far-flung lands.