MONTIGNY Charles de (EN)
Biographical Article
Charles de Montigny, a diplomat, embarked on La Sirène as chancellor of the Lagrené mission, which signed the Treaty of Whampoa with China in 1844. On his return, in 1846, he published a Manual for French Traders in China (Manuel du négociant français en Chine), in which there was no mention of collectors' items.
In 1847, he was appointed Consul in Shanghai and Ningbo, two of the ports newly opened to the French. After arriving in 1848, he obtained the foundation of a French concession in Shanghai, on April 6, 1849, which graduallygrew and remained in existence until 1943. In 1851, Charles de Montigny went to recover twenty sailors stranded on the island of Pigum, in Korea, after the sinking of the whaler Le Narval (Roux P-É., 2012).
Before returning to France in 1853, he went to Ningbo twice a year despite the dangers of travel by sea because of pirates as well as by land.
The diplomatic archives say nothing about the collection – totally unknown to historians, such as Frédet, Brizay, or Roux, who all worked on the career of Charles de Montigny – that he built up during his stay. It was most certainly acquired with his personal funds and brought back to France following an eventful voyage via the Cape of Good Hope. Along with his family and his crates of belongings, he embarked for France with ten “grunting oxen,” or live yaks; a bishop in Tibet had given him four, a number that then multiplied in the consulate garden. During a forced stopover in the Azores, one of these yaks died. Upon his arrival in France in 1854, a dozen yaks were donated to the Museum d’histoire naturelle in Paris (Magasin pittoresque, 1854, p. 329-330); some were then sent to mountainous regions. However, while he had hoped that the fur and the tail of the yaks would constitute new materials for the textile industry, these animals, rare in Europe, became residents in the French zoological gardens.
The collection was presented during the Exposition universelle of 1855 in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in the avenue Montaigne, in three side galleries to the south, near the entrance, close to those of Belgium, according to the plan published in the Magasin pittoresque (1855, p. 215). Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and, above all, Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) noticed the collection. The collection was acquired by the ministère d’État et de la maison de l’Empereurfor the Louvre where it entered after the Universal Exhibition; it enriched the ethnographic section of the Musée de la Marine, then installed on the second floor of the Cour Carrée.
Subsequently, Montigny served as France's envoy to the King of Siam from June 1856 to January 1857. A treaty was signed on August 15, 1856 and the Siamese ambassadors were received by Napoleon III (1808-1873) at Fontainebleau in 1861. Montigny was again in Shanghai as Consul General from June 1857 to June 1859, then as President of the Municipal Council of the concession in 1862. From 1863 until his death in 1868, he was the consul of France in Tianjin.
During his new stays in the Far East, he built up a second collection with nearly 2,000 pieces for sale, which he brought back to Paris and which was mentioned in an article by Auguste Allongé(1833-1898) in the Le Monde illustré of 1860 (Le Monde illustré, May 19, 1860, p. 331-332), with a view on the Chinese museum of the Louvre. A few years later, his name was cited along with those of other famous collectors, Duke Charles de Morny (1811-1865) and Count Alexander Stroganov (1795-1891) for the provenance of objects from China and Japanin a public sale on December 14, 1865 in Paris (Importante collection d’objets d’art et de curiosités de la Chine et du Japon, December 14, 1865).
The Collection of Charles de Montigny at the Musée de la Marine
On July 28, 1854, his collection of objects from China was stored in the Musée du Louvre. He had a catalog drawn up by the auctioneer Jules-Auguste Boussaton (1821-c. 1901), dated 1854 (Catalogue sommaire des objets d’art antique et de haute curiosité de la Chine composant la collection de M. de Montigny, consul de France à Shang-Kaï et Ning-po, 1854). An editor's note boasts of its “many of its riches, all drawn from the northern central provinces of the Celestial Empire,” although the porcelains include Canton porcelain tea sets (No. 244, no. 245). No. 146 concerns two paintings "from the treasury of Emperor Kin-Yuen".
A copy of the catalogue from the Musée de la Marine compiled by Jules-Auguste Boussaton in 1854 is kept in the study and documentation services of the department of paintings at the Musée du Louvre. It describes 1,482 pieces under 390 entries, counting the wooden bases; one object is indicated as Tonkinese, a few others as Japanese, while others are not specified. The catalog includes twenty-two entries of enamels, seventy-eight of bronzes, twenty-two of jades, forty-three of art furniture, twenty-two of paintings, eighty of porcelains, twenty-five of stones fines, ivories, etc., ninety of curiosities and works of art, a lot of coins, and twelve of musical instruments.
The catalog also contains some handwritten notes for forgotten lots and, at the bottom of the first few pages, a list of donations made by Montigny to the museum: fifty-eight objects in twenty-five lots, five of which are everyday objects brought back from his mission to Korea in 1851, a country completely closed to Europeans at that time.
This important acquisition by the Ministry of State and the Household of the Emperor for the Louvre Museum is notably mentioned in the Reports of the Count of Nieuwerkerke of 1863 (p. 26) and 1869 (p. 104). The curator of the Musée de la Marine, Léon Morel-Fatio, includes this collection in the new summary inventory by techniques of his collections, completed on December 31, 1856, but he does not indicate the origin of these purchases and donations, concealed under the rather vague formula: "entered since the accession" of Napoleon III.
The collection has a different character from that brought back by the Lagrené mission, which was not unknown to Montigny since he had been part of it. It can be seen as complementary, revealing the variety of Chinese art before the arrival of objects taken during the sack of the Summer Palace in Beijing in October 1860.
While Shanghai was still a fledgling city, Ningbo, a little further south, was a city of old civilisation, in close contact with Japan – there was a Chinese trading post in the port of Nagasaki –and the Ryukyu Islands to the south of the archipelago. The city specialised in the manufacture of quality furniture. It should be noted that, during his stay, Montigny had regular relations with the missionaries traversing China, whom France protected and who could serve as informants and intermediaries.
While many objects from this collection were no longer on display at the Musée de la Marine from the start of the 20th century and were deposited in various places, the museum’s collections till contain nearly 142 of them. The models of boats have of course been preserved, including No. 1 of the Montigny donations: "[...] a pleasure boat for inland voyages on lakes and rivers, built in the tenth century with all its accessories, to serve as a model to a similar boat construction. This model, copied from one of the most richly ornamented, is made of sandalwood" and "a junk with carved ancient bamboo figure" (no. 338). While items such as two octagonal Chinese ivory vases (no. 279) and fragile cups in copper and mother-of-pearl (part of no. 370), possibly from the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), need restoration, there are also two pairs of Chinese porcelain vases recently remitted from the Ministry of the Navy. The museum also preserves a four-stringed lute (probably one of the [Chinese] violins on sharkskin, n° 385), while the other musical instruments have been divided between the musée de La Rochelle and the musée de l’Homme (currently at the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac). Some panels ("paintings" decorated with bas-reliefs in stone or dark wood), such as one in yellow lacquered wood depicting a landscape and work in the fields (no. 159) and another on a blue background depicting black horses (no. 166), making up a pair, were deposited in La Rochelle, as well as many others.
From 1901, the finest works of art in the collection were transferred to the section of the musée du Louvre Museum, since 1893, to the Far East, before entering the Guimet Museum in Paris in 1945. As transfers within the Louvre did not always entail documentable administrative decisions (such as deposit orders), some were only inventoried in 1915, others, having lost their history, were not listed until later at the end of the MNAAG inventory and their identification is still in progress, particularly for the bronzes (nos. 27, 28, 29, 36, 55, 57, 73, 81 in the catalogue) as well as for certain pieces of Chinese furniture. The musée Guimet museum of Asian arts thus preserves the thirty objects decorated with cloisonné enamels which had been transmitted to the "Far East" (nos. 1 to 17 and 19 to 22). One of them was considered "exceptional" and dated to the 18th century by Catherine Delacour in a recent article (Delacour C., 2019). Claire Déléry was able to find two jade objects, namely a small group sculpted on a square base (n° 88, "Une chimère et ses petits") and a small long square vase with handle and spout (n° 94), six oriental agate cups (part of No. 272, five others being at La Rochelle), a white-spotted carnelian Poussah Buddha (No. 263, "Le Dieu du Plaisir"), a "precious table in eagle wood inlaid with silver threads” (no. 145). In the inventory of the Grandidier collection, a few porcelains have also been located: three bowls (no. 176, no. 177, no. 218), a tray, "water lily leaf garnished with insects inside and flowers outside" (no. 213) and pieces described as modern: a toilet set (part of no. 246?), as well as five cups and four saucers (part of no. 249). A rock crystal vase which does not correspond to n° 278 could perhaps correspond to n° 287.
In 1920, the maritime prefecture of Cherbourg received twenty-six pieces of furniture from the Montigny collection: after the Second World War, some were damaged or disappeared; others would have been sold in 1951. There are currently nine pieces of Chinese furniture still in use, including No. 126: "A Ningbo armoire, in pako and imperial wood with two solid doors and two drawers at the bottom, covered with a landscape in relief of a bizarre composition very artistically carved" in various coloured stones.
In 1923, the city of La Rochelle received in two shipments a large deposit from the Musée de la Marine for the Museum d’histoire naturelle and the Musée d'Orbigny-Bernon (now the musée d’Art et d’histoire), probably including more than fifty objects from the Montigny collection, some of whose history has long since been erased.
Among the objects preserved in La Rochelle, in particular the numerous piers of "art furniture", the spectacular n° 106 is "a large Ning-po bed, hoop shape...", n°109, "two work tables...", No. 110 "a small old six-leaf screen in red lacquer, furnished with plates of northern porcelain decorated with landscapes," with this handwritten addition: "we have given two extra sheets." Various panels with relief decoration, described under the heading “paintings," are also found there. A surprising piece is in the shape of "two chanterelles forming cones, in dark red porcelain" (no. 190). Among the porcelains, we should also mention particularly remarkable bowls which were published by Thierry Lefrançois (1991, n° 67, repr. and pl. in colors XXVI and n° 68, repr.): they correspond, respectively, to n°195 and 194 of the 1854 catalogue. No. 194 is "an ancient bowl, decorated with mandarin ducks and flowers"; No. 195 "[an]other bowl decorated with leaves and insects"; they have both lost their wooden bases. Two "small carved horns" (no. 343) refer to two rhinoceros horn cups, which are smaller than that of the Lagrenémission, also in La Rochelle. Five cups in oriental agate (part of n° 273) are from the same series as those in the Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet. As for No. 22 of the Montigny donations, "a large Korean hat in delicately worked bamboo fabric and a black horsehair headband of very remarkable workmanship," wrongly considered then, as “Chinese," it was probably the first object from this closed country identified in a French museum.
La Rochelle also received two Japanese cabinets with drawers and compartments with sliding doors (no. 111) in lacquer decorated with mother-of-pearl landscapes, in a style typical of Nagasaki production at this period (L'Or du Japon, 2010, n° 104, repr; D'or et de nacre, 2011, n° 39, repr; À l’aube du japonisme, 2017, n° 28, repr.), as well as two bowls in black and gold lacquer, red on the inside (part of n° 368), no doubt commonly used in Shanghai or Ningpo, which Montigny himself did not realise was of Japanese manufacture (L'Or du Japon, 2010, n° 105, 106, 107; D'or et de nacre, 2012, n° 10, repr.; À l’aube du japonisme, 2017, n° 33, 34, repr.). Six small square trays in black lacquer decorated with mother-of-pearl (n° 373) are undoubtedly works from the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) (L'Or du Japon, 2010, n° 105, repr.; D'or et de nacre, 2012 , n° 35, repr.)
In 1924, after an exhibition that was organised the previous year in tribute to the victims of the earthquake in Tokyo, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brest obtained the deposit of sixteen objects from Montigny. Listed as n° 2 of his gifts, we find: "Model of palanquin or official sedan chair with four men," corresponding to the palanquin which Montigny used on his formal visits to the Chinese authorities, and of which he complained in his diplomatic correspondence, that the four porters cost him dearly. Among various Chinese objects in carved red lacquer, n° 89 is described as: "two antique square-shaped lanterns, montants in carved red lacquer, ornaments in gilded copper and lacquer, green and white jade tiles decorated with open fretwork" (Brest-Asia, 2004, p. 31, repr.). Let us also mention n° 70, a bronze incense burner in the shape of a Foe dog, its paw resting on an openwork ball with a baby on its back (Brest-Asie, 2004, p. 57, repr. without its base in wood, then kept in reserve...), n° 91, two "round-shaped screens in green jade carved on both sides with carved wooden trim, with their carved wooden support" (Brest-Asia, 2004 , p. 60, repr.), n° 333, a rectangular screen "in stone with three layers representing a landscape with a junk on a river," whose base is in La Rochelle.
In addition to musical instruments, the Musée de l'Homme received six Japanese bowls of the same type as those in La Rochelle in 1946. The bowls had a black and gold lacquer with a red interior, without a lid (part of n°348) or with a lid (part of No. 349). These bowls are now in the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (L'Or du Japon, 2010, n° 106-1 and 2 and n° 107; À l’aube du japonisme, 2017, n° 29 to 32).
However, there is no doubt that many of the objects brought back by Montigny still need to be identified and have lost all trace of their historical provenance since the end of the 19th century.
