LE LIBON Albert (EN)

Biographical Article

Albert Le Libon, a polytechnicien whose brilliant career at the Ministry of Finance from 1847 is described in his file for the Légion d’honneur (AN, LH//1571/37) – of which he obtained the rank of Commander in 1876 – was notably chief of the mission of the expedition to China for the treasury and the post. He left Marseilles on January 12, 1860, reached Hong Kong on February 27, and continued to Shanghai at the end of May 1860 where he became seriously ill. He then left for the north and on September 29, 1860 found himself in Tien-tsin (Tianjin) where the general staff of the expeditionary force was installed, and from which he shortly thereafter returned to Shanghai. He left China on June 1, 1861 without having gone as far as Beijing, reaching Marseilles on July 29, 1861. The problems posed by the supply of money to the French troops hardly seemed to leave room for a personal trip to Japan for a senior official on mission. From 1873 and until his death, he was Director General of Posts, a service which, until 1878, depended on the Ministry of Finance. His posthumous inventory (AN, MC/ET/CXVII/1380) allows us to understand his tastes: it describes in his five-room apartment framed drawings by Gustave Doré (1832-1883) who was one of his friends; Jean-François Millet (1874-1875); the landscape gardener Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867); Jean-Baptiste Fauvelet (1819-1883) (Joueurs d’échecs); Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796- 1875); and also books illustrated by Gustave Doré, booklets of the review L'Art pour tous, rich in reproductions of works of art, and even musical scores. He was known as a friend of the musician Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) who dedicated a composition to him in 1864 and to whom he bequeathed 100,000 francs (AN, MC/ET/CXVII/1380). He gives the reason in his will: "[...] this sum is intended to remove [him] from the servitude of the organ of the Madeleine and should enable him to devote himself to musical composition". He had planned that Saint-Saëns would write a Requiem, which he dispensed with in a codicil of May 19, 1877. However, his wish was realised, and the Requiem was written and performed at the church of Saint-Sulpice a year after his death, on May 23, 1878. Saint-Saëns shared with Le Libon an interest in the Far East, as evidenced by his short comic opera, La Princesse jaune, of 1872.

The Collection

Le Libon assembled a varied Chinese and Japanese collection: it had more than 220 Japanese objects in bronze, cloisonné, porcelain, bamboo, etc. as well as Chinese objects, but, in his will dated December 17, 1876, kept in the Archives des musées nationaux (AN, MC/ET/CXVII/1380), he specifies: “As for the objects of art and curiosities that I own, I divide it into two parts: the first that I leave in the Louvre is made up of ivory objects and lacquered cups from Japan.” He seems to have assembled ivories and lacquer cups with didactic aims, presenting in both cases a typology of forms, decorations, and subjects in fields hitherto little represented in the collections of the musée de la Marine.

His posthumous inventory states:

134. Thirteen pieces, notebooks and boxes in painted ivory with mother-of-pearl inlays and an ivory ball

135. Three male plaques and a small ivory statuette.

136. 136 lacquer cups from Japan

138. 2 small ivory cabinets, 2 boxes, 3 tips of teeth in carved and gilded ivory

139. 26 carved ivory buttons

140. 120 small groups in carved ivory

The set was to be grouped together in the same window of his apartment with the lot "137. 14 boxes and caskets in lacquered wood" not retained by the Louvre, which also obtained the lot "127. 2 Japanese bracelets" due to the material.

No details are given on their mode of acquisition. Le Libon probably had to visit the Universal Exhibition of 1867 in Paris, particularly its Japanese section, then the following year, in 1868, the exhibition-sale at Chevrillon whose "catalogue of Japanese products and works of art composing the collection sent from Japan for the Universal Exhibition of 1867 and grouped today rue de la Victoire n° 41". Among the 1,208 lots, all intended for amateurs, there are in particular many ivory objects. There were also Japanese objects on rue Vivienne; at E. Desoye (1811-1870), then at his widow, Mme Desoye (1836-1909) after 1870, at 220 rue de Rivoli, who notably owned objects from the Universal Exhibition of 1867; or again at the Sichels, rue Pigalle, Philippe Sichel (1840-1899) having brought back in 1874 450 boxes of various objects from his trip to Japan, including netsuke.

The collection of more than 300 pieces, often of small size, received by Henry Barbet de Jouy (1812-1896), the curator of sculptures and works of art, on August 2, 1877, was transmitted to Vice-Admiral François Edmond Pâris (1806-1893), conservateur at the musée de la Marine. The collection was exhibited in showcases – including a narrow central showcase – in the room of Chinese bronzes, between the Sully and Marengo pavilions on the 2nd floor of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée.

The cups, for sake or sweets, are of various sizes; because of the great variety of their diameters, some must have constituted setsthat were superimposed for the serving of sweets. Only one, 18 cm in diameter, decorated with two fish, is still kept at the musée de la Marine (L’Or du Japon, 2010, n° 162, repr.). A large number were deposited at the Ministry of the Navy in 1922 where they can no longer be found, and the few cups sent to the Cercle naval de Brest in 1926 were destroyed during the Second World War.

In 1924, the musée des Beaux-Arts in Brest received the deposit of twenty-six ivory objects (Bretagne-Japon, 2012, fig. 3, p. 56 and fig. 6, p. 60 and list of thirteen works exhibited, p. 13-14), including two bracelets (Brest-Asie, 2004, p. 55, repr.).

Among the ivories deposited in Brest, the five "tooth tips", most likely pieces of elephant tusks, are brush pots; they present three types of decoration that probably correspond to different workshops: figures and landscape in relief, bas-relief on a plain background with some black and red highlights, incisions with or without polychrome highlights and gilt lacquer decoration. Two of these pots are accompanied by black and gold lacquered bases; one presents a scene of everyday life, a woman carrying a tea tray and a child with black and red highlights and gold motifs. It is a technique that dates from the end of Edo, as shown by a similar object from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which was inventoried in 1869 and acquired during the Universal Exhibition of 1867 in Paris (Inv. 894-1869). The other is decorated with humanised frogs shooting arrows at a gold lacquer lily pad target. Frogs and a snake decorate an ivory box and the two plates of a notebook; a card holder represents a fisherman on one side and a walking woman on the other. A rectangular box is decorated with a falcon on the top that is perched on a branch in black and gold with golden birds in flight and on the sides. Two cylindrical boxes with lids with a more basic incised decoration contain game tokens. A cylindrical box with three superimposed compartments with bright highlights of black and red is decorated with a woman holding two children, another child, dogs , cats and birds; a crane flies over the lid. One of the netsuke representing an octopus playing the shamisen bears the signature of Sômin (Bretagne-Japon, 2012, p. 60, fig. 6, repr.); a button (manju) decorated with children is from Gyokkosai (Gyokkosai Morisama was active in the middle of the 19th century); Hotei with a child seated on his bag (Lacambre, 2008, p. 177, fig. 63, repr.) bears the signature of Minkoku, a famous artist of the late 18th century.

As with the sake cups, many of the ivories have not been found in the collections of the musée national de la Marine; until 1946, it still conserved a model of an ivory boat loaded with passengers, but its current location is now unknown.