TASTET Émile (EN)

Biographical Article

Émile Tastet (1799-1882), "trader in industrial products from China" (MMNS, 4W388) was born on April 11, 1799 in Baigts in the Landes (AN, LH/2571/84). Émile Tastet offers a rare example for the 19th century of an importer who for a time devoted himself to the trade in Chinese porcelain in close connection with the shipowners making the journey to China. However, the sources concerning him remain scattered, which makes it difficult to write linearly of such an eclectic path.

First Traces of Activity

His activities seem to have begun in Bordeaux, with the import-export of all kinds of products. In 1823, he founded a company along with a certain M. Rudelle called “Tastet et comp.” which continued until March 1848 (Anonymous, 1848, n.p.). A case from the commercial court of the Seine tells us about the wide variety of products he was responsible for importing at that time. A pharmacist by the name of Duvignau had lodged a complaint against Émile Tastet because he had left with a batch of medicine without finding a commercial outlet for it in Manila (Anonymous, 1839, n.p.). The court finally acquitted Émile Tastet who had committed only to the transport of the drugs, not to their liquidation (id.). The anecdote also makes it possible to establish that at this time, Émile Tastet was making the journeys to China himself — the return in question aboard the Grand-Duquesne ended in a shipwreck from which he escaped by chance — which is not necessarily the case thereafter (id.). Other sources report that he was the first to introduce cigars from Manila into France (Lafond de Lurcy G., 1843, T. VIII, p. 173).

Émile Tastet and Chinese Porcelain

From 1844, he traded with ships that had freshly arrived from China at the port of Le Havre. He acquired Chinese porcelain brought back by the Lafayette in July 1844 to resell in Paris. In August 1844, the Ceramic Museum of Sèvres thus acquired ten pieces of this cargo from Émile Tastet through a certain Eyriès for a total of 397 francs (SMMN, 4W388; inv. MNC 3401.1 at 3401.10).

In 1846, he was also the owner of the ship Édite, which arrived in Nantes loaded with samples sent to the Sèvres factory by Father Joseph Ly (SMMN, U20 d.19, letter from Stanislas Julien dated June 4, 1846; d 'Abrigeon P., note Joseph Ly). On several occasions, he offered pieces to the Musée céramique de Sèvres, notably in 1847 a "portable terracotta stove, with its kettles" (SMMN, 4W388, letter of 09/15/1847; only the stove inv. MNC 3783 remains), then in 1849 a pair of vases "enamelled in olive-green shade glaze, remarkable for the tone, the brilliance, and the effect produced on the reliefs, by the degradation of color of this glaze" (SMMN, 4W388, letter from Denis Désiré Riocreux dated 06/15/1849); he was thanked for his generosity by a Lanus vase from the Sèvres manufactory (id.). Beyond these exchanges, it seems that Émile Tastet offered to serve the factory to promote its links with China: at the end of a letter, the curator of the ceramics museum reminds the administrator of the manufacture Jacques Joseph Ebelmen (1814-1852) "the idea of ​​Mr. Tastet on the possibility of exchanges to be established between the manufacture and China and his offers of service for the negotiations of such a matter" (id.). This proposal remained unfulfilled.

He was named chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by decree of April 27, 1846 (AN, LH/2571/84); however, his file is too incomplete to explain the grounds for this decoration.

His name reappears in the archives of the Sèvres manufactory in June 1856 related to the gift of a "refrigerating jug from Kabul, province of Afghanistan (Central Asia) brought back from Bombay where it is used extensively to cool the 'water to drink' (SMMN, 4W32, d. Tastet).

In 1850 he was listed as a commission merchant at 43 rue du Faubourg Montmartre; in 1853 he was registered as a "trader-shipowner, commissioner, trade with China and the East Indies" at 26 bd des Italiens, then in 1857 at 10, rue de Choiseul (Business Directory, 1850, p. 380, 1853, p. 831 and 1857, p. 759). These frequent changes of address are undoubtedly the result of his trips to China and India. From 1859, he organised several sales himself at the Hôtel Drouot (see Commentary on the Collection, below). In the records of these sales he is simply described as "owner".

Sericulture and Botany

Alongside his commercial activities, Émile Tastet took a close interest in sericulture. In 1854, he was rapporteur for the "Commission responsible for introducing wild silkworms from China into France, and eggs of ordinary silkworms of the best white and yellow breeds bred in France into this country” (Tastet E., 1854, p. 3). Following his report, the brand new zoological acclimatisation society decided to ask the missionaries present in China to bring cocoons and eggs of wild silkworms back to France. The following year, surveys were also carried out at the initiative of Émile Tastet on Indian moths (Duméril, 1855, p. 396) and rice cultivation in India (Tastet E., 1855, p. 224). From 1855 and until the end of the 1850s, he was on the board of directors and remained a very active member of this society (Anonymous, 1855, p. XXI). It was no doubt his interest in the culture of silkworms and China that brought him into contact with the sinologist Stanislas Julien (1799-1873), translator of a treatise on this subject (Bulletin de la société zoologique, p 225; Julien S., 1837). Émile Tastet also solicited the sinologist to obtain information on oilseed peas in Chinese books (Julien S., 1855, p. 221-226). He took advantage of his activities as a shipowner to bring back Chinese plants, such as seeds of rhamnus utilis (Vilmorin L., 1859, p. 521). His knowledge of China and India made him a valuable asset to the acclimatisation society, not only by facilitating the transport of plants and insects from these lands, but also by providing information on local customs. The minutes of the sessions are rich in his presentations on local cultures and customs (Duméril, 1855, p. 236).

Through the sources that were consulted, it has not been possible to find traces of Émile Tastet after the 1860s until his death on November 15, 1882 (AN, LH/2571/84).

The Collection

Émile Tastet offers a rare example of a 19th century merchant shipowner for whom a few archives and documents survive. Not only does he appear as an essential intermediary between shipowners in Paris and Le Havre, but he also provides valuable information on the modalities of supply in China.

Émile Tastet and Sales in Le Havre

Canton: the Lafayette (1844), the Maupertuis (1847), the Gustave (1847), the Dugay-Trouin and Victor (1849), the Rose (1851), the Jules César (1852), as well as a last unidentified ship (1854) under the responsibility of the company of shipowners Ferrère et Morlot, and finally the Alphonse-Nicolas-Cézard (1854) whose sale was effected through E. Troteux (d'Abrigeon, P, forthcoming). The sale of the ship Lafayette is telling: while Émile Tastet is not mentioned in its title, nor in its distribution, it is known that he sold several pieces for the Sèvres museum as a "vendor". (SMMN, 4W388, “état… août 1844”). It can be easily imagined that for the following sales his role was not limited to the sole "distribution" of the catalog in Paris, but to the solicitation of potential customers for these sales. The absence of the minutes from Le Havre, destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War, together with the private nature of these transactions does not however allow this hypothesis to be further developed.

This intermediary status is perhaps justified by the difficulty that Émile Tastet encountered in establishing himself as a dealer in Paris. The newspaper Le Commerce reports that on January 17, 1845, Émile Tastet had obtained authorisation by a judgment from the Paris commercial court to "sell new goods" which consisted of "Chinese vases and curiosities". However, the tea merchant Mr. Houasse who ran the shop at the Chinese Gate, not seeing the arrival of a competitor with a good eye, opposed this judgment, on the pretext that Émile Tastet was not a "sedentary merchant", and as such won his case (Anonymous, 1845, n.p.).

Sourcing in China in the 1840s-1850s

In his publication on silkworms, Émile Tastet mentions the difficulties at the time of obtaining supplies in China, other than through the intermediary of the missionaries: "with the exception of the five coastal towns open to Europeans, it is impossible, by commercial relations alone, to obtain anything true or good from the interior of China, except with the help of our missionaries and the Chinese Christians who are devoted to them" (Tastet E., 1854, p. 4). Like Stanislas Julien, who relied on the congregation of Saint Vincent de Paul to send Chinese books and various other materials to France, Émile Tastet also made recourse to the help of Lazarists in the transport of his goods. His name appears in a letter from Auguste Droucel dated May 11, 1857, addressed to Ange-Michel Aymeri (known in China as 高幕理 1820-1880), then procurator of the Lazarist missions in Ningbo 寧波, regarding: "the 3 cases T S 1/3 of which you spoke to me were withdrawn here [Marseilles] by the correspondent of Mons. E. Tastet, and I have no outlay to make" (AHCM, 179.I b 3). The nature of the goods is not specified, but the date may indicate that they are Chinese plants collected at his request for the zoological society of acclimatisation.

The few letters from his correspondence preserved in the archives of Sèvres also report on problems of communication that may have existed between the requests of merchants and their execution by dispatchers. His concerns are expressed in a letter dated January 1850, probably addressed to Denis Désiré Riocreux (1791-1872): "Two months ago, I already sent a very long note of objects to be collected for the ship Rose that I have on its way, but I am afraid there are still errors and misinterpretations in the choice, despite the precautions I have taken to explain everything in detail" (SMMN, 4W388). This note also shows that Émile Tastet no longer participated in trips directly, but rather delivered instructions on the type of objects desired. Some sources mention Émile Tastet maintaining at great expense a "connoisseur" in China devoted to acquiring porcelain and other objects of curiosity for him (Burty P., 1860, p. 178).

Trials and Tribulations of the Sales of Émile Tastet

From the late 1850s, Émile Tastet began to organise sales on his own in Paris. A comparison of the sales catalogues kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the analysis of the sales reports of commissioner Charles Pillet has enabled us to identify at least four sales that took place on December 10, 1859, January 26-28, 1860, April 2-4, 1860 (AP, D48E3 51), and March 22, 1861 (AP, D48E3 52). These sales were no longer limited to porcelain, but also included cloisonné enamels, lacquers, jades, various embossed silver objects, ivory objects, wooden vase supports called "iron wood", etc. In these later sales, there is no mention of Émile Tastet in the catalogues’ titles, nor even of the direct provenance from China of the pieces. These could perhaps have come from a stock accumulated during his collaboration with Ferrère and Morlot which continued to sell in the 1860s.

But it would seem that Émile Tastet, unlike other dealers of this time, failed to jump on the bandwagon of the great development of the Asian art market in the 1860s. The world of curiosities also sees failures, such as poorly sold objects and poorly promoted sales that attained low prices for pieces that are in fact very precious. This was the case of the sale organised by Émile Tastet from April 2 to 4, 1860.

The art critic Philippe Burty (1830-1890) gives a glowing review of the pieces in this sale when he states, "the importance and the choice of the pieces, as well as their magnificent preservation made them, for the most part, worthy of entering into elite cabinets", but laments at length their lack of enhancement (Burty P., 1860, p.o 177). The cause of this failure, according to Philippe Burty, was the "bad conditions" in which the sale was carried out: a catalogue deemed too summary, a lack of precision in the descriptions, and a lack of translation of the inscriptions. Burty particularly underlines the discrepancy between the brevity of the descriptions and the true nature of the objects: “How could curiosity be aroused at the Tastet sale by indications such as these: 210. Gourd-shaped bottle, mottled greenish-grey porcelain. This, however, was nothing less than red blown glass, the rarest of Chinese manufactures." The bottle in question was sold for the modest sum of 29 francs (id., p. 177).

Many lots were bought back by Émile Tastet himself (or by his son), no doubt when losses were too great compared to prices attained. The minutes of the April 1860 sale mention the redemption of thirty-nine lots out of the 294 issues sold for total proceeds of 10,572 francs (AP, D48E3 51).

The buyers at these sales were primarily the merchants involved in the trade of curiosities in Paris, notably Beuderley, Chanton, Duvauchel, Evans, Nicolas Joseph Malinet (1805-1886), Monbro, etc. (AP, D48E3 51 and 52).