GASNAULT Paul (EN)

Biographical Article

Paul Gasnault was born on October 19, 1828 in Paris where his father, Jacques-François (1790-1837), was an attorney at the court of first instance; he was notably the counsel of the pamphleteer Paul Louis Courier (1772-1825). His mother, Henriette Sophie née Mouquin (1802-1844), was the daughter of a jeweller of Swiss origin and a member of the Protestant consistory of Paris: she brought a considerable dowry of 300,000 Francs to the household. But the lawyer's health deteriorated, a challenge which led him to pass on his charge to his cousin Jacques-Dominique Belland in 1831. In 1835, a stroke left him paralysed and altered his behaviour to the point of suggesting mental illness, which at the end of 1836 resulted in his commitment to the insane asylum of Charenton (Saint-Maurice) where he died in October 1837. Seven years later, Paul Gasnault successively lost his older brother, barely nineteen years old, and then his mother. Two friends of the family, a lawyer of Belgian origin, Charles Henri Amédée Vervoort (1798-1846), then Pierre Jacques Martin Crosse (1789-1862), honorary attorney, were successively appointed guardians of the orphan. The second accommodated the teenager at his home in the rue de Berlin, where a woman resided whom Paul Gasnault always introduced as his "adoptive mother". She was also named Henriette, Mlle de Tonniges, and was born in Danzig (now Gdansk) in 1798, as the daughter and niece of Hanseatic merchants. She was an owner and rentier and was the friend of Cécile Furtado-Heine, the wealthy philanthropist related to the Foulds.

Paul Gasnault was a student at the collège Bonaparte (current Lycée Condorcet) where he began studying law while continuing his aartistic education (drawing and music) until obtaining the baccalaureate in 1849. In 1851, he was recruited as a supernumerary in the general secretariat of the Ministry of Public Instruction; three years of unpaid labor and the insistent support of Achille Fould, then Minister of State, were necessary to secure him an expeditionary post in this administration. In March 1857, tired of a routine job with no prospect of advancement, he resigned himself to focussing on art criticism and his growing passion for ancient ceramics and porcelain, mainly French, Chinese and Japanese. Devoid of real estate, he began a career as a collector by starting a capital that consisted exclusively of debts and securities he inherited. He remained single and still lived in the company of Henriette de Tonniges. They most often stayed at the home of his former tutor, and in the summer they lived in their holiday resort of Saint-Cloud. He sometimes went to Switzerland, but a journey to the Far East was out of his reach.

In unknown circumstances, Paul Gasnault met Albert Jacquemart (1808-1875), the first French art historian specialising in ceramics, and soon became his follower. Thanks to Jacquemart,  Gasnault structured his knowledge in this branch of the decorative arts. Collecting thus began the process, which very gradually transformed the (modest) annuitant into an exhibitor and then into a museum curator, that is to say also into an employee, which can be interpreted in two ways that are not mutually exclusive. The intellectual capital accumulated in scholarly work undoubtedly offered Paul Gasnault the opportunity to later embrace a career that aligned with his skills. His turn towards this profession, however, may have served as a rescue from penury due to the depletion of his resources caused by incessant purchases of art objects.

The interest of the collection put together by Paul Gasnault was already notorious enough for the Union centrale des arts décoratifs appliqués à l’industrie (UCAD), officially founded in 1864, to solicit him the following year for its first event at the Palais de l’industrie, the "musée rétrospectif", where he indeed exhibited 52 pieces (UCAD, Catalogue du musée rétrospectif, 1867, passim). As he himself wrote in the biographical notice attached to his file for the Légion d’honneur, he then participated "in all the exhibitions of the Union centrale" (AN, LH/1082/43), in particular that of 1869 which included an "oriental museum" where new pieces from his collection filled a cabinet and two display cases (UCAD, "Exposition des beaux-arts appliqués à l'industrie. Guide du visiteur au Muséeoriental", 1869, p. 16-17). His expertise began to be so well recognised that in 1871 Adrien Dubouché involved him in "the organisation of the ceramic museum of Limoges" (AN, ibidem). Gasnault played a decisive role with Albert Jacquemart and then, after his death in 1875, with his widow and his son Jules, in the negotiations leading to the sale of his collection to the museum. He oversaw the transfer (as he would do a few years later for his own collection) and meticulously drew up the catalogue published by the city of Limoges in 1879. The previous year, his socio-professional status changed: he began it as a quasi-volunteer as "secretary [of the 4th section of the admission commission to] the retrospective part of the Exposition universelle (AN, ibidem) of 1878, but it ended with his hiring as curator of the brand new Musée des arts décoratifs, which meant that UCAD, which formerly had borrowed from him, now employed him.

Sometimes also designated as general secretary of the museum, Gasnault was in charge of the establishment for nearly twenty years, i.e. until his death: he ensured the growth of its collections, to which he contributed by regular manual donations (of ceramics, but also jewelry and fabrics), as well as their temporary presentation at the Palace de l’industrie; he made the cause of the transfer to the Pavillon de Marsan his own, without living long enough to see it triumph. Additionally, in 1882, he combined his Parisian job with a second curator position by taking over from Adrien Dubouché who died in 1881, as curator of the Limoges museum, which had become national and which enabled him, to reconnect with and showcase his first collection during quite short and spaced out stays.

The promotion of the enlightened amateur to a specialist of European stature went a step further with the 1882 publication of the first edition of of a Histoire de la céramique... by his disciple Édouard Garnier with the publisher Mame. Gasnault prefaced this publication, and in 1884, it had the honour of being translated into English under the patronage of the South Kensington Museum. Appointed chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1885, Gasnault was henceforth a figure of authority in the field of Far Eastern porcelain that Émile Guimet (1836-1918), for example, did not fail to consult, as evidenced by a correspondence preserved at the Musée national des Arts asiatiques – Guimet, where it was a question of loans, exchanges and expertise.

Although we must be careful in this regard, we can suppose that the recognition of his peers and the reputation acquired among connoisseurs could lighten the weight of the private ordeals, which regularly overwhelmed Gasnault from the end of the Second Empire. At the end of the summer of 1870,  the news of the rout of the French armies at Sedan had reached him in Bern. He and Henriette de Tonniges found themselves stranded there for long months, almost at the end of their resources and dreading to learn that their country home had suffered the same disastrous fate as the Château de Saint-Cloud, which had been bombarded by French troops. Fortunately, this fear did not hold true. After their return to Paris, however, the care required for his protector, who had become almost blind, demanded more and more of the collector, and her death in 1878 shook him deeply. Paul Gasnault moved away from the places where they lived and settled for a few years near the Père-Lachaise cemetery where, like his biological mother, she was buried. In 1888, however, he returned to the Europe district and rented an apartment on rue de Milan. Two years later, he had to put his second collection up for sale. His death took place in January 1898, during Twelfth Night. Due to his lack of descendants, Gasnault had made his friend, the banker René Loiselle, his universal legatee. Apart from a final donation, which was finally converted into a bequest to the Musée des arts décoratifs, the heir hastened to sell the books, ceramics and other movable property he had inherited, which brought him nearly 64,000 F (AP, D48E3 82 and 83). It is possible that this hastened sale was a way for Loiselle to receive a repayment of the loans that he had granted to Gasnault, who was also his client, to fund the accumulation of the collection.It will be necessary to try to ensure that he would not have thus repaid the loans that Loiselle had been able to grant to Gasnault who was also his client, to help him satisfy his passion as a collector.

"Dedicated Apostle of Ceramics"

Paul Gasnault built up a collection at least twice. The first, begun at an unknown date, was sold in 1880 to Adrien Dubouché for the Musée céramique de Limoges; the second was partially dispersed at an auction in 1890, before being sold after its disappearance by its universal legatee. It is difficult to know to what extent the first two sales constituted a total liquidation of the objects amassed by Paul Gasnault. Regardless, these collections all had the preponderant place given to ceramics in common, both Western and Asian, which, according to his contemporaries, completely filled his apartment: "His house was a museum: there was no corner without some little wonder in this house on the rue de Milan” (Berger G., in Anonymous, 1898, p. 32). This passion was undoubtedly partly linked to his friendship with Albert Jacquemart, twenty years his senior, who most likely introduced him to the study of ceramics, a study which he had succeeded in establishing as a science. As early as 1863, Albert Jacquemart mentioned the collection of his "friend" Paul Gasnault in his articles (Jacquemart A., 1863, p. 375). The library of the INHA preserves rare letters written by Gasnault shortly before Albert's death, which testify to their close proximity and their exchanges on the subject of ceramics seen at Parisian merchants (BINHA, Autographe 094, d. 3- 18, 83524-83525). With Albert Jacquemart and Adrien Dubouché, he became the “convinced apostle of ceramics” – to use the words of Georges Berger, president of the Union centrale des arts décoratifs at his burial (Anonymous, 1898, p. 32). His expertise in the field of ceramics led him to write the catalogues of other collectors: that of museum curator Henry Barbet de Jouy (1879), chocolatier François Philibert Marquis (1883), as well as a merchant of art specialising in ceramics familiarly referred to by his clientele as "Father Fournier", living in boulevard Beaumarchais, then rue du Faubourg-Montmartre (1885). In these catalogues, Paul Gasnault remains relatively faithful to the classification drawn up by Albert Jacquemart and Edmond Le Blant in their Histoire de la porcelaine published in 1862: we find, in the aforementioned catalogs, the categories of "exceptional fabrications", "famille verte", "famille rose", etc., elaborated in this work (D'Abrigeon P., 2018). However, he distanced himself from the expertise of his predecessor, particularly with regard to a set of "Korean" porcelains, which he rightly reattributed to Japan (Gasnault P., 1878, p. 904), as well as "porcelains Persians" or "Hindu" later reallocated to China (Chabanne L. 2004, p. 12).

Exhibiting the Collection

As early as 1865, Paul Gasnault's collection of Italian earthenware was presented at the "Musée rétrospectif" exhibition organised by the Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie at the Palais de l’Industrie, avenue des Champs-Élysées (Jacquemart, 1865, p. 402). In 1869, during the exhibition of the "Oriental Museum", Gasnault exhibited 188 numbers of Chinese and Japanese porcelain: celadons, crackles, copper reds, in blue and white, commissioned porcelains and enamelled porcelains of the famille rose and famille verte type; 34 bronzes from China and Japan, a few objects in glass, hard stone and earthenware, all described in a catalog that he co-wrote with Albert Jacquemart. His collection was also presented at the two Expositions universelles of 1878 and 1889. Paul Gasnault was particularly involved in promoting or organising these events: in 1878, he was secretary of the fourth section of the Exposition historique, which was dedicated to ceramics from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  He also wrote an article in the Gazette des Beaux-arts dealing with the Far Eastern porcelain collections that were presented in the exhibition.

Discontent with exhibiting his collection, Paul Gasnault used it to illustrate publications: articles from the Gazette des beaux-arts, third volume of the Merveilles de la céramique (1869) or Histoire de la céramique  by Edouard Garnier (1882).

Purchase of the first collection by Adrien Dubouché

In 1880, Adrien Dubouché (1818-1881), director of the Musée céramique of Limoges, acquired some 1,800 numbers from Paul Gasnault's ceramic collection. This acquisition, made personally by Adrien Dubouché then donated to the city of Limoges for its ceramics museum, had a decisive impact for the museum. As described by Édouard Garnier, “the Gasnault collection will worthily complete and crown this remarkable ensemble, and will make the museum of Limoges rival that of Sèvres, to which in certain respects it will be superior […] Oriental porcelain is present with a richness and a scholarly, methodical order of classification that has no rival; fine china and earthenware are represented there by almost unique specimens, and modern industry from all countries has added its finest productions” (Garnier É., 1880-1881, p. 44-45, quoted in Chabanne L., 2003, p. 9). Before leaving Paris for Limoges, the collection was exhibited for six months at the Musée des arts décoratifs and was then installed in the Palais de l'Industrie, on the avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris: it occupied two entire rooms there, on the sidelines of the exhibition on textiles organized by the Union centrale des arts décoratifs (Chennevières P., 1881-1882, p. 4).

The extent of the Gasnault collection makes it possible to envisage the construction of a new building in place of the old asylum where the ceramic museum of Limoges was located up until then. The latter was finally nationalised so that the city could, with the help of the state, build a new complex of two buildings in order to bring together the museum and the national school of decorative art. Shortly after the sudden death of Adrien Dubouché, Paul Gasnault was appointed curator of the museum on November 8, 1881. As indicated above (cf. Biographical Commentary), Paul Gasnault had already had very close ties with the museum for a long time: in addition to his intervention as an intermediary during the negotiation of the Jacquemart sale and his role in the installation thereof in the museum in 1875, he had contributed to the enrichment of its collections since his first donations in 1869 and had also drawn up his inventory with Albert Jacquemart (Chabanne L., 2004, p. 11; D'Abrigeon P. , 2013 p. 61, 80). From the same period, he regularly bought works in Paris for Adrien Dubouché who then donated them to the museum. This thus facilitated the acquisition of one of the most important pieces of the museum in the field of Chinese ceramics: a large blue and white dish from the Yuan period known as the baizi dish entered in 1872 (ADL 7238, Chabanne L., 2004, p. 11).

In the field of Far Eastern ceramics (more than 700 works), the Gasnault collection represented a considerable enrichment for the Adrien Dubouché museum. It included a remarkable set of famille rose export porcelains, including numerous emblazoned plates made in China to order from East India companies, a set of blanc de Chine porcelains from the Dehua kilns, famille verte porcelains from the Kangxi period, several pairs of sprinklers in blue and white porcelain and with a zijin cover intended for the near and Middle Eastern market, as well as Japanese blue and white porcelain of the kakiémon type. Like Albert Jacquemart, Paul Gasnault wanted to build a collection that would be useful for teaching and that "show[ed] all the kinds of manufacture and all the processes of decoration [...] while bringing together specimens from all periods and pieces serving to different uses, religious or profane" allowing to write, through the objects "the history of an industry" (Garnier É., 1881, p. VI-VII).

Sales of the Collection

In 1890, Paul Gasnault parted with nearly 250 lots from his collection (Lugt 49132). The sale took place in May at the Hôtel Drouot under the hammer of Paul Chevallier: richly stocked with Far Eastern (156 lots) and European (78 lots) ceramics, the collection also included glassware (7 lots) and textiles (5 lots). The event attracted regulars from the world of curiosities: dealers and experts Nicolas Joseph Malinet, Laurent Héliot, Charles Mannheim, as well as collectors Edmond Taigny or Ernest Grandidier, and the Musée céramique de Sèvres (AP, D48E3 76, AN 20144787/13). Yet bids remained relatively low: few lots exceeded 200 francs and Paul Gasnault reeled even during the sale of a piece with one of the highest estimates, "six embroidered panels" (outside the catalogue) valued at 730 francs (AP, D48E3 76).

By testamentary disposition, Paul Gasnault had asked that part of the works in his collection be preserved for the musée des Arts décoratif. His sole heir, René Loiselle, and his friends Edmond Taigny (1828-1906) and Jules Maciet (1846-1911) selected some 740 objects, mainly ceramics, to which a portrait of the collector by the painter Paul Mathey (1844- 1929) was added [AMAD, C1 21; Anonymous, 1898, p. 255-256]. The rest of the objects that made up his collection before his death were sold at an auction: a total of 860 lots were sold on 6 dates, from April 25 to 30, 1898, for more than 67,000 francs. In the field of ceramics, the Gasnault collection had undoubtedly been one of the most exhibited and most represented in the 19th century, which made his posthumous sale a real event. We find, in different proportions, a typology close to the first sale: earthenware, stoneware and European porcelain (268 lots), Chinese (149 lots) and Japanese porcelain (13 lots), glass objects (more than 100 pieces), textiles: guipures, fabrics, and trimmings, to which cloisonné enamels (11 lots) were added, lacquers (71 lots), more than a hundred netsuke and a set of sculpted precious stones.

In June 1898, the auction of more than 2,500 books that had belonged to Paul Gasnault's library took place. A poster conserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF, 1898, DELTA-30279, see also AP, D48E3 83) gives a brief enumeration of the most remarkable books: there are, unsurprisingly, the works of Albert Jacquemart and Édouard Garnier on ceramics, as well as books on binding, ornament and furnishing, but also literary works (Chateaubriand, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, George Sand, etc.). Here again, part of the collection - several hundred works - had previously been donated by René Loiselle to the library of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (AMAD, C1/21).

In the absence of a dated purchase book, it is difficult to quantitatively estimate the collection of Paul Gasnault with precision; it is just as important to establish the chronology of its composition. However, if we compare what was bought by Adrien Dubouché in 1880 with what was sold in 1898, we see that the percentage of European ceramics remained roughly equal to that of Far Eastern ceramics. The 1890 sale, on the other hand, consisted mainly of Chinese and Japanese pieces. It is therefore likely that the sale during his lifetime only concerned the part of his collection that Paul Gasnault wanted to part with, in order to purify it. This detail would also explain the relatively modest prices.