Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe, Water Jousting Scene, ca. 1760

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe, Water Jousting Scene, ca. 1760,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.2242.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe, Water Jousting Scene, ca. 1760,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.2242.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

In this lively scene, a festive atmosphere unfolds as two gondolas, each piloted by uniformed rowers—red coats on the right and blue on the left—navigate their way, with varying results, under a double-pass bridge. The event, probably a water jousting game, draws a crowd of curious onlookers. Spectators occupy the bridge above and the quay to the right, where red and blue pennants proclaiming the colors of the competing gondolas flutter gaily in the breeze. Water jousting, a practice dating back to the twelfth century in France, involves two teams who fight to maintain their balance while unseating their competitors in the other boat.¹

At the right foreground, an elegantly dressed group perches precariously in a third gondola, gesturing wildly at the left-hand boat. There, two women help a uniformed man in a red coat and blue pants, dressed similarly to the righthand team, out of the water. Just left of center, two other figures bob in the water, soon to be joined by a red-coated gondolier who loses his balance and is toppling overboard. A blue-coated rival hastens his descent with a lance. The overall impression of this charmingly chaotic scene is one of lighthearted festivity and humor, appropriate for the lid of a small ornate box, typically made to be displayed or carried to elicit conversation in social gatherings.

Dating to around 1760—indicated by the women’s hairstyles and headdresses²—this miniature shows the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish landscape paintings, esteemed by aristocratic French collectors in the eighteenth century.³ The Van Blarenberghe family of painters, which had close links to Versailles and the French royal family, often produced miniature versions of such landscapes.⁴ Like these examples, they were typically fixed to the lids of decorative gold and enamel boxes, often used to hold snuff or small trinkets. Beyond their role as fashionable accessories and conversation pieces, such boxes also served as diplomatic gifts. By the nineteenth century, they were avidly sought by prominent collectors such as Richard Wallace and the Rothschild family, who delighted in these compact—and therefore highly collectible—showpieces for the skills of not only miniaturists but also goldsmiths and enamellers.⁵

Notes

1. As Paul B. Newman has shown, this riotous game “parodies the courtly jousting of [medieval] knights” and is still practiced to a lesser degree in the south of France. Paul B. Newman, Daily Life in the Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2018), 163.

2. We are grateful to Bernd Pappe, who examined this miniature and offered his insight on the artist attribution and date during a July 23–25, 2023, visit. Notes in NAMA curatorial object files.

3. The Van Blarenberghes were themselves of Flemish origin. On the “extraordinary vogue” for Dutch landscapes in eighteenth-century France, see Colin B. Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 18.

4. Louis Nicolas’s most dedicated patron was Étienne-François de Choiseul-Stainville, duc de Choiseul, chief minister to King Louis XV and an ally to the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour—who herself commissioned works from the Van Blarenberghes. Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide and Jeffrey H. Munger, The Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 228.

5. See Donald Mallett, The Greatest Collector: Lord Hertford and the Founding of the Wallace Collection (New York: Macmillan, 1979); and Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, Les Rothschild: Bâtisseurs Et Mécènes (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 236, as Water Festival Scene.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 265, as Water Festival Scene.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 236, p. 77, (repro.), as Water Festival Scene.