Louis La Caze

Dr. Louis La Caze (1798-1869) was a successful French physician and collector of paintings whose bequest of 583 paintings to the Musée du Louvre was one of the largest the museum has ever received. [ [http://www.louvre.org/llv/exposition/detail_exposition.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673469921&CURRENT_LLV_EXPO%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673469921&pageId=2&bmLocale=en The La Caze Collection] , exhibition, Musée du Louvre, 2007.] Among the paintings, the most famous are likely to be "Pierrot" ("Gilles") by Antoine Watteau, [The painting had belonged to Dominique Vivant Denon, director of the Musée Napoléon, precursor of the Louvre. during the First Empire,] or Rembrandt's "Bathsheba".

The bequest did not come as a surprise. For decades Dr. La Caze had haunted minor dealers in second-hand bric-a-brac, paying modest prices for paintings that were not in the mainstream of fashion and were not easily nursed through the cumbersome vetting process that led to official purchases for the Louvre. La Caze's salon was open to progressive artists such as Degas and Manet or François Bonvin, who were training their manner on close examination of painters like Velázquez, whose "Portrait of the Infanta Marie-Therese" (1653) was in La Caze's collection, and Jusepe de Ribera, at a time when the Spanish school of painting was largely ignored in French official circles. [La Caze's mother was Spanish, a connection that might have triggered his interest in Spanish painting, suggests Guillaume Faroult, the curator at the Louvre who has completed a modern catalogue of the collection: ( [http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=581758 "Louis La Caze: Doctor who put Louvre's experts to shame"] ).] La Caze, who had four of Fragonard's fancy pieces, his "Portraits de fantaisie" also had an eye for the still largely-unappreciated work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin: Chardin's "Le Bénédicité", found in a flea-market, hung on the doctor's walls.

Some 250 La Caze paintings remained at the Louvre, while the rest were distributed among the provincial museums of France.

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