François Henri d'Harcourt, 5th Duke of Harcourt (12 January 1726 – 22 July 1802) was a French general, duke and peer.
He emigrated during the French Revolution, and he became a representative of Louis XVIII of France to the British government (1792–1800).
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D'Harcourt was born in Paris as son of Anne Pierre d'Harcourt, a Marshal of France, and Thérèse Eulalie de Beaupoil.
He married, 13 June 1752, Catherine Scholastica Aubusson, (1733–1815). Their daughter Anne (1753–1778) married Victurnien-Jean-Baptiste de Rochechouart, Duke of Mortemarts. D'Harcourt died in Staines, England, aged 76.
In his château Thury-Harcourt, he created a vast English landscape style park, one of the first in France.
On 5 December 2013, in Bonhams's salerooms in New Bond Street, London, a portrait of d'Harcourt by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, one of his Fantastical Portraits , sold for £17,106,500 sterling, setting a world-record price for the artist at auction. The previous record was £5,300,000 for a painting sold in London in 1999. The sum paid was also the highest price for an Old Master painting sold at auction anywhere in the world in 2013. Bonhams's sale of paintings and sculpture from the collection of the German philanthropist, the late Dr Gustav Rau, raised more than £19 million, with the proceeds benefiting the Foundation of the German Committee for UNICEF – for the children of the world. [1] [2] The painting was also previously sold for £340,000 in 1971 (equivalent to $4,240,000in 2019), when the d'Harcourt family collection was dispersed. [3]
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Amsterdam, Geneva, Shanghai, and Dubai. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François Pinault. In 2022 Christie's sold US$8.4 billion in art and luxury goods, an all-time high for any auction house. On 15 November 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold at Christie's in New York for $450 million to Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, the highest price ever paid for a painting.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings, of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
Bonhams is a privately owned international auction house and one of the world's oldest and largest auctioneers of fine art and antiques. It was formed by the merger in November 2001 of Bonhams & Brooks and Phillips Son & Neale. This brought together two of the four surviving Georgian auction houses in London, Bonhams having been founded in 1793, and Phillips in 1796 by Harry Phillips, formerly a senior clerk to James Christie.
Pierre Max Rosenberg is a French art historian, curator, and professor. Rosenberg is the honorary president and director of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and since 1995, he has held the 23rd seat of the Académie Française. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge in 1987.
Events from the year 1765 in art.
Théodore Jacques Ralli or Theodorus Rallis was an ethnic Greek painter, watercolourist and draughtsman, who spent most of his working life in France and Egypt.
The House of Harcourt is a Norman family, and named after its seigneurie of Harcourt in Normandy. Its mottos were "Gesta verbis praeveniant", "Gesta verbis praevenient", and "Le bon temps viendra ... de France".
When the Viking chieftain Rollo obtained the territories via the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte which would later make up Normandy, he distributed them as estates among his main supporters. Among these lands were the seigneurie of Harcourt, near Brionne, and the county of Pont-Audemer, both of which Rollo granted to Bernard the Dane, ancestor of the lords (seigneurs) of Harcourt. he first to use Harcourt as a name, however, was Anquetil d'Harcourt at the start of the 11th century.
The Swing, also known as The Happy Accidents of the Swing, is an 18th-century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in the Wallace Collection in London. It is considered to be one of the masterpieces of the Rococo era, and is Fragonard's best-known work.
The musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie in the French city of Besançon is the oldest public museum in France. It was set up in 1694, nearly a century before the Louvre became a public museum.
Catherine-Rosalie Gerard Duthé (1748–1830), alternately Duthe or Du The, was a celebrated French courtesan. A companion of French kings and European nobility, she has been called "the first officially recorded dumb blonde." Duthé was a frequently requested subject for portraits, including partial and full nudes, many of which still exist in museums and private collections.
The Stolen Kiss is an oil-on-canvas painting created in 1787, located in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. It has been historically attributed to the French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). At 45 by 55 centimetres, the painting is a genre scene influenced by Dutch Golden Age painting, depicting a young couple in a secretive romance, set in the foreground – a subject that was favoured before the French Revolution among French aristocrats.
The Fantastical Portraits or Fantasy Portraits are a series of portraits by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, mostly dating to 1769. It is said that each was executed in a single hour, from which they gained the Italian name fa' presto.
Henri d'Harcourt, 1st Duke of Harcourt was a French noble, created the first Duke of Harcourt and Marshal of France by king Louis XIV. The duke also acted as extraordinary ambassador to Madrid.
Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds is a 1936 diptych painting by Salvador Dalí. The oil on plywood work represent tables in a desert landscape and are cut out like the silhouettes of the characters in Jean-François Millet's painting The Angelus (L'Angélus). The works are both double portraits of Salvador and Gala Dali.
François d'Harcourt, 12th Duke of Harcourt was a French politician.
The Visit to the Nursery is an oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, created c. 1775, now held in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which it entered in 1946 as part of the Samuel H. Kress collection. It was previously identified with a work auctioned in a 1780 sale of Fragonard's major client Jean François Leroy de Senneville (1715 – 1784), a fermier général, and then re-auctioned four years later, but a work more closely matching that work's description was rediscovered around 2009 in a collection in Estonia.
The Art Collection of John Hunter was a collection of old master and contemporary paintings amassed by John Hunter, an auctioneer and politician, and held by the Hunter family until the death of his only son, Elias Desbrosses Hunter, in 1865. It was auctioned off by the family in January 1866.
La Gimblette is one of the most famous paintings by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard and one of the most famous Rococo paintings. The sketch-like painting exemplifies the virtuoso art of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
The Château d'Harcourt is a stately home dating from the 17th and 18th century, now in ruins, located in the village of Thury-Harcourt, in the Calvados department in the Normandy region in northwestern France. It was the seat of the dukes of Harcourt and the Hartcourt family. Since World War II, only the façades, two guard pavilions and a chapel remain. The ruins are listed as a historic monument.
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