Art
Denys Cochin (1851–1922) bought paintings for nearly thirty years, from 1892 to 1919, from Durand-Ruel, Boussod, Valadon et Cie, Vollard and Bernheim-Jeune[1, 2, 3, 4]. He bought, Vollard says, “for his pleasure”, and did not keep: no sooner had a canvas come in than another tempted him, and there would be an exchange; the Cézanne catalogue counts thirty-one canvases of his[5, 6, 7]. Worn by the deaths of two sons in the war and by illness, he dispersed twenty paintings at Georges Petit’s on 26 March 1919; “what a museum one would make with all that passed through his hands”, writes Vollard[8, 9, 10].
His first known purchases are Impressionist: Pissarro’s Cowherd from Durand-Ruel on 24 February 1892, then, from Boussod, Valadon et Cie, the Morisot and a Monet on 2 June 1892 and The Poplars on 25 October[1, 2, 3, 4]. In March 1896 he came to Vollard through a Van Gogh, Les Alyscamps, and the Metropolitan Museum’s catalogue counts him among the very few buyers at the dealer’s Van Gogh exhibitions[5, 6]. From 1899 to 1917 thirty-one Cézannes came and went between the rue de Babylone, Vollard and Bernheim-Jeune, often in exchange[7]. The Corots passed through Boussod, Valadon, at prices rising from 5,600 francs in 1898 to 42,000 in 1908, and left as fast: a Farmyard bought for 35,000 francs on 15 January 1903 went back twelve days later[8, 9, 10]. At Durand-Ruel’s he kept a Pissarro three days in March 1903, and there he made his last known purchase from a dealer, another Pissarro, on 23 April 1914[11, 12]. In May 1906 he took a Derain and two Matisses from Vollard; Crespelle counts him among the collectors of the Fauves, a Van Dongen in his bedroom[13, 14]. On 22 July 1911 he bought Goya’s Saavedra for 123,500 francs, his largest known price, and left three Corots in part exchange the same day[15, 16]. The Courbets came from 1915 to 1919, and the sale of 26 March 1919 did not stop him: twelve days later he bought a Degas for 7,000 francs at the studio sale, and on 9 July two Courbets at the Juliette Courbet sale[17, 18, 19, 20].
It was at the Salon of 1873, before Manet’s Bon Bock, that his taste for modern painting is said to have come; his family opposed it, and his first savings went into “the decried pictures”[21]. In May 1897 he was one of the twenty-four members of the provisional committee of the Société des amis du Louvre that Georges Berger gathered at the Beaux-Arts, with Rothschild, Camondo, Greffulhe, Detaille, Puvis de Chavannes and Poincaré[22]; in November 1898, Puvis barely dead, he tabled with several colleagues a bill opening a credit of 10,000 francs to raise him a monument, which the budget committee approved[23]. In 1900 he sat on the committee of the Alfred Stevens exhibition, gathered at the comtesse Greffulhe’s[24], and at the Salon of 1902 La Presse counted among the portraits of famous men “M. Denys Cochin, by Besnard”[25]. In March 1903 a journalist of L’Écho de Paris who had come to question him on politics was told “you love painting”, then “come and see my pictures”: in the small drawing room, Degas’s Jockeys beside the Manet, a Corot of Rome and another from the North, a portrait by Renoir, Puvis’s sketches for Marseille and the sketch of a Delacroix; in the smoking room, Maurice Denis’s legend of Saint Hubert; in the study and the hall, Cézannes between Besnards and more Manets[26]. He then lent to every retrospective of the Salon d’Automne: to Manet’s in 1905, where he is thanked among the lenders with Mme Zola, Pellerin and Rouart, and where L’Éclair notes his Execution of Maximilian, “so simple and so moving”[27, 28]; to Courbet’s in 1906, whose twenty canvases came from Mme Castagnary, Billen, himself, Kœnigswarter, Durand-Ruel and Bernheim[29, 30, 31, 32]; to Cézanne’s in 1907, where Gil Blas counts him among the painter’s admirers, between Roger Marx and Octave Mirbeau[33], and in October he joined the committee formed to raise Cézanne a monument at Aix, with Geffroy, Monet, Renoir, Tschudi, Besnard, Sembat, Duret, Reinach, Mirbeau and Camondo[34]. L’Action told in 1916, and Comœdia in 1928 after the baron de Meaux’s book, the ride on horseback where his son Augustin, a child, stopped his father before a painter in a field: “Papa, it must be Cézanne since he is painting a Cézanne”[35, 36]. Les Nouvelles had it as early as May 1914 from the biography of Cézanne published in the Italian review Lacerba, where this meeting is “one of the rare good memories Cézanne kept of his dealings with his fellow men”[37]. In January 1909, as he stood for the Académie, Gil Blas announced that he had bought the day before “a masterly watercolour by Manet, the Races at Longchamp”, and already told of the archbishop of Paris put to bed “between paintings by Cézanne, Maurice Denis, Bonnard, Vuillard”[38]. In 1911, on the day of his election to the Académie, L’Intransigeant credits him with “a fine collection of Impressionist painters, Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Cézanne”[39], and in June he asked the officer’s rosette of the Légion d’honneur for Renoir[40]. Frantz Jourdain, president of the Salon d’Automne, wrote to Excelsior that he had been asking for it himself for seven years[41]; when Renoir was named in October, Le Gaulois saw in it the joy of two deputies “unable to agree on any point, except that one”, Denys Cochin and Marcel Sembat[42]. The same year he sponsored with Maurice Denis and Desvallières an exhibition of Christian art announced for October[43]. In 1912, at the comtesse Greffulhe’s decorative art exhibition on the avenue des Champs-Élysées, his Delacroix, Corot, Puvis, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh hung beside the marquis de Wagram’s[44, 45]. Receiving him at the Académie, Hanotaux saluted “a quite remarkable gallery of modern painters” where “the independents have their place”[46]; Gil Blas noted that Count Kessler had had his Weimar house decorated by Maurice Denis “just like M. Denys Cochin”[47], and La Lanterne marvelled at the “avant-garde painters” protected by the “bourgeois” Denys Cochin[48]. In June 1914 Le Radical detailed the committee of the Grosvenor House exhibition, Pellerin as delegate, Wagram and Canson as treasurers, and the lending collections, from Bernheim-Jeune to Mrs Potter Palmer[49], and Gil Blas noted there, among the Corots, “Venice, lent by Baron Denys Cochin”[50]; in July 1914 he sat on the French committee of the exhibition of French art the same countess gathered at Grosvenor House in London, “from Ingres to Gauguin”, and his collection figured there with those of Pellerin, Sainsère and Mrs Potter Palmer[51, 52]. A minister in 1915, Le Siècle drew him in one stroke: “he collects paintings and is an excellent chemist”[53]. Le Carnet de la semaine met him in 1916 “around five in the evening, in a gallery of the rue Richepanse”, discussing the young post-Impressionists with Théodore Duret and Armand Guillaumin[54], and in 1918 counted him among the admirers of Cézanne, with Monet, Vuillard, Denis, Vallotton, Sainsère, Gasquet and Pellerin[55]. When the sale was announced, the same Carnet predicted that “with the sums these works will bring him” he “will buy new paintings”, “the collecting mania” being “incurable”[56]. After the Separation, Cardinal Richard, without a home, lodged in the rue de Babylone and bore ill “so many beauties, about to enter the bath”: L’Œuvre told in 1922 that it was the cardinal who moved out, “the paintings, for their part, did not budge”, and Le Figaro gave again in 1939, after André Salmon, the host’s reply before his Cézannes, “Your Eminence will admit one sleeps no worse for them”[57, 58]. In November 1919, after the sale, a journalist of Le Petit Parisien received in the rue de Babylone still saw on the walls “an admirable Corot of the Roman period, a surprising Manet watercolour, Degas, rich as Vermeers of Delft, an unexpected copy of Ghirlandaio by Derain”[59]. At his death, Aux écoutes remembered “the most whimsical of collectors”, who fell for a painting, sold it and bought it back within the same day[60].
The online Cézanne catalogue raisonné lists Baron Denys Cochin as a past owner of thirty-one paintings, the thirty-one canvases the family speaks of: landscapes of Aix and L’Estaque, still lifes, two portraits of Madame Cézanne, two groups of bathers[7]. Nearly all came from Vollard and nearly all went back to Bernheim-Jeune or to Vollard himself, often in exchange, between 1899 and 1917[7]. Vollard names among what passed through his hands “the Card Players […], Still lifes, Landscapes” by Cézanne[61]. The prices tell the market: on 26 October 1899 he let Vollard have three canvases at 400 francs each; on 24 June 1912 Vollard bought Six Bathers back from him for 17,000 francs[62, 63].
CézanneFWN 484
1891-92 · Canvas, 100.3 × 81.3 cm
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
CézanneFWN 692
vers 1895 · Oil on paper on board, 70 × 57 cm
From 1895 Denys Cochin, one of Maurice Denis’s first collectors, had his house in the rue de Babylone decorated by him, with the glass painter Henri Carot, and asked Albert Besnard for a large window[64]. For his study he chose the theme of the Legend of Saint Hubert himself: Denis sketched his hunts, then painted in five months, from May 1897, seven panels that follow the hunt across three walls, under a ceiling where three angels sound their horns in the sky[65]. The window of the Path of Life, commissioned for the first communion of his daughters Françoise and Madeleine, who stand in it at the start of the path, closes that study’s only window[66]. His mother-in-law, Madame Péan de Saint-Gilles, commissioned for the first floor the Presentation in the Temple, after Fra Angelico, with her granddaughters in white veils[67]; Besnard gave the dining room Animal Life, farmyard, horses and wild beasts, which are also morning, noon and evening[68]. The windows, given by the family, and the painted decoration are now together at the musée départemental Maurice-Denis in Saint-Germain-en-Laye[64]. In 1924, two years after his death, Baroness Cochin lent The Legend of Saint Hubert to the Maurice Denis retrospective at the Pavillon de Marsan, where André Pératé recalled that “at Baron Denys Cochin’s, only friends had the chance to see them”[69, 70]. In March 1903 a journalist of L’Écho de Paris, led from room to room, saw “the smoking room” decorated with “the episodes of the legend of Saint Hubert” and, in the study and the hall, Cézannes between Besnards and Manets[26].
Maurice Denis
1895 · Stained glass, 305 × 100 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis
1898 · Stained glass in three windows of 254 × 128 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Albert Besnard
1895 · Stained glass in three windows of 330 × 124 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
The collection began before him: his great-grandmother Marie-Guillemine Benoist, a pupil of David, painted herself about 1796 in an oval portrait that the brothers, raised “in admiration” of her pictures, held to be “the best” of her pieces; it came to Denys, the elder, as did the Doctor Gall[71, 72, 73]. Henry had a copy of it made by the Baroness Alix d’Anethan, “faithful to the model and of great personal intelligence”[72].
Four mourners from the tomb of Jean de France, duke of Berry, at the Sainte-Chapelle of Bourges, broken up in 1793, were given in 1807 to Pierre-Henri Péan de Saint-Gilles; they came to Denys Cochin through his marriage of 1876 to Hélène Péan de Saint-Gilles and stayed with his descendants[74, 75]. Two, in alabaster, by Étienne Bobillet and Paul Mosselmann, about 1450–1453, were sold at Christie’s in Paris on 8 November 2013 for 4,017,500 euros[76, 77]. The other two, in marble, by Jean de Cambrai, from the tomb’s first commission of 1403, were pre-empted by the State at their sale of 15 June 2016, sold for 5,025,500 euros, after an export licence was refused, and are at the Louvre[74, 78].
Jean de Cambrai
1403-1433 · Marble, 37.5 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Jean de Cambrai
1403-1433 · Marble, 37.8 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Étienne Bobillet et Paul Mosselmann
vers 1450-1453 · Alabaster, 39.5 and 39 cm
Private collection
The ledgers name pictures no one has seen again: the Derain and the two Matisses of 1906, the Corots taken back in 1911, a Harpignies, a Sisley, a Mignard[13, 16, 79]. The Getty Research Institute keeps a hundred and twenty photocopied pages of receipts, invoices and dealers’ letters concerning the collection, with lists of paintings sold, which this page has not yet read[80]. The Durand-Ruel archive answers written requests only, and Vollard’s books are transcribed online for the Cézannes alone[62, 81].
103 works
Gauguin
1899 · Burlap, 95 × 61 cm
Private collection
Monet
1868-69 · Canvas, 66 × 130.5 cm
Davidlot 8 of the sale
1818 · Canvas, 88 × 102 cm
Goyalot 14 of the sale
1798 · Canvas, 200 × 120 cm
Manetlot 18 of the sale
1878-1879 · Canvas, 77 × 64 cm
Manet
1867 · Canvas, 50 × 60 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
Delacroixlot 10 of the sale
1839 · Canvas, 60 × 50 cm
Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur
CézanneFWN 484
1891-92 · Canvas, 100.3 × 81.3 cm
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
CézanneFWN 692
vers 1895 · Oil on paper on board, 70 × 57 cm
Corotlot 1 of the sale
1831 · Canvas, 55 × 46 cm
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
Delacroixlot 12 of the sale
1838 · Canvas, 98 × 127 cm
Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill
Delacroixlot 11 of the sale
1853 · Canvas, 73 × 59 cm
Maurice Denis1/7
1896-1897 · Canvas, 225 × 175 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis2/7
1896-1897 · Canvas, 225 × 175 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis3/7
1896-1897 · Canvas, 225 × 175 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis4/7
1896-1897 · Canvas, 225 × 175 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis5/7
1896-1897 · Canvas, 225 × 175 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis6/7
1896-1897 · Canvas, 225 × 175 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis7/7
1896-1897 · Canvas, 225 × 175 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Delacroixlot 13 of the sale
1860 · Canvas, 51 × 61 cm
Phillips Collection, Washington
Delacroix
1859 · Canvas, 82 × 104.5 cm
Delacroix
1830-31 · Canvas, 69 × 82 cm
Degaslot 9 of the sale
Canvas, 33 × 25 cm
Degas
vers 1870-1880 · Canvas, 27 × 20 cm
Degas
vers 1876 · Canvas, 61 × 50 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Degas
Not located
Seurat
vers 1882 · Panel, 16.5 × 25 cm
Benoist
vers 1796
Private collection
Benoist
Not located
Alix d’Anethan
Not located
CézanneFWN 54
vers 1870 · Canvas, 80.4 × 129.4 cm
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Tschudi gift
CézanneFWN 245
1888 · Canvas, 81 × 65 cm
Manetlot 16 of the sale
1864 · Watercolour, 23.5 × 58 cm
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge
Corotlot 6 of the sale
vers 1850-1855 · Canvas, 46 × 64 cm
Monet
1875 · Canvas, 60 × 81 cm
Monet
1888 · Canvas, 74 × 93 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Monet
1888 · Canvas, 92 × 81 cm
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
Monet
1878 · Canvas, 50 × 61 cm
Private collection
Monet
1872 · Canvas, 80 × 58.5 cm
Private collection
Monet
1875 · Canvas, 61 × 80 cm
Private collection
Monet
1864 · Canvas, 28 × 49 cm
Private collection
Pissarro
1888-1901 · Canvas, 60 × 73 cm
Private collection
Pissarro
1893 · Canvas, 46 × 55 cm
Private collection
Pissarro
1892 · Canvas, 38 × 55 cm
Pissarro
1879 · Canvas, 54 × 65 cm
Private collection
Pissarro
1890 · Canvas, 33 × 41 cm
Private collection
Corot
vers 1840-50 · Canvas, 32 × 45 cm
Corot
1871 · Canvas, 38 × 46 cm
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
Corot
vers 1856-63 · Canvas, 38 × 56 cm
Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur
Corot
1860-70 · Canvas, 55.9 × 46.3 cm
Corot
1873 · Canvas, 54 × 45 cm
Not located
Corot
1857 · Oval panel, 44 × 59 cm
Private collection
Puvis de Chavanneslot 19 of the sale
Canvas, 98 × 146 cm
Phillips Collection, Washington
Puvis de Chavanneslot 20 of the sale
Canvas, 98 × 146 cm
Phillips Collection, Washington
Goya
1800 · Canvas, 82 × 66 cm
Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati
Van Gogh
1890 · Canvas, 41 × 33 cm
Private collection
Van Gogh
1888 · Canvas, 73 × 92 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Manetlot 17 of the sale
Canvas, 34 × 53 cm
Morisot
vers 1889 · Canvas, 65 × 55 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Manetlot 15 of the sale
Canvas, 64 × 78 cm
Whereabouts unknown
Manet
1854 · Canvas, 70 × 84 cm
Maurice Denis
1895 · Stained glass, 305 × 100 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Maurice Denis
1898 · Stained glass in three windows of 254 × 128 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Albert Besnard
1895 · Stained glass in three windows of 330 × 124 cm
Musée Maurice-Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
CézanneFWN 215
1885-86 · Canvas, 64.8 × 80.9 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Stephen Clark bequest
CézanneFWN 124
vers 1879 · Oil on paper on canvas, 53.5 × 72.4 cm
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Gwendoline Davies bequest
CézanneFWN 256
vers 1888 · Canvas, 80 × 61.5 cm
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Gwendoline Davies bequest
CézanneFWN 213
1885-87 · Canvas, 65 × 81 cm
CézanneFWN 807
1887-88 · Canvas, 73 × 92.2 cm
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Tschudi gift
CézanneFWN 306
vers 1895 · Canvas, 65 × 81 cm
CézanneFWN 104
1876-78 · Canvas, 59 × 72 cm
CézanneFWN 746
1877-79 · Canvas, 65.5 × 81 cm
CézanneFWN 853
1893-94 · Canvas, 38 × 46 cm
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel
CézanneFWN 973
vers 1900 · Canvas, 37 × 45 cm
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel
CézanneFWN 480
vers 1885 · Canvas, 55 × 46.3 cm
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
CézanneFWN 330
1900-04 · Canvas, 79.4 × 62.3 cm
CézanneFWN 466
1883-85 · Canvas, 56.5 × 47 cm
CézanneFWN 533
vers 1899 · Canvas, 93.3 × 73.3 cm
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
CézanneFWN 612
vers 1870 · Canvas, 41 × 55 cm
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Grassi bequest
CézanneFWN 108
vers 1877 · Canvas, 60 × 73 cm
CézanneFWN 105
1876-77 · Canvas, 50 × 60 cm
Villa Flora collection, Winterthur
CézanneFWN 302
vers 1895 · Canvas, 100 × 81 cm
Last seen at Sotheby’s, New York
CézanneFWN 815
1888-90 · Canvas, 48.6 × 60 cm
Last seen at Christie’s, New York
CézanneFWN 885
1904-06 · Canvas, 73 × 92 cm
Private collection, New York
CézanneFWN 752
1878-79 · Canvas, 25 × 39 cm
Abelló Collection, Madrid
CézanneFWN 193
1883-85 · Canvas, 71 × 57.7 cm
Private collection, USA
CézanneFWN 112
vers 1878 · Canvas, 47 × 56.2 cm
Private collection
CézanneFWN 230
1886-90 · Canvas, 58.5 × 71.8 cm
Private collection, New York
CézanneFWN 624
1872-75 · Canvas, 16.5 × 22.5 cm
Private collection, Tokyo
CézanneFWN 957
vers 1887 · Canvas, 33 × 44 cm
Private collection, Geneva
Corotlot 3 of the sale
1825 · Canvas, 19 × 34 cm
Private collection
Corotlot 2 of the sale
1826 · Canvas, 54 × 96 cm
Not located
Courbetlot 7 of the sale
1856 · Canvas, 82 × 53.5 cm
Private collection
Courbet
1851 · Canvas, 46 × 38 cm
Private collection
Courbet
1853 · Canvas, 56.5 × 46.5 cm
Courbet
1855 · Canvas, 97 × 122 cm
Private collection
Courbet
1856 · Canvas, 96.5 × 130 cm
Corotlot 4 of the sale
1826 · Canvas, 18 × 39 cm
Not located
Corotlot 5 of the sale
1844 · Canvas, 49 × 71 cm
Not located
Sources
Every statement on this page is referenced: 159 sources, archives, catalogues raisonnés, press, books and family papers, are cited in notes beneath the texts and listed below by category. There follow 22 references not yet consulted, each with the question it would settle, and a synthesis of what the dealers’ ledgers and the family’s compilation establish about the collection.
Vollard’s stock books, which the Cézanne catalogue transcribes, show Denys Cochin almost as much a dealer as a collector[1, 2]. The catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum’s Vollard exhibition of 2006 counts twenty-two Cézannes of his, fifteen of them bought from Vollard or exchanged with him, and calls the relationship “lucrative, albeit frustrating, for the former and speculative for the latter”[3]. The same catalogue counts him among the very few buyers at Vollard’s two Van Gogh exhibitions of 1895 and 1896–97: he began buying Van Gogh in March 1896, “enthusiastic and indecisive”, always tempted by the canvas he did not yet have[4]. His first purchase from Vollard was a Van Gogh, Les Alyscamps, which the dealer had from the Ginoux of Arles, now at the Kröller-Müller Museum[5]; with Pellerin he was one of the French collectors whose competition with the Dutchman Hoogendijk and the Americans Loeser, Fabbri and Havemeyer drove Cézanne’s prices up[6, 7]. Vollard’s book of movements records in March 1896 a profit of 310 francs on that Van Gogh, bought from Joseph Ginoux for 61 francs on 22 January[8]. On 23 June 1898 he paid Vollard 350 francs for works the register does not name[9]. In May 1906 Cochin bought from him a Derain and two Matisses, a view of the Bois de Boulogne and a small landscape, and a Redon from his walls, figures in the clouds, entered Vollard’s book B at 500 francs[10, 11].
On 26 October 1899 he let Vollard have three canvases at 400 francs each, among them a Clearing and The Seine at the quai d’Austerlitz after Guillaumin, and took the same day Marseilleveyre seen from L’Estaque for 1,200 francs[1, 2, 12, 13]. On 4 April 1900 he bought The Avenue at Chantilly for 1,000 francs, The Large Trees at the Jas de Bouffan for 3,000 francs and a Provençal Woodland for 500 francs, and left a Stoneware Jug in part exchange[14, 15, 16, 17]. On 20 October 1904 Vollard took back The Bibémus Quarry for 1,000 francs and The Sideboard for 2,000 francs; on 2 January 1908 he sold him a small still life for 5,000 francs; on 24 June 1912 he bought back Six Bathers for 17,000 francs and The Thieves and the Donkey for 10,000 francs, forty times the price of a canvas of 1899[18, 19, 20, 21, 22]. Vlaminck remembered the afternoons when Vollard, his nap taken, took him by cab to the rue de Babylone: “Look well at the Corot I will point out to you, Denys Cochin wants to make an exchange, I would like your opinion”[23]. As early as 1906 Théodore Duret counted him among the collectors of Cézanne, with Pellerin, Fabbri, Fayet, Bernheim and Hessel[24]. Cézanne himself remembered the rider who had stopped at his easel: “It was Baron Cochin… he knew about painting, and I was wrong not to be friendly”, he told Léo Larguier[25]. Vollard tells the same meeting, the son crying “Papa, look, Cézanne!”, and the invitation to come and see the Delacroix of the rue de Babylone, which the painter never brought himself to accept[26, 27]. The Getty Research Institute keeps, among papers on Vollard assembled by Gerrard White, a hundred and twenty photocopied pages of receipts, invoices and dealers’ letters concerning the Cochin collection, with lists of paintings sold: the folder that would tell what the registers leave out[28].
The index of the Wildenstein catalogue counts eight Monets of his in all, from the small Étretat of 1864 to the Poplars at Giverny now at the Museum of Modern Art, the first dated one bought from Durand-Ruel on 27 October 1893[29, 30]. The Rouart and Wildenstein Manet catalogue counts seven Manets of his, among them two Executions of Maximilian: the large one, come from Durand-Ruel in 1898 and passed to Mannheim on 5 December 1909, and the sketch, taken from Bernheim-Jeune in 1909 and returned to Durand-Ruel in 1910, now in Copenhagen[31, 32, 33]. The Pissarro catalogue of 2005 adds five Pissarros, all through Durand-Ruel, from the first bought on 24 February 1892 to the last on 23 April 1914, one of them kept three days and another sent back to the painter to be repainted[34, 35, 36, 37].
The books of Boussod, Valadon et Cie, Goupil’s successors, which the Getty publishes, follow him from 1892 to 1911[38, 39]. There he bought three Monets, The Poplars on 25 October 1892 for 6,500 francs, Pond, Sunset for 2,600 francs and The Large Trees, Creuse for 3,500 francs, a Berthe Morisot for 700 francs and a Carrière[38, 40, 41, 42, 43]. Between 1896 and 1901 he sold back to them what no longer pleased him, a Harpignies, a Van Ostade, the Carrière, a Monet, The Stream, a Sisley, Marly, a Mignard, most of which went on to Bernheim-Jeune[44]. Then came the Corots, at rising prices: The Gate 5,600 francs in 1898, a Farm 19,000 francs, Near Arras 13,500 francs in 1901, Château-Thierry 34,000 francs, now at the Römerholz, and an Italian Landscape 38,000 francs in 1904, The Lake 36,000 francs in 1907, a Landscape of Artois 42,000 francs in 1908, now at the Clark[45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53]. A Farmyard bought for 35,000 francs on 15 January 1903 was back with the dealer twelve days later[54]. On 15 May 1903 he took Delacroix’s Erminia and the Shepherds, the picture of the Salon of 1859, for 54,000 francs, and returned it in January 1907 for 50,000[55]. On 22 July 1911 he bought Goya’s portrait of Saavedra, come from Madrid, for 123,500 francs, and left three Corots in part exchange the same day, among them the Italian Landscape and Near Arras[39, 56]. The books also note the dealers’ shares: the Erminia was “held one third with Montaignac and Glaenzer”, and the three Corots taken back in 1911 passed the next month to Bernheim-Jeune by “cession of our half”, the house owning only half of them[39, 55]. Two of those three Corots are “not in Robaut”, and the books give them their negative numbers, 528 for the Italian Landscape and 389 for The Lock, as for every picture the house photographed[39].
Durand-Ruel was the dealer of his Impressionists, and the first to sell to him: Pissarro’s Cowherd on the Epte on 24 February 1892[35], Berthe Morisot’s lake the same year, which he returned in 1897[57], Monet’s Flood on 27 October 1893[30], the Rough Sea at Étretat on 27 January 1898, returned on 19 January 1900[58], the boulevard at Argenteuil under snow, taken in 1898 and taken back in 1900[59]. The Monets that came from Boussod, Valadon passed back through him in 1897[60, 61]. In 1898 he sold him The Execution of Maximilian, 12,000 francs[32], in 1906 the Bullfight[62] and, on 10 November, The Virgin with the Rabbit, which he bought back on 7 October 1915[63], in 1910 Goya’s Queen María Luisa[64]. On 11 March 1902 Denys Cochin sold him Pissarro’s View of Bazincourt at Sunset and bought from him the same day a Degas pastel, Racehorses, 15,000 francs, which the dealer’s journal records[65, 66]. The Cézannes went the other way: Durand-Ruel bought a still life from him on 11 February 1902, stock 6957, and the Village by the Sea on 12 May 1905, stock 7906[67, 68]. The kitchen gardens of L’Hermitage, bought on 20 March 1903, went back three days later[37], and his last known purchase from a dealer was again at Durand-Ruel, the Peasants of Éragny, on 23 April 1914[36]. The house’s books are not online: Durand-Ruel & Cie, 39 avenue de Friedland, answers written requests, for a list of artists that includes fourteen of his, from Cézanne to Sisley[69].
At the sale of 26 March 1919 it was the three dealers, Bernheim-Jeune, Durand-Ruel and Vollard, who assisted Maître Lair-Dubreuil as experts, “before the public of the great days”[70, 71]. Two years earlier, on 21 May 1917, Félix Fénéon, then running the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, asked him to lend his Serveuse de bocks for an exhibition: his letter, kept at the library of the INHA, is filed with two Bernheim-Jeune invoices in Denys Cochin’s name, “for the purchase of several paintings”, and a letter from the dealer Jos Hessel[72]. The Journal des arts had warned that most of the canvases came from great collections or from the sales held after the painters’ deaths, and appeared in Robaut, Moreau-Nélaton or Duret[73]. The twenty canvases brought 684,500 francs: 73,000 for The Waitress, 70,000 for the Goya, 57,000 for The Forum, 51,100 for Christ on the Cross[74, 75]. The Chronique des arts hailed “a collection that honours the boldly French taste” of its collector, and Le Journal noted that The Forum, knocked down at 57,000 francs, had made only 2,600 at the Corot sale of 1875[76, 77]. Six weeks after the sale, on 9 May 1919, Denys Cochin received 30,000 francs from the Galerie Barbazanges for the two Puvis de Chavannes sketches, knocked down in the room at 8,100 and 11,600 francs: the bidding had therefore not sold everything, and some lots went back to the rue de Babylone to be dealt afterwards[74, 78]. Barbazanges had just taken Jos Hessel, the buyer of the Tasso, into partnership by a notarial deed of 30 April 1919[79]. Excelsior announced as early as 20 December 1918 the twenty paintings to be sold “in the first months of 1919”[80]. Le Journal des arts gives, with the hammer prices, the asking prices, 100,000 francs for La Serveuse de bocks knocked down at 73,000, and the earlier prices of the Delacroix, Le Christ en croix 18,250 francs at the Noël sale of 1891 and 15,000 at the Heugel sale of 1905, the Chevaux marocains from 16,000 francs at the marquis du Lau’s in 1866 to 30,200 at the Marne sale of 1904[81].
At his death the American Art News called him one of the very few Academicians who liked modern art, and one of the earliest buyers of Cézanne[82]. The Bulletin de la vie artistique, which the Bernheim-Jeunes published, gave him a page: “Few collectors have had the infallible tact, the sureness of judgement, the independent and just taste that Denys Cochin had”, and remembered his admirable Cézannes[83].
A compilation drawn up by Jacques Cochin in June 2026 counts fifty-two painters and one hundred and sixty-five paintings bought, exchanged, sold or handed down, thirty-three Cézannes and twenty Corots first, then twelve Delacroix, ten Maurice Denis, seven Manets and seven Dufys[84]. Some of these painters, from Dufy, Camoin and Friesz to Vicente López, have no work identified here yet; some of them are the young “Independents” who, the American Art News wrote in 1922, had had the honour of his patronage[82, 85].
Books and archival collections not yet examined, with the question each would resolve.
The two invoices would say which paintings Bernheim-Jeune sold him and at what price, and Hessel’s letter what became of the small Renoir of Vollard’s story.
Sisley’s Marly that passed through the rue de Babylone, which the Boussod, Valadon et Cie books give as 46 × 56 cm.
The Durand-Ruel archive answers written requests only, for a list of artists that holds thirteen of those on this page, from Cézanne to Sisley; the book’s index and notes would say what Denys Cochin bought there, the Execution of Maximilian among them, and the Cardplayers’ way to Camondo.
The press gives the hammer prices; only the annotations of a copy, such as those the Getty keeps, name the buyer of each of the twenty lots.
The finding aid says no more than what the folder holds; the hundred and twenty pages, photocopies of papers that came from the family among other sources, would name the Derain and the Matisses of 1906, the Dufys, the Camoins, the Friesz and everything the dealers’ registers do not detail, with their prices.
Vollard’s ledgers transcribed online stop at the Cézannes; the diaries and letters would tell the rest, the Van Goghs, the Matisses, the Derain and the Redon of 1906.
Volume I, 1816-1831, names Denys Cochin once, at the Mirabeau sketch, and the third and fourth supplements, of 1993 and 2002, read on the Internet Archive, do not name him; volume III, which HathiTrust lets one search but not read, names Denys Cochin on its pages 12, 81, 88, 148, 209, 240, 257, 303 and 358: the Cleopatra, the Tasso, the Erminia, the Horses and the Christ on the Cross are there, and three pages, 12, 257 and 303, concern a lion, a religious or flower subject and an untraced work this page does not know.
Internet Archive’s full-text search finds five entries naming Denys Cochin in the 1928 catalogue, which it will not display: a canvas of 1888, 41 × 34 cm, “coll. Denys Cochin since 1914”, then Druet; one that came to him in 1913, another in 1915 after the Aubry collection, one from Druet in 1912 that went on to Charles Cherfils, and one “before 1911”, shown at Cologne in 1912. With the Alyscamps and the Flowers in a Glass, that is more than the four Van Goghs the family counts.
The earlier owners of the Saavedra, of Queen María Luisa and of Telemachus and Eucharis.
The Woman with a Headband and the two Marseille sketches, with their buyers of 1919.
Cézanne’s L’Estaque, about 1885, 71 × 58 cm, “sea, mountains in the distance”, from Denys Cochin to Durand-Ruel, Cassirer and Matthiesen, shown in London in 1949 and 1963: which of the Cézannes on this page, or another?
Extracts from Vollard’s and Bernheim-Jeune’s books: L’Estaque (Venturi 427) bought by Baron D. Cochin on 19 March 1909, a Head of a Woman on 24 December 1910, The Smugglers (Venturi 108), The Stream, and Manet’s Reichshoffen; the page can only be read on site.
The books of Boussod, Valadon et Cie give each picture its negative number: 528 for the Italian Landscape, 389 for The Lock or Near Arras, 592 for The Lake, 580 for the Landscape of Artois, 487 for Château-Thierry, 23 for the Farmyard, 13 for The Farm, 763 for the Goya, and “cliché Manzi 1615” for The Gate. The negatives the museum keeps, if they carry those numbers, would show the three Corots no one has identified.
The gallery left no stock books, but its exhibition catalogues name the lenders: that of May 1910 shows three of Denys Cochin’s pictures, the Castel Gandolfo, the Christ on the Cross and the Waitress; Sanchez’s repertory would give all his loans, from 1881 to his death.
The At the Theatre that Boussod, Valadon sold him on 25 October 1892 for 2,500 francs and took back in 1897 has neither measurements nor photograph in the stock book; Carrière’s first exhibition, at the same dealer’s in 1891, and the catalogue raisonné of 2008 would say which of Carrière’s theatres it is, and where it is.
The commissions for the house in the rue de Babylone and the painter’s visits to the Cochins.
Further memories of Vollard on Denys Cochin; Gimpel, in Paris in March 1919, may have noted the sale.
A mention of the Cochin house noted in passing and never checked.
Bernheim-Jeune took from Boussod, Valadon et Cie Sisley’s Marly in 1899, Carrière’s Au théâtre in 1897 and the three Corots of 1911, La Méditation, L’Écluse and the Paysage d’Italie: its books would say to whom each went on.
Sedelmeyer bought Isack van Ostade’s Halte à l’auberge on 22 December 1897: his illustrated catalogues, online, would show it and say to whom he sold it.
Les Gros Arbres, Creuse, sold to Denys Cochin on 6 March 1894, 74 × 92 cm, is not under that title in the index: the entries of the Creuse series, by their sizes, would say which canvas it is and where it is.
Plusieurs personnages dans les nuages, an oil of 33 × 26 cm that Vollard’s book B records as coming from Denys Cochin: the catalogue records Vollard’s stock numbers and would say where the canvas is.