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‘A landmark of the transience of all earthly greatness, glory and power!’ Versailles and the Myth of the Ancien Régime in the Writings and Collections of the Swedish Marquis Claes Lagergren (1853−1930)

« Un point de repère de la fugacité de toute grandeur, gloire et puissance terrestres ! » Versailles et le mythe de l’Ancien Régime dans les écrits et collections du marquis suédois Claes Lagergren (1853-1930)
Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

Résumés

Né fils d’un paysan suédois, Claes Lagergren suit une formation de commerçant à Paris au début des années 1870. Un héritage inattendu le rend financièrement indépendant et lui permet d’effectuer plusieurs voyages en Europe. Pendant son séjour à Rome, il décide de se convertir à la foi catholique romaine, une étape importante dans une carrière sociale qui l’introduit rapidement dans les cercles de la noblesse romaine – et en particulier dans les familles restées fidèles au pape au lendemain de l’unification de l’Italie. Lagergren est présenté à la cour pontificale et au pape Léon XII qui le protège. Il est alors honoré du titre de marquis et devient l’un des chambellans du pape. Il est aussi chroniqueur et publie ses mémoires en neuf volumes dans les années 1920. Ses écrits sont une source presque inexplorée révélant ses opinions politiques et culturelles – mais aussi son amour pour Versailles. Au cours de ses nombreuses visites au palais, éclairé par sa lecture de guides et de mémoires, il relate ses sensations et ses expériences de l’ancien site royal. Politiquement, Lagergren se considérait comme un légitimiste qui honorait les valeurs de l’Ancien Régime et il chérissait la Restauration. Dans cette optique, Versailles et son palais constituaient un symbole fort et un lieu de mémoire de l’Europe prérévolutionnaire. Au début des années 1880, Lagergren épouse la riche américaine Caroline Russell. Le couple achète le château de Tyresö, datant du xviie siècle et situé à l’extérieur de Stockholm - une maison que Lagergren lèguera finalement au musée Nordiska après sa mort en 1930. Tyresö est devenu un lieu d’exposition de collections, en particulier des portraits des membres de la dynastie française des Bourbons que Lagergren avait vus à Versailles.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Stockholm, Nordiska museet, Markis Claes Lagergrens arkiv, correspondence letter to Carolina Lagerg (...)

‘My dearest mother!
Here at Versailles, it is heavenly to walk up and down the large galleries in the château and in the walks of the park thinking of the lost, powerful days of Louis XIV with his glorious court and Marie Antoinette wandering with her children − they have all been swept away and the banner of the revolution triumphs over the palace.’1

  • 2 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 1; Norlander Eliasson 2015, p. 185.

1With these words, the young Swedish merchant apprentice, Claes Lagergren (Marquis, after 1899), described his very first encounter with Versailles and its environs. The year was 1876 and his life was soon to take a drastic turn. Born in the Swedish region of Närke in 1853, into a prosperous farmer’s home, Lagergren spent his early school days dreaming of a future as an actor.2 (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1. Stephan Wladislaw Bakalowicz, Portrait of the Marquis Claes Lagergren, 1930, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA. 0048430.

Fig. 1. Stephan Wladislaw Bakalowicz, Portrait of the Marquis Claes Lagergren, 1930, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA. 0048430.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​011013847473/​portratt-av-markis-claes-lagergren-1853-1930-i-pavlig-kammarherreuniform

Public domain, CC BY-NC-ND

  • 3 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 2.
  • 4 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 3, p. 187.

2His parents strongly disapproved and put him through an education geared to a career in trade. In 1875, he was sent to France to gain professional expertise.3 The social life of Paris suited Lagergren perfectly. Handsome, clever and equipped with an extraordinary social ability, he gained the confidence − and, subsequently, the fortune − of a lady member of the baronial Mallets, a family of bankers, who had acted as his benefactor.4 The inherited fortune permitted young Lagergren to abandon his career and adopt the globetrotting lifestyle of a wealthy man. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2. Guillaume Berggren, Portrait of Claes Lagergren in a Bedouin costume, c. 1878, photograph. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA.0063582.

Fig. 2. Guillaume Berggren, Portrait of Claes Lagergren in a Bedouin costume, c. 1878, photograph. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA.0063582.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​011013855558/​markis-claes-lagergren-1853-1930-i-osterlandsk-drakt-rokandes-vattenpip

Public Domain Mark

3Financial independence offered him the opportunity to develop his interests in writing and the history of the Ancien Régime, eventually leading to an exceptional social career as a mondain.

  • 5 Norlander Eliasson 2019.

4The aim of this essay is twofold. First, it discusses the symbolic importance of the site and palace of Versailles as they appear in the writings of Claes Lagergren. His published diaries and memories offer a valuable insight into the political and social − and highly personal − opinions that he developed from a very young age and in which French history, among other factors, played a crucial role. Claes Lagergren was a natural storyteller. His dense memoirs, Mitt livs minnen (Memories of my life), published in nine volumes in the years 1923−1930, constitute an extraordinary resource for understanding the making of his public persona. The style is varied, offering contemporary anecdotes from the fashionable circles of late nineteenth-century Europe alongside lengthy passages of history. Fundamental to Lagergren’s learning and writing was his experience of the collections and historical sites of Versailles, as well as his reading and consulting of the popular Baedeker guidebooks − common makers of canonical taste and aesthetic opinion by the end of the nineteenth century.5 Lagergren’s lifelong travels feature prominently in the memoirs, and, consequently, his visits to France and Versailles are frequently mentioned. Since the text was based on his personal diaries, and not always edited with precision, it offers an interesting mix of general, impersonal remarks and highly personal opinions.

5Secondly, the essay illuminates the Marquis Lagergren’s strategy for transferring the Versailles myth to his own home, Tyresö Castle, outside Stockholm. The castle, bequeathed by the Marquis at the time of his death to the Nordiska museet, is today a home museum, displaying the fruits of Lagergren’s collecting in the form of paintings, engravings and memorabilia. All these objects, still in situ, constitute a precise, material manifestation not only of the Marquis’s taste but, above all, of his desire to implement a personal vision of a worldly order in a domestic aesthetic which also worked as a political statement. The links to Versailles were vital in this context.

A legitimist view of the world

  • 6 Norlander Eliasson 2015, pp. 183−4.
  • 7 Ibid. 2015, p. 184.
  • 8 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 4, pp. 261−85.

6His inherited fortune enabled Lagergren to undertake extensive travels in Northern Africa. Soon, these sojourns were replaced by regular, long visits to Rome. He experienced and witnessed the turbulent decade of the 1870s in the aftermath of the unification of Italy. In those years, Rome was subjected to what may safely be defined as a rupture. This involved not just a radical urban replanning and the formation of an efficient public administration worthy of a modern nation, but also a revision of the idea of the Roman ruling class and the city’s hierarchical system.6 The secular powers of the popes had been definitively cancelled when the Papal States were added to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. This led to a strong reaction among the Roman nobility which, subsequently, divided into two factions: the white nobility, faithful to the King, and the black nobility, who forcefully and visually gave their support to the Papacy.7 Lagergren was instantly attracted to the latter: defenders, apparently, of the Ancien Régime. He rapidly made his way into families belonging to the more conservative faction, and, after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1880, new possibilities of a career in the Vatican opened up. Indeed, Pope Leo XIII (1810−1903) appointed him Chamberlain in 1884.8

7Rome represented for Claes Lagergren the last bastion of the old regime and a symbolic setting onto which to project his legitimist views. His conservative pathos involved imagined notions of the Ancien Régime which brought him to strongly condemn and ridicule the values and manners of the bourgeoisie, to which he originally belonged. He believed that aristocratic culture from the pre-industrial era should be protected, and the victims of the French Revolution − held up as martyrs by the legitimists − commemorated and kept in high esteem. It is possible to argue that Lagergren’s dreamy passion for the grandeur of a lost social order had its roots in his deep interest in theatre. Performing a carefully constructed public persona became a lifelong duty for him and his extensive network of powerful European and American co-actors when claiming a just world characterized by a precise definition of beauty.

8Lagergren’s early education was highly formative of his mature visions of politics and culture. As a young boy, he read avidly the anecdotal history of the Swedish clergyman and schoolmaster Anders Fryxell (1795−1881) and soon developed a passion for biographical writing. This lifelong interest in human destinies (of both the living and the dead), testified to by his son Johan Lagergren (1898−1975), was certainly connected to his passion for theatre, but it also defined his entire sense of history and stimulated his passion for portraiture.

  • 9 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, pp. 293−4.
  • 10 Skuncke 1998.

9Apparently unaffected by any liberal influences of the mid-nineteenth century when he was growing up, the young Lagergren marvelled at anecdotes of Louis XIV and his court at Versailles, the memories of Saint-Simon and the letters of Madame de Sévigné.9 The francocentric positioning of his interests followed a long tradition in Sweden, centred around the eighteenth-century court milieu of King Gustav III (1746−1792),10 who played a crucial role in the romantic convictions of the young Lagergren. Gustav III’s own anachronistic fascination (he ascended the throne in 1771) with seventeenth-century court etiquette at Versailles and the part he played in the preparations for the flight to Varennes (1791), eventually overseen by the Swedish Count and Marshal of the Realm, Hans Axel von Fersen (1755−1810), made a strong impact on the young Lagergren. Von Fersen remained, for his entire life, a hero and a role model. As for his deep admiration for Gustav III and the foreign politics of his later reign, this remained intact and well preserved throughout the Marquis’s life.

The Versailles of Claes Lagergren: a lieu de mémoire and stage for historical romance

  • 11 It has not been possible to establish the exact edition used by Lagergren for this first visit to V (...)

10When approaching Versailles for the first time in 1876, Claes Lagergren was already a well-read young man in terms of the general history of the site and its royal inhabitants over the centuries. Yet, his direct impressions, as revealed in the letter to his mother, have a somewhat generic and vague character which seems out of place in someone prone to drama and romance visiting a much sought-after site for the first time. His visit to the château gives a glimpse of the established museum tour, clearly defined by a close reading of the current Baedeker guidebook to Paris and its environment.11 Examining Lagergren’s letter and the text offered in the guidebook affords interesting insights into the formation of historical taste and tourist attention regulated by Baedeker authority.

  • 12 Salomé and Bonnotte 2020.

11Lagergren visited Versailles a few years before Pierre de Nolhac (1859−1936) was appointed as director. The palace was not particularly favoured by the public, a status that de Nolhac eventually would improve, and inevitably the Baedeker guidebook reflected this in its advice to the notional traveller.12

  • 13 The system consisted of a three-step ranking where three asterisks indicated an excellent level of (...)
  • 14 Norlander Eliasson 2019, p. 217.
  • 15 Baedeker 1874, p. 240.

12The Baedeker guidebooks used a system of asterisks to indicate the value and importance given by the authors to a specific monument or site.13 This was considered an efficient tool for the busy traveller seeking to carefully choose how to spend their time abroad.14 When no asterisks were given, the editors’ comments were clearcut and sometimes harsh. The description of Versailles and its different milieus in the 1874 Baedeker offers a very good example of this. Whilst the palace, as such, was not particularly praised, the editors encouraged busy travellers to follow the asterisk system in the Versailles section of the guidebook to save time in coming to appreciate what was considered of highest importance. Alternatively, for those visiting Versailles for the first time, it was advisable to stroll through all the apartments to get a general view of the whole and, eventually, choose according to personal preference or by following the guidebook’s officious advice.15

  • 16 Ibid., p. 238.

13Lagergren certainly belonged to a more independent group of travellers, but he still could not avoid giving precedence to the Baedeker hierarchy. Held in the editors’ highest esteem were the spaces of the History Galleries, founded by Louis-Philippe (1773−1853) in 1837.16 (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3. Galerie des batailles, Versailles, 1886, photograph. Stockholm, Fredrik Arvidsson Posses arkiv/Tekniska Museet, TEKA0156199.

Fig. 3. Galerie des batailles, Versailles, 1886, photograph. Stockholm, Fredrik Arvidsson Posses arkiv/Tekniska Museet, TEKA0156199.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021016323837/​versailles

Public Domain Mark

  • 17 On Louis-Philippe’s historical museum at Versailles, see, for instance, Gaehtgens 1984 and Lavaux 2 (...)
  • 18 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 2, p. 40: ‘Det var skada att behöva börja med Ludvig Filips historiska må (...)
  • 19 In the 1874 edition’s section on Versailles and its sites, a substantial amount of text is dedicate (...)

14This ambitious project, highlighting the glories of French history through historical paintings, was situated in the wings of the palace building and constituted the starting point of the regular museum tour.17 This is further enhanced by Lagergren who, while admittedly following the Baedeker path, writes that it was a great pity and somewhat detrimental ‘to have to start with the historical paintings of Louis-Philippe and to lose so much time on that’.18 Lagergren’s comments indicate that, even if he were dutifully following the Baedeker prescription, this fairly contemporary museum project was not where his intentions and interests lay. His Versailles was something else, and he did not care for the long excursus of realpolitik and recent public affairs that constituted a peculiarity of the Baedeker guidebooks.19

  • 20 Ibid., p. 238.
  • 21 Ibid., p. 242.
  • 22 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 2, p. 40.
  • 23 Ibid., p. 39: ‘[…] i Le Hameau levde jag helt i det förgågna.

15Following the 1874 edition, it appears that the museum of Louis-Philippe was considered, even by the Baedeker editors, ‘interminable’.20 Once Lagergren reached what he defined as ‘the heart of the palace’ (‘palatsets hjärta’), namely the Hall of Mirrors and the King’s Bedchamber, he was exhausted. Yet he mustered courage and proudly visited ‘every room’ (‘varje rum’), taking in all the battle paintings by Horace Vernet and the series of portraits in the North and South Attics, highly approved of by the Baedeker with two asterisks.21 After a tiring visit, he was happy to experience the grandes eaux (fountains show) from the terrace and in the park, his thoughts completely occupied by Louis XIV.22 Omitted from the letter, but emphasized in the published memoirs, is his visit to the Petit Trianon. And as he wandered around the Queen’s Hamlet, ‘he lived entirely in the past’.23

  • 24 For a discussion of this vision of Versailles, also see Charles-Éloi Vial’s essay in these symposiu (...)
  • 25 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, pp. 291−300.
  • 26 Ibid., p. 291: ‘Vilket minnesmärke över all jordisk storhets, glans och makts förgänglighet! […] Vi (...)

16These first impressions of Versailles, even if rather commonplace, already embody the most important factors that came to characterize Lagergren’s view and understanding of the palace: a dreamy stage for a lost worldly order.24 In 1886, he visited the château once more, this time accompanied by his lifelong American friend and fellow convert John How (d. 1916).25 ‘A landmark of the transience of all earthly greatness, glory and power! […] We couldn’t have chosen a better place to stay for a few weeks than Versailles where I could wander around the Grande Galerie, the Œil de Bœuf and the other rooms for days – where the old times unfolded like rapturing paintings.’26

  • 27 Ibid., pp. 291−2.
  • 28 Ibid., pp. 292−9.
  • 29 Ibid., p. 299: ‘Dessa Versailles’ salar blevo för mig levande med människor, som jag väl igenkände.(...)

17On this occasion, Lagergren had brought a different book, in French − Le château de Versailles. Histoire et description (1871), by the historian Louis Dussieux (1815−1894). He thought it excellent, not least since it included a system of extensive plans on transparent paper which could be superimposed on the current palace plans in the book. This gave readers the opportunity to locate the exact position of, for instance, the rooms of seventeenth-century courtiers in relation to those of King Louis XIV.27 It was precisely this kind of insight that Lagergren appreciated. The historical topography stimulated his imagination and enabled him to transfer the anecdotal history he favoured onto an actual stage. This manifests rhetorically in his memoirs: his presentation of Dussieux’s book is followed by long, festive anecdotes based on authors connected to the court of the Sun King,28 and culminating in his sentiment that ‘all these salons of Versailles came alive to me, inhabited by people that I knew so well’.29

  • 30 Ibid., p. 300.
  • 31 Baedeker 1874, p. 253.
  • 32 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, p. 300.

18On Sunday 12 June, Lagergren and How enjoyed the grandes eaux.30 As the Baedeker made clear, this recurrent event was advertised a week beforehand and attracted vast crowds.31 This is verified by the Marquis who, in his memoirs, gives a vivid image of the happy atmosphere and the merry play of the water under the trees with their light-green spring leaves. He cheerfully notes the composition of the audience, typical for Versailles: military men, dignified elderly ladies with ceremonious manners, and older gentlemen proudly wearing the Legion of Honour.32

19The rigid structure of the Baedeker book could hardly satisfy the sensibility with which Lagergren approached Versailles. Dussieux’s narrative, full of accurately referenced notions of life at court during the Ancien Régime, suited him far better. Lagergren’s impressions of Versailles were from the start defined principally by a desired familiarity. On the one hand, Versailles symbolized the source of his political convictions. On the other, it had been the actual stage on which fascinating personalities had lived their lives and succumbed to their destinies. It is this sense of the theatrical that attracted Lagergren to the dramatic implications of the palace and its sites, and determined his sought-after familiarity with Versailles and the people who once inhabited it. At the heart of these convictions were a strong link to his own political and legitimist views, and the double role that Versailles played in his understanding of the world: as the absolute symbol of a righteous order of power, and therefore the happiest of places, and, at the same time, a symbol of the destruction of that very order.

  • 33 Ledbury 2020, pp. 215−37.

20An important aspect of how Lagergren experienced Versailles was his apparent lack of interest in art or architecture. His writings lack depth of information regarding the palace’s architectural history or the forming of its collections. This is a trait that he shared with the Baedeker, notable for its minimal and straightforward information, its concentration on the contemporary museum projects in the palace, and its relatively slight attention to the era of the Bourbon dynasty. Lagergren’s apparent disinterest in art history has a bearing on his eventual collecting activities, and sheds bright light on how he thought Versailles should be experienced: as a proper stage of the past, a scenographic framework for people, actions and destinies.33 This kind of informed yet highly emotional approach influenced his entire view of the site.

  • 34 Nora 1984, p. 92.
  • 35 Ibid., pp. XVIII−XIX; Maior-Barron 2019, p. 12.

21Ultimately, Versailles and its connecting sites represented for Lagergren what might be termed a lieu de mémoire, according to the historian Pierre Nora’s definition.34 This seems particularly evident when considering Nora’s argument regarding a process of detaching memory from history, depriving the latter of what is characterized as ‘affective and magical’.35 In the case of Lagergren, this rings particularly true since his writings on Versailles were strongly determined by emotion, personal remarks and a political credo that extended, in a sort of longue durée, from the Ancien Régime to his own time.

Versailles at home: the collection at Tyresö Castle

22In 1891, Claes Lagergren married the wealthy American Caroline Russell (1854−1919) in Rome. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4. Oscar Björck, Portrait of the Marquise Caroline Russell Lagergren, 1898, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0611146.

Fig. 4. Oscar Björck, Portrait of the Marquise Caroline Russell Lagergren, 1898, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0611146.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597977/​portratt

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

  • 36 Womack 2017, p. 15.
  • 37 Ibid., pp. 11−15.

23This transatlantic marriage, quite uncommon in Sweden at the time, turned out well. Two years before the marriage, the Pope had appointed Lagergren to the title of marquis (the only one ever in Sweden) and ensured that the title would be inherited according to the law of primogeniture.36 His new honour and his marriage to a woman of large fortune made it appropriate and possible for Lagergren to acquire a proper home in Sweden, namely Tyresö Castle and estate, outside Stockholm.37 (Fig. 5)

Fig. 5. Tyresö slott, north façade, 2014, photograph. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA.0031990.

Fig. 5. Tyresö slott, north façade, 2014, photograph. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA.0031990.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​011013839136/​tyreso-slott-slottet-fran-norr-med-vagen-upp-mot-borggarden

© Peter Segemark/Nordiska museet

  • 38 Ibid., pp. 16−18.

24Tyresö became a place for entertaining and writing, and it housed the collections that the Marquis would gather over the years. His collecting intensified after the purchase of the estate, and by 1900 he had amassed a considerable number of artefacts and installed them in the highly eclectic setting of his family home.38

  • 39 Norlander Eliasson 2015.
  • 40 Bodenstein 2011.

25Lagergren’s collecting activities were not organised in a structured way. Guided by passion, curiosity and chance, he often came across purchasing opportunities through the extensive social network he had carefully built over the years.39 Considering his legitimist views, his enthusiasm for the French Restoration and his passion for biographies, it is clear that his collecting was oriented, broadly, towards two categories: Ancien Régime memorabilia and portraiture. Like many late nineteenth-century legitimists, Lagergren collected ‘relics’ from the victims of the French Revolution.40 Among the more striking, preserved in the Tyresö collection, was a piece of a dress that supposedly had belonged to Marie Antoinette. The piece was set in a suitable gilded frame with doors, like a domestic altar. The setting was (and is still) displayed in a small corridor at Tyresö Castle, surrounded by engraved portraits of saints. (Figs. 6 and 7)

Fig. 6. Setting with a piece of a dress said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, late nineteenth century. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610486.

Fig. 6. Setting with a piece of a dress said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, late nineteenth century. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610486.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597329/​klanningsvad

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

Fig. 7. Setting with a piece of a dress said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, late nineteenth century. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610486.

Fig. 7. Setting with a piece of a dress said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, late nineteenth century. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610486.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597329/​klanningsvad

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

  • 41 Womack 2017, p. 22.
  • 42 Vogtherr, Preti and Faroult 2014.

26The Marquis’s principal artistic interest was, inevitably, portraiture. This genre corresponded perfectly with his passion for biography and suited his hospitality.41 Tyresö Castle was indeed a home for friends, living or dead. Engraved portraits were easily come by and thus placed almost everywhere in the large house. Painted portraits were a trickier quest. By the turn of the century, the European art market had a lot to offer buyers with a penchant for eighteenth-century art.42 Yet Lagergren made eccentric choices. He was not interested in acquiring original paintings on the art market. Rather, he desired proper copies of his favourite portraits, especially those he knew so well from Versailles (and the Louvre) – and he was prepared to pay a lot for them.

27In 1905, the Marquis and John How travelled once again to Paris. After a visit to the Musée Carnavalet, where they were struck by terrifying accounts of the Revolution, they literally fled to Versailles where Lagergren was overwhelmed with joy to see the palace again. This time, however, he was on a mission as a collector. One of the museum guards in the palace had suggested that he contact a Monsieur Georges Jouve, who acted as a painting copyist at the palace. Fortunately, Jouve was present and Lagergren could make his request. He desired a full-scale copy of the French painter Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette and her children (1787). (Fig. 8)

Fig. 8. Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie-Antoinette, reine de France, et ses enfants, 1787, oil on canvas, 275,2 × 216,5 cm. Versailles, Musée national des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, MV 4520.

Fig. 8. Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie-Antoinette, reine de France, et ses enfants, 1787, oil on canvas, 275,2 × 216,5 cm. Versailles, Musée national des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, MV 4520.

http://collections.chateauversailles.fr/​?permid=permobj_79d56c50-f05c-497f-88b4-692d44b5c279#213a2cf6-ec58-456e-ba83-ed836f97a3b2

© RMN-GP (Château de Versailles) / © Gérard Blot

  • 43 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, p. 398.

28They agreed on the sum of 2,000 francs and the contract was sealed. A few days later, the Marquis had the chance to meet with the Director of the Musée de Versailles, Pierre de Nolhac, who congratulated him on his choice and gave him permission to copy the painting.43 (Fig. 9)

Fig. 9. Georges Jouve, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and her children (copy from Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska Museet, NM.0610042.

Fig. 9. Georges Jouve, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and her children (copy from Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska Museet, NM.0610042.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026596873/​portratt

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

29This was the starting point of a long collaboration between the Marquis and Jouve. In the years that followed, the painter produced a large number of copies for Tyresö. The paintings clearly show the royal persons and courtiers who were closest to Lagergren’s heart, and whose pictorial presence in the house was thus highly desirable.

30An interesting example is a series of copies featuring the immediate family of Louis XV. Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s pastel portraits of King Louis XV and Queen Marie Leszczyńska (1748) were commissioned and installed in one of the smaller cabinets in the castle. (Figs. 10 and 11)

Fig. 10. Georges Jouve, Louis XV (copy from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour), c. 1905, pastel. Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610253.

Fig. 10. Georges Jouve, Louis XV (copy from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour), c. 1905, pastel. Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610253.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597096/​portratt

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

Fig. 11. Georges Jouve, Marie Leszczyńska (copy from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour), c. 1905, pastel. Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610255.

Fig. 11. Georges Jouve, Marie Leszczyńska (copy from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour), c. 1905, pastel. Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610255.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597098/​portratt

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

31Considerable effort was put into the frames, which were also carefully copied. For the same interior, Jouve was commissioned to copy two of the French painter Jean-Marc Nattier’s many portraits of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska’s daughters: Anne-Henriette (1727−1752) as Flora, and Marie-Adélaïde (1732−1800) as Diana (1742 and 1745). (Figs. 12 and 13)

Fig. 12. Georges Jouve, Anne-Henriette of France (copy from Jean-Marc Nattier), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM. 0610249.

Fig. 12. Georges Jouve, Anne-Henriette of France (copy from Jean-Marc Nattier), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM. 0610249.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597092/​dorroverstycke

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

Fig. 13. Georges Jouve, Marie-Adélaïde of France (copy from Jean-Marc Nattier), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610248.

Fig. 13. Georges Jouve, Marie-Adélaïde of France (copy from Jean-Marc Nattier), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610248.

https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597091/​dorroverstycke

© Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

  • 44 Milam 2003.

32The original portraits had been commissioned by Marie Leszczyńska as pendants and Lagergren had had the chance to admire them on display at Versailles.44 The ensemble continued with Nattier’s 1748 portrait of the youngest of Louis XV’s daughters, Louise-Marie (1737−1787), showing the ten-year-old in a robe de cour with flowers in her hand. Finally, the set was completed with Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s portraits of Marie-Josèphe of Saxony (1731−1767) − painted in the years 1756−60 − and her consort, Louis of France (1729−1765), son of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska, and Dauphin de France, painted in 1745.

33Examining the subjects of the portraits in the small cabinet at Tyresö, one can discern a pattern in the display. It is clear that the Marquis was interested in offering the viewer a Bourbon lineage, represented not only by Louis XV and his immediate family, including the heir to the throne, but also by the strong presence of Louis XIV, the symbol of absolutism. In the Tyresö cabinet, Louis XIV appears in an engraved version of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s state portrait from 1700, placed above the portraits of the Dauphin and Dauphine.

  • 45 Womack 2017, pp. 15-16.
  • 46 Germann Grant 2020.
  • 47 Cortequisse 2001.

34Hung between the princely couple is a copy of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s portrait of Mauritz of Saxony (1696−1750), General Marshal in the army of Louis XV and a great favourite of the King. It seems the royal theme is broken here in favour of another factor highly valued by Lagergren: namely, diplomacy. Mauritz of Saxony had played a crucial role in the treaty leading up to the marriage of Marie-Josèphe and the Dauphin in 1747. Thus, the exact placement of his portrait in the cabinet appears to praise his intervention for the continuation of the Bourbon lineage. But the presence of the General Marshal had other implications, too. Born the illegitimate son of Maria Aurora von Königsmarck (1662−1728) and Augustus II of Saxony (1670−1733), he was partly Swedish on his mother’s side. This surely appealed to Lagergren’s imagination, fancying himself as an intervener for the legitimist cause. Politics was firmly connected with the idea of family. Lagergren had a strong relationship with his mother; and he was a caring husband and a very loving father to his sons.45 It is evident that within the emotional and historical setting of Tyresö, French royal lineage was also conceived as an idea of family and family virtues. The portrait of Marie Leszczyńska, chosen by the Marquis for Tyresö, represents the Queen as a devout consort, a portrait formula often adapted for her with the intent of underlining her faith and virtuous life as wife and mother.46 Among the many available portraits of the daughters of Louis XV, Lagergren chose to copy that of the youngest, Louise-Marie, who in 1770 entered the religious Order of the Carmelites and became a nun.47 The Marquis’s own religious devotion was palpable in Tyresö’s interiors, where copies of portraits of the French royal family were intermingled with effigies of the saints.

  • 48 Sheriff 2003.

35The desire to connect members of the Bourbon dynasty with family virtues is evident in Lagergren’s choosing to acquire a copy of the Vigée Le Brun portrait of Marie Antoinette, Marie Leszczyńska’s successor. Notably, the original portrait had been conceived to enhance the motherly virtues of the increasingly unpopular Queen.48 Lagergren’s equal desire to stress the idea of royal virtue probably informed his decision to hang the full-scale portrait in the large salon at Tyresö. This drawing room constituted the climax of a suite of rooms that, piece by piece, put together lives and events of European royal history, with an emphasis on the Bourbon dynasty in France. And it was evidently not by chance that the Marquis decided to place a portrait of Hans Axel von Fersen in this setting. He did so less because of von Fersen’s close connection to the last Queen of France, and more because of his strong identification with those Swedes who − somehow, sometime − had contributed to upholding the order of the Ancien Régime in Europe.

Conclusion

36Claes Lagergren’s lifelong relationship with Versailles and its connecting sites manifested in distinct ways. Primarily, in written form. In his dense memoirs, he described his experiences of visiting Versailles in a highly emotional yet concise way, combining the personal with the apparently objective structure of nineteenth-century travel guides, such as the popular Baedeker editions. His personal views were strongly informed by an interest in and passion for royal history, with a particular emphasis on France, that had been nurtured since boyhood. As an adult, he became a firm legitimist and as such fully convinced of the right to rule of the old dynasties of Europe, principally the Bourbon dynasty. Consequently, Versailles constituted for him the perfect symbol of this rightful order. At the same time, it served as a place of remembrance (lieu de mémoire) of a grand past, but also of a possible reality in the sense of realpolitik. Lagergren’s experiences of the site were detached from aesthetic or artistic aims and interests. He valued it as an historical stage inhabited by people with whose biographies he was deeply connected. This affective and emotional experiencing was radically different from the fact-driven guidebooks which eschewed personal history and the historical context of the Versailles court.

37Since Versailles constituted the absolute source for his political credo and a place of dreamy imagination of a past he idolized, the Marquis desired to transfer some of its nature and character to his own home in Sweden, Tyresö Castle. Within an eclectic interior design, he promoted a collection of Ancien Régime memorabilia and copies of original portraits of those historical protagonists he admired most: members of the French royal family. The heavily adorned suite of rooms both worked as a stimulus for conversation and constituted, through the overwhelming presence of portraits, a sort of personal Versailles-related court over which the Marquis could preside. His choice of paintings and objects reflected the characteristics and virtues that he associated with the protagonists and victims of the Ancien Régime, making of the Tyresö display a highly personal take on historical events and their course.

38The Marquis Claes Lagergren died in 1930. His Tyresö estate, the collections, the archive and the extensive grounds were bequeathed to the Nordiska museet to be kept as a house museum showing the lifestyle and fashions of an upper-class home at the turn of the century. The bequest, much to the discontent of the Marquis’s heirs, constitutes Lagergren’s last and most durable desire to make a monument not only of his own era but of a credo that went beyond religion and political views into the realm of the universal order. While it is true that the site and idea of Ancien Régime Versailles were not the only components of this credo, they were certainly those closest to Claes Lagergren’s heart and to which his life was most securely anchored.

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Bibliographie

Printed sources

Baedeker Karl, 1874, Paris and its environs, with routes from London to Paris, and from Paris to the Rhine and Switzerland, Leipzig, K. Baedeker.

Lagergren Claes, 19231930, Mitt livs minnen, Stockholm, Norstedts förlag, 9 vol.

Studies

Bodenstein Felicity, 2011, ‘The Emotional Museum. Thoughts on the “Secular relics” of Nineteenth-Century History Museums in Paris and their Posterity’, in S-Morin M. and Noël P.-M. (eds.), Les représentations du passé: entre mémoire et histoire (special issue), Conserveries mémorielle [online], no 9, published online 15 April 2011. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cm/834.

Cortequisse Bruno, 2001, Mesdames de France : les filles de Louis XV, Paris, Perrin.

Gaehtgens Thomas, 1984, Versailles, de la résidence royale au musée historique, Paris, Albin Michel.

Germann Grant Jennifer, 2020, Picturing Marie Leszczinska (1703–1768). Representing Queenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Farnham, Ashgate.

Lavaux Marion, 2019, Une aventure artistique ‘à toutes les gloires de la France’: préfiguration, mise en place et postérité du musée historique de Louis-Philippe (1794-1892), thesis for the diploma of archivist paleographer, under the supervision of Christine Nougaret, Paris, École nationale des chartes.

Ledbury Mark, 2020, ‘Melancholy, Nostalgia, Dreams: Adventures in the Grand Cimetière Magique’, in Ledbury M. and Wellington R. (eds.), The Versailles Effect. Objects, Lives, and Afterlives of the Domaine, New York, Bloomsbury publishing, pp. 21537.

Maior-Barron Denise, 2019, Marie Antoinette at Petit Trianon. Heritage Interpretation and Visitor Perceptions, London, Routledge.

Milam Jennifer, 2003, ‘Matronage and the Direction of Sisterhood: Portraits of Madame Adelaide’, in Hyde M. and Milam J. (eds.), Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 11538.

Nora Pierre (ed.), 1984, Les lieux de mémoire. I, La République, Paris, Gallimard.

Norlander Eliasson Sabrina, 2015, ‘Civis Romanus Sum. The Roman nobility and the loss of the Ancien Régime in the writings of the Swedish Marquis Claes Lagergren’, in Norlander Eliasson S. and Fogelberg Rota S. (eds.), The City of the Soul. The literary making of Rome (Suecormana, no. 8), Stockholm, Svenska Institutet i Rom, pp. 18193.

Norlander Eliasson Sabrina, 2019, “‘Authors of degenerated Renaissance known as Baroque”. The Baedeker Effect and the Arts: Shortcuts to Artistic Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Rome’, in Blennow A. and Fogelberg Rota S. (eds.), Rome and The Guidebook Tradition. From the Middle Ages to the 20th Century, Amsterdam, De Gruyter, pp. 197227. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110615630-006.

Salomé Laurent and Bonnotte Claire (eds.), 2019, Versailles revival 18671937, exh. cat. (Château de Versailles, 19 November 2019 15 March 2020), Paris/Versailles, In Fine/Château de Versailles.

Sheriff Mary D, 2003, ‘The cradle is empty: Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Marie Antoinette and the Problem of Intention’, in Hyde M. and Milam J. (eds.), Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 164−87.

Skuncke Marie-Christine, 1998, ‘L’Histoire dans l’éducation de Gustave III de Suède’, in Grell C., Paravicini W. and Voss J. (eds.), Les princes et l’histoire du xive au xviiie siècle, symposium proceedings (Paris/Versailles, Institut historique allemand/Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin, 1316 March 1996), Bonn, Bouvier, pp. 599604.

Vogtherr Christoph Martin, Preti Monica et Faroult Guillaume (eds.), Delicious Decadence: the Rediscovery of French Eighteenth-Century Painting in the Nineteenth Century, Farnham, Ashgate.

Womack Anna, 2017, Den osynliga markisinnan. Caroline Russell Lagergren på Tyresö slott, Stockholm, Nordiska museet.

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Notes

1 Stockholm, Nordiska museet, Markis Claes Lagergrens arkiv, correspondence letter to Carolina Lagergren, 18 August 1876, vol. 1, no pagination: ‘Min egen älskade mamma! […] Här i Versailles är det himmelskt att gå upp och ned i de stora slottsgallerierna och i alléerna af parken och tänka på försvunna mägtiga dagar då Ludvig XIV med sitt glänsande hof, Marie Antoinette med sina barn vandrade där – de har sopats bort och revolutionens flagga fladdrar öfver det stora palatset.’ All English translations of Swedish quotes are by the author.

2 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 1; Norlander Eliasson 2015, p. 185.

3 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 2.

4 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 3, p. 187.

5 Norlander Eliasson 2019.

6 Norlander Eliasson 2015, pp. 183−4.

7 Ibid. 2015, p. 184.

8 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 4, pp. 261−85.

9 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, pp. 293−4.

10 Skuncke 1998.

11 It has not been possible to establish the exact edition used by Lagergren for this first visit to Versailles. It is likely that he used Paris and its environs, with routes from London to Paris, and from Paris to the Rhine and Switzerland which was published in 1874 and, consequently, constituted the newest and most up-to-date edition.

12 Salomé and Bonnotte 2020.

13 The system consisted of a three-step ranking where three asterisks indicated an excellent level of interest.

14 Norlander Eliasson 2019, p. 217.

15 Baedeker 1874, p. 240.

16 Ibid., p. 238.

17 On Louis-Philippe’s historical museum at Versailles, see, for instance, Gaehtgens 1984 and Lavaux 2019.

18 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 2, p. 40: ‘Det var skada att behöva börja med Ludvig Filips historiska målningar och förlora så mycken tid på sådant.’

19 In the 1874 edition’s section on Versailles and its sites, a substantial amount of text is dedicated to the French-Prussian conflict and the role of Versailles. Baedeker 1874, p. 239.

20 Ibid., p. 238.

21 Ibid., p. 242.

22 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 2, p. 40.

23 Ibid., p. 39: ‘[…] i Le Hameau levde jag helt i det förgågna.

24 For a discussion of this vision of Versailles, also see Charles-Éloi Vial’s essay in these symposium proceedings: https://journals.openedition.org/crcv/26696.

25 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, pp. 291−300.

26 Ibid., p. 291: ‘Vilket minnesmärke över all jordisk storhets, glans och makts förgänglighet! […] Vi kunde icke välja någon härligare plats för några veckor än Versailles, där jag hela dagarna kunde gå omkring i la grande galerie, i l’Œil de Bœuf och de andra salarna, där gamla tider rullade ut fängslande tavlor.’

27 Ibid., pp. 291−2.

28 Ibid., pp. 292−9.

29 Ibid., p. 299: ‘Dessa Versailles’ salar blevo för mig levande med människor, som jag väl igenkände.

30 Ibid., p. 300.

31 Baedeker 1874, p. 253.

32 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, p. 300.

33 Ledbury 2020, pp. 215−37.

34 Nora 1984, p. 92.

35 Ibid., pp. XVIII−XIX; Maior-Barron 2019, p. 12.

36 Womack 2017, p. 15.

37 Ibid., pp. 11−15.

38 Ibid., pp. 16−18.

39 Norlander Eliasson 2015.

40 Bodenstein 2011.

41 Womack 2017, p. 22.

42 Vogtherr, Preti and Faroult 2014.

43 Lagergren 1923−1930, vol. 9, p. 398.

44 Milam 2003.

45 Womack 2017, pp. 15-16.

46 Germann Grant 2020.

47 Cortequisse 2001.

48 Sheriff 2003.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Stephan Wladislaw Bakalowicz, Portrait of the Marquis Claes Lagergren, 1930, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA. 0048430.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​011013847473/​portratt-av-markis-claes-lagergren-1853-1930-i-pavlig-kammarherreuniform
Crédits Public domain, CC BY-NC-ND
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 491k
Titre Fig. 2. Guillaume Berggren, Portrait of Claes Lagergren in a Bedouin costume, c. 1878, photograph. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA.0063582.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​011013855558/​markis-claes-lagergren-1853-1930-i-osterlandsk-drakt-rokandes-vattenpip
Crédits Public Domain Mark
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 160k
Titre Fig. 3. Galerie des batailles, Versailles, 1886, photograph. Stockholm, Fredrik Arvidsson Posses arkiv/Tekniska Museet, TEKA0156199.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021016323837/​versailles
Crédits Public Domain Mark
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 110k
Titre Fig. 4. Oscar Björck, Portrait of the Marquise Caroline Russell Lagergren, 1898, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0611146.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597977/​portratt
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 59k
Titre Fig. 5. Tyresö slott, north façade, 2014, photograph. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NMA.0031990.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​011013839136/​tyreso-slott-slottet-fran-norr-med-vagen-upp-mot-borggarden
Crédits © Peter Segemark/Nordiska museet
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 92k
Titre Fig. 6. Setting with a piece of a dress said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, late nineteenth century. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610486.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597329/​klanningsvad
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 59k
Titre Fig. 7. Setting with a piece of a dress said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, late nineteenth century. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610486.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597329/​klanningsvad
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 83k
Titre Fig. 8. Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie-Antoinette, reine de France, et ses enfants, 1787, oil on canvas, 275,2 × 216,5 cm. Versailles, Musée national des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, MV 4520.
Légende http://collections.chateauversailles.fr/​?permid=permobj_79d56c50-f05c-497f-88b4-692d44b5c279#213a2cf6-ec58-456e-ba83-ed836f97a3b2
Crédits © RMN-GP (Château de Versailles) / © Gérard Blot
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-8.png
Fichier image/png, 649k
Titre Fig. 9. Georges Jouve, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and her children (copy from Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska Museet, NM.0610042.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026596873/​portratt
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 115k
Titre Fig. 10. Georges Jouve, Louis XV (copy from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour), c. 1905, pastel. Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610253.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597096/​portratt
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 203k
Titre Fig. 11. Georges Jouve, Marie Leszczyńska (copy from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour), c. 1905, pastel. Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610255.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597098/​portratt
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 206k
Titre Fig. 12. Georges Jouve, Anne-Henriette of France (copy from Jean-Marc Nattier), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM. 0610249.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597092/​dorroverstycke
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 64k
Titre Fig. 13. Georges Jouve, Marie-Adélaïde of France (copy from Jean-Marc Nattier), 1905, oil on canvas. Stockholm, Tyresö slott/Nordiska museet, NM.0610248.
Légende https://digitaltmuseum.se/​021026597091/​dorroverstycke
Crédits © Sabrina Norlander Eliasson
URL http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/docannexe/image/27160/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 64k
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Sabrina Norlander Eliasson, « ‘A landmark of the transience of all earthly greatness, glory and power!’ Versailles and the Myth of the Ancien Régime in the Writings and Collections of the Swedish Marquis Claes Lagergren (1853−1930) »Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles [En ligne], 23 | 2023, mis en ligne le 03 mai 2023, consulté le 25 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/27160 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/crcv.27160

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Auteur

Sabrina Norlander Eliasson

Sabrina Norlander Eliasson is Full Professor of Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, where she is the founding director of the International Master’s Programme in Art History: Technical Art History and the Art Museum. Norlander Eliasson is the author of Portraiture and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Manchester University Press, 2009). She led a research project on the collection of Italian paintings in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, whose results were published in 2015. That same year, she co-edited the volume City of the Soul: The Literary Making of Rome (Editorial Committee of the Swedish Institutes in Rome and Athens). She is currently finishing a monograph on the materiality of female religious life in Baroque Rome.
Sabrina Norlander Eliasson est professeure titulaire d’histoire de l’art au département de la Culture et de l’Esthétique de l’université de Stockholm. Elle est la directrice et la fondatrice du programme international de master en histoire de l’art technique et du musée d’art. Auteure de Portraiture and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Manchester University Press, 2009), elle a dirigé un projet de recherche sur la collection de peintures italiennes du Nationalmuseum de Stockholm qui a donné lieu à une publication en 2015. La même année, elle a co-édité le volume The City of the Soul. La fabrication littéraire de Rome (Comité éditorial des Instituts suédois de Rome et d’Athènes). Elle termine actuellement une monographie sur la matérialité de la vie religieuse féminine dans la Rome baroque.
sabrina.norlander.eliasson[at]arthistory.su.se

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