Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

des Monumens Français. They were not alone. On their first visit the Louvre was too crowded to
see much. All of London, as the popular song had it, was in Paris. 30
Figure 23 Le Musée des Monumens Français
The attraction of the Louvre for the English, apart from seeing the art itself, lay in the
very idea of a public gallery. There was no such thing in Britain. With his orderly, botanical
mind, however, Turner was disappointed by the looseness of the categories in the various rooms.
He found the sculpture ‘too crowded & not arranged by any system’. 31 The ‘Salle des hommes
illlustres’, for example, included statues of Minerva and Mercury, while the Venus de Medici
was dwarfed. Over a number of visits Turner and his friends debated the morality of the French
acquisitions from conquered nations and the quality of various paintings. Yet whatever they
thought of its arrangement and its legitimacy, neither they nor any of the other tourists had any
doubt about what kind of objects they were discussing. These were works of art, created,
displayed and debated as such. At the Musée des Monumens Français, however, the case was
less clear and much more significant for that particular relationship to the artefacts of the past
represented by antiquarianism [fig: 23]. Housed in the former convent of the Petits-Augustins the
museum had been known in Britain for some time. The first volume of the catalogue was
translated into English in 1803, and visitors over a decade later were agog to see the reality.
30
Grimaldi sang: ‘London now is out of town/Who in England tarries?/Who can bear to linger there/When all the
world’s in Paris’. Quoted in Mansell, Paris Between Empires, p.38.
31
Turner, ‘Journal of a Tour to France, 1814’, f149.
109