Édouard André (art collector)

Édouard André ( * 1833, † 1894) was a French politician and art collector.

Life

As the son of Ernest André (1803-1864) Édouard André was born into a Protestant banking family, who came from the south of France and had its heyday during the Second Empire. With the backing of Emperor Napoleon III. , Open to the ideas of Henri de Saint -Simon, the family André benefited from the financial investments of the modernization of France and the big companies of the Empire.

Édouard André lost his mother at the age of two years. He was destined for a military career. At age 18 he joined the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint- Cyr, and later belonged to the personal elite regiment of the Emperor. He fought in Italy and Mexico, before he left the army in 1863. He began to build a collection of furniture, paintings and objets d'art. From 1864 to 1870 he followed his father as a deputy of the department of Gard. After the end of the Second Empire, he became involved in 1871 in the National Guard. He undertook with the Rothschilds efforts to ensure the required sum of reparations from France to the German Empire. Then he turned to disappointment from political life and devoted himself exclusively from its collections.

In 1868, he was by the architect Henri Parent a feudal town house on 5,700 sqm in Paris on Boulevard Haussmann No build 158, which cost 1,520,000 francs. The construction lasted from 1869 to 1875. Palais now houses the Musée Jacquemart -André.

In 1872 he purchased the Gazette des Beaux -Arts and was president of the Central Union of Decorative Arts. In the same year his bust by Jean -Baptiste Carpeaux and his portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter was completed. He made another portrait of the painter Nélie Jacquemart make, which he eventually married in 1881.

The couple went to Italy every year to shop there artworks for the expansion of the collection. In this way, they made one of the finest private collection of Italian art in France together. They also acquired important works by French artists such as Nattier, Vigee -Lebrun, Fragonard, David.

After the death of Edward Andrés in 1894 Nélie Jacquemart extended its collecting activities over Italy from up in the Orient to expand the collection with precious craft objects. True to the intentions of her late husband, she bequeathed the house on Boulevard Haussmann, including the collection of the Institut de France with the aim of setting up a museum there. This museum was opened in 1913.