Zéphyrus, Flora and Amor are back at the nest. Louis XIV had it threesome gallant once ordered for his flower gardens around the Trianon, the ‘palais de Flora’ in Versailles. Together with many other works of art, they had disappeared from the Sun King’s palace after the demise of the monarchy. But the masterpiece by the sculptors Philippe Bertrand, René Frémin and Jacques Bousseau plus the allegory of Abundantia by Lambert Sigisbert Adam can be admired again since February 5 – thanks to the generosity of the Republic of Angola and its understanding of cultural legitimacy.
Lionel Arsac, curator at Versailles charged with restoring the original sculpture collection, had been looking for eighteenth-century sculptures for months. He found images of it in French sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries, “the art historian’s bible” with the sculptures made under Louis XIV and Louis XV. The photos were dated 1975, but there were no whereabouts. Arsac eventually concluded from auction catalogs that Baron Alphonse de Rothschild had bought them in 1881. This heir to the French Rothschild empire put them in the vestibule of his Paris hôtel de Saint-Florentin.
Rothschild’s country houses
The family fanned out to the other side of the Atlantic. There was no start for Arsac. First, let’s go to Rothschild’s country houses around Paris: public places, such as the Château de Boulogne, a ruin, and the Château de Ferrières, now a gastronomy school. Not a marble statue in sight. Until the curator spotted a few small white dots via Google Street View in the Parisian backyard of the hôtel Ephrussi on Avenue Foch, the former Parisian residence of Alphonse’s daughter Béatrice de Rothschild (1864-1934). Could these be the missing images? Yes, of course! They had been robbed by the Nazis from the vestibule of the hôtel Saint-Florentin during World War II, but miraculously they returned after the liberation and were placed in the garden on Avenue Foch. In 1979 the Rothschilds sold their city palace to Angola, which established its embassy there.
Immediately after his virtual bird’s-eye view, curator Arsac was immediately prevented from doing so. Et voilà: until June 5, visitors to Versailles can see the two groups of statues, together with about fifty other statues recovered from the collection. And all this without years of diplomatic negotiations or complicated official procedures. The only consideration Angola demanded in return for its donation of the French heritage was an expression of thanks at the Versailles exhibition and replicas of the sculpture groups for the embassy garden.