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THE WALLACE COLLECTION
MANCHESTER SOUARE
LONDON, W.I

9th, December, 1970

Dear Mr. Seligman,
  
Thank you for your letter of 28th November. I am so pleased that you received and liked our little guide. We certainly do have a copy of your book “Merchants of Art, 1880 - 1960,” which I reviewed in “The Burlington Magazine” in August 1963. Benedict Nicolson (the Editor, and Lady Sackville's grandson) particularly asked me to do it, but if you could spare another copy we would be more than grateful, as it is most useful in tracing things which formerly belonged to Wallace and Murray-Scott, but it makes fascinating reading over and above this. The probate inventory of No. 2 rue Lafitte with your annotations is of course even more valuable, although it is sometimes a little difficult to identify objects and bronzes from the inevitably very brief descriptions.
    
I see that the large Boucher appears on page 46, having I suppose been moved from Bagatelle, where it must have taken up a prodigious amount of space. It certainly appears as if the Metropolitan have a "dom" on it as a Boucher, and the Director, Francis Watson, says he always asks for it when he goes there, only to be told that it is on loan to some other museum, he thinks in the deep South somewhere. So neither he nor I have ever seen it, nor do we know where lord Hertford acquired it, although it might be possible to trace, through XIXth century sale catalogues. From photographs it would not appear to be ensuite with the three pairs of large Bouchers here, and the dimensions differ quite considerably from The Rising and Setting of the Sun, which are the only pair which correspond to it as to subject matter. It also seems to be rather more thinly painted than any of the Bouchera here, but that may only be due to the photograph. Watson thinks that Ted Rousseau (late of the Metropolitan) believed in it as a Boucher.

Yours sincerely,
R A Cecil
Assistant to the Director


Mr. Germain Seligman,
5 East 57th Street,
NEW YORK,
N.Y. 10022, 
U.S.A.