Tuesday, 17 September 2024, Paris: the Jacquemart-André, Chez Papa

Written 17 October 2024

The plan for Tuesday, our last full day in Paris, was to visit the Jacquemart-André, one of our favorite Paris museums, to see its special exhibition of masterpieces from the Borghèse Gallery in Rome.

The J-A has a wonderful café/restaurant, where we've had many excellent lunches before visiting the collection, so we planned as usual to show up there well before our 2 pm admission to allow time for one of their delicious salads. So we caught the #9 metro again at St. Ambroise but rode it only about half as far, to Miromesnil, then walked the last few blocks to the museum. But, whoa, people were lined up four deep for half a block at the entrance! I went to the head of the line, showed them our tickets and explained that we wanted to eat in the restaurant first.

No problem—they waved us through. We walked in through the tunnel, then up the climbing spiral drive, and emerged into the house's magnificent courtyard (the museum is in the house the Jacquemart-Andrés built to live in and to house their art collection). The house faces away from the bustling Boulevard Haussman, so that the main entrance is here on the sweeping circular drive surrounded by vine-covered trellises and a wall of southern magnolia trees (behind me as I took the photo).

But we were clearly not the only people who had had this idea. We've always been able to stroll right in, but this time, in the lobby, we found a long line of folks waiting to get into the restaurant. The receptionist estimated a 20-minute wait, and we had plent of time, so we stashed our stuff in the lockers provided for the purpose (the only place this year where we actually had to front our own euro coin to use them) and joined the line. When 20 minutes had gone by, the line had literally not advanced by a single person. Clearly the room had filled immediately when the restaurant opened at noon, so we had to wait for even the first of those folks to finish. Eventually, the line started moving, and after nearly an hour, we finally got a table. As we walked in, I grabbed this photo at the right of the dessert cart. It is an actual cart, with wheels, but it's too big for the spaces between the tables, so at dessert time they invite diners to go to the cart to choose.

The room itself is worth a visit, as you can see from the photo at the left. This is the view from our table back toward the door where we entered.

The restaurant operates independently of the of the museum and is under new management since we were last there. Perhaps they've advertised more widely, and the Borghese exhibition was being trumpeted widely about the city—on the sides of buses, on construction scrim, on posters in the metro. Maybe that's why the place was so much more crowded than usual. The restaurant's menu has been revamped, but some of the old salads are still available. All the salads used to be named after artists; now some are named for places. We each ordered the Bellini: penne pasta salad with crayfish tails, feta, sun-dried tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, Parmesan, and basil, served with arugula, green tapenade, and a lemon vinaigrette.

For dessert, we both chose David's beloved fromage blanc with coulis de fruits rouges (red fruit sauce). It wasn't the best kind, in which the cheese is molded "à la faisselle," but it was extremely delicious all the same.

After lunch, before heading upstairs to the special exhibition, we did a quick turn through the permanent collection, which we've visited many times before, pausing for a little while to look again at Nattier's portrait of young Marie-Françoise-Renée (known as Mathilde) de Carbonnel-Canisy, Marquise d'Antin (at age 14), which hangs in our living room in poster form. (She became a marquise by marriage, at age 12, to a 28-year-old titled naval officer and was widowed at 16.)

Here's the view back down the magnificent curving double staircase in the winter garden. I took it from the musicians' gallery that completely surrounds the ballroom at second-floor level. At the top edge of the photo, you can see the bottom edge of the large Tiepolo fresco the Jacquemart-Andrés brought from Italy. (As I've explained in previous diaries, for big parties, the walls separating the three main rooms on the main level can be lowered into the basement, opening the ballroom at both ends to yield a much larger space. The J-A's entertained a lot.)

At the right here is the ceiling of the ballroom. Magnificent.

Two details from paintings in the collection were magnified and used to flank all the advertisements for the exhibition, so we encountered them frequently in the street and in the metro. Here, they're blown up and used to flank a window at the entrance to the special-exhibition space. For scale, note the people sitting on a bench below the window, partially hidden by the railing.

The first piece one encountered on entering the exhibition was this little Carrera marble sculpture of the Goat Amalthea with the infant Jupiter and a faun. It was made by Gian Lorenzo Bernini sometime between 1909 and 1615, i.e., when Bernini was between 11 and 17 years old. Scipion Borghèse knew a budding genius when he saw one and promptly commissioned a bunch of more ambitious pieces.

Unfortunately, the exhibition was elbow to elbow with people, and the lighting was such that even when I could get a clear shot at a photo, I had to take some of them at pretty extreme angles to get flares out of the image.

At the right here is "Lot and His Daughters" by Giovanni Francesco Guerrièri (1617).

At the right, Jacopo Bassano's 1547–48 "Last Supper."

And here are the two paintings chosen to feature in all the publicity. At the left is Caravaggio's "Boy with a Basket of Fruit" (ca. 1596). Caravaggio's style was hugely influential, to the point that artists like Rubens, Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt were referred to as "caravaggists."

At the right is Dominichino's (1617) "Cumaean Sibyl." He painted more than one version; there's also one in Rome's Capitoline Museum, for example.

At the left here is "The Kidnapping of Europa" (ca. 1603) by Giuseppe Cesari (called "Le Cavalier d'Arpin" in French), who was head of the studio where the young Caravaggio trained. Actually the word used in the French title of the painting is "enlevement," which is used for "kidnapping," but it literally means "carrying off," and she certainly looks in the painting as though she's going willingly.

At the right is a "mature self-portrait" of Bernini, painted when he was about 40.

I got some other good shots of beautiful paintings that perhaps show a little too much flesh to be appropriate for posting here. One example is "Suzanne and the Old Men" by Rubens (ca. 1606). Another is "Leda and the Swan" by Leonardo da Vinci.

It will be interesting to see, on future visits, whether the J-A goes back to what we think of as normal crowd levels or whether it has just become enough better known now that it's always mobbed.

Tuesday was our last full day in Paris, so our dinner reservations were at a nearby branch of Chez Papa, a chain serving southwestern French food that we discovered last year. I chose it because at the time, I assumed we would have to leave at the crack of dawn Wednesday to catch our flight to Italy, and it's an informal sort of place where we could eat early and have only a couple of courses. We could also walk there and back. Suprisingly though, our flight has been rescheduled, by a lot. Rather than 1:50 pm, the most recent we had heard, it had been moved to 3:50 pm! That explains why the Tauck people sent us an email saying they expected us at the Milan airport so much later than I thought we would be arriving.

Here's our starter, which we split (and a good thing, too). David ate most of the foie gras in the little glass canning jar, I ate most of the heap of confit gizards in the foreground, and we split the confit duck leg you can barely see just this side of the salad. The little glass jar with the spoon in it is Basque black cherry jam.

And here's our main course. We each ordered a cassoulet, since the waiter assured us it wasn't large enough to share. Right. He lied. Half a gallon each of duck, sausage, giant Tarb beans, in a sauce so rich it made your lips sticky. Scrumptious, but we couldn't come near finishing it. And dessert was out of the question.

Note, just above the knuckle end of the duck bone that sticks a little above the surface of my portion, the single Tarb bean I have fished out and laid on the surface so you can see how large they are. Best stewing beans in the world, maybe two to the mouthful.

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