Our Roman marble priestess (2005.006.001) recently traveled to Texas to be part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s exhibition Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times. While she was being prepped for the trip, I realized I had never spent quality time with her provenance. As the priestess has a documented history dating back more than 120 years, she wasn’t one of my problem children. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn more about her story.
The earliest published reference to the priestess that I have found is from a December 1902 sales catalogue by the Paris dealer Georges Petit (1856–1920). The sculpture was being sold as part of the collection of a Mme Camille Lelong. I haven’t been able to find many details about Mme Lelong thus far, apart from some extremely colorful accounts of her and her collection published soon after her death in 1902. Laurentine-Françoise Bernage was born in 1840, and she was married at least twice. Her first (or at least her earlier) husband had the last name Boisse. Her last husband, Camille Lelong, predeceased her. Laurentine-Françoise was reportedly known in her youth for her beauty and friendly disposition. She was an avid collector and dealer of art and antiques, which she kept in her Paris home at the Hôtel Rouillé de Meslay on the Quai de Béthune. By all accounts, while Laurentine-Françoise was financially secure as a widow, she became infamous (probably unfairly) for her art hoarding and miserly spending later in life. She had a reputation for only selling objects from her collection if she felt she was being properly compensated. Her home was always cold because she reportedly was reluctant to heat it due to fear of fire and the cost associated with heating such a large building. At the time of her death, Paris media reported that she died of pneumonia caused, in part, by her chilly home.
After the 1902 Petit sale in Paris, I don’t know where the priestess went. She next surfaces in 1915 at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Held from February 20 to December 4, the exposition celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal the year before. One of the exhibitors was a New York Gallery run by brothers Cesare (ca. 1863–1922) and Ercole (1868–1929) Canessa, who displayed the priestess alongside several other significant Greek and Roman marbles. She was still with the Canessa brothers when they published another catalogue in 1919. However, when Cesare’s estate was sold by the American Art Association in New York on January 25, 1924, and when Ercole’s estate was sold by the same group on March 29, 1930, our priestess doesn’t show up in either catalogue. Presumably, she was sold by the Canessa brothers sometime before their estates were settled. Her location remained a mystery for several decades, as when the priestess was published by Roman art specialist Hans Jucker in 1961, her whereabouts are listed as unknown.
The next reported sighting of the priestess was in the late 1960s. According to a letter in our files, Swiss dealer Alain Moatti (1939–2023) purchased her at that time from the Parisian dealer Étienne Lévy. So, the priestess started out in Paris in 1902, showed up in San Francisco in 1915, maybe landed in New York by 1919, and resurfaced in Paris in the late 1960s. By 2004, she had made her way back to the United States, where Sotheby’s New York sold her as “Property from an American Private Collection.”
We’re happy to give the priestess a permanent home here at the Carlos, but she does still like to get out and about sometimes. If you happen to be in the Houston area this holiday season, be sure to pay our girl a visit!
