The Lost World of James Smithson by Heather Ewing

Author:Heather Ewing [Ewing, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596917798
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2007-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Vivant Denon in Kassel examining pictures to take back to Paris for the Musee Napoleonienne (the Louvre), 1807.

By the beginning of November 1806 the French had taken Kassel. Prince Wilhelm fled up into the Schleswig-Holstein peninsula, to his brother's castle at Gottorf. His abandoned citizens watched as a French general installed himself in the palace. In January 1807 Dominique-Vivant Denon, the acclaimed head of the Musee Napoleonienne and one of the savants who'd accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, arrived in Kassel to survey the pictures. Fresh from his plunder of the royal collections at Potsdam and Berlin, where he had also stripped the Brandenburg Gate of its golden quadriga, he found an unexpected world of riches in Kassel. Over the course of nearly a month a delighted Denon selected his spoils from the picture gallery and the Fridericianum and shipped the material off to Paris.40

Where Smithson spent the winter of 1806-7 is a mystery. Only one clue sheds any light: a pamphlet in his collection on the November sack of Lübeck.41 It recounts the final chapter in the humiliating destruction of Prussia, the story of how Blücher, unable to cross the Elbe and driven back by the French, took refuge in the free Hanseatic city of Lübeck, only to see the town invaded and pillaged. Was Smithson there? Why did he own this particular pamphlet? And why, if he had already made his way up into Schleswig-Holstein, did he not decide finally to brave the North Sea and attempt the journey home?

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