Une vente secrète en 1765 : la correspondance inédite entre Pierre Paul Louis Randon de Boisset (1709-1776) et le marquis de Voyer d'Argenson (1722-1782)

In 1765, Marquis de Voyer d'Argenson, Lieutenant General of the King's armies, proposed to Randon de Boisset, Receiver of Finances of the Generality of Lyon, living in Paris, to sell him a certain number of paintings and objects of his collection. It was a private transaction, unknown for a long time, which has been revealed to us by an unpublished correspondence between these two great collectors, kept in the University Libraries of Poitiers, in the Argenson archives. Similar to a lively conversation, these letters dated between the 14 th and the 18 th March, 1765 introduce us into the machinations of this secret sale, with its inevitable bargaining over the price and value of the objects. One witnesses the different stages of the transaction, concerning certain pieces of furniture and china, but above all eight paintings of the Northern schools some of which have been identified: two by Van Huysum, two by Gerard Dou (including the Portrait of the artist with a palette in his hand of the Louvre), two by Metsu, a 'Velvet' Breughel, a Teniers. Thus revealed by these unpublished letters, printed in an Annexe to this article, is the constitution of Boisset's cabinet, much less well known than that of its dispersal, after the collector's death, in a public sale in Paris, in 1777. Cahier 8.