Rothschild homage to ancien régime goes on display

The decadent fashions of 18th-century France continued to fascinate art collectors long after the French Revolution, among them the Rothschild banking dynasty. Now a collection of 75 drawings, many of them depicting the ancien régime which was in place before 1789, is to be shown in public for the first time.

It is also the first time that the drawings, ranging from scandalous scenes of the French aristocracy to costume designs and intricate architectural drawings, have left Waddesdon Manor – the country mansion built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to house his oustanding collection of artefacts. The images will go on show in the new Theatres of Life exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London.

Because of their delicate condition, the Rothschild drawings are normally stored away in the private rooms at Waddesdon – the French Renaissance-style château that Baron Ferdinand had built between 1874 and 1889 on a hilltop overlooking the Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. The exhibition includes works by some of the most important French artists of the 18th century, including Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Nicolas Lancret, Augustin and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and François Boucher.

While the collection is eclectic – the Rothschilds delighted in the unusual – it is unified by a fascination with 18th-century life and morals, particularly in France, which was considered the arbiter of fashion throughout Europe. There is a series of drawings by Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger, who became court painter to King Louis XV in 1770. Entitled Suite d'éstampes pour server à l'histoire des moeurs et du costume des François dans le dix-huitième siècle, it shows well-dressed ladies and gentlemen flirting at the theatre and over supper.

Despite the questionable morals of the subjects, the drawings were sold as prints to show off the fashions of the day, in the same way as a modern-day magazine photoshoot. Most of the original drawings were amassed by Edmond de Rothschild (1845-1934), of the French branch of the family, who kept his vast collection in portfolios in the library of his house in Paris. His son James inherited Waddesdon from his cousin Alice, the sister of the widowed and childless Baron Ferdinand.

The later drawings show how the French fascination with the pre-revolutionary days continued into the 19th century. Eugène Louis Lami's The Orgy (1853), imagines a debauched party held at Versailles by Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, and depicts drunken women, one with a leopard print overskirt and grapes in her hair, and another tumbling to the floor, dropping her glass.

The curator of the exhibition, Juliet Carey, said: "The sweetness of life, the sense of the fleeting pleasures and ephemeral delights of pre-Revolution life are a real preoccupation of the Rothschild collectors."

Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection, The Wallace Collection, London, 8 November -27 January 2008