- Mrs Lyne-Stephens, née Yolande Duvernay (1812-1894), started life as a ballerina and went on to become one of the stars of the Paris Opera. She married Stephens Lyne-Stephens (1801-1860), who inherited the immense family fortune in 1851. She did not collect art before they were married for the simple reason, no doubt, that she was not in a financial position to do so. Their choice of pictures was, as we will see, very much in the goût du temps, and it is tempting to say that it was her taste that moulded the couple’s collection. There are two strong factors that support this claim. First, the fact that Yolande’sname can be found in annotated sales catalogues indicates that she was certainly known to regular buyers in the Parisian art market.Not all the names of purchasers were written in these catalogues, only those of people who could be identified without too much difficulty, so her presence here is significant. Second, Yolande outlived her husband by thirty-four years, during which time she continued to acquire art and, in this period, there was no divergence in taste. Studying this Christie’s 1895 sale catalogue allows one to see very clearly a preference for the historical French and Northern schools of painting. Indeed, out of the group of eighty pictures, twenty-eight were by painters from Northern Europe (Albert Cuyp, Willem van de Velde, etc.) while twenty-four were by French masters (Watteau, Nattier, Lancret, Mme Le Brun), most of them from the eighteenth century.The collection also contained a number of notable early Italian (Murillo, etc.) and Spanish (Velasquez, etc.) pictures. Perhaps surprisingly, given the context, the British School was only represented by four equestrian portraits, which are the only pictures that we know Stephens had acquired before meeting Yolande. The fantastic collections she amassed remained largely hidden for nearly half a century. Although Yolande left very little writing about her collection, upon her death in 1894 her Lynford Hall estate was put up for sale and a sale prospectus drawn up by the land agent Edward Tewson, and the firm of solicitors Tatham and Pym included a description of the house and several contemporary photographs of the interiors. These photographs, together with Yolande’s will in which she talks about her paintings, and the 1895 Christie’s sale catalogue of her collection, are the main documents on het art collection. Lyne-Stephens also fails to feature in most publications dedicated to women art collectors. In : French Taste in Victorian England: The Collection of Yolande Lyne-Stephens. By Laure-Aline Griffith-Jones.