A Collection From Napoleon III’s Dentist, Now on View at Penn

The University of Pennsylvania is showcasing overlooked bequests from Thomas W. Evans, a 19th-century dentist to European royalty.
Dr. Evans, a Philadelphia native, settled in Paris in the early 1840s and made a fortune pulling teeth and making gold fillings while also investing in real estate. After Dr. Evans died in 1897, Penn’s dental school inherited his estate, including Manet paintings and gold Napoleonic knickknacks. Last week highlights of the collection, which had been scattered for five decades among offices and storage spaces at Penn, went on display in the university’sArthur Ross Gallery.
The exhibition, “Courtly Treasures: The Collection of Thomas W. Evans, Surgeon Dentist to Napoleon III,” running through Nov. 8, includes portraits and statuettes depicting French and Russian rulers, and gold Swiss- and Prussian-made pocket watches studded with diamonds. A black carriage, built in Paris in the 1860s and newly restored by Amish artisans, bears Dr. Evans’s monogram on the doors. In 1870, after Napoleon III’s forces surrendered to the Prussians and the government collapsed, the Empress Eugénie fled Paris inside the carriage. She had persuaded the dentist to drive her to the northern French coast, where a British sympathizer was waiting with a yacht to take her to exile in England.

Dr. Evans recalled in his memoir that they passed various royal palaces: “The very road we were traveling had been a via dolorosa in the history of the Bonaparte family.”
Lynn Marsden-Atlass, Penn’s university curator, and Denis F. Kinane, the dean of Penn’s School of Dental Medicine, led a five-year effort to track down Dr. Evans’s artworks and objects. Ms. Marsden-Atlass said that Dr. Evans’s elite clients “paid him in fabulous objects.” His wife, Agnes, received jewelry, including a diamond-and-emerald bracelet from Eugénie. Manet dedicated a still life of flowers in a crystal vase to “my friend, the Dr. Evans.”

Manet’s mistress and muse Méry Laurent, an actress, also carried on a long affair with Dr. Evans; he supported her in extravagant homes.

After his death, Dr. Evans’s family contested his will. Penn spent years battling family members, and eventually prevailed. Penn used the inheritance to establish the Thomas W. Evans Museum and Dental Institute School of Dentistry. Its galleries, which opened in 1915, closed in 1967.
The collection languished to the point that gold vessels, encrusted with dirt, were mistaken for pewter. In the 1980s, Penn auctioned some of the bequeathed paintings and objects. Two Manet still lifes, including the floral vase scene, sold for about $1 million each. The show’s catalog illustrates and analyzes the painting, which now belongs to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
More Evans material has recently surfaced: a descendant of a lawyer who helped settle the Evans estate has donated papers related to the inheritance battle.

Correction: July 25, 2015 

Because of an editing error, a report in the Antiques column on Friday about an exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania titled “Courtly Treasures: The Collection of Thomas W. Evans, Surgeon Dentist to Napoleon III” misidentified the academic position that Denis F. Kinane holds at the university. He is the dean of the school of dental medicine, not the school of medicine. The article also erroneously included one item among those on exhibit. A still-life painting by Édouard Manet that belonged to Evans can be seen only in the exhibition catalog; it is not in the show.