Acquisitions: news from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (2)

3/9/23 - Acquisition - Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts - Our previous news item about the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes (which dealt with restorations and the launch of the online collections database, see here) was published in March. We should have published this one, covering acquisitions for 2022, more quickly.

Last year may not have been as good as previous years - remember that in 2021 the bronze of Louis XIV entered the museum (see the news item of 18/2/22), and so did several works from Bruno Foucart’s collection (see the news item of 3/6/21) - and unlike 2023 when several important works have been acquired which we will talk about very soon, it was not a blank year. In addition to a very fine old master drawing, and a revolutionary-era portrait with its preparatory drawing, there is a sketch by the Breton painter Alphonse Le Henaff, very much in the spirit of the Foucart donation, and no fewer than eighteen drawings by Louis-Marie Baader, another artist from the region who was the subject of a retrospective exhibition in Morlaix in 2012 (see the news item). We’ll be talking about this group in a third short article to come.

1. Jean-Baptiste Corneille (1649-1695)
The Presentation at the Temple
Pen, brown ink, grey ink, wash - 17 x 21.2 cm
Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Photo: J.-M. Salingue (public domain)

See the image in its page

We will begin chronologically with a drawing donated by Nicolas Schwed: a Presentation at the Temple by Jean-Baptiste Corneille (ill. 1) of which we do not know the definitive work that it is probably preparing. For biographical information on this artist, son of Michel Corneille the Elder and brother of Michel Corneille the Younger, we refer to this article by Moana Weil-Curiel published on this site in 2012.
Drawings by Jean-Baptiste Corneille, with his very typical handwriting, are not numerous, and are even rarer to come on to the market. Despite the importance of its graphic art collection, including…