A new Daret for Marseille

4/2/25 - Acquisition - Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts - Spring sometimes comes early to Marseille, whose museums were represented at the Louviers auction house, where a large, well-known painting (ill. 1) by Jean Daret was sold on Sunday. It was immediately preempted after being sold for €105,000, i.e. €133,350 including costs. It was in Aix-en-Provence that this Allegory of Spring was unveiled in 1978, at the famous exhibition "Painting in Provence in the 17th-century", where the artist featured prominently with fifteen paintings and more than twenty drawings, as Pierre Rosenberg pointed out in his preface to the catalogue of the Jean Daret retrospective organised by the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence last summer (see article). The Allegory of Spring was exhibited there opposite…