A painting by Charles Valfort acquired by the Musée de la Vie romantique

19/2/24 - Acquisition - Paris, Musée de la Vie romantique - A fascinating representation of an artist’s studio has joined the collections of the Musée de la Vie romantique. Acquired from the Michel Descours gallery in Paris, it is by Charles Valfort, a little-known painter and lithographer. A pupil of Gros, he exhibited at the Paris Salons from 1836 to 1857 and at the Lyon Salons from 1840 to 1858, mainly Orientalist genre scenes inspired by his Mediterranean travels, which he began in 1838 in Italy, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Albania and Malta. Presented at the Salon of 1848, Concert in the Studio most likely depicts the painter’s studio, then installed for another year at no. 3 rue de Ménilmontant. As Gaëlle Rio, the director of the Musée de la Vie romantique, points out in her detailed notice [1], this new painting provides the museum with an illustration of the artistic bohemia of the 1840s, which included the Friday evenings in the rue Chaptal attended by Ary Scheffer and his friends painters, writers and musicians - Eugène Delacroix, George Sand, Frédéric Chopin, Pauline Viardot and Ernest Renan - and for which no representation is known. In this way, it adds to a major theme of the permanent exhibition, which seeks to illustrate the fraternity of the arts in the Romantic period.

: Charles Valfort (1808-1867)
Concert in the Studio, 1847
Oil on canvas - 97.3 x 130 cm
Paris, Musée de la Vie romantique
Photo: Paris, Musée de la Vie romantique; See the image in its page

At the centre of the composition, in full light, take their place a string orchestra, a flautist and a pianist giving a concert under the guidance of a conductor at whose feet a man selects scores from a heap laid out on the floor. The covers of some of the scores bear the names of Jean Rémusat, flutist, Hélène-Jean-Joseph Miramont, flutist, composer and lyricist, and Sylvain Mangeant, operetta composer. As Gaëlle Rio points out, the unusual fact that the names of the composers…

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