A retable group preempted by Cluny

4/7/25 - Acquisition - Paris, Musée de Cluny - Offered for sale by the Giquello auction house on Wednesday 18 June at the Hôtel Drouot, a retable group in oak (ill. 1) was preempted by the Musée de Cluny after being sold for €19,500 (fees included). It joins in the museum’s collections three other polychrome sculpted groups connected to the retable of the miraculous story of the Holy House (Santa Casa) of Loreto (ill. 2 to 4), from which it is also believed to originate, as indicated in the auction house’s and the Musée national du Moyen Âge’s notes [1].

1. Île-de-France or Beauvaisis, first quarter of the 16th century
Retable relief: The Adoration of the Holy House of Loreto
Oak - 48 x 41 cm
Paris, Musée de Cluny
Photo: RMN-GP

See the image in its page

These three reliefs, acquired by the museum in 1939 from a private individual, are believed to come from the Cistercian abbey of Notre-Dame d’Ourscamp, not far from Noyon in the Oise region. This provenance was given to the museum by the seller, André Delacourt, who had it from his uncle, Achille Peigné-Delacourt, a member of the Société des Antiquaires de Picardie and author of a monograph on the abbey of Ourscamp. He had acquired the reliefs in 1830. According to him, they had been donated to the church of Bailly (between Noyon and Ourscamp) by a local resident who had bought them in 1792 as national property. As for the fourth relief recently acquired, its provenance before it entered the photographic archives of the Demotte gallery – active in both Paris and New York – in the early 20th century is unknown. It later appeared in a private English collection before first being offered at auction at Sotheby’s in London in July 1988. A major difference is that the new group shows no trace of polychromy, unfortunately stripped, at the latest in the early 20th century.

2. Île-de-France or Beauvaisis, first quarter of the 16th century
Retable relief: The Miraculous Transport of the…