A new watercolour by Marie-Désiré Bourgoin acquired by the Musée d’Orsay

15/4/26 - Acquisition - Paris, Musée d’Orsay - In a vast high-ceilinged room, whose every piece of furniture is laden with objects, plants, mail or studies, is depicted an elderly woman entirely dressed in black, seated, in profile, in an armchair, facing a bed made up like an altar, covered and edged with honorary objects, an Academician’s sword and a grand cross sash of the Legion of Honour, a painter’s palette, portraits and branches of boxwood or olive. Emerging from these effigies, a well-known canvas, presented on an easel, Ernest Meissonier’s final self-portrai today preserved at the Musée d’Orsay, old man with long white double-pointed beard resuming the pose of an earlier composition, that of the Philosophe of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles. Such is the subject,…