Death of Laurent Hugues

Laurent Hugues
Photo : CCRP66-Din Thi Tien-Image Maker

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7/1/25 - Obituary - Laurent Hugues died on 3 January in a fire that destroyed his home in Nîmes. This tragic accident shocked his colleagues at Monuments Historiques, bringing to an end an exemplary career as a curator, which had unfortunately been damaged in recent years by illness, and which I would like briefly to retrace here.

Originally from Nîmes, an art historian trained in Montpellier and Paris (Master’s degree from the University of Paris-IV Sorbonne), and a specialist in 18-th century art and portraiture in particular, he joined the INP in 1993 and was posted to the CRMH in Lyon. In 1996, he joined the Montpellier DRAC, where I had the pleasure of handing over to him the role of curator of historic monuments, which I was then carrying out on my own for the five departments in the region. He succeeded me at the same time in Corsica, as I also had this role. Laurent stayed on until 2014, the year in which he was promoted to Conservateur Général, and was joined by other curators, but always with the same focus on territories that is essential to the field of Monuments Historiques, which sees works of art in their context, often in the places for which they were created, and without separating objects from their function, buildings from their décor, their origin or their route, or their landscape. Yesterday, those with whom he worked, in the Catalan valleys of the Pyrénées-Orientales, or in Lozère, still told me of his availability and presence, his expertise, his exacting standards in carrying out restorations and in respecting the Heritage Law and the role of the State - his own, in this case. With his help, the Pyrénées-Orientales’ rich heritage of movable heritage, with its hundreds of gilded and polychrome altarpieces (I’m thinking in particular of the exceptional group of altarpieces in Espira de Conflent, where he was involved), saw the emergence…