French drawings from French private collections

An exhibition consists of a curatorial thesis, works of art, exhibition design, and a catalogue. For an exhibition to be truly successful, all these elements must be equally accomplished. The exhibition currently presented by the Musée de Picardie meets this requirement perfectly.

The exhibition’s premise may be summed up by the provenance of the works: they are all drawings preserved in private collections, and are therefore largely unfamiliar, many of them even previously unpublished. Yet beyond this lies a genuine art-historical argument, offering a survey of French drawing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The works are not merely relevant to the subject: they have been carefully selected and, for the most part, are of outstanding quality.
The exhibition design is simply flawless. Despite the challenges posed by the museum’s exceptionally large exhibition gallery — a lofty space better suited to hanging paintings than to the intimate presentation that drawings require — the museum’s staff (everything having been produced in-house) devised a serpentine route using partitions echoing the panelling motifs of the walls, ideally suited to the display of the works (ill. 1).
Finally, there is the catalogue, in which every sheet is analysed in detail through comprehensive entries written by several specialists, including the exhibition’s three curators.

It should be recalled that Patrick Ramade, former director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, now retired, and Nicolas Schwed, a dealer in Old Master…