17/4/23 - Acquisitions - Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts - Like the Musée Fabre, the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans is so active in terms of acquisitions that we find it difficult to keep up with its news. And as we have written many times before, museums that work are often rewarded for their efforts by donations, which further enrich their collections.
We were just about to finish a short article about the museum’s preemptions at the Talabardon & Gautier sale (it will appear soon). But we have received information that the Jean Bardin retrospective that we have mentioned twice on this site (see this article and this one) has been followed by two donations of paintings that were on display in the exhibition and will therefore remain in the museum. A drawing, which was also on display, was acquired from the Aaron Gallery. We reproduced this sheet and the two paintings in our review.
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- 1. Jean Siméon Berthélémy (1743-1811)
Tullia Passing Her Chariot over the Body of her Father, 1765
Oil on canvas - 112 x 142 cm
Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Photo : MBO - See the image in its page
The first painting offered is not by Jean Bardin, but by Jean-Simon Berthélémy (ill. 1). It is Tullia Passing his Chariot Over the Body of her Father, his entry in the 1765 Prix de Rome competition of which Bardin was the winner. The work was donated by Nathalie and Christian Volle, Nathalie Volle being a specialist in the painter to whom she dedicated an Arthena monograph in 1979.
Berthélémy was born in Laon, the son of a woodcarver who sent him to Paris to study painting in Noël Hallé’s studio. Although he failed several times in the competition, he finally obtained the consecration so desired in 1767 with Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot. Although he died during the Empire, his style shows few traces of neoclassicism, remaining faithful to the style of his youth, between rococo and Rubenian baroque, until the end of his life (he hardly painted at all).
The painting donated to the museum shows Tullia driving the chariot herself, contrary to the text of Titus Livius from which the subject of the competition was inspired. It differs in this respect from that of Bardin, of which Orléans has kept a sketch and from that of Ménageot, another unsuccessful candidate who won the supreme prize the following year.
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- 2. Jean Bardin (1732-1809)
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia
Oil on canvas - 44.8 x 90.6 cm
Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Photo : MBO - See the image in its page
A second painting (ill. 2), a sketch this time and by Jean Bardin, was offered to the museum by Philippe d’Arcy, a collector and expert from Lyon. It will join the four paintings already in the museum’s possession, a small number considering that the artist spent the last twenty-three years of his life in Orléans.
Although he was present in Rome between 1768 and 1772 at the Académie de France, no works dating from this period were known. This one, thought to have been painted by Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, was attributed to him on the occasion of the exhibition, and dated to the end of his stay in Rome, or shortly thereafter. Frédéric Jiméno, the curator of the Orléans exhibition, to whom we owe this rediscovery, writes that "we find in it the painter’s usual features, the stocky proportions of the bodies and the schematism of the faces". He also underlines the kinship of this composition with those of the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton, who was present in Rome at the same time as him.
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- 3. Jean Bardin (1732-1809)
The Triumph of Amphitrite, c. 1787
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, red wash and gouache highlights - 32.7 x 51.2 cm
Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Photo : MBO - See the image in its page
The drawing purchased from the Aaron Gallery, on the other hand, dates from Jean Bardin’s period in Orleans. It represents The Triumph of Amphitrite (ill. 3) and we had also - like the two paintings offered - reproduced it in our review. We noted there that it was directly inspired by comparable compositions (triumphs of marine divinities) by François Boucher and, above all, Noël-Nicolas Coypel with The Abduction of Europa in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.