The reopening of the Musée de la Vie Romantique

We were very concerned about the works carried out at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, which reopened its doors two months ago. It turns out that the result is rather satisfactory, even if it could have been even better.

One of the positive points is the number of works on display. Since its opening more than forty years ago, the museum’s holdings have been greatly enriched. It was once heavily dependent on numerous loans, in particular from the Dordrecht Museum, which holds a large collection of works by Ary Scheffer. Today, its collections are substantial and of high quality, allowing a broad selection of Romantic works to be shown, including sculpture, painting and drawings, many of them recent acquisitions already mentioned here (see les articles).
The interior layout (ill. 1), even if some regret the one that originally accompanied its creation, is quite successful, apart from one or two digital installations that could easily have been dispensed with.

One may regret the colour of the shutters, whose green formerly combined with ochre, and which are now brown (ill. 2 and 3). We are told that the green was not original, and that the new shade was imposed by the chief architect of historic monuments (ACMH). We are willing to believe that this is indeed the colour that existed in the nineteenth century, even if we are often sceptical about the explanations provided by the ACMH (let us recall, for example, Versailles or Fontainebleau…). Yet it is still rather amusing to be told that one is restoring the original state when half of the building on the left has been raised by one storey (ill. 4), in order to…