The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille is home to one of the
most impressive art collections in France, aside from the museums of
Paris, but it is little known, and its treasures have remained largely
unstudied. Originally part of a network of regional museums established
in 1801 by Napoleon, through a fortuitous combination of historical
circumstances, its geographical location, and the intercession of a
handful of devoted patrons and gifted curators over the next century,
the Musée des Beaux-Arts has evolved into one of the leading French art
museums. Its splendid late-nineteenth-century building is currently
undergoing renovation—an event that has provided The Metropolitan Museum
of Art with a unique opportunity to borrow a selection of Lille's most
important paintings and drawings and to present them to the American
public. This volume, which complements that exhibition, is the first
scholarly publication in decades to be devoted to the history of the
Lille museum and to its collections.
The nearly one hundred works
of art included highlight over forty of the museum's celebrated
paintings and about fifty examples from its remarkable drawings cabinet.
Peter Paul Rubens and other Flemish painters are well represented
because Lille was a Flemish city until 1667, when it was recaptured by
France—Ruben's great Descent from the Cross was ordered by the
Capuchin convent in Lille in 1617. Major French and Spanish paintings
were acquired first under Napoleon and then by such outstanding curators
as Édouard Reynart, who was Director of the Museum from 1841 to 1879.
It was Reynart who encouraged the purchase of Delacroix's newly
completed Medea About to Murder Her Children, Jacques-Louis David's Belisarius Begging Alms, and the pair of large canvases by Goya contrasting youth and old age (a detail of one of these, Time,
is reproduced on the cover). There is also a special section of local
Lille artists, and five sculptural reliefs, one of which is by
Donatello. Many of the spectacular drawings in the Musée des Beaux-Arts
were assembled by the Lille painter Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Wicar, a pupil
of David and Napoleon's agent in Florence, and left to the city in 1834.
Not only is the collection rich in examples by Raphael, Pontormo, and
other Italian masters, but among the drawings by French artists are six
preparatory studies, as well as the oil sketch, for Delacroix's Medea.
Each
of the works is discussed in an entry by a specialist at the
Metropolitan Museum or the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Every text is
accompanied by a full-color reproduction and often by color details or
by black-and-white illustrations of comparative objects; many are shown
in color for the first time. The book is introduced by a panoramic
survey of the evolution of the modern museum by the eminent French
cultural historian Marc Fumaroli. This is followed by an essay by
Arnauld Brejon de Lavergne, Chief Curator of the Musée des Beaux-Arts,
which explores key developments in the history and formation of its
collections. Walter Liedtke, Curator in the Department of European
Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum and author of most of the entries
on the Dutch, Flemish, and seventeenth-century French paintings,
provides a comprehensive overview of all of the European paintings in
the Lille museum. William M. Griswold, Assistant Curator in the
Department of Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum and author of the
majority of the drawings entries, presents the reader with the full
scope of the drawings collection in Lille. Full details of provenance,
footnotes, exhibition history, and literature round out each catalogue
entry, and, in addition, a List of Exhibitions, a Selected Bibliography,
and an Index are included. Although addressed to an educated lay
audience, this handsome volume will serve as a standard reference work
for art historians and scholars alike.
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