It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
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Testament de Jeanne Mance, le recto
Jeanne Mance (November 12, 1606 – June 18, 1673) was a French nurse and settler of New France. She arrived in New France two years after the Ursuline Nuns came to Quebec. Among the founders of Montreal, Canada in 1642, she established its first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, in 1645. She returned twice to France to seek financial support for the hospital. After providing most of the care directly for years, in 1657 she recruited three sisters of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, and continued to direct operations of the hospital.
Jules Breton (1827-1906) : Bénédiction des Blés en Artois (1857).
Presented at the 1857 Salon, at the same time as Millet’s Gleaners, this enormous painting won Jules Breton a second class medal. This was a mark of official recognition for the still youthful artist, and the work was even purchased by the State for the Musée du Luxembourg. It has to be said that this portrayal of rustic life is very pleasant compared to Millet’s more Realist vision.
The scene depicts a Rogation procession which takes place three days before Ascension. In the countryside around Courrières, Breton’s native village, young girls wearing their first communion dresses, clergy and local dignitaries, walk around the fields to attract Heaven’s blessing on future harvests. The scene highlights the important role of Christianity in rural life.
The artist produced many accurate studies of clothes and faces for this work. He chose a composition in the style of a frieze, reminiscent of Courbet’s Burial at Ornans. But whereas Courbet dealt with a contemporary subject in a very bold way, life-sized figures were usually only to be found in history painting, Breton portrays his characters in a small format, thus retaining the idiom of the genre scene. It was this anecdotal aspect of his work that brought him great success in France and in America. When he became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1886, Breton was regarded as the official artist of rural life.
Enseigne de pèlerinage, Saint Côme et Saint Damien, Ile de France, 15e siècle.
Pilgrimage sign, with Saint Cosmas and Damian - both of them holding a salve box in their right hand (the two brothers were physicians).
Medallion with the Crucifixion, ca. 1100
France (Conques)
Gilt copper, cloisonné and champlevé enamelDiam. 4 1/8 in. (10.3 cm)
Purchase, Michel David-Weill Gift, and 2006 Benefit Fund, 2007 (2007.189)
This precious medallion of the Crucifixion is, astonishingly, the missing centerpiece of four enameled plaques with symbols that the Museum acquired from the Morgan collection in 1917. The ensemble, probably from a book cover, can be securely attributed to the celebrated pilgrimage abbey of Saint Foy in Conques. Because of its location in the mountains of central France, much of the abbey’s precious goldsmiths’ work escaped destruction during the French Revolution. Several works in copper were dispersed from the abbey’s treasury over the course of the nineteenth century. The Crucifixion medallion shares with these and others still in situ a technique, style, and palette uniquely combined during the abbacy of Bégon III in the late eleventh century. For these pieces, the monk goldsmiths employed superimposed copper plaques, the lower one to receive the delicate cloisons that define features and drapery, the upper one cut to delineate the silhouettes of the figures and the cross. Hallmarks of the style include the single cloison used to define eyebrows and noses and the thin loop of gold that creates cowlicks. In the Museum’s reconstituted ensemble, the same remarkable oxblood color was used for the symbol of Saint Luke and the hair of the image of the Sun (“Sol”) above the Crucifixion. Furthermore, scientific analysis has determined that common enamel compositions and the same metallic oxides were used to tint and opacify all five pieces.
Plan du monastère de Port-Royal-des-Champs d’après une gravure de Magdeleine Hortemels
Louise-Magdeleine Horthemels, or Louise-Madeleine Hortemels, also called Magdeleine Horthemels (1686 – 2 October 1767), was a French engraver, the mother of Charles-Nicolas Cochin. She is also sometimes credited under her married name of Louise Madeleine Cochin or Madeleine Cochin.
Horthemels was active in Paris as an engraver for nearly fifty years and produced more than sixty signed copper plates.
Her first published work was a frontispiece for Alain-René Lesage’s novel Le Diable boiteux(fr) (1707), which she signed Magdeleine Horthemels fec. Her later work is signed variously Magd. Horthemels, L. Mag. Horthemels, M. Horthemels, Magd. Horthemels Sponsa C. Cochin, and Magdeleine Cochin.
It was long believed that Louise-Magdeleine and her sisters Marie-Nicole and Marie-Anne-Hyacinthe all signed work Marie Horthemels, but a careful study has shown that the signed work of the sisters can easily be distinguished. Nevertheless, the members of the family commonly worked together on a single composition.
Louise-Magdeleine Horthemels engraved paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Charles Le Brun, Antoine Coypel, Michel Corneille the Younger, Claude Vignon, and Nicolas Lancret,and produced illustrations for a history of the Hôtel des Invalides and for a history of the Languedoc, in collaboration with her husband Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Elder. She designed a series of twenty-three plates depicting the nuns of the abbey of Port-Royal and their everyday life. The abolition of the abbey had been ordered by a bull of Pope Clement XI in September 1708, the remaining nuns were forcibly removed in 1709, and most of the buildings were razed to the ground in 1710, on the orders of the Conseil du Roi of King Louis XIV.
Horthemels completed a great plate called Le feu d’artifice de la place de Navone, after Giovanni Pannini, which had been begun by her son Charles Nicolas Cochin. She also engraved portraits, such as a copper engraving of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, after an early eighteenth century painting by her brother-in-law Alexis Simon Belle.
In the early work of Horthemels as an engraver, there is a certain rigidity of line, while architectural detail is emphasized. However, her skill lay in engraving the work of others so that their genius was revealed and her own style was suppressed. Her hand was sure, and her work shows a delicacy and clarity of touch which were much admired in her own time.
Le théologien et réformateur français Jean Calvin (1509-1564). École flamande. Portrait de Jean Calvin jeune (Portrait of Young John Calvin).
Jean Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530. After religious tensions provoked a violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where he published the first edition of his seminal work The Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536.
Retable de la Vie de la ViergeDescription :Vers 1500-1510 ; provient de la Chartreuse Saint-Honoré-de-Thuison (Abbeville)Ecole : Ecole françaiseCrédit photographique : (C) RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-Gilles BerizziPériode : 16e siècle@credits
Eglise troglodytique de Haute-Isle, Val d’Oise
Photo : Didier Rykner
Carved in 1670 into the chalk cliffs, at the expense of Nicolas Dongois the land owner, this building (which strictly speaking was not “built”, except for the bell tower) has a very simple layout, with only one vaulted nave in a barrel arch. Its wealth comes from its remarkable wood furnishings consisting in a pulpit, also carved into the wall and, above all, a sculpted choir enclosure and altarpiece of very high quality. This is not really surprising since, initially, the furnishings were intended for the chapel of the Palais de Justice in Rouen
