Promenades on paper

There’s nothing like a summer on the banks of the Loire to restore your strength after a harsh American winter, even if you might prefer "Promenades on Paper" to "Promenades de papier", especially as the exhibition in Touraine has very little in common with the one at the Clark Art Institute. Yet their - laudable - objective remains similar: to show, at last, little-known sheets from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s famous Prints and Photography Department. Indeed, it is under this overly restrictive name - as two of the exhibition’s curators readily admit at the outset of their interesting essay on the history of these collections, published in the book [1] accompanying the Ligerian exhibition - that the graphic treasures sparingly shown by the venerable institution slumber peacefully. With the regularity of a metronome, it sometimes presents its treasures at events outside the walls of the Richelieu quadrilateral: at the end of 2003, it was the Renaissance that was given pride of place in Barcelona [2] (see article) followed, in spring 2014, by the French 17th century (see article). Nearly a decade later, the 17th-century also deserved to be stripped bare in its turn.

1. François-Joseph Bélanger (1744-1818)
eaumarchais’s Garden, 1788
Watercolour, pen and ink over preparatory pencil sketch - 20.5 x 32.8 cm
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Photo: BnF

See the image in its page

Pleasant as it is, the walk never fails to surprise the curious visitor or the lover of the Age of Enlightenment, who can thus delight, for example, in François Joseph Bélanger’s ’landscape drawing’ immortalising Beaumarchais’s famous garden in Paris (ill. 1), which enabled the man of letters to observe the storming of the Bastille from his terrace. While we are delighted to see that F.-J. Bélanger is becoming better studied (see article), this beautiful leaf has not been shown since the "Jardins romantiques français" exhibition in summer 2011 (see article). A generous lender, the BnF’s Prints Department nevertheless suffers from its lack of visibility outside the naturally rather restricted circle of researchers and specialists. The latter are familiar with the singular history of its collections, inherited from the Ancien Régime, and the names of Michel de Marolles and Roger de Gaignières seem familiar to them. For a wider public, however, a bit of education was in order! This is also the strength of this summer exhibition, a national adaptation of a tour designed for North American visitors: we are not discovering "one hundred masterpieces" from their portfolios, but rather a number of little-known artists, happily embellished with a few curiosities that are sometimes unexpected here.

2. François Boucher (1703-1770)
A Herdsman Fleeing with his Animals, c. 1730-1731
Sanguine - 23.5 x 35 cm
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Photo: BnF

See the image in its page

Enthusiasts can rest…