Who does not know Versailles, its castle, its galleries and its immense royal garden crossed by inspired groves and ingenious fountains?
Certainly not its visitors, who were more than 8 million to travel annually, before the pandemic, the former royal residence.
How many knows that Versailles is also home to a remarkable graphic arts cabinet?
Confidential - and inaccessible to the public outside of exhibitions - this treasure of rare leaves and fragile works has been on display since the beginning of summer, and until October 3, with its most beautiful recent acquisitions.
From royal splendor to perpetual palatial changes, nearly four centuries pass by to meet the contemporary public.
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Installed in the former apartments of Madame de Maintenon, in the middle of what we now call the rooms of the Empire, the exhibition highlights the most beautiful pieces to have joined the cabinet of graphic arts since the beginning of the 2000s. The date was not chosen at random: it corresponds to the first appointment of a dedicated curator at the head of the collection. On site, the highlighting of these acquisitions only illuminates a half-shadow. The subdued light of these exhibition apartments, much quieter than the eternal bustle of neighboring salons, is apt to make the many palettes of gouaches, pastels, black chalk and red chalk assembled for the occasion emerge from the walls.This atmosphere of tranquility lends itself perfectly to a tête-à-tête with the figures of the Court captured to life, to the discovery of dazzling studies prepared for the painted decorations of the palace, and to the quiet contemplation of the arborescences of architectural planks.
François Lemoyne (1688-1737),
Head Study for Love of Virtue in the Apotheosis of Hercules
, circa 1733, pastel, three pencils and stump on formerly blue paper.
RMN-GP (Palace of Versailles) / Franck Raux
Versailles as we have never seen it
The common feature of all these heterogeneous and disparate acquisitions is a simple and radiant clarity: it is about Versailles, both the castle and the curial synecdoche. The royal residence is given over to admiration from a variety of angles, from the most agreed-upon plans to the most daring angles, through numerous sketchy sketches of its gardens, an abundance of drawings depicting its facades and a waterfall. rigorous plans, signed for some by foreigners eager to reproduce in their country the beautiful system of André Le Nôtre. The
Album of plans and views of the Petit Trianon
of Marie Antoinette is there particularly highlighted, its inaccessible content evoked by a small video device and some planks extracted. Classified as a National Treasure, it was acquired in 2015.
Richard Mique and Claude-Louis Châtelet,
Album of plans and views of Trianon bearing the arms of Marie-Antoinette
RMN-GP (Palace of Versailles) / Franck Raux
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In addition to the faithful reproductions of the palace we know, eyes stop with pleasure in front of some curiosities and daring, projections of a Versailles as we have never seen it, or too little. A Versailles of a beehive with coaches here, a Versailles with a view and a bird's eye view there. A section of the route looks back on the many proposed or aborted development projects, such as a semicircular colonnade gaillarde - Saint-Pierre de Rome style - imagined by Marie Joseph Peyre (1730-1785), for the main courtyard . On another wall, the absurd silhouette of the ephemeral barracks of the French guards surprises: the anonymous ink and watercolor of 1780 presents a building completely covered with an immense ticking like a monumental tent. Now gone, thebuilding stood on the Place d'Armes.
Anonymous,
The Barracks of the French Guards on the Place d'Armes of the Palace of Versailles
, built by Louis François Trouard, circa 1780, ink and watercolor on paper, H. 12.8;
L. 28.2 cm Palace of Versailles / C.
Crazy
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The heart of the exhibition leads its spectators to the discovery of a castle in the process of metamorphosis, with a series of marvelous preparatory drawings for the palatial decorations. A miracle of precision and voluptuousness, the study of
The Head of Love of Virtue
by François Lemoyne (1688-1737) - which serves as the frontispiece of the exhibition - emerges at the edge of a room. This little pastel, with three pencils and a stump, made around 1733 for the apotheotic ceiling of the Salon d'Hercules, was pre-empted last year by the Musée de Versailles. Everything does not turn, however, only around the 17th and 18th centuries, as can be seen from a study by Horace Vernet (1789-1863) for his
Battle of Isly.
- exhibited in the Salle du Maroc - or the work that closes the course, a dazzling pastel by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865-1953), between intoxication of mother-of-pearl and green coulis of May.
Anonymous,
Washerwomen at the Swiss lake, in front of the Orangery of the Palace of Versailles
, circa 1780-1790 brown ink, H. 14;
L. 19.5 cm Palace of Versailles / C. Fouin
In the end, between the profuse evocations of architectures and gardens, not to mention the alignments of miniatures, allegories and completed or incomplete portraits, the exhibition never fascinates as much as at the turn of its few gems of humor. . The surprise comes at the example of an anonymous drawing in brown ink. Seized on the eve of the Revolution, it represents a trivial scene: washerwomen at work in the Swiss pond, near the Orangery, in front of the overhanging, proud and distant mass of the castle, this other world. A succulent little caricature signed around 1747 of the Dauphin of Louis XV himself forms another of these unsuspected pictorial celebrations. Representing the austere and curved profile of an unfortunate Franciscan,the drawing would actually represent the Duchess of Brancas, the famous ugly woman and lady of honor to Marie-Thérèse of Spain, the first wife of young Louis. In Versailles itself, twisted passions sometimes prevail over the nobility of the stones.
“Drawings for Versailles, Twenty Years of Acquisitions”, at the Palace of Versailles (78), until October 3. Catalog edited by Élisabeth Maisonnier, 376 pages, € 45.