Le visage de l’histoire : le portrait au musée historique

Abstract

Portraits make up for more than two-thirds of the collections displayed in the historical museum founded by Louis-Philippe at Versailles in the early 1830s. They reveal both how much Louis-Philippe was inspired by the portrait galleries he visited as a young man (at the Palais-Royal, in Eu, at the Tuileries and so on) and what his aspirations and ambitions – whether they succeeded or not – at Versailles were. Far from constituting a coherent whole, the portrait collection included older and contemporary works, which were either removed from their original location or commissioned for Versailles from both renowned masters and second-rank artists. A subset of the collection is especially significant in terms of how the collections were assembled: copies and casts. Since they represent two-thirds of the portrait collection, they must be treated as an integral component of the historical galleries. Those casts were mainly executed by a dedicated workshop at the Louvre, whose head scoured France (and other parts of Western Europe) to gather copies from well-known funerary monuments, at a time when numerous initiatives led to the exploration and inventorying of remarkable French monuments. Public opinion of the historical museum of Versailles was divided, torn between harsh criticisms of the artificial grouping of disparate artworks and an emotional acknowledgment of the very personal connection between visitors and portraits of ancestors or historical figures encountered during revolutionary or Napoleonic battles.

Keywords

• Versailles
• collections history
• portrait gallery
• Louis-Philippe
• Musée d’Histoire de France
• casts