EXHIBITION THE TRIP TO ITALY BY LOUIS GAUFFIER

Don't miss the exhibition "Le Voyage en Italie de Louis Gauffier" from May 7 to September 4, 2022!

This summer exhibition at the Musée Fabre, organized in collaboration with the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, is the first devoted to the career of Louis Gauffier, a late 18th century painter.

Born in Poitiers in 1762, Louis Gauffier is one of those European artists for whom Italy was a land of choice. Winner of the Prix de Rome in 1784, he discovered the Eternal City and its remains, then Florence and Tuscany from 1793, until his early death in 1801.

The painter deploys his art both in mythological and biblical subjects, portraits and landscape. At the dawn of the 19th century, he offered new formulas of great originality, intimate and poetic, which distinguished him from his contemporaries.

The singular charm of his paintings explains the rich representation of the painter in French and international museums, which support the Fabre Museum exhibition with their loans: Uffizi Museum in Florence, Kenwood House in London, National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Minneapolis Art Institute, Fine Art Museums in San Francisco, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

It was in Italy, in Rome and then in Florence, that Louis Gauffier and François-Xavier Fabre became comrades and friends. The care with which Fabre collected works by his friend after his early death explains today the very fine representation of Gauffier at the Montpellier museum, whose exhibition will allow you to discover the richness of his career.

The route of the exhibition

The exhibition shows through chronological and thematic sections the evolution of Gauffier's career, both in the neoclassical language that he develops in his history paintings, marked by a great archaeological curiosity as by a soft sentimentalism, or still in its innovative taste for the landscape, featuring the European aristocracy of the Grand Tour setting out to discover Tuscany.

This retrospective will also put the artist in perspective with his contemporaries, be they his French comrades, Drouais, Gagneraux and especially Fabre, but also with the Italian artistic context deeply marked by painters from all over Europe and in which Gauffier fits, especially in his portraits and landscapes. The visitor will be invited to a real discovery of the Italy of the Grand Tour.

Rates

Access

Tramway / streetcar line : Lignes 1 et 2 arrêt Comédie

Opening

From 07/05/2022 to 04/09/2022