HERE’S A GOOD piece on two artists, Eugène Delacroix and Aristide Maillol, and their eponymous museums in Paris. Neither museum is ever especially crowded, but each is rewarding. I am an especially big fan of Maillol’s 1905 La Méditerranée bronze in the Musée Maillol. Happily you can also see this sculpture in the Musée d’Orsay, which has both a marble version (a copy made during Maillol’s lifetime) and a bronze (a recent cast). The original limestone statue is in Switzerland.
CATHARINE REYNOLDS, introduced previously, was a contributing editor at Gourmet, where this piece originally appeared. Reynolds recently wrote to give me a great recommendation for a restaurant near both museums profiled here: Café Varenne (36 rue de Varenne, 7ème / +33 01 45 48 62 72). “Diane Johnson has been spotted there more than once, alongside all the pols from the Matignon. The food’s the best of home and the regional wines well chosen and sometimes surprising.”
EVEN THE MOST devoted art connoisseurs can find the Grand Louvre and its ilk just that: big, not to say exhausting. Paris’s small museums—often devoted to the works of a single artist—come as a welcome antidote, offering a keyhole view of creators and their creations.
For me, none is more evocative than the Musée National Eugène Delacroix, tucked in the square on the leafy rue de Furstenberg, a backwater of the sixth arrondissement north of the Église Saint-Germain. Visitors quickly recognize it as the location chosen by director Martin Scorsese for the final, bittersweet scene in The Age of Innocence.
The setting admirably suited Eugène Delacroix, that prolific Romantic giant of mid-nineteenth-century painting, whom Théophile Gautier lauded as a fiery, savage, passionate artist who “depicted the anxieties and aspirations of our period.” Delacroix lived the last five years of his life behind the green gates in the northwest corner of the square.
Delacroix’s color merchant, Étienne-François Haro, had in 1857 located the apartment, with its parade of six rooms caught between an eighteenth-century inner courtyard and a pretty back garden shaded by a chestnut tree. The land had once belonged to the nearby abbey church. It provided a “hermitage” of monastic quiet yet was only a few blocks from the work that had episodically absorbed much of the painter’s creative energy since 1849: the Chapelle des Saints-Anges at the Église Saint-Sulpice. At the side of the garden the landlord had built a pretty studio with a north-facing skylight and lofty walls to the artist’s specifications.
When he moved from the Right Bank into his new abode after Christmas 1857, the ailing fifty-nine-year-old painter found it “decidedly charming,” writing in his Journal that “the view of my small garden and the cheerful appearance of my studio inspire elation.”
The forty thousand annual visitors to the recently spruced-up museum share that response. Although not very many of the furnishings were Delacroix’s own, his spirit pervades the peaceful, domestic-scale rooms. Drawings, small oil sketches—mostly on loan from the Louvre—and holograph letters line the walls and vitrines of the square sage green salon and the adjacent library and bedroom, illustrating the threads of his life: his friendships with George Sand and Gautier; his fashionable philhellenism; and his taste for Shakespeare, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. His self-portrait in the guise of Ravenswood, hero of The Bride of Lammermoor, exemplifies Romanticism as well as any other image, revealing the twinkling eyes that Odilon Redon claimed “seemed to outshine chandeliers.”
The library’s four hundred volumes were dispersed. Delacroix’s delightful Journal—chockablock with thoughtful musings and extracts from his interests—demonstrates the breadth of his interests and literary gifts that rival his painterly talents. He was an enormously likable man: acute, analytical, affectionate, handsome, wry, courageous, intense, and loyal.
The airy garden studio, with its tall easel and his palettes and paint tables alongside bowls and leather goods he brought back from Morocco, Algeria, and Spain, inspires fantasies. Delacroix had been the rallying point for an art more passionate than David’s and Ingres’s neoclassicism. He exalted imagination. The classical, literary, and biblical vocabulary of his works is today less familiar to many of us and the colors in which he gloried have often proved unstable, yet the sweep and gusto that caused him to break with the era’s prevailing academic canon leave us captivated.
Later in his life, a self-appointed cerberus—a sensible Breton named Jenny Le Guillou—dominated Delacroix’s domestic life. Her portrait, painted shortly after she became his housekeeper in the mid-1830s, today hangs in the bedroom, looking out with keen, thoughtful eyes. At once mother and confidante, Jenny was devoted to his genius, massaging his confidence and providing an unruffled influence, a contrast to the erratic attentions of his worldly mistresses and flirtatious models. Jenny even accompanied him to the seaside and to museums, where Charles Baudelaire once observed them, “he, so elegant, refined and learned,” though not one to disdain explaining “the mysteries of Assyrian sculpture to this excellent woman.”
The Musée Delacroix faithfully evokes these personalities but possesses none of the artist’s great canvases. A half hour’s wandering through its rooms serves as an aide-mémoire, inspiring one to track Delacroix’s paintings across Paris, the museum’s map in hand: from La Barque de Dante, which made his name at the 1822 Salon, to the flamboyant ceiling in the Galerie d’Apollon, both at the Louvre, to the canvases at the Musée d’Orsay; from the Musée Carnavalet to the Petit Palais. Of course, one should see the lyrical yet austere wall paintings at Saint-Sulpice. Their power is apparent, in spite of bad lighting and damage from damp. Take the time to seek out the splendid if troubling Pietà at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais and to venture an hour’s tour of the Assemblée Nationale to admire the magnificent décors of the Salon du Roi (located off the left side of the debating chamber and therefore, ironically, the principal writing room for French Socialist deputies) and the Bibliothèque.
The art critic Robert Pincus-Witten writes, “Aristide Maillol’s place among the great sculptors has been secure for nearly a century.” Others who are less aesthetically attuned dismiss this nineteenth-century artist’s work with “Seen one, seen ’em all.” Whatever your predispositions, you should plan a visit to the Fondation Dina Vierny–Musée Maillol. You can’t help but walk away convinced of the genius of this man whose oeuvre focused almost exclusively on the female form but who found in it the means of expressing endless near-abstract reflections.
The museum nestles discreetly beside a ninety-foot-wide fountain created by one of the eighteenth century’s leading sculptors, Edme Bouchardon. Little matter that the rue de Grenelle is only sixteen feet wide. The pure theatricality of the grand Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons endears it to Parisians.
First-time visitors to the Musée Maillol determined to gain insight into the artist’s work should head directly upstairs, and seek out the early paintings. For, to the surprise of many, Aristide Maillol came to sculpture via painting and tapestry design.
Born in 1861, this son of a cloth salesman had passed a lonely childhood in Banyuls-sur-Mer—a coastal town not far from the Spanish border in what is called French Catalonia—first distinguishing himself in art at secondary school. At twenty he prevailed on his impoverished family to assure him a twenty-franc monthly stipend and took off for Paris. Initial rejection by the Académie des Beaux-Arts discouraged but did not defeat him. He eventually gained admittance, but the courses proved disappointing, providing little more than technical grounding.
Maillol was more shaped by the friends he made, among them members of the Nabis, a group whose name means “Prophets” in Hebrew. These Neoplatonic artists, who included Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard, sought to express “Ideas” through their creations, lending substance to their interior visions. Georges Seurat’s color theories also appealed to Maillol, but the artist’s greatest single inspiration seems to have been Paul Gauguin. The museum’s early Maillol canvases, L’Enfant couronné and Le Portrait de Tante Lucie, which date from 1890, glow with backgrounds of Gauguin’s much-favored cadmium yellow.
A chance visit to the Musée de Cluny sparked Maillol’s interest in tapestry. Two years’ feverish tapestry design—the handsome products of which are arrayed at the museum—wrought mayhem with the artist’s eyesight, so he turned to wood carving and then to monumental sculpture.
At the time, Rodin still dominated the latter field. Unlike most of his contemporaries, the Catalan consciously avoided the master’s studio, convinced, in the words of Constantin Brancusi, that “nothing grows in the shade of great trees.” Which is not to suggest that the two did not respect one another; indeed, Rodin actively promoted Maillol’s career.
Paralleling Cézanne’s growth as a painter toward abstraction through simplified volumes, Maillol predicated his sculpture on geometry. He cast aside the nineteenth-century lexicon of classical allegory and symbolism (and the exaggerated sentiment it sustained), seeking to express abstract truths through distilled mass, specifically, the female body. Already in 1896 a bronze such as La Vague reveals the characteristic sumptuous reserve that would mark Maillol’s subsequent work.
The Salon of 1905 proved a turning point in Maillol’s career. Amid the sensation created by the Fauves, Maillol’s La Méditerranée garnered André Gide’s praise and announced the themes that forty years’ work would amplify. Examples of many of Maillol’s monumental sculptures occupy a room on the south end of the museum’s second story. The artist called on the female figure to express a whole range of human thought: the fecundity of Pomone; grief for the dead of World War I; and homage to men as disparate as Cézanne, Debussy, and a French revolutionary, Auguste Blanqui. No Kate Mosses here; sturdy limbs and apple breasts characterize Maillol’s earthy women.
The most familiar face within the museum is also its creator, Dina Vierny. In 1934, the fifteen-year-old Russian-born Ms. Vierny became Maillol’s model and Egeria, inspiring a final decade of creativity: bronzes, sanguines, and oils—some of which are on view in the museum. Still others were produced by Maillol’s friends, for he was in the habit of lending Dina to them, as in the spring of 1941, when he sent her to his lifelong friend Matisse with the message: “I am lending you the inspiration for my work, you will render her in a single line.” The resultant drawings still hang in the museum. His gift for friendship indirectly cost him his life, when, at the age of eighty-three, he set off from Banyuls to visit Raoul Dufy. The car veered off the road, and Maillol died a few weeks later of his injuries.
The Musée Maillol’s very existence is a tribute to his model’s tenacity. As the residual legatee of the Maillol estate, Ms. Vierny set up the foundation, assembled the buildings to house the museum, and installed the works, orchestrating every detail down to the (exquisite) doorknobs and the (brilliantly conceived) lighting and framing.
Ms. Vierny is an unapologetic collector. The museum exhibits some of her French primitives and works by a number of Soviet painters—many of them artists her rue Jacob gallery represented in the postwar period. The rooms are also sprinkled with Degases, Redons, Picassos, and Duchamps.
In the mid-sixties Dina Vierny, not a woman to be gainsaid, gave the state eighteen of Maillol’s monumental sculptures to be displayed in the Jardin du Carrousel west of the Louvre. The area—only ten minutes’ walk away—has recently been replanted to great effect.
(6 rue de Furstenberg, 6ème / +33 01 44 41 86 50 / musee-delacroix.fr). Open daily 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. except Tuesdays.
(59–61 rue de Grenelle, 7ème / +33 01 42 22 59 58 / museemaillol.com). Open daily 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. except Tuesdays.
(68 bis rue de Turenne, 3ème / +33 01 44 54 35 88).
(33 bis quai d’Orsay, 7ème / +33 01 40 63 99 99 / assemblee-nationale.fr).