Selected works

Willem van Diest
(The Hague, before 1610 – The Hague, after 1663)

Seascape, 1646

Oil on board, 40.8 x 58 cm

The musée Fabre has just acquired a painting by Willem van Diest, Seascape, to complete its collections of paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, probably the most beautiful set of Dutch paintings of the 17th Century in French regions. The most famous names of the genre scene (Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, Frans van Mieris, Adriaen van Ostade, Jan Steen) and of landscapes ( Paulus Potter, Jacob van Ruisdaël, Philips Wouwerman) are represented with major pieces.

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Louis Gauffier (La Rochelle, 1762- Florence, 1801), « View of Vallombrosa», 1797,

Oil on canvas, 82,5 x 114 cm
SDbg : L.Gauffier/Flor.ce 1797

François-Xavier Fabre gave the musée Fabre several drawings and paintings by his friend Louis Gauffier: drawn and painted sketches made on the famous site of the monastery of Vallombrosa in the Appenins in 1796 and 1797. Some of his works were preparatory to this painting, which is the final version, made in his studio of Florence in 1797. Gauffier passed most of his life in Italy. Acknowledged by his peers, one of the best of his time at working on the motif, he remains almost unknown because he died very young.

See the works by Louis Gauffier in our collections.

This huge painting of Vallombrosa is very modern in its innovating composition and because of the small realistic figures of young priests playing with a ball on the foreground. It is the first representation in European painting of this forerunner of football. Well-known Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi writes at the same time a poem on the theme of this ball game.

Its arrival in our collections is the logical ending of this famous and very important series of History of Art, as it is an example of the work of a neoclassical landscape painter, prerigurating Naturalism in the 19th Century, beginning with Corot.

The Communauté d'Agglomération de Montpellier bought this major painting €384,000, with the help of the Fonds du Patrimoine (€150,000) and the FRAM (Fonds Régional d'Acquisition pour les Musées) for around €50,000.

The Jean Thuile collection was put up for auction on October 24, 2007, allowing the musée Fabre to acquire 8 objets d’art for an amount of €55,300. This was financed equally by the Agglomération de Montpellier and the Région Langudeoc-Roussillon.
Jean Thuile, as a particularly wise scholar and collector, wrote “La céramique ancienne de Montpellier” (Ancient Ceramic from Montpellier) (1943) and “L’histoire de l’orfèvrerie en Languedoc du XVIIe au XVIIIe siècle” (History of Plate in Languedoc in 17th and 18th Centuries) in 5 volumes (1964-9), two reference masterworks on decorative arts in Languedoc. Thanks to his friendshp with Jean Claparède, he was also the curator of the exhibitions “Trésors d’orfèvrerie en Languedoc méditerranéen et Roussillon” (Treasures of Plate in Mediterranean Languedoc and Roussillon) (1954) and “La faïence de Montpellier” (Earthenware from Montpellier) (1964) at the musée Fabre. These two exhibitions gave the occasion to discover the collection he was able to gather. In addition to the interest of the pieces owned by Jean Thuile due to their provenance, they often are reference artworks.

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