Delacroix, Géricault … This exhibition on childhood representations not to be missed at Le Mans – L’Express

Delacroix, Géricault, David d’Anger, Ingres or Corot, heavy goods vehicles; Auguste de Châtillon, Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet or Jean-Jacques Monanteuil, Les Forgotés. All have painted, drawn or shaped childish figures. Associated with the Louvre, the Tessé museum, in Le Mans, then, from July, the Musba of Bordeaux, dissect the roles assigned by these masters to the youngest and their anchoring in the social realities of half a century rich in mutations. From the idealized toddler to the child soldier, cursed princes to small beggars, from family intimacy to prodigy, Wise as an image? questions childhood in the eye of artists. Focus on three works from the exhibition.

Portrait of a young boy (around 1820?), By Théodore Géricault

Remarkable in many ways, this star work of the Mancelle collection, signed by the most tormented by the romantics, keeps some mysteries, starting with that of its dating. The Tessé museum located around 1820, four years before the death of the author of Jellyfishat the age of 32. We do not know with certainty who is the young boy, whose face occupies almost all of the canvas here, even if the rapid sketch of the clothing elements, which seem unfinished, refers to someone close to Géricault. Perhaps it is Olivier, the son of Colonel Bro, neighbor of the painter on rue des Martyrs, who has already served him as a model. The important expressive charge conferred on the child, as absent from the world around him, nevertheless refers more to psychological study than to simple portrait.

Louis XVII Enchaîné (1827), by Achille Joseph Etienne Valois

The tragic fate of Louis-Charles de France, known as Louis XVII, son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who died in captivity at the age of 10, due to a lack of care, lastingly inspired poets and historians, while his iconography remains, for its part, long proscribed. This posthumous sculpted portrait is the only one that has been the subject of an order under the restored monarchy. Faithful obstinate from the kings, Achille Valois is the heir of the shirtless crown, the shoulders covered with a coat decorated with lilies. Heavy channels hinder his juvenile body with the drawn muscles, while the face, with personalized features, turns to the sky, as if to call him to deliver him from his martyr.

Two poor lost little girls (1840), by Jean-Jacques Monanteuil

Recognized for his talent at the beginning of the 19th century, Monanteuil ended her life in Le Mans, abandoned by his contemporaries. Whoever was the student then the main performer of Anne-Louis Girodet, for whom he also played the models, counts in his corpus about fifteen paintings evoking the world of laborious or unhappy childhood. The two lost little girls, tightened against each other under a threatening sky, to which the little Frédérique and Françoise, the painter’s daughters, have lent their features, are distinguished by the moving Solidarité sororal which they exhale. The delicacy and the precision of the brush make these figures loss of landmarks, painted at a child’s level, an allegory of children’s fraternity in the face of the upheavals of the world.