French Painting 1800-1945. Anatomy of a Collection

Mounted within The collection, the display of the museum’s permanent collection, as well as in the MCBA Espace Focus gallery, the show French Painting 1800-1945. Anatomy of a Collection invites visitors to rediscover the many masterpieces of French painting conserved in the museum. These are pieces signed by a number of major French artists, including Corot, Courbet, Degas, Cezanne, Matisse, and Bonnard. It is also the chance to discover paintings that are rarely on view.

The Catalogue raisonné des peintures et des pastels français du Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne 1800-1945 is the culmination of several years of research into the museum’s collection. To mark the publication of this catalogue raisonné, MCBA is pleased to feature in its galleries some sixty works of art. It is a rare occasion indeed, bringing together major pieces – often on loan to international institutions – along with more obscure pieces, including some that are being shown for the first time.

French Painting 1800-1945. Anatomy of a Collection highlights the different facets of a unique collection, one that naturally reflects the history and policy of the museum’s approach to acquisition, as well as the tastes of the collectors who made this enrichment possible. From the first gifts to the institution at the start of the 1840s – meant to help young artists to train their eye and hand by studying paintings from one of three ‘schools’, France, Italy, and Northern Europe – to recent acquisitions, made in light of the pieces that had entered the collection over the years, the show traces the constant attraction of French art in a museum that is especially known for having asserted its regional and national identity.

The windfall of over one hundred paintings and pastels the Lausanne doctor Henri-Auguste Widmer bequeathed to the museum in the 1930s – not to mention many Italian, Belgian and Swedish – permanently changed the profile of the MCBA collection. It was now open, to a significant degree, to the artistic output of one of Switzerland’s large neighbours and, more broadly, to the greater world beyond. The urge to keep a trace of artists who stayed in the Canton of Vaud, like Courbet or Corot, has also helped to develop the French presence of a Lausanne-based collection.

Although not intended to offer a complete history of French painting from Romanticism to the Return to Order, the European art movement after the First World War, along with Realism and Impressionism in between, the show French Painting 1800-1945. Anatomy of a Collection points up the French touch at work in the MCBA collection.

Exhibition curators: Camille Lévêque-Claudet, curator of ancient and modern art, MCBA; Camille de Alencastro, research associate, MCBA.

Publication: Catalogue raisonné des peintures et des pastels français du Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne 1800-1945, ed. Camille Lévêque-Claudet and Camille de Alencastro, Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 2025, 224 p.