Date: 11-11-2007
Owning Institution: Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille
Publication:             Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010  
Subject:   20th Century  19th Century  18th Century  17th Century  16th Century    

Much fanfare has greeted the fact that when the new Eurostar terminal opens at St Pancras, in three days’ time, it will bring Paris even closer to London. What has been rather overlooked is that the grand old city of Lille will be brought practically next-door by the new route – just one hour and twenty minutes away, to be precise, the merest of commuter hops. As a result, the people of England might be said to have suddenly acquired a new and rather grand local museum. Its name is the Palais des Beaux-Arts; it occupies an imposing fin-de-siecle building, complete with pillars and pediments and vast sloping mansard roofs, in the heart of the old town; and it contains one of the best collections of painting and sculpture in all of France . To borrow that discreet phrase favoured by the green Michelin guides, this is a museum that “vaut la visite”. In fact for a person interested in art who might also have a penchant for beer and exceptionally heavy food – cheese pies, tripe sausage, beef carbonnade, mussels with cream, and chips with more or less everything – Lille is just about the ideal daytripper’s destination.

The city has a vividly multicultural past. Over the centuries it has been ruled by the Normans and the Spanish, has been part of the great Burgundian empire and was once the capital of Flanders . All this is reflected in the holdings of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, which, as well as containing numerous masterpieces of French art, also has fine collections of Dutch and Flemish painting, some wonderful Spanish pictures, and one of the rarest and most brilliant works of the early Florentine Renaissance (more of which later).

Although its collections range from the Middle Ages to the beginnings of modern art, the museum itself is very much a child of the French Revolution and the years of the Napoleonic Empire. Anyone going to Lille in search of its artistic riches before 1789 would have been advised to visit the city’s richly decorated convents and churches, and seek entrance to the homes of some its richer and more aesthetically enlightened merchants. But after the Revolution, the monasteries were disestablished and their property confiscated, the churches were looted and the merchants (mostly) lost their heads to the guillotine. The resulting stockpile of art formed the nucleus of the city’s museum. Ten years later, Napoleon decreed that 846 canvases seized during his military rampages through mainland Europe should be divided among fifteen French cities. Lille , one of those selected, received almost 50 works from this treasure trove of loot. The collection was further enriched by a bequest from Jean-Baptiste Wicar, who was a painter in his own right – having been a pupil of the celebrated Jacques-Louis David – as well as being one of the most remarkable collectors of early nineteenth-century France .

The bulk of the riches thus assembled are displayed, today, in an elegant suite of high-ceilinged galleries on the first floor of the museum. The opening rooms are devoted to Flemish and Netherlandish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Netherlandish Mannerist Jacob Jordaens is singularly well represented, there is an interesting School-of-Bruegel winter scene and the eye is also caught by a teeming depiction of A Bull Race in the Ruins of the Colosseum, by Martin van Heemskerck, fascinating master of topographical fantasies. But the undoubted highlight here is Rubens’s monumental Deposition of 1617, with its bright chromatic harmonies and startling blend of high artifice and raw emotion. The picture  was originally a Franciscan commission, and reflects the Franciscan emphasis on the physical agonies of the crucifixion. On the ground at the foot of the cross, Rubens has painted the instruments of Christ’s torture – crown of thorns, bloodied nails, vinegar-soaked sponge – with an impressionistic lightness of touch. The body of the Saviour, shockingly blued by death, is lowered to the ground by a teetering pyramid of mourners, the most prominent of whom is Mary Magdalene. A sturdy, ale-fattened Flemish wench, with bright gold hair, she presses her tear-stained cheek to the ragged and bleeding perforation in his right hand. It is almost as if the whole signifcance of the scene has been distilled to this single, telling detail, spelling out a poignant contrast between the Magdalene’s health and beauty and the pathos of Christ’s death.

The Dutch galleries are also rich in masterpieces, including Jacob Ruisdael’s Wheat Field of 1660, which takes a scene of perfect inconsequentiality – a group of tiny figures, walking with a dog or two through some corner of Holland’s flat, fertile, high-skied landscape – and turns it into an unexpected idyll, the very image of a world sleepily at peace with itself. Emanuel de Witte’s Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, of 1656, is a more strident assertion of the spirit of Dutch independence – a grandly assertive view of the white walls and whitewashed columns of a proudly Protestant place of worship, with the towering tomb of William of Orange at its centre. Pieter Codde’s Student in His Study is a wry study of a truculent young man, head propped on one hand in an attitude of self-conscious melancholy verging on outright bolshiness – vivid testament to the perennially vigorous discontent of the world’s student population.

The Spanish collection is smaller but also rich in memorable works, including some swirling, hallucinogenic El Grecos and a couple of singularly strange and dark Goyas. But perhaps the strongest of all the museum’s various clusters of galleries are those devoted to French Neoclassical and Romantic art. Here the visitor will find great paintings by Delacroix and Gericault, a whole wall covered with the vivid oil sketches of Louis-Leopold Boilly – one of the unsung masters of early nineteenth-century French portraiture – as well as Jacques-Louis David’s small but intense oil-sketch of Napoleon himself, one of the principal benefactors of the museum.

Here too hangs David’s presentation piece to the French Academy , the work with which he announced himself on the stage of French art – the solemn, severe Belisarius Receiving Alms, of 1781. The picture tells a story not dissimilar to that recounted in the recent Russell Crowe movie, Gladiator. Belisarius, a once mighty general brought low by the evil machinations of Rome ’s rulers, sits blind, begging and bereft in front of a great triumphal arch erected to commemorate one of his victories. His child holds out his helmet, into which a pitying Roman maid drops a coin. A soldier who once fought in his command, caught in the act of recognising his former general, is frozen in an expression of horror. The painting, a parable of virtue endangered in a darkly corrupt world, hovers on the brink of melodrama, but is saved from sentimentality by the solemn rigours of David’s style. The figures are vulnerable, spotlit actors in a world of hard stone and angular surfaces. The stooped figure of Belisarius looks almost as though he is being crushed beneath the weight of the Corinthian columns that tower above him.

Like all great museums, the Palais des Beaux-Arts repays frequent visits, but no whistlestop tour would be complete without a foray into the museum’s basement galleries. Here, at the end of an avenue formed by shattered fragments of religious statuary saved from the wreckage of France ’s revolutionary past, the visitor will find the museum’s single greatest treasure. The jewel of the Wicar Bequest, it is a small and exceptionally fine bas-relief by the greatest sculptor of the early Italian Renaissance, Donatello. Thanks to the brilliantly designed lighting, there is probably no other museum in the world where it is possible to appreciate and explore the subtleties of Donatello’s carving as fully as this.

The subject of the bas-relief is the story of Salome. At the centre of the image, she dances her dance of the seven veils, watched impassively by an audience that seems weighed down by a sense of foreboding rather than aroused by the erotic display. To the left, a servant brings the head of John the Baptist to the banqueting table. The dinner guests grimace and frown, disgust etched into their faces, while Salome herself reels away from the consequences of her own actions. The figures and faces are intensely expressive, while the frieze-like composition suggests the influence of Roman sarcophagi. The work is one of a number of so-called schiacciato reliefs by Donatello, and represents not just a triumph of condensed, piercingly emotional narrative, but also a near-miracle of craftsmanship. Although it is a relief, not a painting, this is one of the very first Renaissance images constructed according to the rigorous principles of mathematically calculated perspective. Carved into a depth of no more than a centimetre of stone, the scene is set within a spatially convincing architecture – an architecture of steps and arcades and proliferated arches – which is so complex that it is possible to enumerate no fewer than nine progresssively receding layers of space within it.

Donatello’s Salome is also an object with a romantically intriguing provenance. It is recorded as having once been in the collections of Lorenzo de’ Medici – Lorenzo the Magnificent, who welcomed the young Michelangelo in his home, and encouraged him to study the many sculptures in the Medici collection. The work is indeed full of hints and suggestions that would be explored by the greatest sculptor of the High Renaissance in his own early work – the frieze-like composition, the poetic sense of narrative, even specific details like the steep flight of stairs carved in the subtlest light relief. The similarities are so compelling as to suggest that the later artist must have known and studied this particular work. So as well as being a window on to the world of the early Renaissance, this tablet of stone must once surely have been, so to speak, the young Michelangelo’s school-book.