Until February 2025, the Museum of Fine Arts in Tours is devoting a temporary exhibition to portraiture, from its origins in Antiquity to today’s world with the rise of the selfie.
Portraiture is an art that is far from new. In Antiquity, it was reserved for an elite: only emperors, Roman consuls, or heroes could claim to be represented, by artists as talented as they were rare for the time. During the Renaissance, portraiture opened up to the nobility and the bourgeoisie, who could promote their image and show their wealth and power during their lifetime.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, portraiture became a business. You just need to be a little wealthy to have yourself drawn or painted alone or with your family, to give yourself importance in the face of the noble or the big bourgeois. We then pose in our Sunday best, well dressed, and we pose for a long time.
Then comes the arrival of the photo. And even if there are 100 million selfies per day in the world, the portrait is still there to show itself, to present itself, to promote itself personally.
It is this story that we discover throughout the Touraine exhibition: 166 works in 2 galleries. You will be able to notice in particular a full-length portrait and larger than life of the Empress Eugénie or a wall filled with mixed portraits, of all kinds and from all periods: nobles, ordinary people, children, starlets, etc. Gallery that you can complete with your face thanks to a skillfully placed mirror.
The exhibition is also an opportunity to discover what many local figures look like, who often evoke the districts of Tours more than historical figures. Among them, we can discover Trousseau, Descartes, Clocheville, Béranger, Velpeau, Laloux.
Finally, to discover, a surprising self-portrait by Louis Joseph César Ducornet, who literally painted with his feet.
Pascal Montagne
