Like butter wouldn’t melt? Childhood through the eyes of the artist 1790-1850

After three years of enriching collaboration with the Louvre Museum (2019-2021) and the Musée d’Orsay (2022), Bordeaux Fine Arts Museum (MusBA) is renewing its partnership dynamic in 2025 with major national and regional museums.

MusBA will be joining forces with the Tessé Museum in Le Mans and the Louvre Museum to present Like butter wouldn’t melt? Childhood through the eyes of the artist, an exhibition that explores the roles assigned to children and their representations in art in French society from 1790 to 1850. The exhibition is based on a fertile dialogue between the academic arts (painting and sculpture) and the then new medium of photography.

This still relatively little studied half-century in the history of France was a turbulent time in politics and philosophy and extremely fecund in the arts. What representations of childhood did the painters, sculptors and photographs of this period propose? How did these images adhere to the spirit of the times, and in what ways did they diverge from certain social realities? Can we see ourselves in them still today? Are our perspectives able to accept and understand them all?

The chronological and thematic visit route leads the visitor from the legend of innocence inherited from the Enlightenment to children in the military, from cursed princes to orphans, and from labourers to geniuses, through a large gallery of painted, sculptural or photographic portraits.

Alongside the great names of the period, such as Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Camille Corot, Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, James Pradier and Honoré Daumier, the exhibition showcases artists who are less well known because they were women or were far from the Parisian circles, such as Auguste de Châtillon, Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet and Sophie Feytaud-Tavel, as well as previously unseen or rarely presented works. 

Benefitting from exceptional loans from the Louvre Museum, the exhibition is composed of approximately 100 works (paintings, sculptures, graphic arts works and photographs) from French public and private collections, particularly from the Parisian region and western France. The Bordeaux section also showcases collections from South-West France, with works from several museums in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (Libourne Fine Arts Museum, the Bordeaux Museum of Design and the Decorative Arts, the Musée d’Aquitaine, Goupil Museum and the Museum of Art and History of La Rochelle).

In resonance with this exhibition, MusBA is presenting, in partnership with medico-social organisations, an exhibition to view and listen to from its own collections (12 June 2024 - 8 January 2025, Actualités Room, Lacour Wing), and new signs in the permanent exhibition to better identify works in connection with childhood and youth beyond the chronological bounds of the temporary exhibition.

 1*       2*

1* : Jules-Claude Ziegler, Giotto dans l'atelier de Cimabue, 1833 © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, F. Deval, Mairie de Bordeaux.
2* : Jean-Victor Schnetz, La diseuse de bonne aventure, 19e siècle © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, F. Deval, Mairie de Bordeaux.

Exhibition catalogue
Publication by Éditions Liénart, February 2025.

Scientific Curators
Stéphanie Deschamps-Tan, Head Curator in the Sculptures Department of the Louvre Museum
Côme Fabre, Curator in the Paintings Department of the Louvre Museum.

Curators, MusBA, Bordeaux
Sophie Barthélémy, Directror, Curator General
Chloë Théault, Deputy Director, Associate Curator.

Curators, Tessé Museum, Le Mans
Alice Gandin, Museums Director of Le Mans, Curator General
Carole Hirardot, Associate Curator.