Current Exhibitions

Little Marks, Great Collectors

13 January – 5 April 2010

The Condé Museum holds one of the greatest drawing collections in Europe, created in the latter half of the 19th century by Henri d’Orléans, Duke of Aumale (1822-1897), who donated Chantilly and its collections to the Institut de France in 1886. More than half of the 2500 drawings have a collector’s mark that bears witness to their time spent in the ownership of some of the great collectors of the 17th to 19th centuries: Fréart de Chantelou, banker Eberhard Jabach, Pierre-Jean Mariette (the 18th century ‘Prince of Collectors’), the Marquis de Lagoy, English painters Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence, Empire-period Director of the Louvre museum Dominique Vivant Denon, Edouard Desperet, etc.

This exhibition has been organised for Semaine du Dessin 2010 (Drawing Week 2010), and provides an opportunity for visitors to see, in some cases for the first time, about fifty sheets by the greatest artists from the Renaissance to the late 19th century: Raphaël, Primatice, Albrecht Dürer, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Rubens, and even Delacroix.