PARIS.- Developed in partnership with the Hébert Museum in La Tronche (Isère), where it will be hosted in the spring of 2026, the exhibition will also be presented at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici in the spring of 2027. Marie Robert, the exhibition's curator, was welcomed there as part of a joint residency between the Villa Medici and the Musée d'Orsay, conducting a year-long research project in the history of photography.
The exhibition Who's Afraid of Women Photographers? (1839-1945) presented at the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie in 2015 was a milestone for recognition of women artists in France. One of the many photographers featured was Gabrielle Hébert (1853, Dresden, Germany - 1934, La Tronche, France).
An amateur painter and the wife of artist Ernest Hébert, twice director of the French Academy in Rome, Gabrielle Hébert began photographing with great intensity and enthusiasm at the Villa Medici in 1888. Like artists and writers such as Henri Rivière, Maurice Denis, or Émile Zola, who in the late 19th century took up a camera to capture family life, Gabrielle developed a private and sentimental approach to the medium, encouraged by the technical and aesthetic revolution of snapshot photography. She stopped abruptly twenty years later in La Tronche (near Grenoble), upon the death of the man she idolized, nearly forty years her senior, and whose legacy she largely ensured by supporting the creation of two monographic museums, one in La Tronche (1934) and the other in Paris (1978).
At the Villa Medici, as First Lady of a prestigious cultural institution, Gabrielle organised receptions and welcomed the visiting high society. But she soon slipped free of such obligations: in the summer of 1888 she acquired a camera, took lessons from a professional in Rome, and, together with the resident painter Alexis Axilette, set up a darkroom to develop her glass negatives, make prints and retouch them. It was the beginning of an impressive output of nearly two thousand photographs. “I photo”, “I photograph”: not a day went by without her noting in her diary that she had been taking pictures.
While she shared with the brothers Luigi and Giuseppe Primoli, nephews of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte and pioneers of instantaneous photography in Italy, a taste for society portraits and tableaux vivants, Gabrielle explored every genre: the nude, reproduction of works of art, landscape, still life, and “photographic recreations”. Offering the point of view of a permanent resident, looking in wonder at the palace, its gardens and their inhabitants through every season, artists and models, foreign visitors out for pleasure, Italian staff at work, flowers and animals, her work reveals a little-known side of daily life in this artistic phalanstery. Her photographic chronicle is in fact the first proto-reportage on the Villa Medici: at once an architectural masterpiece dominating the Eternal City, a place of life for the winners of the Prix de Rome, and a laboratory for a new relationship between France and newly “unified” Italy.
It is also a unique testimony to one of the first creative couples at the Villa Medici. If Gabrielle assisted Ernest in his work – posing for him, preparing his canvases, retouching or copying his paintings – Ernest, in turn, became the central subject of the photographer's gaze. Turning gender stereotypes on their head, she captured him relentlessly with her camera: sittings with models, the progress of his paintings, diplomatic society events, interactions with residents, but also walks in the Roman countryside, bathing by the sea, or moments of solitude in his study. Every facet of Ernest Hébert's life as artist, director and husband was scrutinised and documented.
Thus, when she returned permanently to France with him, Gabrielle abandoned the photographic passion born under the Italian sky. She nevertheless continued to photograph Hébert until the end, to preserve his image and to compose a tomb, in the poetic sense, erected in memory of him and of their love. Before this, stepping outside the enclosed world of the Villa Medici and its singular inhabitants, she made her photographic swansong, equipped with a Kodak, on one final journey to Spain, a country she captured with a decidedly modern eye, nourished by the emerging cinematograph.
From her first photographs to her final images, this exhibition presents both what Gabrielle made of photography and what photography made of her. Claiming a place as an author in a milieu where artistic creation was reserved for men, it would be 1911 before a woman resident joined the French Academy in Rome, she revealed herself to herself. In exploring the possibilities of the snapshot, she became the subject of a creative and existential experience: photography.
Exhibition co-organised with the Musée Hébert de La Tronche (Isère department).
