BARCELONA.- Drawing Versailles: Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) is the result of a strategic agreement between the Louvre Museum and ”la Caixa” Foundation to organise joint exhibitions and enable audiences to discover artists, collections and periods in art history that are not represented in Spanish museums.

This ambitious agreement forms part a line of action launched by ”la Caixa” Foundation in recent years to establish strategic alliances with leading cultural institutions around the world with a view to intensifying the organisation’s cultural activities and generate synergies with international centres of the highest standing.

The historic entente was intensified by the signing of agreements covering two consecutive periods (2008-2012 and 2012-2016) for the joint organisation of exhibitions at ”la Caixa” Foundation cultural centres, including the loan of works from the Louvre collections and the provision of curatorial services by specialists from the Parisian museum. Moreover, thanks to support from ”la Caixa”, the Louvre Museum has been able to launch campaigns to restore many works within the framework of exhibition projects.

Thanks to this agreement, the various CaixaForum centres have been able to present such diverse, high quality shows as Roads of Arabia. Archaeological Treasures from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; Etruscan Princes. Between East and West; Another Egypt. Coptic Collections from the Louvre Museum; Delacroix (1798-1863); and Before the Flood. Mesopotamia (3500 – 2100 BC).

This winter, then, CaixaForum Barcelona has become “little Louvre”, thanks to the coincidence of two outstanding projects: the present show, devoted to the cartoons of Charles Le Brun; and the archaeological exhibition Animals and Pharaohs. The Animal Kingdom in Ancient Egypt. Meanwhile, Women of Rome. Seductive, Maternal, Excessive is open to the public at CaixaForum Madrid until next February.

Charles Le Brun, first painter to Louis XIV for two decades
Born in 1619 to a father who was a modest sculptor and engraver of tombstones and a mother from a family of calligraphers, the artist Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) was discovered at an early age by Chancellor Séguier, who made the young man his protégé and sent him to Italy. On his return, Le Brun redoubled his decoration work in Paris and Vaux-le-Vicomte before placing himself at the exclusive service of Louis XIV. Thanks to the unconditional support of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Charles Le Brun held the appointment of first painter to the king from 1664 to 1683.

In 1682, Louis XIV moved the court of France to Versailles. Accordingly, for the next century, the city was the political and administrative centre of the kingdom. Over the previous twenty years, Versailles had been immersed in permanent works to redesign the park, increase the number of buildings and decorate the apartments with large decorative cycles that paid homage to the glory of the monarch.

Le Brun was commissioned to plan this work, to which he applied an “orchestral” treatment involving the participation of hundreds of artists and artisans, the finest from each discipline. Le Brun personally produced several pieces, including two particularly impressive compositions: the Staircase of the Ambassadors and the Hall of Mirrors, adorned by a series of paintings from his mature period, imbued with the most exceptional, moving beauty.

The present exhibition explores the origin of these great decorations through the unique testimony provided by the cartoons requisitioned by the Crown on Le Brun’s death. These full-scale versions of the paintings, used to sketch out their contours, provide a glimpse of the working methods employed by the artists and his assistants, as the use of different tools is clearly apparent in the cartoons themselves.

The Staircase of the Ambassadors
Le Brun’s drawings enable us to admire the decoration, now lost, from the Staircase of the Ambassadors, with their figures on the same scale, enriched by all the gravity and dramatic quality of drawing in black pencil.

This staircase, which led up to the grand apartments of the king and queen, was the first space to symbolise the power of the monarch at Versailles. Designed in around 1671 and decorated between 1674 and 1679, the staircase was destroyed in 1752, during the reign of Louis XIV.

In his work, Le Brun made exceptional use of a narrow space that received only overhead lighting. Using optical illusion, he increased the sensation of space as he mixed fact and fiction to create an allegorical composition depicting the return of Louis XIV after one of his military victories. In a monumental composition to the honour and glory of the absolute monarch, the French artist surrounded the king by representatives from nations in the four continents, the gods of Antiquity, victories, cupids and the arts. The cartoons demonstrate that Le Brun worked on the Staircase of the Ambassadors right up to the last minute, retouching and perfecting his drawings.

The Hall of Mirrors
The cartoons for the Hall of Mirrors enable us to follow the artist’s working process, step by step, from the first small sketches, their pencil strokes embodying powerful movement, to the final drawings, which are the same size as the final paintings themselves. Also conserved are the engravings, copies of the entire work, produced for the purpose of making this masterpiece known beyond French borders, adding to the monarch’s fame.

According to the tradition in European painting, the figure of the king was to be represented by a mythological figure: Apollo, Hercules and so on. Le Brun, however, portrays the king himself, at the head of his troops, wearing an ancient breastplate and a modern wig, acting together with the gods and the allegories. The gallery ceiling illustrates the epic history of Louis XIV’s reign from 1661, when he took the decision to govern the country alone, until the end of the War of Holland. One of the most famous episodes in this war, The Crossing of the Rhine in 1672, is represented by the cartoons made for the painting, exhibited exactly as they were found in Le Brun’s studio.

Cartoons: exceptional material, much of it shown for the first time
The exhibition presents these two famous decorative works through original materials, little known to the general public: the painter’s preparatory cartoons, huge, 1:1 scale drawings that were used to transfer the contours of his models onto the walls and vaults.

Such cartoons were commonly used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, but few have reached our days. Le Brun’s cartoons are the exception: the Louvre Museum conserves 350, which formed part of the store of 3,000 works requisitioned from the artist’s studio after his death in 1690 and added to the royal collections.

The cartoons are formed by several large sheets of paper, on which the artist marked out his drawing in black pencil and white chalk, occasionally adding sanguine. They were used to transfer the model onto the wall or canvas. Although their use seems to have been widespread, they often became stained, damaged and even torn during these operations, which explains why so few have been conserved. Moreover, for many years they were considered merely utilitarian works, not worthy of being saved.

Of the 350 cartoons in the entire collection, 75 have been restored specifically for this exhibition, and will be divided between the two centres hosting the show. Due to their fragility, these works cannot be placed on view for more than three months at a time, for which reason at the end of the exhibition period they will be returned to the storerooms of the Louvre Museum, where they will be protected from the light for at least three years.

At CaixaForum Barcelona, the exhibition comprises 78 works. Some of the 37 cartoons presented are shown to the public for the first time here, horizontally and unmounted, as they were found in the Le Brun’s studio.

The show also includes a score of preparatory sketches and drawings and a series of engravings of the two rooms, as well as the oil painting The King Rules Alone, the only work not from the Louvre Museum, as this piece has been loaned expressly by the Musée National du Château de Versailles et de Trianon.

The exhibition is divided into two large sections devoted to the two decorations, separated by third illustrating the techniques used to transfer the works onto the walls and ceilings.

As usual in shows organised by the ”la Caixa” Foundation, the project also includes the publication of a catalogue that details the main scientific elements, as well as articles on each of the exhibition themes. A full programme of parallel activities has also been organised, featuring not only tours of the exhibition for different audiences and groups, but also a season of Versailles-related films, coordinated by the journalist Àlex Gorina, and a cycle of lectures by Rafael Argullol, writer and professor of Aesthetics at Pompeu Fabra University.

The restoration: from the storerooms of the Louvre to CaixaForum Barcelona
Thanks to the involvement of ”la Caixa” Foundation in the project, the cartoons presented in this exhibition were painstakingly restored in the restoration workshop of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Louvre Museum.

Twenty experts worked for two years to restore and mount the 75 cartoons, which were found in various states of conservation. Some were rolled, in a similar state to that when they were requisitioned in the seventeenth century, and have never been shown in public. Others had been glued to canvas supports in the nineteenth century, ready for exhibition at the museum. Finally, several others had been restored and glued as part of work carried out in the 1990s.

The restoration was conducted in accordance with clear guidelines: maximum respect for the works in their original state, whilst reinforcing them and making it possible to place them on show. As a result, all the marks made when the cartoons were originally used have been left clearly visible, to enable an interpretation of these works in their original purpose as working utensils.

The most difficult part of the undertaking concerned the cartoons glued to canvas in the nineteenth century. These took months to restore, as it was necessary to detach them from their canvas, separate the various sheets that formed each cartoon, then restore them before assembling the pieces once more on a new canvas.

The restoration work was also a source of discoveries. Drawings were found on the backs of two cartoons, something not very common at the time. This made it necessary to rethink the approach originally planned, and the works concerned were finally not glued onto canvas again, as this would have caused the drawings on the back to be lost once more. Accordingly, they are placed on show with both sides visible.