Acquisition of Alexandre Antigna's Naufrage

The Musée des Beaux-Arts has acquired Alexandre Antigna's Naufrage by pre-emption for €570. Born in Orléans in 1817, Alexandre Antigna enjoyed great success in Paris from his early days in the 1840s, making his native town proud of its work, which was awarded the State prize for Après le Bain in 1849. It was above all in 1850, with L'Incendie, that he established himself alongside Courbet as one of the leaders of realism, building his work on subjects taken from the world of streets and fields, between poetic visions of a simple, happy life and the pangs of misery affecting society at the end of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans houses the artist's reference collection, with a room devoted to him in addition to the works displayed in the grand salon. La Pauvre femme from the Salon of 1857, Cousquet-hi, recently purchased from the artist's descendants, Les Aragonaises, a large Spanish canvas such as he produced in the 1860s, and the study heads that made him a worldwide success, offer the public a broad panorama of the art of this artist, who is today little-known, but whose reputation extended across the Atlantic and throughout Europe during his lifetime. Today, however, there are no seascapes representing this aspect of his career. His discovery of Brittany, where he would spend the rest of his life, inspired more than twenty years of subjects, sometimes of joyful young fishermen, sometimes of raging seas rendering bodies inert, such as The Shipwreck. This painting now brings the two rivals together on the walls of the Musée d'Orléans in a confrontation of La Vague by one artist and Le Naufrage by the other, which share a great plastic proximity.

This painting was previously known from an old photo kept in a collection of photos from the studio. It had never reappeared, and it is likely to have been acquired during the artist's lifetime by an amateur in Toulouse. Antigna exhibited regularly in Toulouse in the 1860s and seems to have built up a network of buyers.