Stars of the North
Four Centuries of Drawing on the Banks of the Rhine

The collection of drawings from the Écoles du Nord at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans consists of 869 sheets. Included among the museum’s 13,000 drawings, they have been the subject of a systematic study over the past four years by art historian David Mandrella, who has worked to identify, analyze, and attribute them, and now make them accessible to the public. This exhibition, which accompanies the publication of the catalog raisonné of Northern European drawings, reveals for the first time the great richness of this little-known collection—with the exception of about ten masterpieces by Rubens, Jordaens, Stradanus, Goltzius, and Lievens. Frits Lugt (1884–1970), founder of the Dutch Institute and the Custodia Foundation in Paris, recognized its importance during a visit in 1927, as did Daniel Ternois, who undertook a catalog of Flemish drawings in 1949 that was never published.

This exhibition presents the results of a research project rich in discoveries, featuring the 160 most beautiful Dutch, Flemish, German, and Swiss drawings from the Orléans collection. The city of Orléans owes its close ties with Northern Europe to the reputation of its law school. From the Middle Ages through the^17th century, students flocked there from the countries of the Holy Roman Empire, the United Provinces, and Scandinavia. As the kingdom’s main trade route, the Loire River also brought merchants and artists from the Netherlands to the city on the Loire, such as Lambert Doomer (1624–1700) from Amsterdam and Jan Peeters (1624–1678) from Antwerp. These commercial ties familiarized local art lovers with artistic productions from the North. The art collector Thomas Desfriches of Aignan, in particular, developed a passion for these schools and, in the second half of^{the 18th} century, sparked a wave of enthusiasm that would benefit the Musée d’Orléans when, upon its founding in 1823–1825, the people of Orléans donated their collections to form the museum’s initial holdings.