The Art of transmitting
The Antoine Béal Collection

In 1825, the Musée d'Orléans opened thanks to the generosity of art lovers who had responded to the Count of Bizemont's call to build a great museum in Orléans. Since then, the donations have never ceased, telling the story of the passion of men and women who sometimes donated a painting, sometimes linked their name to the institution in a more lasting way. Antoine Béal, a well-known collector and donor to French museums, is just such a man.

Methodical and daring in his purchases, not afraid of large formats more suited to museums than to a Parisian apartment, learned and curious in his choices, Antoine Béal already had the soul of a hoarder as a child, of stamps and small flags, puzzles and timetables and railway networks. Although he chose to study law, his parents' visits to museums - in Lille, Arras, Chantilly, Amiens and Paris - forged an early interest in antique painting. Naturally, his first salaries as an administrative judge led to his first purchases in the 1980s.

His initiatory path followed fashion. He began at the Galerie Cailleux, where he was guided towards ^18th-century drawings, which he soon sold to buy Italian landscapes, most of which he in turn sold. With each exhibition - Suleiman the Magnificent at the Louvre, Pierre Subleyras in Luxembourg, Jacques Stella in Lyon, Landscapes of Italy at the Grand Palais, Turpin de Crissé in Angers - his taste was refined, as was his knowledge, and the collection took on its true direction. From now on, each acquisition will be definitive.

What followed was a series of aesthetic shocks, and a desire for works that would have a place in public collections. In 2006, he took the first step with a donation to the Musée du Louvre, followed by fourteen others, subject to usufruct, to museums close to his heart: the Louvre, Lyon, Rennes, Montpellier, Amiens, Montargis, Strasbourg and Orléans. It is in this museum, where he has already donated three paintings, and in the city where Proust, his great man, did his military service, that his collection and the generous collector are revealed for the first time in this exhibition.