JEAN-BAPTISTE MALLET, FEATURED IN FRANCE'S FOREMOST MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

The exhibition's curator Carole Blumenfeld approached numerous fellow curators to discuss the prospect of a major monographic show. They enthusiastically agreed to open up their collections. For the very first time, this exhibition will be enjoying loans from nine renowned institutions: the Louvre, Museum of Decorative Arts, Cognacq-Jay and Carnavalet museums in Paris, together with the Dieppe castle-museum, Château de Pau national museum, Thomas Henry Museum in Cherbourg, Provence Art and History Museum in Grasse and Fabre Museum in Montpellier. These numerous museums harbor little-known works by the painter that visitors to Grasse can look forward to discovering this summer.

When the Jean-Honoré Fragonard Museum opened its doors ten years ago, Jean-Baptiste Mallet was still a relatively unknown painter. Since then, time has weaved its magic. Numerous curators and art historians have visited the museum, where around thirty of Mallet's works are on show including the disturbing Madam Duchess of Angoulême at the grave of her parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Among recent acquisitions, Innocence and Loyalty Bringing Back Love and The Sleepwalker have also considerably revamped the Grasse painter's image in the eyes of period specialists. In turn, the Cognacq-Jay museum in 2015, Fabre museum in 2017 and Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018 all acquired works by Mallet: proof indeed of the interest now sparked by Mallet among the research community. The fruit of two years' work, this monographic exhibition should significantly change public perception of the painter, by demonstrating the close attention he paid to social and political issues throughout his career. When Mallet – born in Grasse two years before Marguerite Gérard – arrived in Paris, nothing could have foretold his future career. In 1783, he began studying at the studio of Toulon-born artist Simon Julien, approved by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. He soon realized that genre painting, unlike historical painting, was synonymous with freedom. His first known works are lighthearted subjects painted in gouache "adapted to the latest taste", together with a scattering of etchings that allowed him to gain an insight into the engraving trade. Nevertheless, he struggled to "find himself " until the early 1790s. He became a painter, draftsman and even engraver of the personal upheavals that marked the revolutionary period, as depicted in The Departure of the Volunteer and The Republican Divorce. His embroiderers and fashion sellers of yesteryear suddenly embraced the revolutionary times. Through his gouache paintings showing young women who had just given birth among ancient ruins, mothers teaching basic education to toddlers dressed in rags, and priests celebrating christenings in palaces displaying dramatic traces of bygone splendor, Mallet captured the mood of a generation of art lovers who had fled events in France. His efforts brought him little financial reward, but Mallet understood that in order to exist, an artist must convey a message. Highly attentive to the issues of piety and religion, his 1797 work Natural Cult, portraying the Theophilanthropy sect, which he designed and engraved himself, met with great success. The work's very wide circulation and the trouble it brought him after the sect was banned allowed him to definitively make a name for himself. From then on, in particular under the Empire, the artist used his relationships of trust and friendship to move forward on a path mapped out to meet his aspirations. His close ties with the artist Prud’hon, especially, inspired him to innovate.