Three graces present their naked bodies to nature in bloom. Three apples take the sun at their feet. And in front of them stretches an audience of journalists who came to discover Thursday, in the interior garden of the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen, the immense triptych in spring colors of which fruits and women form the core. The work, Le Cours de la Seine, was painted by Le Havre artist Raoul Dufy (1877-1953). Left unfinished by the artist in 1937, the composition once again illuminates the heart of the Rouen establishment.
Swirls of freshness, these three oils on canvas present over 60 meters the city of Le Havre and the Seine estuary, the monuments of Rouen, Jumièges and Paris, as well as fertile fields crossed by cast iron bridges. This triple celebration of the Normandy and Ile-de-France landscapes was not designed, in its genesis, to embellish the covered courtyard of the Rouen museum, but to adorn the bar-smoking room of the Théâtre de Chaillot. Othon Friesz’s diptych, La Seine de sa source à Paris was already bathed there between the vapors of alcohol and the smoke of cigars. Raoul Dufy ultimately delivers a completely different composition to his client. Also called Cours de la Seine, this second triptych left the Parisian theater in 1963 and is now exhibited at the Terrasses Saint-Pierre, the restaurant of the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon.
The primitive and incomplete Course of the Seine has, for its part, sailed in the shadows for years. The three paintings first spent forty years stored in the depths of the Palais de Chaillot. In 1978, the Museum of French Monuments (current City of Architecture and Heritage) entrusted the triptych to the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen. The ensemble then enjoyed nearly thirty years of respite. Then, again: the Sequanian composition once again escaped the public’s delight in 2007. Because it proved too imposing to win the museum’s reserves, Raoul Dufy’s work was hidden behind a new picture rail. An older masterpiece is chosen to capture the public’s gaze. This is the Martyrdom of Saint Agnès, a monumental composition by Joseph Désiré Court painted in the 19th century.
The Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie now plans to restore the unfinished and battered pictorial ensemble of Raoul Dufy. To this end, Joseph Désiré Court’s painting was unframed and deposited on April 3. Public cleaning and restoration work on the Cours de la Seine will begin in July, curator Florence Calame-Levert, in charge of the modern and contemporary art collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen, announced on Thursday. Five specialists will endeavor to revive this unloved contemporary composition of the most famous work of the Norman painter: The Electricity Fairy, kept at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The end of the restoration of the triptych is scheduled for October.
This “rediscovery”, which is therefore not really one, was warmly welcomed by the Rouen Seine Normande 2028 association. is an immense pleasure to rediscover the territory of candidature thus interpreted”, rejoiced in a press release Rebecca Armstrong, general delegate of the candidature of Rouen as European Capital of Culture 2028.
