Francois-Xavier is not sleeping

Last night I went to the Musée Fabre during its “François-Xavier n’est pas couché” (Franços-Xavier is not sleeping) event, where the museum opened its doors from 8:00 in the evening until midnight free to college students.  François-Xavier Fabre, (1766–1837) was a famous French painter who studied under the famous Jacques-Louis David.  Fabre painted a number of famous aristocrats of his time, including the brother of Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte.  In 1824, he returned to his native Montpellier and offered the city a large number of his most important works, on the condition that they build a name a museum after him and also let him live in said museum.  The city figured it to be a pretty good deal.  He was named a baron by the French King Charles X (during the Restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy in the decades after Napoleon) and he was also made an Officer of the Legion of Honor, which was the highest honor capable of being bestowed upon a citizen of France.

The museum was opened to the public in 1828.  It was furnished by Fabre’s donation of his works and of his private collection.  He had quite a few important paintings, both of his master David’s and of his friends, who were also leading artists and sculptors of the era.  They mostly represent the Classical and Neo-classical periods.  The museum has since acquired an important collection of several masters from Holland, a collection of the precursors of the impressionism movement, and has received deposits from the Louvre, the musée d’Orsay, the National Museum of Modern Art.  It features the work of Eugène Delacroix, Frédéric Bazille, Gustave Courbet and Alexandre Cabanel (whose ability to create life-like detailed faces very impressed me).  I was also very impressed by the work of Pierre Claude François Delorme for the same reasons.  There was also a nightmare fuel painting, Chasse au sanglier by Abraham Hondius, of several hunting dogs attacking a boar.  All of the animals’ expressions are a mix of horror and bestial savagery and it is a very gruesome scene.  While the Holland collection was primarily peaceful pastoral scenes (with the previously mentioned exception), a great deal of the other art consisted of biblical or Roman mythological scenes.  They were incredibly beautiful and detailed.  I was also shocked by size of some of the paintings, which is very hard to describe, but many were larger than life.  It is hard for me to believe the skill of these artists, whose work still looks fresh and newly painted, even though some of the work has been around longer than my country.