(Lille) The mayoress of Amiens, in the north of France, “begs” in a video the American star Madonna to “lend” her a painting from her personal collection, similar to a work that disappeared from the city during the First World War world, so that the inhabitants can “review” it.
“Madonna, […] I learned that you had bought a painting, Diana and Endymiona work by Jérome-Martin Langlois (1779-1838), a few years ago, ”says Brigitte Fouré in this video posted Monday on her Facebook page, and spotted by the local newspaper The Courrier Picard.
“It is likely” that this painting “is a work lent by the Louvre Museum to the Museum of Fine Arts in Amiens before the First World War, and of which we then lost track”, adds the mayor, in this video in French, with English subtitles.
Emphasizing that she does not “challenge in any way the legal acquisition” of the work (which could be a copy), she explains that she wants to “show” it to the public in 2028, on the occasion of the city’s candidacy for the title of “ European capital of culture “.
According to the article in the French newspaper Le Figaro by which the mayor was alerted, this painting, sold for 1.3 million dollars to the singer by Sotheby’s in 1989, had been recognized by a curator in a photograph of Paris Match, taken at home. Monumental, it represents the naked goddess Diana flying towards the shepherd Endymion, a mythological scene.
“I’m not sure it’s the authentic painting”, but whether it is or is a copy, “it looks a lot like the work” and “I would like the people of Amiens to be able to see it again”, explained the chosen one.
The original was a royal order, placed in 1817 to adorn the Palace of Versailles, detailed for AFP François Séguin, acting director of the Musée de Picardie, the new name of the Beaux-Arts in Amiens.
Left at the Louvre Museum, then exhibited in Amiens from 1872, the work will be declared missing after the war, he continues, without being able to specify its exact fate.
The painting exhibited at Madonna stands out in the 1980s on the Parisian art market. The Louvre Museum, where it was shown in 1988, considered “that it is most certainly a copy, probably by the hand of the artist himself”.
In the absence of signature, date and stamp, and with a “difference in format of about 3 cm”, “it is unlikely” that it is the original, estimates Mr. Séguin. But it remains “the only testimony of the lost work”.