Gilles and Bathsheba

Gilles and Bathsheba

Today, I set myself the task of reuniting Gilles and Bathsheba, separated for more than a century. Watteau’s Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles, and Rembrandt’s Bathsheba belonged to the collection of Dr. Louis La Caze, the finest donation of paintings to the Louvre, bequeathed in 1869. The collection is long exhibited together—including the eighteenth-century painters that La Caze had helped rediscover, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, Nattier, and Watteau, and masters like Rembrandt, Hals, Tintoretto, and Velázquez—on the first level of the Denon wing in the magnificent room now decorated with the sky of Cy Twombly (Denon, room 663). The La Caze collection was scattered in the 1920s and the works went to join their respective schools and periods. Gilles and Bathsheba lost sight of each other. I wanted to reunite these two treasures of the Louvre by running straight from one to the other, and I started with Bathsheba at Her Bath (Richelieu, room 844) before a long journey across the Richelieu and Sully wings alongside rue de Rivoli. I tried to keep Bathsheba’s image in my head to set her down next to the one I still call Gilles. To no avail: Gilles is out for restoration at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France [Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France]. Luckily, I had him perfectly in my memory. Despite my disappointment, I reconnected the two paintings, ideally joined together for eternity.