Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!

The Bruyas Collection from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier

June 27–September 6 2004

Nicolas François Octave Tassaert

The Painter’s Studio

1853
Oil on canvas
The Bruyas Collection, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France

Alfred Bruyas (1821–1877) was one of the most remarkable art collectors of his time. The son of a banker, he spent much of his life in Montpellier in Southern France, yet he assembled an ambitious and wide-ranging collection of works by many of the greatest French masters of the mid-nineteenth century. Recognized today as Gustave Courbet's most avid patron and collector, Bruyas acquired a superb group of paintings by Courbet, whom Bruyas met and befriended in Paris. Their collaboration resulted in The Meeting (popularly known as "Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!"), a painting that has become one of the icons of nineteenth-century art. Bruyas also purchased significant masterpieces by Géricault, Delacroix, Cabanel, and other prominent artists, so that his collection surveys the major artistic trends of his time. In an act of public beneficence, he donated his art to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier in 1868 and 1876. This exhibition, organized around themes that reveal the range of Bruyas's taste and highlight the individual artists he most favored, presents his collection for the first time outside his native town. This exhibition has been organized by the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, with the Dallas Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco under the auspices of FRAME (French Regional and American Museum Exchange). It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.