At the centre of this display are two miniature portraits gifted to the Fondation by a friend from Brussels. In Year VIII of the French Republic (1799-1800), Pierre de Saint-Pierre and his wife, née Marie Texier, were depicted in profile against a dark background, as was the habit of the miniaturist Charles Bourgeois, who was also a physicist and a chemist. A window within a window, the frame harboring them is lined with a slightly faded reddish-brown velvet which adds the perfect final touch to their precious and refined natures.

From portraits of a presence to portraying through absence. With his sensitivity as a naturalist painter, Albert Besnard, for his part, devoted all his attention to a humble and ordinary subject, an object that is par excellence intimate: a pair of slippers. In a few strokes of brown, grey and green watercolour, he instilled life into the house shoes, their heels flattened for comfort and effortless use, worn through the years, and warped by their wearer’s feet.

From indoor shoes to outdoor shoes. The Dutch painter Jan Baptist Weenix, two centuries earlier, had also spent some time contemplating a pair of shoes that he’d seen while traveling through Italy. The sandals, drawn vigorously in black chalk, belonged to a hunter who had not only removed his shoes but also deposited his hunting horn nearby. Could it be that he’d crossed paths with a deer, or perhaps with the goddess of hunting herself?

The latter is represented above, in a chiaroscuro woodcut. Sitting in a languorously reclining posture, leaning on a vase from which water gently flows, and surrounded by numerous animals, this Diana calls to mind the large bronze sculpture executed by Benvenuto Cellini upon Francis I’s request, for his château in Fontainebleau (and found at the Louvre today). This rare print – there are only two other impressions known, in Vienna and Chicago – could be by the hand of an artist of the same school.

From the Fontainebleau Diana to an Italian Diana. In Bernardino Cavallino’s drawing – one of eight drawings given to the artist today – Diana, without her animals or arrows, can be recognized through the crescent swiftly drawn in her hair. With a few strokes, the Italian artist defined the elegant tilting of her head as well as the movement in her hair and in the drapery over her shoulder. Then the red chalk lingers, adding a frown to the brow, lowering the gaze and parting the lips. An expression of distress, anger or perhaps surprise thus appears on her face, most probably as a reaction to an indiscreet encounter, to which only the painter was privy.