Reception room

Rosa BONHEUR • Étude de cheval gris au vert

Born in Bordeaux to a father who was a drawing teacher, Rosa Bonheur succeeded - a rare feat in her day, when women were not even admitted to the École des Beaux-arts - in becoming a painter as recognised as the
male artists. A free spirit and feminist, she smoked cigars, dressed as a man and walked with a lion cub on a lead. Her animal paintings brought her international fame, and she was the first painter to be awarded the Légion d'honneur. "I had a taste for stables that was more irresistible than that of the royal or imperial anterooms. His rural and realistic paintings are largely devoted to the animals of the French countryside, with a passion for horses and cattle.

Louise ABBÉMA • Portrait de Renée de Pont-Jest sur la plage

Louise Abbéma was a pupil of Chaplin, Henner and Carolus-Duran, and a close friend of Sarah Bernhardt, whose portraits she painted on numerous occasions. She is best known for her portraits, but also for her decorative floral panels. On a personal level, she was a very free woman in an era dominated by patriarchy, and wore men's suits in particular. A painter of actresses, she was nicknamed the ‘Sarah Bernhardt of painting’. This portrait is one of her paintings of her other actress friend, Renée Delmas, known as Renée de Pont-Jest. Born in Paris to parents of Rémois origin, Renée Delmas married Lucien Guitry in 1882 and became the mother of Sacha Guitry.

Sarah BERNHARDT • Buste de Victorien Sardou

Marcel Proust deeply admired Sarah Bernhardt. Considered one of the greatest actresses of the Belle Époque, she was a major inspiration for the character of La Berma in Du côté de chez Swann, described as an immense artist. Although they were not close, Proust and Sarah Bernhardt had mutual friends, including Madeleine Lemaire. Many painted portraits of the actress exist, many of them by Louise Abbéma. Although posterity has rightly retained the figure of the great actress, Sarah Bernhardt was also a talented artist, painting and sculpting. Two of her bronzes are presented here, one of which represents her great friend, the famous playwright Victorien Sardou.

Jean-Francis AUBURTIN • Portrait d’Isadora Duncan

The American choreographer Isadora Duncan was a pioneer of modern dance, embodying a new freedom for women too. The first to dance barefoot, with her thin tunics and free movements, she imposed a new idea of dance based on improvisation and the search for a personal language. ‘To dance is to express one's inner life’, she used to say. In 1905, she opened her first dance school in Berlin. Her tours took her all over Europe and she settled in Paris, where she became close to many artists, including Rodin, Bourdelle, Denis, Cocteau and Auburtin, a highly modern artist who painted her on several occasions.

Jean de GAIGNERON • Portrait d’Anna de Noailles, poétesse

"Without Marcel Proust, without his morning hymns and evening angeles, which arrived in envelopes overloaded with extra taxes, I would not have written (...). His dazzling friendship influenced me, changed me, as only a noble love of the word can do". This is how Anna de Noailles described her friendship with Proust, who wrote in return: ‘I have known her for a very long time, I knew her as a young girl, I admire no writer more than her’. Born Princess Bibesco Bassaraba de Brancovan, Anna de Noailles was a writer and poet, and a great friend of Marcel Proust, whom she met in 1893. They corresponded a great deal during Proust's stays in Cabourg.

Phonograph

It was at the 1878 World's Fair that the public discovered Edison's phonograph. The operator spoke in a loud voice in front of a mouthpiece containing a membrane of the type used in Bell's telephone while rotating a cylinder with a crank. The vibrations of the blade, caused by the sound, animate a steel point which engraves grooves in the tin foil surrounding the cylinder. The voice, recorded, is amplified and played back through a megaphone placed on the mouthpiece.

It was mainly the musical field that gave this invention all its interest. Before the First World War, the "rolls", by allowing the diffusion of songs and short musical pieces, gained an enormous success.

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