The renovated Goya Museum sheds light on Hispanic art

About the reopening of the Goya Museum in Castres on 15 April 2023.

After three years of work, the Goya Museum reopened its doors in Castres on 15 April, and is making a splash by offering a unique tour of Hispanic art in France, from the Middle Ages to the present day, with a focus on Goya, its tutelary figure. In the May 2023 issue of Beaux Arts Magazine, journalist Sophie Flouquet offers us a guided tour of this museum jewel, which has been ignored for too long. Even if it still has to share the Bishop's Palace with the town hall, the Goya Museum has risen to the level of the most beautiful French museums, according to Sophie Flouquet. Now opening on the ground floor, it opens onto new temporary exhibition rooms, currently dedicated to Miro's homage to Gaudi until 4 June, but which will be the setting for the exhibition "Goya in the Eye of Picasso" from 30 June to 1 October. On the first floor, instead of the eleven existing rooms, there are now twenty-three rooms displaying more than 600 Spanish works of art. The highlight is the new Goya room.

"I wanted to put Goya back at the heart of the exhibition by isolating him and devoting an entire room to him, with the paintings on one side and the prints on the other in a more intimate graphic art room," explains Joëlle Arches, the museum's director and leader of this renovation. She succeeds all the good fairies who have bent over the cradle of this museum from its first beginnings in 1840 to the present day, including its current name dating from 1947 after the miraculous manna of the bequest of Marcel Briguiboul (1837-1892), which made it the only Hispanic art museum in France. There were, for example, benevolent curators from the national museums, such as René Huyghe, and wise directors such as Gaston Poulain, Jeannine Baticle, who came from the Louvre, and Jean-Louis Augé, who directed the museum for thirty-eight years. But who is this Marcel Briguiboul who is finally at the origin of the spectacular blossoming of a small provincial museum?

"His name will probably mean nothing to you", writes Sophie Flouquet. "Marcel Briguiboul was a very strange character. Painter, sculptor, excellent draughtsman as well, he trained for a time in Barcelona, where his parents had settled in the 1840s, then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid until 1857, before going to Paris, at the age of 21, to attend the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Marcel Briguiboul may have been talented, he frequented the very academic Jean-Paul Laurens as much as the future impressionists Auguste Renoir or Claude Monet, and even made himself noticed at the Salon where he exhibited from 1861 onwards, but he did nothing to develop his fame. It must be said that he had no need to find buyers for his works of art for sale, as he came from a wealthy family of merchants in Castres and lived well off. However, the State bought one of his works of art for sale at the 1863 Salon, and he was an admirable (self-)portraitist, as shown by the Self-portrait with short hair on the walls of the museum, which owes him so much.

Although his work includes more than two hundred paintings, which are as disconcerting as their creator because of their mixture of influences, between symbolism, orientalism nourished by his stays in the Maghreb and Spanish art, Marcel Briguiboul will be remembered above all as a compulsive and particularly inspired collector. Paintings, objets d'art, Hispano-Moorish earthenware, tapestries... everything interested him! And it was love at first sight when he discovered Goya's painting at an art dealer's in Madrid. At the time, the only works known in France were the engravings of the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). "Crazy thing: we don't know how exactly, but on 7 May 1881, Briguiboul had the opportunity and the intuition to buy three works by the master, including one for the sum of 8,750 gold francs and a loan," says the journalist from Beaux Arts Magazine.

And what works! In the endearing Self-Portrait with Glasses, dating from around 1800, Goya repeats the pose he had adopted to represent himself in the Family of Charles IV, the great painting in which he had the honour of appearing. This is a far cry from the tortured iconography of his later paintings. In his Portrait of the Financier Francisco del Mazo, we are amused to see the model's hands, which are so untidy that we think the artist did it on purpose because he did not receive a sufficient price. And finally, in front of the Junta de los Filipinos, Goya's greatest historical painting of 1815, we can see how the artist is making fun of Ferdinand VII, surrounding the King of Spain with an assembly of puppets, who has just regained the throne as an absolutist, deceitful and incompetent monarch, while the empire is in the process of being dismembered. For one must always seek the underlying meaning of a Goya painting.

Briguiboul had only one son, Pierre, who died a year after him while doing his military service, and who bequeathed, as did his mother a little later, the whole of the family collections and his father's studio collection to the town of Castres. From bequests to deposits, with the Louvre entrusting Castres with some thirty works, including Velazquez's Portrait of Philip IV and Murillo's Virgin with a Rosary, and from donations to acquisitions, such as Francisco Pachebo's magnificent Last Judgement in 1996, "the Goya Museum has, over time, carved out a destiny: that of becoming the only museum of Hispanic art in France, concentrating in particular a remarkable collection of paintings from the Golden Age (17th century), the most important after that of the Louvre," writes Sophie Flouquet.

A Golden Age that is, in the end, rather misnamed, since it was the period during which Spain had to deal with plague epidemics, the mismanagement of colonial manna and the decline of its reigning dynasty. Nevertheless, paradoxically, it was the period in which the arts were at their peak. Literature with Cervantes and Lope de Vega, music too, but above all painting, with Ribera, Velazquez and Zurbaran, then Murillo and Valdés Leal. However, the painting of this period emanated a strange atmosphere, made up of the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition, preventing artists from unleashing their brushes. As the journalist from Beaux Arts Magazine writes, "Goya was the one who opened up Hispanic art to modernity with his work, which testifies acutely to the dark side of Enlightenment Europe". He now has a museum in Castres worthy of his importance.