AGEN.- The City of Agen and its Fine Arts Museum, located between Bordeaux and Toulouse in the South-west of France, is presenting, over the winter of 2019-2020, an outstanding exhibition with a fresh and unexpected view on Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) and his work.

Through a selection of works in several media (paintings, drawings, engravings), the exhibition demonstrates the essential characteristics that remain constant in Goya’s work and reveal the role played by his collaborators in his studio.

The Museum’s scientific team is assisted in this project by one of the specialists of Goya’s work Juliet Wilson-Bareau and the event has received personal support from the French Minister of Culture.

Nearly 90 works loaned by museums and private collections around the world (France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, UK, USA) are on display in the Jacobins’ Church (Église des Jacobins), an Agen architectural jewel and an emblematic place for the Museum’s temporary exhibitions.

GOYA IN AGEN
In the late nineteenth-century, Count Damase de Chaudordy (1826-1889) bequeathed a very substantial collection to his birthplace Agen. As French ambassador to the court of Madrid he bought many works, such as five of six paintings by Goya from the private collection of Federico de Madrazo, former first painter of the queen and director of the Prado Museum. These paintings have already been catalogued by Charles Yriarte in 1867 and come directly from the collections of Goya’s son Don Xavier (1784-1854) and grandson Don Mariano (1806-1874) Marquis of Espinar.

FROM «FORTUNY TO PICASSO» ... TO GOYA
This ambitious project is reminiscent of the blockbuster exhibition organized in 1993 «From Fortuny to Picasso» which attracted more than 25,000 visitors. This was the first major exhibition at the Jacobins’ church and the result of a collaboration with the Prado Museum in Madrid. It has been the origin of precursory research on Spanish painters of the 19th century. The curator at the time, Yannick Lintz, now Head of the Department of Islamic Arts at the Louvre Museum, keeps a benevolent eye on Agen’s projects and supports this exhibition.

This exhibition is based on research from the Louvre Museum and the Research and Restoration Centre of the Museums of France (C2RMF). The exhibition benefits from the technical and scientific advice of this latter institution, where two paintings of Goya’s followers (Goyesques) from the Museum of Agen are currently being studied and restored for the exhibition.

It is a new approach to Goya’s work that is being proposed to better underline the singularity of his art and his way of working, from drawing to painting.

This project could, in the long term, better define the artistic approach of Goya and the implication of the collaborators in his workshop. The aim of the exhibition is to provide both the large public and the painting connoisseurs with a unique opportunity to enjoy and admire many masterpieces that can also be analyzed in detail (documentation and technical analysis).