Toulouse has found the Paul Dupuy museum, its Precious Arts and its curiosities
The Paul Dupuy museum has opened its doors to the public after 3 years of closure in Toulouse. Renamed “Museum of Precious Arts” it offers several rich and astonishing collections such as old clocks. A large place is also given to the precursor objects of the cinema. Lovers of beautiful things and curiosities, a visit is a must.
In this museum, you have to accept getting lost and being surprised. The location is superb, in a former Toulouse mansion from the 12th century. In the basement in beautiful vaulted cellars, on the ground floor or on the upper floors, more than 150,000 objects and works have been nestled with a new scenography.
Located in the historic district of the Carmelites, renamed “Museum of Precious Arts” there are decorative arts, graphic arts, but also a new and important fund allocated to cinema.
Among the many collections, the one dedicated to the 7th art has never yet been opened to the public. Most of the cinema and pre-cinema collection comes from Jean Rouzaud’s collection acquired in 1985. 38 objects have thus been restored to be revealed to the public. Under names with unusual names such as “praxinoscope”, “zootrope” or “mutoscope”, they tell the story of cinema, from the first optical recreations of the 19e century until the projection devices of the first decades of the XXe century.
2 rooms are now devoted to these objects, in partnership with the Toulouse cinematheque. The first is reserved for optical processes for making relief and animation. We thus find the “graphoscope” (ancestor of 3D), the really magic lanterns or the “mutoscope” invented before the cinematograph of the Lumière brothers. “It is called mutoscope or kinora, says Francis Saint-Genez, curator and director of the museum. It is an English object with the same principle as the “flip book” (NDR: booklet of drawings or photographs that you leaf through very quickly to animate the image). The process is placed inside this case, with magnifying glasses. We could watch this show at 3. We found it in fairs, places of passage, stations. It is a very beautiful object. At the time, there were several processes to set the image in motion.”
There are also many posters, an optical table that would have belonged to the Lumière brothers, the first horror and fantasy films… more than 2,000 objects to delight the curious and enthusiasts.
The jewel of the museum remains this collection of old clocks to measure time in beauty. Objects that also bear witness to their time. From Renaissance clocks with a single hand, to more precise clocks with 2 hands that appeared around 1750 and then a 3rd for the seconds, these table clocks, pocket watches and other clocks that also adorned public buildings are all more beautiful. than the others. Most of this “cabinet du temps” comes from a donation from Edouard Gélis, a collector from Toulouse born in the 19th century.
There is even a clock that served as a time reference in the 19th century for the whole of France, placed underground to avoid variations and shifts as much as possible.
The choice of Francis Saint-Genez is for a clock sculpture that we owe to Paul Landowski, author of Christ in Majesty over the Bay of Rio.
“It is a unique piece, the first bronze print. It is an allegory of passing time, the god Chronos who devours his children. The bronze was cast in 1907. The work was purchased by a Parisian collector to the artist shortly before her death. She never left her house until the museum purchased her at a public sale in 2020.”
Closed for 3 years but temporarily open during a parenthesis at the end of last year, the museum’s renovation work cost €1.5 million. The Museum of Decorative Arts and Graphic Arts was initially the work of its founder Paul Dupuy. This Toulouse collector never lived in the Besson hotel but he had to rehabilitate this place in 1909 to put his many collections there.
At the end of his life, he made a foothold in the State of his immense fund which retroceded it to the city of Toulouse. It has been a municipal museum since 1949.
From floor to floor, from room to room, we find local earthenware from Maîtres-Tolosane, porcelain from Valentine and… a plate by Picasso.
Curiosities, preciousnesses that must be unearthed. Reliquaries, the Jesuit pharmacy, dresses by great couturiers (Castelbajac, Popy Moreni..), musical instruments like the “serinette” (ancestor of the barrel organ) or a very old “boha” (bagpipe). Very moving too, these spoons sculpted by the soldiers in the trenches.
A good idea for an outing for this rainy weekend. A rich museum of precious arts often modest or each object has a story to tell.