Toulouse. Who was Paul Dupuy, who gave his name to the museum which has just reopened?
By Toulouse editorial staff
Published on
“The goods donated under the present residences will be specially assigned to the establishment and for the purposes of a regularly controlled municipal museum, and to the exclusion of any other assignment”. When he disappeared on December 11, 1944, Paul Dupuy bequeaths all of its collections and the building that houses them to the State.
Inauguration of the museum in 1949
Returned to the City of Toulouse in 1948, the “Paul Dupuy Museum” is represented the following year, July 14, 1949. Robert Mesuret, his successor, describes Paul Dupuy as a “counter-fashion” art lover, passionate about the search for precious pieces as well as testimonies of popular and domestic life. There are “snuffboxes, binoculars, shagreens, bergamot, plates, cups, pots, glasses, lamps, vases and everything that could fit into the cupboards of our ancestors between the reign of Louis XVI and that of Napoleon III”.
A number of ceramics, furniture, drawings and prints (mainly by Toulouse artists) also occupy a prominent place in the range of his tastes.
A life devoted to the arts
Disdaining family business – his father ran a successful business in the sale of colonial foodstuffs, rue des Changes, and his brother later took over President of the Chamber of Commerce of Toulouse -, Paul is studying at the Central School of Arts and Manufactures in Paris in order to embark on a career as a civil engineer. But his appetite for the arts is the strongest. He devoted his life to it, hunting here and there among antique dealers and maintaining close relations with learned societies and other directors of institutions.
He throws his evolution on the Hotel de Besson
In 1909, he fell in love with the Besson hotel, old parliamentary residence of the Carmelites in ruins which he remodels to store his many acquisitions. “He added a third floor decorated with mirandes and erected a chapter tower on the base of the only vestige of the original Renaissance building,” explains Claire Dalzin, head of graphic arts.
A museum true to its spirit
For seven decades, the museum, faithful to the spirit of its initiator, needed to enrich itself. Each of the curators brings their own personal touch. In the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Measuret develop graphic arts, bring in furniture from the Toulouse Renaissance or even medieval and modern medallions.
Jeanne Guillevic, she creates a restoration workshop and begins the construction of reserves. Jean Penent founded a cabinet of drawings, expanding to the Italian style and the European neoclassical landscape, and adding other objects from the regional heritage.
Finally, Francois Saint-Genez increases the collection of old clocks (with, among other things, the donation of the old collection of Georges Prin) or that of cinema and pre-cinema (such as an optical box and a series of six optical views or the first cameras cinematographic like kinoras…).
Matthew Arnal
Was this article helpful to you? Know that you can follow Actu Toulouse in space My News . In one click, after registration, you will find all the news of your favorite cities and brands.