Histoires de familles

In Grève at Saint-Ouen, Paul Delance paints workers, women and children in the midst of a demonstration, in front of the factory. For an exhibition devoted to the family, the Musée d’Orsay thus chooses an image that shows it in the street. The painting sets the tone for Histoires de familles, which follows the family ties from the home to the public space, in France from 1848 to 1914.

The major portraits by Degas and Bazille show how a bourgeois family chooses to present itself, several generations gathered in a single frame. The poor or wandering families drawn by Daumier shift the question: what remains of this domestic ideal when the home itself is precarious? The exhibition extends this gap toward maternity. The works of Berthe Morisot and the trajectory of the Countess of Castiglione reveal experiences that the conventional image of the mother of the family poorly gathers.

Heritage also hinges on a name. Félix and Adrien Tournachon dispute the use of the name Nadar, which had become famous in the world of photography. With Odilon Redon, the family narrative is read through pastels where the mourning of a child surfaces. These two stories of siblings convey all that circulates within a family, from reputation to the memory of the deceased.

Paintings, photographs, films and archives respond to one another even in the sections devoted to couples and to the desires that marriage, as then regulated by the Civil Code, leaves on the margins. The menagerie that Rosa Bonheur gathers at Thomery still shifts the gaze. Its presence in the route raises the question of bonds of attachment beyond human kinship. Contemporary interventions bring it back to the present: who can form a family, and under what conditions?

Practical information
- Thursday late opening until 9:45 p.m.
- Closed on Mondays and on May 1.