Le cèdre, « vert diadème » des cimes de Méditerranée

In its graphic arts cabinet, the Musée d’Orsay presents 19th-century drawings inspired by the majestic Mediterranean cedars. Through works by Guillaumet, Lévy-Dhurmer and Belly, discover the beauty of these emblematic trees.

The cedar forests dear to poets Alphonse de Lamartine and Stéphane Mallarmé also inspired 19th-century draftsmen. Conical when young, the cedar, by the time it reaches a century, takes on the emblematic shape by which it is known. Its silhouette, with its “towering tiers,” emerges among fig trees, hawthorn in blossom and the white lilies of the desert in northern Algeria that Gustave Guillaumet rendered in ink, charcoal and pastel on tracing papers and colored papers in pale mauve, bluish and grayish tones. Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer likewise sketched, in blue pencil, the long, slender form of the Atlas cedars, while Léon Belly punctuates the pages of his notebooks with them as he travels from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea.

Cover: Gustave Guillaumet, Landscape with Cedars, Broken Trees and Hills, undated, Musée d’Orsay Collection – Department of Graphic Arts of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, mode of acquisition unknown, n.d., © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Tony Querrec