BOUTHEMARD FUND - Lot 253

Lot 253.2
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Résultat : NC
BOUTHEMARD FUND - Lot 253
BOUTHEMARD FUND Carefully preserved for almost 120 years, the incredible "Bouthemard" collection is inextricably linked to the late 19th century, a golden age for the promotion of French heritage. Comprising hundreds of casts, original fragments of medieval and Renaissance decors and modern decorative elements, this collection bears witness to the flourishing activity of a masonry company working on behalf of building renovation projects in the Chartres region in the last third of the 19th century. In 1869, Louis-Xavier Bouthemard (b. 1815), a mason by profession, took over "the work on the cathedral". "the work on the cathedral, following in the footsteps of Bourgeois. His son Louis (b. 1841) took over in 1876. Both worked for the Ministère des Cultes, under the direction of architect Emile Boeswillwald (1857-1896), successor to Jean-Baptiste Lassus, on the abysmal restoration of Chartres Cathedral. Over the course of almost three decades, they contributed to the renovation of major parts of one of France's most beautiful Gothic cathedrals, notably the Vendôme chapel and the large rose window in the gable of the southern transept. In 1884, the minutes of the Société archéologique d'Eure-et-Loir recalled that "the Congress of Architects awarded Mr. Bouthemard a medal for the intelligence with which he restored the rose window of the south portal". During work on the cathedral, Bouthemard father and son supervised the work of a number of sculptors, including Parfait, Journée, Fritel and Duvieux, who were called upon to carry out stamping campaigns and make replacement copies. The advantage of the stamping technique is that it produces a cast that strictly represents the state of a subject at the moment the impression is taken. It also enables the production of multiple working documents distributed to various institutions (museums, repositories, private collections), which can serve as a reference standard or source of inspiration for a workshop or school. This practice was inaugurated by Lassus, a disciple of Viollet-Le-Duc responsible for the restoration of Chartres Cathedral from 1845 until his death in 1857, who embarked on a restoration project in which the quest for archaeological accuracy predominated. In 1848, Lassus had a lapidary repository set up in the cathedral's crypt to house these stamps and casts. His successors, Émile Boeswillwald (1857-1896) and Antonin Paul Selmersheim (1896-1916), continued this policy, which Bouthemard adopted for many of its projects, including the cathedral. While all the casts from some of these stamps, as well as the lapidary fragments from Chartres Cathedral in the Bouthemard / Chedeville collection, have been identified and returned to the Drac, the works allotted for this sale come from other sites. Bouthemard, whose activities are partly dedicated to heritage renovation and partly to contemporary construction (marble works dating back to at least 1930), has been involved in other projects in and around Chartres, such as the annex to the Chapelle de la Brèche, the Post Office building near the Notre-Dame cloister, the chapel of the Sisters of Notre-Dame on Rue des Jubelines, the monument to the heart of the Bishop of Chartres, Monseigneur Lagrange at the Séminaire de Chartres, and many others. Monseigneur Lagrange at the Séminaire de Saint Chéron, and the tabernacle on the high altar in Denonville church. This collection, preserved to the present day by Bouthemard's successors, is not only the vestige of a company collection. It has also taken on the character of a collection of notorious local interest. Well-known to the Chartres public, it demonstrated the interest in and love of art that Louis Bouthemard nurtured throughout his career. Many of the works, including some originals such as the altarpiece from the church in Chuisnes and four plaster tympanums from the former Salle Saint-Côme, were exhibited in his small private museum in a part of his property known as "la galerie". When Louis Bouthemard died in 1914, after having been elected town councillor and curator of the museum of the Eure-et-Loir archaeological society, his funeral homage, read at the meeting of February 18, 1915, described him in the following terms: "[...] M. Bouthemard, essentially conservative in his actions, intransigent even in his manifestations, loved to pull out of the dumpster demolitions or save clumsy transformations made under
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