Musée des beaux arts - Limoges

We do love a museum, especially when it has a display of arts.

We visited the musée des beaux arts de Limoges, a grand building that was commissioned by the bishop as a new personal palace in 1766. It was never completed following the French Revolution of 1789. The museum has three distinct sections, an Egyptian section, a history of Limoges section, and a section devoted to enamels.

The section on the history of Limoges had a series of 3D maps showing the size of the city through the ages, and a collection of very detailed paintings showing what Limoges looked like during those periods.

They also had works by painters that had lived or worked in Limoges, including a few paintings by our local celebrity Renoir.

A rather spectacular piece, that caught our attention, is the rather crazy Parade Burlesque by David-Ossipovitch Widhopff, 1924

Just love those pigs!

The real surprise was yet to come though, in the enamel section.

Enamelling, in its most basic form, is a method that seals vitreous powder (ground from crystal), that’s mixed with colourings, to copper plate using heat. The coloured layers need to be applied in the correct order, with the highest melting point colours first. Each colour fired separately. It’s a painstaking process, but the results can be mesmerising.

It’s not a process reserved for flat plates of copper either, many of the works were created on complex shapes formed by sculpting the copper first.

This small, blue vase was so beautifully textured, and finished with metallic enamels for that extra ‘pop’.

It was an altogether wonderful museum, but the enamels really were the star of the show.