Musée national de la marine and Mathurin Méheut : 201308

I visited the Musée national de la marine in the Tracadero. It was a pretty good museum and the temporary exhibit, that of Mathurin Méheut, was fantastic. I had no idea of his work and the amount of work he's done made me really feel like I've wasted a lot of time - to be honest. That being said, there is surprisingly little about him on Wiki or Wiki French (although there's a good list of works), but you can read about him at the Musée de la marine or the Musée Mathurin Méheut in Lamballe, France

Left: my ticket with une sirène ailée, figure de proue de l'Australie (winged mermaid, figurehead from Australia). It was 10€ for the permanent collection and the temp expo. On the right, une autre figure de proue qui ressemble Napoleon 1er. You can't appreciate the scale in the photo, but the Napoleon figurehead is pretty large and being all white, was quite impressive.

In the permanent collection, you can take pictures of anything you like, which is always nice. Even so, I only took two pictures of paintings. There were several paintings - mainly of ships and/or naval battles - which aren't necessarily my taste. I did take two shots of painting I thought best evoked emotion.

Top: Battle of Texel, 1836 (date of painting, date of battle was 29 juin 1694), by Eugène Isabey.

Below: Francis TATTEGRAIN, Le Charles Dickens, après 1880

I really like Le Charles Dickens as it's not the normal subject and was really detailed. It's a pretty small painting, but that made the impact more impressive. 

There are lots of pictures of this diving suit on the web, but I had to join in. This atmospheric diving suit, by the Carmagnolle brothers, held the patent for the first properly anthropomorphic design of ADS featuring rolling convolute joints consisting of partial sections of concentric spheres formed to create a close fit and kept watertight with a waterproof cloth.

The last thing I photographed in the permanent gallery (mainly because I didn't give myself enough time) was the Jules Verne Trophy. The trophy is a prize for the fastest circumnavigation of the world by any type of yacht with no restrictions on the size of the crew provided the vessel has registered with the organization and paid an entry fee. The trophy itself is pretty cool. It resembles a hull and just floats in space. It's actually held in place by a little mooring cable. The pics don't do it justice.

THE TEMP EXHIBIT : Mathurin Méheut.

Where do I begin? I thought Méheut's works were awesome. They subjects ranged from people, to animals, to landscapes; and his media included drawing, caséine, acrylic, gouache, oil and even sculpture. I was most impressed. After all, I think he is most known as an illustrator.

Since I couldn't take pictures, I tried to find some examples of what I lied on the web. The blue lobster above is a perfect example. It's found in "Regarde" by Colette et Méheut (shown below). They only made 750 (I think) so these books are certainly collector's items. Par exemple, you can buy one on French Ebay for 4.950 €. That's about 250 € per illustration.

Of course the museum had a copy. Museum's are so lucky. I liked Marais salants, femme portant du sel sur sa tête, but I could only find one lo-res photo on the web. Another rather famous pic is Ramasseuse du sel. Much easier to find and shown below.

Left: Ramasseuse du sel (pickers [female] of salt), entre 1882 et 1958, huile sur toile

Right: another example of the illustrations in Regarde

Walking through the exposition, there were some awesome illustrations by Maurice Pillard-Verneuil, a French artist and decorator in the Art nouveau movement. The panels were from l'Animal dans la Décoration, 1897. Here are two great examples...

As you can see, totally art nouveau and fantastic artwork.

Here is an example of his sculpture,

Un poulpe attaquant un banc de poissons (je dirais un seiche, pas un poulpe) pour le restaurant Prunier. Another restaurant with Méheut's work is l'huîtrière in Lille. Below is an incredible example of his mastery of illustration. The thousands of shades of gray and the occasional white highlights make these jump to life.

There were so many more works, but I think you get an idea of his breadth of work and range of subjects. Sadly, while some of his works are in Paris, you can't count on seeing a collection this large as it was a temporary exhibit.