Anne Marie Adèle Caussin (1831-1921). Collecting and patronage in Paris du-ring the Second Empire.

Abstract

Born in a modest family in the French town of Commercy, Adèle Caussin came to have a social position that allowed her to gather one of the largest collections of painting of the last third of the 19th century in France, achieving great notoriety, especially when acquiring in 1870 “La Vicaría” by Mariano Fortuny in its first sale in the Goupil´s Exibition Hall in Paris for 70,000 francs. Although historiography has preferred to point out a profile of a frivolous character, it has been possible to access a whole series of unpublished documentation that allows us to know the true personality of the marquise, her humanitarian work, her great knowledge in the field of painting and her relation-ship with the most distinguished of the painters of the time. Corroborates this new version of Mme. Caussin the unpublished epistolary of the Marquise formed by a corpus of more than one hundred letters that have been rescued.