ACQUISITIONS

A so-called Joséphine s carriage for the Musée National de la Voiture du Château de Compiègne This green and gold-painted wooden carriage, decorated with an eagle, two griffins and a statuette representing the goddess Hebe and with a box upholstered in green velvet, was part of the collection of the coachbuilder Mühlbacher. Fortunately, in 2021 it joined the collections of ceremonial carriages at the Musée National de la Voiture du Château de Compiègne, which mainly features carriages from the 18th century and the Second Empire, through a pre-emptive acquisition.

A relocation and six donations for the Musée du Moyen Âge In 2021, an incredibly rare applied figure was relocated to the Musée de Cluny, Musée National du Moyen-Age. Representing a rider charging at a gallop, this figure had been seized by the French Central Office for Combating Trafficking in Cultural Property following illegal excavations. The coat of arms of Malestroit allowed this applied figure to be resituated in the Hundred Years War and the conflict between the Duke of Brittany and the King of France. Generous donations were also made to the Musée de Cluny by Madame Eliane Vergnoll, a renowned specialist in Romanesque art. These included four sculpted architectural elements dating from the last quarter of the 11th century and the last quarter of the 12th century, attesting to diverse influences and the expressive work in Early Gothic art.

Two acquisitions at public auctions for the Cité de la Céramique The Musée Adrien Dubouché in Limoges acquired six watercolour drawings by Theodore Russell Davis (one of which was funded by the association of friends of the museum), bearing witness to the creative process of one of the most important services created by the Haviland manufactory. Made in 1879 for the White House, this service was intended to be a manifesto on the diversity of American flora and fauna. Only the expertise of the artists and decorators of the Limoges manufactory made their complex transposition onto porcelain possible, using the new technique of chromolithography. The original pieces are still held in Washington. As part of the new display of its collections, the Musée National de la Céramique in Sèvres planned to highlight Nevers as a centre of faïence, using theatrical scenography. It was given the opportunity to complement its selection of ancient busts painted by palette with what is likely a representation of Alexander the Great with a salamander on his head. The firing flaws on this bust, decorated with the bright colours of high firing, illustrate the complexity of such productions, no doubt made in a single manufactory in Nevers, by the same single painter in the 1680s.

A national treasure for the Bibliothèque nationale de France An autograph manuscript by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814), The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage, paper scroll, 1785, with its case.

This extraordinary manuscript, the first real book by the Marquis de Sade, was made between October and November 1785 while he was imprisoned at the Bastille. All traces of this unfinished work had been lost when the fortress of the Bastille was demolished in July 1789, until its first publication in Germany in 1904. The scroll was then purchased in 1929, then stolen in 1982 and sold to a Swiss collector, before returning to France in 2014. This black sun of literature, crucially important to Sade s body of work and at once the most radical and monumental of his writings, containing the essence

224