L’art annexé comme source d’inspiration. Un paysage de Rembrandt venu de Cassel à Paris et une peinture de Georges Michel

Abstract

The article explores the considerable impulses that have been generated by paintings which had come to Paris in the wake of the confiscations of works of art during the Napoleonic Empire. At the centre of the contribution is a revealing case study that shows how, around 1814, the French painter Georges Michel responded to a landscape by Rembrandt and used it as inspiration for his own painting. Based on this example, two questions are addressed : On the one hand, Michel’s painting exemplifies how much contemporary landscape painting in Paris benefited from the unusually good presence of Rembrandt’s landscapes in the years up to 1815. On the other hand, the case study could allow to determine the chronology of Michel’s oeuvre more precisely.