The Musée d’Orsay presents the exhibition Gabrielle Hébert: Amour fou à la Villa Médicis as part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival.
An amateur painter and the wife of artist Ernest Hébert, twice director of the Académie de France in Rome, Gabrielle Hébert (1853–1934) took up photography in an intensive, exalted way at the Villa Medici in 1888. Like artists and writers such as Henri Rivière, Maurice Denis, or Émile Zola who, at the end of the nineteenth century, took up a camera to record family life, Gabrielle developed a private and sentimental practice of the medium, encouraged by the technical and aesthetic revolution of the snapshot. She would stop abruptly twenty years later in La Tronche, upon the death of the man she idolized—nearly forty years her senior—whose legacy she did much to ensure by fostering the creation of two monographic museums, one in La Tronche (1934) and the other in Paris (1978).
At the Villa Medici, as the First Lady of a prestigious cultural institution, Gabrielle organized receptions and welcomed visiting high society. But she quickly escaped her duties: in the summer of 1888, she bought a camera and took lessons from a professional, she acquired a camera, took lessons from a Roman professional, and together with resident painter Alexis Axilette set up a darkroom to develop her glass negatives, print, and retouch her proofs. It was the start of a substantial output of nearly two thousand photographs. “I photo,” “I photograph”: not a day passed without her noting in her diary that she made pictures.
Conceived in partnership with the Musée Hébert in La Tronche (Isère), where it will be shown in the spring of 2026, the exhibition will also be presented at the Villa Medici Académie de France in Rome in the spring of 2027, where Marie Robert, the exhibition’s curator, was welcomed as part of a Villa Medici / Musée d’Orsay cross-residency for a year-long research project on the history of photography.
Gabrielle Hébert : Amour fou à la Villa Médicis
Through 4 January 2026
Musée d’Orsay
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
75007 Paris
01 40 49 48 14
https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr
