THE ADELE FERRAND COLLECTION
Adèle Ferrand, Portrait de Georges Ferrand (père d'Adèle), 1835-1840
Adele Ferrand
Nancy, 1817 - Saint-Pierre, 1848
Adele Ferrand was born in Nancy on 20th October 1817, the youngest child of a family of five children. Her father, a paper merchant, had settled in the town in 1814, probably to flee from the political troubles in Paris.
Like her brother Jules, Adele studied painting with artists in Nancy such as Jean-Joseph Thorelle and Pierre Dieudonne.
The family returned to Paris in 1834, under the July Monarchy, settling in the neighbourhood of Nouvelle Athenes, where a number of artists, writers and musicians of the Romantic period lived. She claimed to be a pupil of Le Poittevin, genre, landscape and seascape painter, then a pupil of the Belgian Louis Gallait, a well-known historical painter. As from 1837, she regularly exhibited her genre scenes and portraits at the Paris Salon, but also in the provinces, achieving a certain success with the critics.
Louis Gallait, Autoportrait, vers 1830
Adèle Ferrand, Portrait présumé de Madame Jean Lauret tenant une rose, 1846-1848
Adele Ferrand and Reunion island
In Paris in 1846, she met Denis François Le Coat de Kerveguen, the eldest of the youngest branch of a rich family of landowners, whom she married. Along with Adele’s parents, the couple settled in Saint-Pierre on Bourbon island in the same year. In December 1846, she gave birth to their son Herve. She died in Saint-Pierre, Reunion on 1st April 1848, aged 30.
Adele Ferrand’s career was very short, just twelve years, the last two of which were spent in Reunion. During her stay on the island, she produced a number of studies of her young son, as well as portraits of her husband’s family and other portraits on commission. Certain of her drawings and sketches are linked to the years she spent on Reunion, through the presence of specific iconographic elements: straw huts, aloe plants, palm trees and exotic birds.
Adèle Ferrand, Le Boucan et le Choca bleu, vers 1847
Adèle Ferrand, La mère et l'enfant, 1835-1840
The Adele Ferrand collection in the art gallery
The Leon-Dierx art gallery first acquired Adele Ferrand’s works in 1911, during the campaign to build up the gallery’s collections, before it opened in 1912.
Ten years later, in 1922, Herve Le Coat de Kervéguen, Adele Ferrand’s only son, bequeathed to the Leon-Dierx art gallery all of his mother’s works in his possession. This exceptional bequest consisting of 24 framed works – paintings and drawings – as well as 305 other drawings, were added to the initial collection of a dozen of the artist’s paintings and also the museum’s collections from the first half of the 19thcentury.
The collection of drawings, sketches, rough sketches and small paintings enable us to follow the stages of Adele Ferrand’s artistic development.
Adèle Ferrand, Études de personnages à l'époque Louis XIII, 1835-1840 (à gauche) ; Jeune fille dessinant, 1835-1840
