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Baticle, Jeannine

    Full Name: Baticle, Jeannine

    Gender: female

    Date Born: 05 July 1920

    Date Died: 24 December 2014

    Place Born: France [Villiers-le-Bel, France]

    Place Died: France [Nanterre, France]

    Home Country/ies: France

    Subject Area(s): Spanish (culture or style) and Spanish Renaissance-Baroque styles

    Career(s): art historians

    Institution(s): École du Louvre


    Overview

    Art historian specializing in Spanish painting. Born in Villiers-le-Bel in 1920, Baticle studied at the École du Louvre before joining the Louvre Museum in 1945. She worked in the department of paintings, drawings, and the Rothschild collection, then directed by René Huyghe. She defended her thesis, “Spanish Drawing in the 17th Century: The Madrid School,” in 1947. Her early research established the Spanish specialization that would shape her subsequent career.

    In 1950, she published History of Spanish Painting from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century with Paul Guinard. Appointed an assistant at the Louvre in 1952, she became a first class curator in 1962. In 1963, she collaborated with Michel Laclotte and Robert Mesuret on the exhibition and catalogue Treasures of Spanish Painting: Churches and Museums of France, presented at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Her articles “Artistic Relations Between France and Spain” (1963) and “The Founding of the Trinitarian Order by Carreño de Miranda” (1965) reflected her interests in Spanish artists and connections between French and Spanish art.

    In 1970, Baticle curated Goya at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, subsequently presented at the Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris. The following year, she organized Eugenio Lucas and Goya’s Satellites at museums in Lille and Castres. Also in 1971, she contributed, along with other scholars, to the tenth volume of Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, authored by Harald Keller.

    Baticle became an exceptional-class curator at the Louvre in 1977. She subsequently participated in European Art at the Spanish Court in the Eighteenth Century, presented in Bordeaux, Paris, and Madrid in 1979–1980. In 1981, she published the catalogue for Louis-Philippe’s Spanish Gallery at the Louvre, 1838–1848, alongside Cristina Marinas. The catalog reconstructed the dispersed royal collection and contributed to the study of Spanish painting’s influence on nineteenth-century French collecting and taste.

    From 1980-1986, she directed the Musée Goya in Castres, France. During her tenure, the museum undertook a comprehensive inventory and renovated its Goya room and seventeenth and eighteenth-century galleries between 1982 and and 1986. Acquisitions included Alonso Cano’s The Annunciation, The Visitation, and The Marriage of the Virgin. Her book Goya d’or et de sang (Goya of Gold and Blood) was aimed at a more general audience and introduced the artist to a broader readership. In 1987, she curated the major exhibition Zurbarán, presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and later at the Grand Palais in Paris.

    Baticle’s publications and exhibition catalogs were widely regarded as important contributions to the study of Spanish Golden Age painting. Reviewing her exhibition catalogue Zurbarán (1987), Nina Ayala Mallory praised the exhibition’s “admirable objectives” and its contribution to clarifying the artist’s style, development, and artistic limitations. While questioning some of Baticle’s proposed datings and attributions, Mallory agreed with several of her revisions and emphasized the catalog’s value in advancing the study of Zurbarán and Spanish religious paintings.

    Baticle retired as Honorary Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Department of Paintings at the Louvre. In 2005, she donated her research files and library of more than 2,000 volumes to the Musée Goya in Castres. In recognition of her contributions to the museum and to the study of Spanish art, the museum’s library and documentation center was named the Jeannine-Batile Library and Documentation Centre. A member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando and a member of the Hispanic Society of America, she received honors from both France and Spain for her contributions to the study of Spanish art. She died in Nanterre, France on December 24, 2014.


    Selected Bibliography

    • Goya d’or et de sang (Goya of Gold and Blood). Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
    • and Paul Guinard. Histoire de la peinture espagnole du XIIe au XIXe siècle (History of Spanish Painting from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century). Paris, 1950.
    • Velázquez, peintre hidalgo (Velázquez, Gentleman Painter). Paris: Gallimard, 1989.
    • Goya. Paris: Fayard, 1992.
    • Zurbarán. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.
    • and Cristina Marinas. La Galerie espagnole de Louis-Philippe au Louvre, 1838–1848 (Louis-Philippe’s Spanish Gallery at the Louvre, 1838–1848). Paris, 1981.
    • and Michel Laclotte and Robert Mesuret. Trésors de la peinture espagnole: églises et musées de France (Treasures of Spanish Painting: Churches and Museums of France). Exhibition catalogue, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 1963.
    • Eugenio Lucas y los satélites de Goya (Eugenio Lucas and Goya’s Satellites). Exhibition catalogue, 1971.

    Sources



    Contributors: Amalia Gay


    Citation

    Amalia Gay. "Baticle, Jeannine." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/baticle-jeannine/.


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