INTERIOR OF GUSTAVE CRAUK’S STUDIO
1906 – Musée de Valenciennes, Louis-Fréderic VERRIMST – Paris, 1856 -Bezons, 1931
In 1903, Valenciennes-born sculptor Gustave Crauk inaugurated a museum in his hometown to showcase his work. It was for this museum in his name that he commissioned one of his contemporaries, the painter Louis Frédéric Verrimst, to paint a view of his studio in Paris. It was his widow, however, who brought the project to fruition, as Gustave Crauk died in November 1905, after seeing the sketch of the painting, but before the large format was completed in 1906.
While the sketch remained in the Verrimst family, the painting commissioned by Crauk entered the Crauk Museum in 1907.
It features many of the works now in the Musée de Valenciennes: La Jeunesse et l’Amour, La Source, Le Matin, Le Baiser de l’Amour, Le Tombeau de Jules Machard, Les Trois Grâces portant l’Amour… and of course, in the center, the group from Le Combat du Centaure, behind which the sculptor discreetly appears. Le Combat du Centaure appears here in its large marble version, completed in 1899 and destined for the Town Hall of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, while the Museum preserves two smaller versions, in plaster and bronze.
THE CRAUK PLACE VERTE MUSEUM.
In Valenciennes, four museums coexisted: the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Musée de l’Hôtel de Ville, the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle and the Musée Crauk. Today, only the Musée des Beaux-Arts remains. Among the others, the Gustave Crauk Museum has left enough footprints in the archives to trace its existence from beginning to end. It didn’t live for forty years, and was located behind today’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, as the postcard view from Place Verte attests.
