Saved from Los Angeles fires, works by Watteau exhibited at Château de Chantilly

Almost two months after fighting for several days against the Los Angeles fires, which left around thirty dead and ravaged 12 % of the surface of the second city in the United States, Lionel Sauvage was, Sunday March 2, at the Château de Chantilly (Oise).

This collector is a specialist in the painter Antoine Watteau, one of the masters of French painting who lived from 1684 to 1721, to which the domain of the south of the department devotes an exhibition, from this Saturday March 8 until June 15.

Exfiltrated works of the flames during the night

Among the works on display, “the adventure of adventure”. “I am very close to this table, I live with this table. So it’s a bit like a child, we get caught up, “explains, to AFP, the Franco-American collector who had not seen the work since she had left Los Angeles to escape the flames.

The fire ravaged then Pacific Palisades, upscale district of Los Angeles where Lionel Sauvage lives. His Watteau paintings are then “the first thing” he thinks. With his gardener, they descend the works in an airtight cellar, then protect the Villa from Flames for 12 hours thanks to a pump connected to the pool water, details AFP.

To exfiltrate the works in the neighborhood, evacuated and completed by the National Guard, the two men rent a van and leave at three in the morning, while “the soldiers sleep in their truck”, reports Lionel Sauvage, with the news agency.

The works owned by Lionel Sauvage are all the more precious since they “have very rarely been exposed” or even, for some, never, underlines Axel Moulinier, co-commissioner of the exhibition. The Condé museum, located in the heart of the Chantilly estate, has four paintings and six drawings from Watteau and also obtained other loans for its exhibition, bringing together around fifty works by the painter.

“If a misfortune had happened, it would have been a loss for the history of this great master who revolutionized, in a way, the course of painting”, underlines Mathieu Deldicque, director of the Condé museum. “It would have been quite appalling. »»