Impressionists become influencers on Instagram: the Musée d'Orsay's new initiative

What would the various Degas, Monet, Renoir and colleagues post if they were active artists today? The Musée d’Orsay, the museum of the Impressionists in Paris, has probably asked itself this question and is launching an initiative on its Instagram account (@museeorsay): every Monday, an illustration will be posted showing interactions between artists in the museum’s collection, as if they were really using the popular social network of images.

The idea stems from an artist residency, that of French illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme, who was recruited by the Musée d’Orsay and will draw the cartoons that, as mentioned, will be posted every Monday. It is an initiative that aims to raise awareness of the museum’s works and artists in an unconventional way, and with real dialogues in the form of exchanges of comments between the protagonists of the time.

The first vignette is a portrait of one of the greatest writers of the second half of the 19th century, Joris-Karl Huysmans, painted by Jean-Louis Forain, one of the sharpest observers of fin-de-siècle Parisian society. In the exchange of comments, Huysmans (with his fictitious account “jk_Huysmans”) thanks “jl.forain” for his portrait, and further below another painter of the time, Henri Gervex, asks if “there is no criticism this time.” And among the various likes obtained by Forain’s portrait pops up ... that of Degas!

The web is not new to such initiatives: in Italy, for example, the Facebook page “If social networks had always existed” has met with great success, where every day there are exchanges of jokes between the various Dante Alighieri, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giovanni Verga, Napoleon, Manzoni and many other personalities of history, art and literature: over a million fans and even a book. In France they decided to “institutionalize” the idea, and they liked it: almost six thousand likes cashed in from the first cartoon in the series.

Impressionists become influencers on Instagram: the Musée d'Orsay's new initiative

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