Images of Ajaccio
At the dawn of the 21st century, the Palais Fesch preserves just over a hundred representations of Corsica, only. The revival of interest in island painting in Ajaccio took place in 2005, when the Bassoul brothers offered the City a superb portrait entitled Le Vieux medaaillé, painted by Jean-Baptiste Bassoul (1875-1934), a prominent member of the “Ajaccio school” in 1901. Three years later, the Bassoul family greatly enriched the Ajaccio collection of the Palais Fesch by donating a collection of nearly 400 drawings from their grandfather. That is not all because, between 2007 and 2021, François and Marie-Jeanne Ollandini contributed greatly to the development of these collections through a succession of donations that made it possible, as early as 2010, to open a department entirely devoted to island arts within the walls of the museum. Today, the collection dedicated to Corsica amounts to more than a thousand works largely devoted to representations of Ajaccio. In order to celebrate the 530th anniversary of the founding of the city, it was therefore obvious to dedicate a temporary exhibition of time travel between 1850 and 1950 to the discovery of a selection of these images of Ajaccio and its inhabitants.