Maurice Sand, an ethnographer’s gaze. From Berry to the Americas
After exploring Algeria in 1861, Maurice Sand met Prince Jérôme Napoleon in Algiers. He offers to follow him on his journey to the United States, aboard his yacht. This is how Maurice Sand set off to explore the Americas through Spain, the Azores, Newfoundland… between May and September 1861. Over the course of the stopovers, he observes, studies, sketches and pencils the natives he meets, and lingers on the costumes, habitats and landscapes with precision and elegance in his travel diaries. Preserved in the Bibliothèque Historique de Paris, these notebooks are not only vivid testimonies of the peoples and traditions that have now disappeared, but also a photograph of the birth of a new country, the United States of America.
This exhibition will reveal a selection of some of the drawings reproduced on the occasion of the commemoration of the bicentenary of Maurice Sand. These drawings from distant countries will interact with the collections of the museum and the legends and traditions of Berry.