An exhibition on the Allar brothers at the Art Museum

Opening today at 6 p.m. at the Toulon Art Museum of the exhibition From Toulon to La Londe-les-Maures. André and Gaudensi Allar. 1850-1900 of which the art historian, Laurent Noet, is the scientific curator.

The Toulon Art Museum and the Château des Bormettes in La Londe-les-Maures are used in the second half of the 19th^e century, to the same team of architects and decorators: the theoretician of monumental polychromy Paul Sédille (1836-1900), the ceramist Jules Loebnitz (1836-1895) and especially the brothers André and Gaudensi Allar (1845-1926 / 1841 -1904). The latter, one a sculptor, the other an architect, joined forces at the same time to offer their hometown and its surroundings some of their most remarkable monuments.

The MAT exhibition offers a stroll from one territory to another. The first stop is at the Château des Bormettes, a little jewel of eclecticism desired by its successive owners. While the painter Horace Vernet (1889-1963) designed with the Hyères architect Victor Trotobas (1807-1884) a medieval fortified house type residence at the end of the 1850s, the industrialist Victor Roux (1819-1893) redesigned and expanded the castle into a pleasant holiday resort between 1874 and 1890. Its master builders, Paul Sédille and Gaudensi Allar, added multiple Renaissance and orientalist references, notably by the addition of enameled terracotta decorations from the Loebnitz factory. The Château des Bormettes highlights the decorative earthenware business of Jules Loebnitz, whose importance and influence in Provence we are discovering today. The loan of ceramics, photographs, paintings and magnificent catalog plates by the Mudo – Musée de l’Oise shows this artistic and industrial interaction between Paris and the provinces. Thus, thanks to the collaboration of his friends Paul Sédille and André Allar, the ceramist triumphed during the Universal Exhibitions of 1878 and 1889.

The route ends with the Allar brothers, Toulon glories of the end of the 19th century.^e century, notably André who remains the only Grand Prix de Rome for sculpture in the Var. During the decade 1880-1890, they worked together at the École Rouvière, at the Fontaine de la Fédération and at the Museum-Library, their masterpiece.

The exhibition, which is held in the graphic art office, presents around sixty varied documents: paintings, sculptures, engravings, photographs, ceramics… It sheds new light on today little-known personalities, on heritage to rediscover and protect. On view until February 25, 2024.