Jules Laforgue: Reader to Empress Augusta / Babelsberg Palace
The empress Augusta, who usually spent the summer months at Babelsberg Palace, employed a French reader from 1881 to 1886. Jules Laforgue had come to Prussia at the age of twenty-one through the mediation of his friends Paul Bourget and Charles Ephrussi.
David von Becker
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–81, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Ambassador for French Impressionism
Laforgue had previously been employed by Ephrussi, who was a collector and the influential editor of the journal Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Ephrussi’s recommendation enabled the Symbolist poet Laforgue to become well-connected in the Berlin art scene. In addition to his position at court, he also worked as a correspondent for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and as an art critic. Soon he became an ambassador in Prussia for French Impressionism, which he had come to know and appreciate in the Paris collection of Charles Ephrussi.
For a time he enjoyed a close friendship with the Symbolist painter Max Klinger, but increasingly Laforgue lamented a lack of artistic understanding on the part of the German people. He said they were “anti-artistic” and were still in the “childhood stage of art”—a condition that could, however, be quickly overcome through a better understanding of French art.
But there is still another connection between Laforgue, the queen’s reader, and the Museum Barberini: the painting Clipper, Opus 155 by Paul Signac once belonged to a friend of Laforgue. Today, it is part of the Hasso Plattner Collection in the Museum Barberini.
Hasso Plattner Collection
Paul Signac: Clipper, 1887
Laforgue and the Museum Barberini
But there is still another connection between Laforgue, the queen’s reader, and the Museum Barberini: the painting Clipper, Opus 155 by Paul Signac once belonged to a friend of Laforgue. Today, it is part of the Hasso Plattner Collection in the Museum Barberini.
The Babelsberg Palace is one of the stops on the audio tour France in Potsdam, which was developed for the Barberini App on the occasion of the French Impressionists moving into the Barberini Museum. The audio tour invites you to discover around 25 stops with French influences that have helped shape Potsdam over the centuries. Simply download the free Barberini App and be surprised by the city's many French references.
