The Fabric of the Flemish: Fashion and Painting in the 17th Century.

Organized in partnership by three museums, this exhibition will be held first at the Musée de Tessé in Le Mans from October 22, 2022 to January 29, 2023, then at the Musée des Beaux-arts in Tours between March and June 2023, and then at the Musée des Beaux-arts in Angers in 2024. This exhibition on the theme of costume and its representation by the Northern schools in the 17th century takes as its starting point the painting collections of the Northern schools (Flanders and the Netherlands) of these three museums. The exhibition will bring together more than sixty works, mainly paintings, engravings and archives which will interact with elements of clothing and pieces of fabric, both ancient and modern, helping the public to grasp the different textures represented as well as to understand the arrangement of clothes. The collaboration between the three institutions will also allow the arrival of paintings which will be able to be compared for the first time with similar works from the Le Mans collection.