Frédéric Reiset

Marie Frédéric Eugène de Reiset (12 June 1815 – 27 February 1891) was a French art collector, art historian and curator. He served as curator of the department of prints and drawings at the Louvre and as director-general of France's Musées Nationaux. Born in Oissel, he was the son of the receiver general for Seine-Maritime Jacques de Reiset (1771–1835), nephew of general Marie Antoine de Reiset and brother of Jules Reiset and Gustave de Reiset. His father was also a regent for the Banque de France from 1826 and on his death on 5 February 1835 Frédéric inherited his fortune. On 4 November the same year, he married his cousin Augustine Modeste Hortense de Reiset, with whom he had one daughter, who married count Edgar de Ségur-Lamoignon. The new couple moved into his family's hôtel particulier in Paris before honeymooning in Italy in 1836. There they visited the main artistic centres and became friends with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (then director of the Villa Medici in Rome). De Reiset began collecting on the trip, which confirmed his passion for art, particularly that of Raphael and the Umbrian school. He wrote on works in his own collection or in those he curated. In 1849 he stated that "throughout my life masterpieces have been, are and will be the object of my stubborn study every day", although he never wrote any general works on art history. He was made curator of the department of prints and drawings at the Louvre in January 1850, just when the Louvre was under the new leadership of the comte de Nieuwerkerke, lover of Napoleon III's cousin Mathilde Bonaparte. He and Horace His de la Salle had already visited the department in 1846, with Reiset himself stating "All the portfolios that we visited were just as monstrously classified". In the following decade he classified and catalogued the collection, added attributions, wrote an overall catalogue in 15 volumes, taking in 35,544 drawings. He specified that he had had to "attribute to each master all that legitimately belonged to him, to give him only what belonged to him, that was the problem to resolve .