Enfilade

Now on view at the Château de Fontainebleau:

Le Panache des Lumières

Château de Fontainebleau, 19 September 2026 — 25 January 2027

François-André Vincent, Henri IV and Sully at Fontainebleau, 1784, oil on canvas, 143 × 138 cm (on long-term loan to Fontainebleau; photo by Gérard Blot). One of a series of six paintings intended as tapestry cartoons for a history of Heni IV.

The Château de Fontainebleau presents The Panache of the Enlightenment, an installation focused on the figure of Henri IV as reinterpreted during the reign of Louis XVI. Complementing the concurrent exhibition Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI at Fontainebleau: Splendor and the Joys of Living, the installation traces the dynasty back to the first of the Bourbons. On the eve of the Revolution—as his reign grew more fragile—Louis XVI invoked Henri IV, the ruler who lingered in popular memory as the ‘father of the people’.

The heart of the exhibition is the painted cycle devoted to the history of Henri IV by François-André Vincent, whose sketches are today kept at the château de Pau. These works trace how the memory of the Béarnais king was revived at the end of the ancien régime, somewhere between a heroic narrative and an early instrument of political communication.

In the French imagination, Henri IV embodied a king who stood with his people. In reviving his image, the eighteenth-century monarchy looked for a unifying, protective icon. The installation shows how an image from the past could be recycled to serve the present. The white plume of Henry IV, once a symbol of courage, reemerged as a useful reference under Louis XVI. Behind the paintings, we read a lesson in the history of images and their power, still as relevant today.