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Born: 22 February 1936, France
Died: 18 November 2004
Country most active: France
Also known as: Marianne de Cayeux
Scholar and catalogues raisonnés compiler; dealer of eighteenth-century French art; director of the Galerie Cailleux from 1982-1996. Roland Michel was a student of André Chastel who received her master’s degree at the Sorbonne in 1959 with a thesis on the still life and genre painter Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818). This artist served as the subject of Roland Michel’s first article that appeared in Burlington Magazine in 1960, and of the later monograph, Anne Vallayer-Coster (1970). From 1960 until 1981, Roland Michel regularly contributed articles to Burlington’s supplement on the eighteenth century, writing on artists like Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Hubert Robert (1733-1808), and Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743), among others. In 1982, she began overseeing exhibitions at la Galerie Cailleux, the Parisian commercial gallery that her grandfather, Paul de Cayeux de Sénarpont (1884-1964), had established in 1912, and over which her father, Jean de Cayeux (1913-2009) had also presided. She completed a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne in 1983 under the supervision of Jacques Thuillier with a dissertation on the painter of Rococo interiors, Jacques de Lajoüe (1686-1761), which was published the following year as Lajoüe et l’art rocaille (1984). Roland Michel headed thirteen exhibitions during her time as director of the Galerie Cailleux. She also wrote exhibition reviews that appeared in journals like Master Drawings as well as the Burlington Magazine. Alongside her work as a dealer, Roland Michel published widely as a scholar of eighteenth-century art in French and Anglo-American journals and museum catalogs. In 2002-2003, Roland Michel organized the first and only solo retrospective exhibition on Vallayer-Coster, Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie Antoinette, that travelled from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to other venues in Dallas, New York, and Marseille.
After Roland Michel’s sudden passing in 2004, the Fondation Marianne & Roland Michel was established by her husband and children to preserve her influence on eighteenth-century scholarship. Le Centre de Documentation Marianne Roland Michel opened in 2005 near Roland Michel’s home in Neuilly and provided scholars access to her reference collection of materials on seventeenth- thru nineteenth-century, primarily French, art. Since 2016, the collection has been housed at the research library of the Petit Palais museum. In 2006, Roland Michel’s family began funding an annual prize that supports the publication of manuscripts on themes related to her work. Roland Michel’s son, Christian Michel (1958-), is also an art historian, teaching as professor of art history at the Université de Lausanne (UNIL) in Switzerland since 2006. His specialty is the history of collecting and decorative arts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger (1715-1790).
Roland Michel catalogs for the gallery are considered her most “enduring contributions” to fellow collectors and scholars (Borne and Williams). Alongside her work as a dealer, Roland Michel published widely as a scholar of eighteenth-century art in French and Anglo-American journals and museum catalogs. A number of her texts have been translated into English and German. “Classic” monographs on artists like Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) (1982, 1984) and Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) (1994) bear evidence of her commitment to research based on direct study of original artworks, rather than reproductions (Rosenberg). The majority of her books she formatted as catalogues raisonnés, a style that suited her object-driven approach to art history (Borne and Williams; Rosenberg).
Work cited
Yasemin Altun. “Roland Michel, Marianne.” Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rolandmichelm/.