Cécile Tainturier

Cécile Tainturier is a French art historian and curator specializing in early modern Dutch and Flemish art, particularly seventeenth-century drawings and paintings. She is a curator at the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, in Paris. She joined the institution as a junior curator in January 2007 and subsequently became a curator.

Her work encompasses exhibitions, scholarly catalogues, teaching, collection research and the conservation of Dutch and Flemish paintings and works on paper. She was one of the main scholars behind the first monographic exhibition and catalogue raisonné devoted to the seventeenth-century painter Jacobus Vrel.

Education

Tainturier initially studied law in Cologne, intending to qualify as an art auctioneer in France. She completed a master's degree in German and French law before studying art history at the University of Paris X–Nanterre, now Paris Nanterre University. During an internship at the Jean-François Heim Gallery in Paris, she developed an interest in art-historical research rather than the commercial art market.

Tainturier has participated in exhibitions and publications concerning collections including those of the Uffizi, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Musée de Grenoble and the P. and N. de Boer Foundation. She also contributed to the exhibition and catalogue Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print, organized with M – Museum Leuven and the Royal Library of Belgium.

Curatorial and scholarly work

Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt

Tainturier co-curated Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, organized jointly by Fondation Custodia and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition was presented in Washington from October 2016 to January 2017 and in Paris from February to May 2017.

The exhibition brought together more than ninety drawings and twenty-seven paintings to examine the ways Dutch artists used compositional drawings, figure studies, construction drawings, sketchbooks and underdrawings during the painting process.

Tainturier contributed a historiographical study tracing Vrel's reception from the seventeenth century through his later association with Johannes Vermeer. Reviewers highlighted her examination of the gradual reconstruction of Vrel's artistic identity after works by him had been attributed to Vermeer and other Dutch painters.

The exhibition, described by Fondation Custodia as the first devoted exclusively to Vrel, opened at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in February 2023 and was presented at Fondation Custodia from June to September 2023.

Selected exhibitions

Tableaux flamands et hollandais du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Institut Néerlandais, Paris, 2010 — curator and catalogue editor. With Diederik Bakhuÿs and Jasper Hillegers, Tableaux flamands et hollandais du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen (Fondation Custodia and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, 2009). With Bernd Ebert and Quentin Buvelot, eds., Jacobus Vrel: Looking for Clues of an Enigmatic Painter (Hirmer, 2021). “Les caprices de Jan Moninx: Une récente acquisition de la Fondation Custodia redéfinit les contours du dessinateur”, in Mélanges autour du dessin en l’honneur d’Emmanuelle Brugerolles (Silvana Editoriale, 2022).