Gabrielle Hébert exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay: her photos of the Villa Medici

From October 28, 2025 to February 15, 2026,Gabrielle Hébert takes up residence at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris's 7th arrondissement for a groundbreakingexhibition that plunges us into the intimacy of the Villa Médicis at the end of the 19th century. This German-born photographer, wife of painter Ernest Hébert, offers us the first proto-reportage ondaily life at the legendary Villa Médicis between 1888 and 1908.

Born Gabrielle d'Uckermann in 1853, in 1880 she married Ernest Hébert, an academic painter and director of the Académie de France in Rome. At the Villa Medici, as wife of the director, she initially organized receptions and received visiting personalities. But she soon escaped these mundane duties to acquire her own camera.

After a few lessons from a Roman professional, she set up a darkroom with a boarder her own age to develop her negatives and print her proofs. This was the start of an impressive photographic output, which she meticulously recorded in her diaries: "Je photo... I photograph..." she notes almost daily.

Unlike her brothers Luigi and Giuseppe Primoli, nephews of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, with whom she shared a taste for worldly portraiture, Gabrielle Hébert was a solitary explorer of all photographic genres. Artistic nudes, reproductions of works of art, landscapes, still lifes, "photographic recreations": nothing escaped her lens.

Her unique eye offers the perspective of a permanent resident who observes the Renaissance palace and its inhabitants from the inside. Boarders, employees, models, but also the Villa's dogs and cats: she documents this artistic community in every season with an unprecedented intimacy.

Even more fascinating, Gabrielle Hébert overturns the codes of the time by obsessively scrutinizing her husband Ernest. Posing with models, painting progress, moments of conviviality, walks in the Roman countryside or bathing: she immortalized every aspect of the life of the artist, director and husband.

The Musée d'Orsay exhibition features mostly original 9 x 12 cm prints, accompanied by photographic albums made by Gabrielle herself. We discover her personal diaries, boxes of glass plates and the cameras she used. Enlargements made from unprinted negatives enrich the presentation.

The exhibition is enriched by drawings and paintings byErnest Hébert, as well as sentimental relics: palette, medallion, letters. These objects bear witness to a love affair with a man and a country, the newly unified Italy of which Rome became capital in 1871.

In 1898, Gabrielle Hébert made her "photographic swan song" during a trip to Spain. Her vision, influenced by emerging cinema, reveals a surprising modernity. On her final return to France, she ceased her intensive photographic practice, contenting herself with immortalizing Ernest until his death in 1908.

Marie Robert, chief curator of photography and cinema at the Musée d'Orsay, is curating this exhibition. This specialist benefited from a one-year residency at the Villa Médicis as part of a Villa Médicis/Musée d'Orsay cross-residency to further her research.

This chrono-thematic exhibition reveals how Gabrielle Hébert secured her place as an author and social status in an environment where artistic creation was reserved for men. More than just a hobby, photography enabled her to invent her own mythology across an exceptional geography and time.

This wonderful discovery is part of an ambitious international tour. Conceived in partnership with the Musée Départemental Hébert in La Tronche, Isère, the exhibition will be hosted in spring 2026 in this venue dedicated to the painter. It will continue in autumn 2026 at theAcadémie de France in Rome - Villa Médicis, symbolically bringing the exhibition to a close at the very place where this photographic passion was born.

For lovers of historicalphotography and artistic history, this exhibition offers a unique testimony to the creative emancipation of a woman in the 19th century. Not far from the Invalides and the Seine, the Musée d'Orsay invites us to discover this pioneer who quietly revolutionized the art of portraiture and photographic reportage.