[Poet], be faithful to the study chamber;
Make it a strict habit every day,
A time for thought and solitude.

Make it the hidden port, the safe and charming shelter
Where, in the peace of the cloister and meditation,
You can find yourself at any time.

Auguste Dorchain (Precepts I in Revue des deux mondes, T.119, p.647, Paris, 1893)

After the linen canvas on which she long brushed imaginary paradises, inhabited by her couples of adolescent lovers, after the colored glass blown into luminous vases or engraved in light cups in a workshop next to hers, after the gathered colored fabrics rainbow, Marie Ducaté adopts two new supports: tracing paper and metal weaving.

Painted in watercolor on thick tracing paper, which has the firmness and transparency of old parchment, these new illuminations have taken on relief because Marie Ducaté had the idea of crumpling them like the rock-colored papers which serve as decoration at nurseries.

It is the cycle of the Coronation of the Virgin, a magnificent commission from the Carthusian fathers to Enguerrand Quarton for the funeral chapel of Innocent VI, that Marie Ducaté revisits. She lived for several weeks in the solitude of her cell, inspired by this large egg-painted panel in 1453, her window open to the coldness of a late spring to better listen to the birds, of which she was deprived in her Marseille studio. of Joliette.

Danièle Giraudy