Jean-Henri-Louis Le Secq des Tournelles and His Museum

In which I "meet" the fascinating 19th-century photographer Jean-Henri-Louis Le Secq des Tournelles and visit his unusual collection.

{Rouen, France}

I think that we can all agree that one of the best things about travel is the people you meet along the way. In Rouen, for example, I met a man with a very long and fancy name…Jean-Henri-Louis Le Secq des Tournelles. Sometimes my rudimentary French gets in the way of getting to know people very well, but it wasn’t a problem in this case because Henri had been dead for 140 years by the time I met him.

This is our guy: Jean-Louis Henri Le Secq des Tournelles. He looks like he would have been fun to know, doesn’t he? Born into a noble family of Norman origins, he studied art as a young man, and by the mid 19th-century he was a painter and photographer living in Paris.

The daguerreotype process had been discovered in 1839, heralding the age of photography worldwide, and in 1851 the French government implemented a plan to use the new art form to conduct of a survey of French churches, cathedrals, historic monuments and other sites of architectural importance. The photographs were meant to be used to document the restoration work that needed to be done across the country.

Henri le Secq was among five photographers chosen to carry out the survey, along with his distinguished contemporaries Gustave Le Gray, Edouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, and Auguste Mestral. Each man was assigned a particular area of the country to photograph: Henri was chosen to document Paris and the region directly to the east, including Reims and Strasbourg.

Henri at Notre Dame in Paris, photographed by Charles Nègre

The work wasn’t always easy - he sometimes had to climb precariously onto balconies and roofs to get the angles he wanted. The negatives from the five photographers were delivered to the French government at the end of 1851, but the results were disappointing for some…prints of the photographs were never published, preventing the public from seeing some of the first photographs of the cathedrals and monuments that they had heard about for their entire lives. The negatives are now in the archive at the Musée d’Orsay.

Henri continued to work as an architectural photographer, both for the government and for himself, and along the way gained developed a great appreciation for architectural craftsmanship, and in particular for historic ironwork.

Chartres Cathedral, North Transept c. 1852, Henri Le Secq, Getty Institute

It wasn’t until the death of his wife and his young daughter in 1862, however, that he began to actively purchase iron objects. He collected objects of all kinds: signs and brackets, trivets, keys, locks, padlocks, tools, andirons, plaques, gates and fences, grills, coffers, caskets…anything made of iron. Sometimes, he would take his young son along on his excursions.

After Henri’s death in 1882, his son (also called Henri) continued acquiring…and by the turn of the century the collection had grown to 14,000 objects. Over a thousand pieces were sent to the Paris Universal Exposition for display in 1900, and after the exposition closed Henri (the younger) started looking for a permant home for his collection. The Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris was interested, but they (unsurprisingly) didn’t have the space.

Henri (the younger) had been visiting Rouen on and off to research his Norman ancestors in the first decades of the twentieth century, and when city officials became aware of his collection, they offered him the use of the Saint-Laurent church. The fifteenth century Gothic church was no longer being used, but had been saved from the wrecking ball just years before, and had recently been restored. The Musée Le Secq des Tournelles officially opened in 1921, with Henri as the chief curator. He didn’t stop collecting, of course, he added pieces to the museum until his death in 1925 - and subsequent collectors have donated even more items over the years.

It is partly the extraordinary setting that makes a visit to the wrought iron museum so memorable. Every nook, crany, chapel, balcony and crevice is filled with objects - some utilitarian, some of astonishing beauty.

The show-stoppers, of course, are the beautiful iron trade signs with ornately wrought brackets that fill the nave, but the smaller objects tucked away are fascinating as well. The massive collection of medieval keys and locks is worth the price of admission alone…although - pro tip - I didn’t have to pay admission on the day I visited. The city of Rouen opens the doors to all of its museums free of charge on the weeks that kids are on school break.

Rouen is particularly rich in museums: there is a Natural History Museum straight out of the Victorian era, crammed full of scientific specimens and taxidermy: this is the museum that Gustave Flaubert visited for inspiration. Around the corner is the impressive Museum of Fine Arts, and just across the park from that is the Museum of Ceramics and Pottery. The house where Flaubert was born is a museum as well - it exhibits objects related to the history of medecine. But it is the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles that won my heart.

What a thrill it must have been to be a collector in the late 19th and early 20th century! To have been able to travel throughout the country, when all of these amazing objects were still out there in the wild, waiting to be found.

I think this is my favorite kind of museum, to be honest - the kind where you can really feel the passion of a person though the collection they have formed. It not only illuminates the subject, but the collector as well.

And so when I say I met Jean-Henri-Louis Le Secq des Tournelles…well, I didn’t really meet him, meet him. But thanks to his incredible museum, I did get to know him - and that’s really just about the same thing, isn’t it?

PS - If you thought my visit to the wrought iron museum was exciting, wait until I tell you about my visit to the pencil museum in the Lake District…