Madeleine Castaing

Madeleine Castaing (French pronunciation: ​[madlɛn kastɛ̃]) (1894–1992) was a French antique dealer and interior designer of international renown. She was the friend and the sponsor of many artists, including Soutine, who made her portrait in 1928. Original, even whimsical, she revolutionized the world of decoration, creating the style Castaing which is now a reference.

The daughter of an engineer who built the train station in Chartres, Madeleine Magistry early married an heir from Toulouse, the art critic Marcellin Castaing. Their meeting, very romantic, had concluded by a "kidnapping" of the girl, who was barely fifteen or sixteen at the time. Twenty years older than she was, Marcellin Castaing was known for his impressive literary and artistic culture. During the fifty years of their marriage, he remained his wife's great love, according to all the couple's friends, including the writer and photographer François-Marie Banier, who remembers "Madeleine's legendary love for her husband".

In the 1920s, Madeleine Castaing made her debuts as an actress in silent films, then gave up this career while being already nicknamed "the French Mary Pickford".

At that time, her husband had offered her a neoclassical manor she had been longing for, in Lèves, not far from Chartres. He wanted her to "unwind", he explained. The young woman had indeed discovered her own vocation for interior design.

Shortly after their friend Modigliani's death, the Castaings made the acquaintance of Soutine at the Café de la Rotonde, in the centre of Montparnasse. The first meeting was difficult: Soutine refused the 100 franc note handed to him by Marcellin Castaing in order to buy him a painting without having even looked at it. A few years later, in 1925, the Castaings could buy their first painting by this artist at Leopold Zborowski's, the primary art dealer of Soutine and of Modigliani, and became friends with him. From 1930 to 1935, they welcomed him home during the summer in their mansion of Lèves, becoming his patrons and main buyers. It is thanks to them that Soutine could hold his first exhibition in Chicago in 1935.

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