Postcard Marquet de Vasselot - La Purete planant au-dessus des Vices, Petit Palais Paris

Museum postcard with a photographic reproduction of the sculpture "La Pureté planant au-dessus des Vices" (Purity Floating Above the Vices) by French sculptor Marquet de Vasselot (1840-1904), published by A.N. Paris under number 65. The front cites the Palais des Beaux Arts de la Ville de Paris — the present-day Petit Palais — as its source. The photograph shows a standing marble female nude with arms raised vertically, placed on a dark bronze base on which figures embody the vices. The photographic technique against a black background sharply renders the texture of the marble. The reverse is unused and blank, with the notation "Fabrication Française".

Jean-Jacques Marquet de Vasselot was a French sculptor and art historian known at the end of the nineteenth century for his allegorical sculptures in the academic tradition. The title of this work — Purity floating above the Vices — reflects the moralising allegory that the Third Republic frequently commissioned in the form of monumental sculpture. The A.N. Paris series of the Petit Palais comprised dozens of numbers and constitutes one of the earliest systematic photographic documentations of a French municipal museum.