Museums in France
Louvre
The Louvre is one of the world's largest museums and a historic monument and a central landmark of Paris. Nearly 35,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 60,600 square metres. The Louvre is the world's most visited museum, and received more than 9 million visitors annually. The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built as a fortress in the late 12th century under Phil ...
Founded: 1793 |
Location:
Paris, France
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay was built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationa ...
Founded: 1898-1900 |
Location:
Paris, France
Musée Rodin
The Musée Rodin was opened in 1919 and is dedicated to the works of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. It has two sites, at the Hôtel Biron and surrounding grounds in central Paris, and just outside Paris at Rodin"s old home, the Villa des Brillants at Meudon (Hauts-de-Seine). The collection includes 6,600 sculptures, 8,000 drawings, 8,000 old photographs and 7,000 objets d’art. The museum receives ...
Founded: 1919 |
Location:
Paris, France
Musée de l'Orangerie
The Musée de l"Orangerie is an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. Though most famous for being the permanent home for eight Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet, the museum also contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Rousseau, Alfred Sisley, Chaim Soutine, and Maurice Utrillo, among others. the Orangerie w ...
Founded: 1852 |
Location:
Paris, France
Musée des Beaux-Arts
The Fine Art Museum - Musée des Beaux-Arts, is situated just behind the Chartres Cathedral. It was formerly the ancient episcopal palace from the 12th century, where the bishops of Chartres lived. Some religious sculptures and painting from European School, and other collections of ancient and modern arts are on all year exhibition in the museum.
Founded: 1833 |
Location:
Chartres, France
Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations
The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem) is a national museum located in Marseille. It was inaugurated in 2013. The museum is devoted to European and Mediterranean civilisations. With a permanent collection charting historical and cultural cross-fertilisation in the Mediterranean basin, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to society through the ages up to modern times. The museum is built on recl ...
Founded: 2013 |
Location:
Marseille, France
Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon
The Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon is housed near place des Terreaux in a former Benedictine convent of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is one of the largest art museums in France. Its collections range from ancient Egypt antiquities to the Modern art period and make the museum one of the most important in Europe. The paintings department has European paintings of 14th- to mid-20th-century paintings. They are arranged chron ...
Founded: 1801 |
Location:
Lyon, France
Museum of Fine Arts
The Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des beaux-arts) was founded in 1794 with objects seized during the French Revolution and was first housed in the city"s town hall. Throughout the 19th century its collections grew via purchases and bequests, until in 1908 the city of Reims decided to buy a separate building to house it. Their choice fell on the former Saint-Denis Abbey of Reims located in vicinity of Reims Cathedral. ...
Founded: 1794 |
Location:
Reims, France
Musée du Petit Palais
The Musée du Petit Palais is a museum and art gallery. It opened in 1976 and has an exceptional collection of Renaissance paintings of the Avignon school as well as from Italy, which reunites many 'primitives' from the collection of Giampietro Campana. It is housed in a 14th-century building at the north side of the square overlooked by the Palais des Papes. Named Petit Palais to distinguish it from the ...
Founded: 1503 |
Location:
Avignon, France
Museum of Fine Arts
The Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy is one of the oldest museums in France. Established in 1793, the museum is housed in one of the four large pavilions on the Place Stanislas. In 1930, the town council decided to convert the building into a museum in order to host the fine art collection hitherto held in the city hall. In 1999, the art historian Jacques Thuillier donated a huge collection of drawings (2,000) and engravings ...
Founded: 1793 |
Location:
Nancy, France
Espace Van Gogh
The Espace van Gogh was originally built in the 16th century as Arles main hospital and it remained as such well into the 20th century. It"s major claim to fame is that it was here that Van Gogh was committed after the infamous episode of cutting off his left earlobe in December 1888. The courtyard has been extensively planted out to resemble as closely as possible his famous painting 'Le Jardin de l"Hôtel ...
Founded: 16th century |
Location:
Arles, France
Musée Masséna
Originally built as a holiday home for Prince Victor d’Essling (the grandson of one of Napoleon’s favourite generals, Maréchal Massena), the lavish belle-époque Musée Masséna is another of the city’s iconic architectural landmarks. Built between 1898 and 1901 in grand neoclassical style with an Italianate twist, it’s now a fascinating museum dedicated to the history of the Riviera – taking in everything from ...
Founded: 1898-1901 |
Location:
Nice, France
Vieille Charité
La Vieille Charité is a former almshouse, now functioning as a museum and cultural centre. Constructed between 1671 and 1749 in the Baroque style to the designs of the architect Pierre Puget, it comprises four ranges of arcaded galleries in three storeys surrounding a space with a central chapel surmounted by an ovoid dome. The main body of the structure is a rectangle, 112 m by 96 m, composed of four walls in pink an ...
Founded: 1671-1749 |
Location:
Marseille, France
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans
The Musée des beaux-arts d'Orléans (the Museum of Fine Arts) was founded in 1797 and is one of France's oldest provincial museums. Its collections cover the period from the 15th to 20th centuries. The museum owns 2,000 paintings (Correggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Sebastiano Ricci, Diego Velázquez, Anthony ban Dyck, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Hubert Robert, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gaugu ...
Founded: 1797 |
Location:
Orléans, France
Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte
The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte is a baroque French château built between 1658-1661 for Nicolas Fouquet. It was made for Marquis de Belle Île, Viscount of Melun and Vaux, the superintendent of finances of Louis XIV, the château was an influential work of architecture in mid-17th century Europe. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the architect Louis Le Vau, the landscape architect André le Nôtre, and the painter-decorator Charles Le ...
Founded: 1658-1661 |
Location:
Maincy, France
Musée des Augustins
The Musée des Augustins is a fine arts museum in Toulouse which conserves a collection of sculpture and paintings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. The paintings are from throughout France, the sculptures representing Occitan culture of the region with a particularly rich assemblage of Romanesque sculpture. The building in which the museum is sited was built in 1309 in the Gothic style and prior to t ...
Founded: 1795 |
Location:
Toulouse, France
Palais des Beaux Arts
The Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille (Lille Palace of Fine Arts) is a municipal museum dedicated to fine arts, modern art, and antiquities. It is one of the largest art museums in France. It was one of the first museums built in France, established under the instructions of Napoleon I at the beginning of the 19th century as part of the popularisation of art. Jean-Antoine Chaptal's decree of 1801 selected fifteen Fr ...
Founded: 1809 |
Location:
Lille, France
Musée Picasso
The Musée Picasso, formerly the Château Grimaldi at Antibes, is built upon the foundations of the ancient Greek town of Antipolis. The castle was a residence of the bishops in the Middle Ages (from 442 to 1385). The castle was moved in 1385 to the Monegasque family. In 1608 it became a stronghold of the Grimaldi family and has borne their name ever since. In 1702 it became the town hall of Antibes. From 19 ...
Founded: 11th century / 1966 (museum) |
Location:
Antibes, France
La Piscine Museum
La Piscine (French for 'the swimming pool') is a museum of art and industry, located in the city of Roubaix in northern France. It is more formally known as La Piscine-Musée d"Art et d"Industrie André Diligent or Le musée d"Art et d"Industrie de la ville de Roubaix, but its common name derives from the fact that it is housed in a former indoor swimming pool, with a notable art dec ...
Founded: 2000 |
Location:
Roubaix, France
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux
The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux is the fine arts museum of the city of Bordeaux. The museum is housed in a dependency of the Palais Rohan in central Bordeaux. Its collections regroup paintings, sculptures and drawings from the 15th to the 20st century. The painting collection is the largest one and its strong points are works by French and Dutch painters. In front of the buildind, there is the Galerie des Be ...
Founded: 1801 |
Location:
Bordeaux, France