The Musée historique is one of the three museums of Haguenau, France. It was established in 1900 and inaugurated in 1905, when Haguenau was a German town and part of Alsace-Lorraine. In spite of its name, it is as much an art museum as a museum dedicated to History.
The museum was founded by the mayor, Xavier Nessel, who was also a keen amateur archaeologist. The building was initially designed to house the municipal collections, the municipal archive and the municipal library.
Apart from artefacts relating to the history of the town, including its Jewish community, the museum owns a rich collection of archaeological finds from the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Gallo-Roman period. It also displays a number of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque artworks from religious and secular buildings from the town and its surroundings; in many cases, those buildings themselves (such as Frederick Barbarossa's castle in Haguenau) have long disappeared. The museum also owns a collection of Strasbourg faience by the Hannong Family and a collection of modern art, including Art Nouveau glassware, and paintings.
The ethnographic and folk art collections relating to Alsace were moved to the Musée alsacien nearby in 1972.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.