Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen : a guide to the collections

Musée des beaux-arts de Rouen

A Guide to the Collections

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen is home to one of the most prestigious public art collections in France, encompassing paintings, sculpture, drawings, and objets d'art from every school from the fifteenth century to today. Perugino, Gerard David, François Clouet, and Veronese are the first major milestones in a visit that continues with an exceptional group of seventeenth-century paintings, including works by Peter Paul Rubens, Caravaggio, Diego Velâzquez, Simon Vouet, Nicolas Poussin, and others. The rooms devoted to the eighteenth century bring together paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Hubert Robert, along with sculpture and objets d'art. With the richness of its collections, the breadth of the artistic movements represented, and the presence of key works by the great masters, from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Claude Monet, the museum is a true temple to nineteenth-century painting : it includes masterpieces by Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Moreau, and Edgar Degas. A gift from François Depeaux, in 1909, established Rouen as the home of the most important collection of Impressionist works in France outside of Paris. Amedeo Modigliani, Raoul Dufy, and the Duchamp Brothers introduce the twentieth-century collections, focussed primarily on the Puteaux Group, followed by abstract painters, including Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jean Dubuffet, and Aurélie Nemours. Twenty-first-century art has made its way into the museum with ambitious works by Wim Delvoye and Felice Varini.