Musée Antoine Vivenel

The Musée Antoine Vivenel is the municipal museum of Compiègne, a city in the Oise department of northern France's Hauts-de-France region. Founded in 1839, it stands as one of France's notable provincial museums, holding particular distinction for its archaeological collections. The museum is located at 2, rue d'Austerlitz in the city center and is recognized as a musée de France under the law of 4 January 2002. Its significance rests on the exceptional quality of its Greek ceramic collection, ranked second in France only to the Louvre, and its diverse holdings spanning antiquity through the nineteenth century.

The museum originated from the generosity of Antoine Vivenel, an entrepreneur-architect and major collector who made his fortune in Paris during the reign of Louis-Philippe. Vivenel specialized in classical antiquity and Renaissance art objects. In 1839, he donated his collection to his native city with an ambitious vision: to create a comprehensive study museum featuring art galleries, plaster casts after antiquity, science and natural history collections, and free courses in drawing and music. This expansive project failed to materialize due to insufficient funds and space. For a century, the museum operated in cramped quarters within the town hall, developing only modestly. The institution's trajectory changed in 1952 when it moved to the Hôtel de Songeons-Bicquilley, a private mansion bequeathed to the city by Count René Personne de Songeons. The collections continued growing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through state deposits, contributions from the Société historique de Compiègne, excavations at the Gallic sanctuary of Gournay-sur-Aronde between 1975 and 1984, and private donations and bequests. Since 1998, the museum has also utilized the former church of Saint-Pierre-des-Minimes, a twelfth-century building, as a space for temporary exhibitions.

The museum's most celebrated holding is its Greek ceramic collection, one of France's largest after the Louvre, with some pieces deriving from the collections of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother and Prince of Canino, in Italy. The museum also holds deposited sculpted blocks from the Gallo-Roman temple of Champlieu, located approximately twenty kilometers southeast of Compiègne. Egyptian artifacts include a child's mummy among the funerary furniture. In painting, notable works include Lavinia Fontana's Presentation at the Temple (1586), Luca Giordano's The Holy Family and Saint John the Baptist (circa 1660), Charles Le Brun's sketch for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (1678), Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps' The Musical Monkeys (1836), and Dominique Papety's Portrait of Antoine Vivenel (circa 1843-1845). The sculpture collection features one of the sixteen surviving Magdeburg Ivories from the tenth century, Eugène Delaplanche's Allegory of the Air in bronze, and Auguste Joseph Peiffer's paired works Arab Playing the Mandolin and Arab Playing the Tambour. The decorative arts include maiolica, Rhenish stoneware, works from Bernard Palissy's workshop, Limoges enamels such as Léonard Limosin's Briseis and Hercules from the Heroes of Ovid's Heroides series, Venetian glass, Bohemian crystal, and sculptures in alabaster, bronze, and ivory.

Since 1952, the museum has occupied the Hôtel de Songeons-Bicquilley, a late eighteenth-century private mansion constructed on the ruins of a Dominican monastery founded by Saint Louis and destroyed during the Revolution. The building is set within a two-hectare park. Remnants of the former abbey's Gothic architecture survive on the grounds, including a window arch, portal, pointed arches from the cloister, and a statue of Saint Dominic. The park also contains the monumental gate and two neoclassical tombs from the vanished Clamart cemetery, as well as Marguerite de Bayser-Gratry's Fountain of the Deer. A scented garden extends below the former medieval ramparts. The park regularly hosts sculpture exhibitions, concerts, and other cultural events.