Musée départemental de l'Oise

The Musée départemental de l'Oise, commonly known as MUDO, is an art museum located in Beauvais, the prefecture of the Oise department in northern France. Housed in the former bishop's palace at the foot of Beauvais Cathedral, the institution holds the status of a classified historical monument. Founded in 1841 and opened in its current location in 1981, the museum underwent extensive renovations before reopening in January 2015. It serves as the principal repository for the artistic and historical heritage of the Oise region, with particular strengths in nineteenth-century French painting, Art Nouveau ceramics, and modern and contemporary art.

The museum's origins trace to 1841, when the historian Louis Graves and the Société académique de l'Oise established a collection to preserve objects of artistic and historical value. Initially stored in various municipal offices, the collection outgrew these spaces. In 1908, the city of Beauvais and the Société académique de l'Oise offered the collection to the departmental council, which acquired a large building north of the cathedral in 1909. The museum was evacuated during World War I in 1918, and suffered devastating losses during World War II when it was bombed in June 1940, destroying most of its objects. The surviving works were installed in the attic of the former Bishop's Palace in 1960. After the courts moved out in 1973, architect Jean-Pierre Paquet led a restoration and conversion project, and the museum opened as a new museographic center in June 1981. Structural problems forced its closure in 1997. A renovation project launched in 2013, costing over €9.5 million and supported by the Oise Department and the Picardy Region, enabled the museum to reopen on 25 January 2015. Additional works were carried out in July 2023, and the museum closed to the public again from 2020 before reopening in March 2025 with two new exhibition routes.

The museum's collections span from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century, encompassing painting, sculpture, ceramics, decorative arts, and graphic works. The nineteenth-century holdings form a core strength, representing diverse movements from Neoclassicism and Romanticism to Orientalism and the Barbizon School. The museum also maintains significant collections of Art Nouveau and Art Deco objects, twentieth-century modern art, and a substantial ceramic collection ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. A dedicated cabinet of graphic arts supplements the permanent holdings. The collections are organized thematically, addressing subjects such as the renewal of religious art, the relationship between art and power, the development of landscape painting, and the evolution of European art from the 1900s to the 1960s and 1970s.

The museum's signature work is Thomas Couture's monumental unfinished canvas Enrôlement des volontaires de 1792, displayed in the old courtroom alongside numerous preparatory sketches. The nineteenth-century tour features paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Camille Corot, Alfred Sisley, Paul Huet, and Prosper Marilhat, as well as works by Théodore Chassériau, Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Hippolyte Flandrin, and Henri-Eugène Le Sidaner. Decorative works include pieces by Alexis-Joseph Mazerolle and Pierre-Victor Galland, and ceramics by Jules-Claude Ziegler. The old masters section contains works by Italian and French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painters including Baciccio, Charles Le Brun, and Sébastien Bourdon, as well as French Renaissance works attributed to Antoine Caron. The seventeenth-century marble funerary sculpture of Charles de Fresnoy, attributed to Michel Bourdin le Jeune, is a notable sculptural piece. For twentieth-century art, the museum holds works by Raoul Dufy, Félix Vallotton, Francis Picabia, Maurice Denis, and Tamara de Lempicka, including her paintings Mère et Enfant and Madone ronde. Denis's staircase decoration L'Âge d'or is a significant decorative work. The Art Nouveau dining room designed by Gustave Serrurier-Bovy and the bust of Auguste Delaherche by Pierre Félix Masseau complement what the museum describes as the most important collection of Delaherche's ceramics. The museum also holds the Boudot-Lamotte bequest, comprising works and collections of the painter and collector Maurice Boudot-Lamotte, and a major donation of works by Jean Lambert-Rucki received in 1997.

The Musée départemental de l'Oise is located in central Beauvais, at the foot of the cathedral, within the classified former episcopal palace. Owned by the Oise Department, the museum reopened to the public in March 2025 after a period of closure since 2020, with two new exhibition routes: nineteenth-century collections on the first floor and twentieth-century collections on the second floor, the latter inaccessible to the public since 1997. The museum presents temporary exhibitions several times annually, organizes lectures, and conducts children's workshops. Visitors can access information through the museum's website at http://mudo.oise.fr/.