Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret

The Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret is a municipal art museum in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France, located at 33 avenue des Baumettes in the Baumettes district west of the old city. Housed in a former private mansion built in 1878 for Russian Princess Elizaveta Vasilievna Kochubey, the museum opened on 7 January 1928 as the Palais des Arts Jules Chéret, named for the artist Jules Chéret who lived and worked in Nice during his final years. The institution holds particular significance as the principal fine arts museum of France's second-largest city on the Riviera, with a collection spanning four centuries and special strength in French painting and sculpture from the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2023, it has maintained a partnership with the Musée d'Orsay for scientific collaboration and international loan facilitation.

The museum's origins trace to 1860, when Nice's annexation to France under the Treaty of Turin prompted Emperor Napoleon III to encourage the creation of a municipal art museum and arrange state loans of artworks. Initially lacking dedicated premises, the collection was displayed in the municipal library on rue Saint-François de Paule. Successive relocations followed: in 1875 to a floor of the Comtesse Rey's palace, in 1892 to a rented building on boulevard Dubouchage, and in 1901 to avenue Notre-Dame at the suggestion of painter Alexis Mossa (1844-1926), who directed the museum until his death. His son Gustav-Adolf Mossa succeeded him, serving as director until 1971. During the Second World War, the collection was evacuated to the Château de Vérignon for safekeeping, and the museum reopened on 9 November 1945. The city of Nice purchased the current villa in 1925, undertaking several years of conversion work before the 1928 inauguration.

The collection developed through municipal acquisitions and substantial private donations, including bequests from Félix Ziem, Fanny Trachel, Marie Bashkirtseff's mother, Baron Joseph Vitta, Madame Dufy, Maurice Fenaille, the Mossa family, and more recently Aline Avigdor, Ethel Messiah, and friends of Michel de Tarnowsky. The holdings emphasize French painters and sculptors from the 19th and 20th century, with notable concentrations in academic painting, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, the Nabis, and Fauvism. The museum also preserves an important collection of works by Jules Chéret, the painter and poster artist who died in Nice in 1932.

The museum's Italian Renaissance holdings include Agnolo Bronzino's Crucifixion, dated circa 1540, and works by Francesco Guarino, Francesco Trevisani, and Francesco Cozza. Flemish and Dutch art is represented more narrowly, with pieces such as Jan Brueghel the Younger's Allegory of Earth and Allegory of Water and Abraham Bloemaert's Angelica and Medoro. A dedicated gallery honors the van Loo dynasty of painters, featuring Charles André van Loo, court painter to Louis XV, and his nephew Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo, represented by large-format works including La sultane commande des ouvrages aux odalisques and La sultane servie par des eunuques noirs et blancs. Eighteenth-century French painting includes Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Tête de vieillard and Hubert Robert's Les gorges d'Ollioules. The monumental staircase is adorned with four large paintings by Nicaise de Keyser. Barbizon School works include Camille Corot's La Clairière, souvenir de Ville d'Avray, plus paintings by Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Théodore Rousseau, and Narcisso Virgilio Díaz de la Peña. The museum holds an extensive group of works by Félix Ziem, acquired from the artist's widow, and academic paintings by Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. Orientalist works include Paul Désiré Trouillebert's The Harem Servant, Félix-Auguste Clément's The Orange Merchants, and Luc-Olivier Merson's The Flight into Egypt. Impressionist and related holdings feature Eugène Boudin, Armand Guillaumin, Alfred Sisley, and Claude Monet's Cliff at Fécamp (1897). Naturalism is represented by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Marie Bashkirtseff, and Louise-Catherine Breslau, whose Self-Portrait and other works were bequeathed by her companion Madeleine Zillhardt. Twentieth-century works include Nabis painters Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, and Fauves such as Louis Valtat's On the Beach, Charles Camoin's Terrace at St Tropez, Kees van Dongen's Madame Jenny, and numerous works from Raoul Dufy's estate. Additional holdings include Henri Lebasque's Jeune fille à sa toilette, Georges d'Espagnat's Méditerranée, and works by Marie Laurencin, Moïse Kisling, Félix Vallotton, and Marc Chagall. The museum possesses significant groups of works by Gustav-Adolf Mossa and Jules Chéret. Sculpture holdings include Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, François Rude, Auguste Rodin, and 75 works from the estate of Michel de Tarnowsky (1870-1946).

The museum building originated as a private villa commissioned by Princess Elizaveta Vasilievna Kochubey (1821-1897), wife of Prince Lev Viktorovitch Kotchoubeï, a privy counselor to Tsar Alexander II. Beginning in 1878 on a roughly one-hectare plot in the Baumettes district, she constructed an Italian Renaissance-inspired villa with Genoese and Michelangelesque elements, possibly influenced by the Razumovsky Palace at Batouryn, Ukraine. Construction proceeded slowly; in April 1883 the unfinished villa was purchased by wealthy American entomologist James Livingston Thomson (or Thompson), who engaged Nice architect Constantin Scala to complete it. Thomson hosted concerts and balls there until his death on 9 December 1897. The property was subsequently divided, with portions of the park sold for development. The city of Nice acquired the villa in 1925 and converted it for museum use, preserving only the grand Belle Époque staircase while removing decorative elements such as Pompeian-style frescoes. The façades with their Genoese Mannerist architecture and rooflines were inscribed as historic monuments on 17 December 1976 and classified on 19 December 2023.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret is located at 33 avenue des Baumettes in Nice, France. It is a municipal museum owned and operated by the city of Nice. The museum's official website is http://www.musee-beaux-arts-nice.org. Visitors tour two floors of the building, entering through a patio, formerly a winter garden, featuring a tall Belle Époque glass roof. The ground floor presents works from regional primitives through the 18th century, including the van Loo family gallery, while the monumental staircase leads to the first floor devoted to 19th-century academic painting and sculpture, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, the Nabis, and Fauvism.