Nantes Museum of Arts

The Nantes Museum of Arts (French: Musée d'Arts de Nantes), formerly known as the Fine Arts Museum of Nantes, is one of France's most significant provincial art museums. Located in the city of Nantes in the Pays de la Loire region of western France, it was established by consular decree on 31 August 1801 under Napoleon Bonaparte as one of fifteen provincial museums designed to disperse the Louvre's overflowing collections. The museum holds a place among the largest public collections outside Paris, comparable to those of Valenciennes, Grenoble, Lyon, Lille, and Montpellier. Its collections span from the 13th century to contemporary art, offering a comprehensive panorama of French and European artistic movements. The museum is owned by the municipality of Nantes and is situated in the Richebourg-Saint-Clément and Malakoff-Saint Donatien neighborhoods.

The museum's origins trace to the Chaptal Decree of 1801, which created fifteen provincial museums to geographically distribute the Louvre's holdings. Nantes received an initial allocation of 43 paintings from state reserves in 1804 and 1809, drawn from the former royal collection, Parisian churches and convents, and works seized during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. The decisive moment came in 1810, when the city purchased the collection of brothers Pierre and François Cacault. An 1808 inventory recorded this acquisition as comprising 1,155 paintings, 64 sculptures, 134 folio volumes, and 6,370 prints, making it the richest painting collection outside Paris at that time.

For decades, the collection lacked a proper home. It was dispersed across various municipal buildings, including the Hôtel de Ville, the Prefecture, the civil court, and churches. In 1830, the museum finally opened to the public on the upper floor of the Halle aux Toiles, a former cloth market in the city center, with approximately 500 square meters of exhibition space. Despite expansions in 1833, 1836, and 1846, the building proved inadequate, described in 1843 as "too small, too cold, inconvenient, exposed to dust." Following a bequest from brothers Edgard and Alphonse Clarke de Feltre in 1852, the museum became known as the Musée Clarke de Feltre for about fifty years.

State pressure mounted for a proper facility. In 1887, Jules Dauban, inspector of Fine Arts, condemned the existing museum, and in 1890, Minister Léon Bourgeois threatened to withdraw state deposits unless action was taken. A competition for a new building was launched in 1891.

The museum's collections encompass art from the 13th century to the present day, representing all major French and European movements. A particular strength lies in Italian Trecento painting, with significant holdings from the Florentine and Sienese schools. The collection has been built through state allocations, the foundational Cacault acquisition, subsequent donations and bequests, and an active purchasing policy supported by the Société des amis du musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. The museum also benefits from deposits from the Regional Contemporary Art Funds of the Loire and the Centre Pompidou.

The 17th century is represented by Italian still lifes and landscapes, French works including nocturnal scenes by Georges de la Tour, and Dutch and Flemish masters. The 19th-century holdings feature Romantic, academic, and landscape traditions. Modern and contemporary art are also well represented, with the museum maintaining an active program of temporary exhibitions to disseminate heritage and contemporary creation.

Among the Italian Trecento and Quattrocento works are pieces attributed to Bernardo Daddi, Perugino, Bicci di Lorenzo, Cosmè Tura, Andrea Solari, and Giovan Battista Moroni. The 17th-century Italian school includes Guido Reni, Luca Giordano, Giuseppe Recco, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Orazio Gentileschi. Dutch and Flemish masters represented include Peter Paul Rubens, Gaspar de Crayer, Matthias Stomer, Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrik Goltzius, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Adam Frans van der Meulen, Peter Lely, and Marinus van Reymerswaele.

Notable 19th-century works include Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Portrait of Madame de Senonnes (1814), pieces by Eugène Delacroix, Henri Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Paul Baudry. Landscape painters include Maxime Maufra and Edward Burne-Jones, with James Tissot also represented.

The modern collection features Fauvist works by Raoul Dufy and Robert Delaunay, Paul Signac, Jean Metzinger, Claude Monet, Kees van Dongen, Max Ernst (La Forêt), Wassily Kandinsky, Maurice Denis, Tamara de Lempicka, and Jean Tinguely. Contemporary holdings include Maurizio Cattelan, photographs by Gilbert & George, installations by Christian Boltanski, and paintings by Gerhard Richter.

The present museum building was designed by Nantes architect Clément-Marie Josso, winner of the 1891 competition. Constructed according to principles established by recent museums in Lille and Amiens, the building is organized around a central courtyard covered by a glass roof, with a dual circuit of galleries and rooms on two levels behind a monumental double staircase and vaulted vestibule. Ground-floor rooms are lit by large windows, while upper-floor rooms feature modern overhead lighting enabled by the metal framework. The architectural eclecticism reflects the triumph of architects at the 1900 Universal Exhibition, the year of the museum's inauguration. Decorative elements include allegories of art and architecture in the tympanum above the entrance. The facades, roof, and stairs were registered as historical monuments on 29 October 1975. From 1985 to 1990, the building also housed the bulk of the municipal library's holdings. In 2011, the museum closed for planned expansion work intended to increase its area from 11,400 to 17,000 square meters, including the enclosure of the nearby Oratory chapel for temporary exhibitions and new construction by British architects Stanton Williams. The project added 2,500 square meters of exhibition space, primarily for contemporary art, an 180-seat auditorium in the patio, improved accessibility, and completely renovated glass roofs to maximize natural light. However, discovery of significant groundwater in the foundations required nearly four additional years of work and added 10 million euros in costs. The fully expanded museum reopened on 23 June 2017. On 1 January 2015, the museum became the Musée d'Arts de Nantes, reflecting the transformation of the urban community into a metropolis. The Jules-Dupré course, a paved road connecting Georges Clemenceau Street to Gambetta Street along the museum's west side, was named in 1899 in honor of painter Jules Dupré (1811-1889).

The Nantes Museum of Arts is located in downtown Nantes and is accessible via the Trébuchet bus station, served by lines 11 and 12. The museum is owned by the municipality of Nantes. Following its 2011-2017 closure for expansion, the museum reopened with significantly enlarged facilities. In 2018, it received more than 400,000 visitors. The museum's website is https://museedartsdenantes.nantesmetropole.fr/.