Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen is a fine arts museum in the French city of Caen, founded at the start of the 19th century and rebuilt in 1971 within the ducal château.
On September 1, 1801, the Minister of Interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal selected 15 cities to serve as depots to display a large number of paintings confiscated from émigrés or acquired through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although the city of Caen was chosen for its academic reputation and character as cultural capital of Normandy, it showed, at first, little enthusiasm because article 4 of the Chaptal decree specified that "the paintings will be sent only after the town has effected the expense for a gallery suitable to receive them". The paintings removed from churches and religious communities during the Revolution having already been stockpiled in the Sainte-Catherine-des-Arts church, the mayor Daigremont St. Manvieux first thought of installing the museum in the former Jesuit church. But on October 27, 1801, the decision was finally made to use the left wing of the former Eudist seminary, already partly occupied by the mayoralty since 1792. On October 27, 1802, the prefect of Calvados asked for the title of museum commissioner to be conferred to François-Pierre Fleuriau, a highly ranked design instructor at the Central School of Calvados. To augment the already existing collections, the new curator selected, in 1804, 46 paintings by various artists . This made the Caen collections the largest ones after those of Lyon. The curator also expended the new collections, even trying, although unsuccessfully, to have the Bayeux Tapestry transferred to Caen.

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