Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice
The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice is a municipal art museum in Nice . It is located in a neo-renaissance villa . The focus of the collection is on works by French artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
history
When Nice fell to France through the agreements in the Treaty of Turin in 1860 , the city did not have an art museum. This changed when Emperor Napoleon III. during a visit to Nice suggested the establishment of a museum and had works of art on loan from state collections made available for this purpose. Since there was initially no museum building of its own, the works of art were exhibited in the municipal library (Bibliothèque municipale) on Rue Saint-François de Paule. Due to the constantly growing collection and the associated lack of space, the museum moved several times in the period that followed. In 1875 the city decided to rent a floor in the palace of the Comtesse Rey for the museum, in 1892 the collection moved to a building on Rue Dubouchage and in 1901, at the suggestion of the painter Alexis Mossa (1844–1926), a building on Avenue Notre-Dame was moved into . In 1928 the company moved to the present museum building, the former Villa Thomson . Alexis Mossa managed the museum until his death in 1926, after which his son Gustav-Adolf Mossa took over the management, which he held until his death in 1971. During the Second World War, the collection was deposited in the castle of Vérignon . The museum reopened after the war on November 9, 1945.
building
Today's museum building was originally built as a residence for the Russian Princess Elisabeth Kotschubei. In 1878 she had a villa built in the style of the Italian Renaissance in the Baumettes district to the west of the old town on a one-hectare property. During the long construction work, she sold the building in 1883 to the American James Thomson (also Thompson ), who had it completed by the Nice architect Constantin Scala . Thomson organized concerts and balls in the villa and lived in the house until his death in 1897. The property with the spacious English garden was divided and built on several times in the following years. The city of Nice finally acquired the villa in 1925 to house the city's art museum. First of all, several years of renovations began to convert the building, which was originally a residential building, into a museum. Of the decorative interior, only the grand staircase in the style of the Belle Époque remained , while frescoes in the Pompeian style, for example, disappeared. On January 7, 1928, the museum opened as the Palais des Arts Jules Chéret . Since December 17, 1976, the building has been listed as a Monument Historique .
collection
The collection came about partly through purchases by the city of Nice, while large parts came to the museum through donations from private individuals. In particular, the museum received numerous works from the estate of various artists. The focus of the collection is on works by French painters and sculptors.
One of the most important works in the museum is the painting Crucifixion by Agnolo Bronzino from around 1540 . Works by other Italian artists are only sporadically represented in the collection. These include paintings by Francesco Guarino (1611–1651), Francesco Trevisani and Francesco Cozza . The inventory of Flemish and Dutch art is also limited to a few works. These include Allegory of the Earth and Allegory of Water by Jan Brueghel the Younger or Angelica and Medoro by Abraham Bloemaert .
One room is dedicated to the French artist family van Loo. Charles André van Loo , who was born in Nice and was the court painter to King Louis XV. Well-known, is represented in the museum with a wedding of the virgin , for example . The museum owns the large-format works La sultane commande des ouvrages aux odalisques and La sultane servie par des eunuques noirs et blancs from his nephew Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo . Other works from the 18th century are Tête de vieillard by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Les gorges d'Ollioules by Hubert Robert .
Four monumental paintings by Nicaise de Keyser from the 19th century adorn the stairwell. There are also pictures from the Barbizon school such as La Clairière, souvenir de Ville d'Avray by Camille Corot and works by Charles-François Daubigny , Jules Dupré , Théodore Rousseau and Narcisso Virgilio Díaz de la Peña . The museum received an extensive collection of works by Félix Ziem from the artist's widow. The collection also includes works by the academic painters Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and paintings of orientalism such as The Harem Servant by Paul Désiré Trouillebert , The Orange Merchants by Félix-Auguste Clément (1826–1888) and The Flight to Egypt by Luc-Olivier Merson (1846-1920). The museum also shows works by Eugène Boudin and the Impressionist painters Armand Guillaumin , Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet ( Cliff Fécamp from 1897). Pictures by Jules Bastien-Lepage , Marie Bashkirtseff and Louise-Cathérine Breslau stand for naturalism .
Works by artists from the Nabis such as Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard as well as the Fauves such as Sur la plage by Louis Valtat , Terrasse à St Tropez by Charles Camoin , Madame Jenny by Kees van Dongen and numerous works from Raoul's estate date from the 20th century Dufy . There are also the pictures Jeune fille à sa toilette by Henri Lebasque , Méditerranée by Georges d'Espagnat (1870–1950) as well as works by Marie Laurencin , Moïse Kisling , Félix Vallotton and Marc Chagall . The museum has large groups of works by Gustav-Adolf Mossa and Jules Chéret . The museum also has sculptures by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux , François Rude , Auguste Rodin and 75 works from the estate of Michel de Tarnowsky (1870–1946).
Agnolo Bronzino:
Crucifixion
Paul Désiré Trouillebert:
The harem maid
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux:
Enfant à la coquille, pêcheur napolitain
Michel de Tarnowsky:
Surprise
literature
- B. Debrabandère-Descamps, J. Forneris: Musée des beaux-arts de Nice . Musées de Nice, Nice 1997.
Web links
Coordinates: 43 ° 41 ′ 40.3 " N , 7 ° 14 ′ 55.9" E