Photo: ROZE Sébastien · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Rochelle

19th-century art museum in the Hôtel Crussol d’Uzès, closed for works before its transformation into the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire.

Temporarily closed

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Musée des Beaux-Arts de La RochelleTemporarily closed

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Temporarily closed. The museum has been closed to the public since winter 2019, first to secure the building and then to fully rework the route as the future Musée d’Art et d’Histoire.

About the museum

The Musée des Beaux-Arts was founded in 1844 from works acquired since 1841 by the Société des Amis des Arts. It occupies the Hôtel Crussol d’Uzès, a former episcopal palace built under Louis XVI. The first curators, the painters Édouard Pinel and Tibulle Mary Furcy de Lavault, enriched the collections through purchases at the Salon, works by regional artists, gifts and bequests.

The museum offered a panorama of European painting from the 15th to the early 20th century, with a strong identity built around academic and Orientalist painting. For lack of space, it could show only a small part of its nearly 900 paintings and drawings. From 2008 to 2018 it held participatory hangings, in which non-specialists became exhibition curators.

A structural alert in 2018 led first to a partial closure and then, in winter 2019, to a full closure. The first phase of works, covering the shell and roof, ran from late 2021 to 2024. The second phase provides for a new route designed by the architect Michel Goutal, whose outline draft was approved in 2025. The future Musée d’Art et d’Histoire will bring together the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts and the Musée d’Orbigny-Bernon to tell the cultural history of the city, from the Neolithic to the present day.