Sunday, August 22, 2010

Musee de Beaux Arts Rennes

Musee de Beaux Arts Rennes

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, like many French museums, was a creation of the Revolution. Founded in 1794 with works confiscated from the city's religious and civil buildings, the museum in fact owes most of the wealth of its collection to the fabulous 'cabinet of curiosities' collected by Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698-1756), President of the Parliament of Brittany. After two years of work, the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes has reopened February 9, 2010 its permanent collection rooms, restyled, extended and enriched with new masterpieces: 320 paintings of which about fifty have never been shown.

Due to its lack of a suitable building, the museum has never been able to exhibit the whole range of its diverse collection. It has a fine reputation as an art gallery, due to the signal quality of its pictures, though this is only a partial image of its potential. It contains strangely few sculptures -  not the result of the destructions of the last war, which mainly affected the 19th century works, but rather that the two main sources of the collection, Robien and works lent by the French state, had very few to offer.
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