The Fabulous Musée Fabre

We headed off for a coffee on our way to the Musée Fabre. Unfortunately, Café Cours, where we had coffee on our first walk around Montpellier, was closed, so we found another place in the pretty Place Jean Jurés. We then walked up to the museum which is located just past the large Place de la Comédie.

Musée Fabre, was founded by the neoclassical painter François-Xavier Fabre in 1825. It is one of France’s finest public collections and continues to grow through donations and bequests from artists and collectors. Pierre Soulages recently demonstrated his attachment to the museum and the city of Montpellier by making a large donation of works from his collection, which covers his career from 1951 to 2012. The museum was renovated between 2004 to 2007 and is a deceptively large space. It is easy to get lost or distracted as there are many floors and staircases to follow.

It was fairly quiet, so we started off in the ‘Nordic’ painting section which had art from Flanders and the Netherlands, from the Renaissance to the 18th century. We had planned to continue looking at the old masters but caught a lift and somehow found ourselves on the top floor in the much more contemporary Soulages Collection, which was very interesting. Pierre Soulages was born in Rodez and moved to Montpellier in 1941 to study at the School of Fine Arts to become a teacher; around this time he also discovered the Musée Fabre. Following World War II, he established himself as one of the main representatives of French art abroad. A unique feature of his work is that he paints almost exclusively in black, apparently due to a fascination with an ink stain on his wall when he was a child.

We found our way back to the old masters and went through the Renaissance and 17th Century, French Painting of the 17th and 18th Centuries, and then onto Neoclassicism, Modernity and Contemporary Art. After two solid hours we had had enough, so went in search of lunch.

We saw much that we liked and much that just didn’t do it for us, especially the religious art. A new artist I was drawn to was Alexandre Cabanel, but only his later work from the 1860’s till his death in 1889. We saw a number of Delacroix paintings, a few by Rubens, Renoir, Degas, Manet, Monet, Corot, Greuze and of course Fabre.Read more