Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans

The Musée des beaux-arts d'Orléans is a museum in the city of Orléans in the Loiret department and the Centre-Val de Loire region in France.Founded in 1797, it is one of France's oldest provincial museums. Its collections cover European arts from the 15th to 20th century.The museum owns circa 2,000 paintings (with paintings by Correggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Sebastiano Ricci, Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Hubert Robert, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso), 700 sculptures (Baccio Bandinelli, Auguste Rodin), more than 1,200 pieces of decorative arts, 10,000 drawings, 50,000 prints and the second largest collection of pastels in France after that of the Louvre.HistoryThe museum was founded during the French Revolution by the initiative of Jean Bardin, director of the school of drawing of the city and of Aignan-Thomas Desfriches, in 1797. The museum was installed in the Palais épiscopal d'Orléans, an ancient college, in 1799. In 1804, the museum was closed and the collections were placed in the Jardin des plantes d’Orléans.