What it is
The museum occupies the Palais Saint-Pierre, the former abbey of the Benedictine nuns of Saint-Pierre-les-Nonnains, rebuilt in the second half of the seventeenth century. It was founded officially in 1801 and opened in 1803.
In the nineteenth century it kept a room of flower paintings for the designers of the silk industry — the museum was, in part, a tool of the silk trade.
What is in it
An encyclopaedic collection: antiquities, medieval art, European painting from the old masters to the twentieth century. Among the prizes is The Stoning of Saint Stephen, the first known painting by Rembrandt.
Getting it right
The old cloister garden in the middle of the building is free to walk into and one of the quietest places in central Lyon.
The collection is large; choose a few rooms rather than trying to see all of it.
A museum created to save the silk industry
Like revolutionaries all over France, those in Lyon wanted the art seized from the church and the nobility gathered in one place to educate the public. In 1792 the painter Philippe-Auguste Hennequin and Father Joseph Janin listed what had been collected, including 300 paintings. But in Lyon there was a practical reason too. The silk industry, which depended on the art of drawing, had been devastated by the siege of 1793, and its designers needed to train by studying masterpieces. A deputy for the Rhône asked the government for paintings, including flower pieces by Van Huysum, "the study of flowers being essential for Lyon".
The decision to set up the museum in the abbey of Saint-Pierre was taken on May 16, 1795, but it took the Chaptal decree of September 1, 1801, creating museums in fifteen provincial cities, to make it real. Lyon was first on the list and received the largest allocation from the state. A decree of April 13, 1802, installed it in the Palais Saint-Pierre, alongside a drawing school with a class devoted to flowers for silk designers, and the first room opened to the public on November 23, 1803.
How the collection grew
Shipments from the state in 1803, 1805 and 1811 brought nearly 110 paintings, including works by Perugino, Veronese, Tintoretto, Guercino, Rubens and Jordaens. In the nineteenth century the museum shared its building with the fine arts school, kept a flower salon for the silk designers and gave whole rooms to Lyon painters, yet it still acquired major works such as Rembrandt's Stoning of Saint Stephen, his earliest known painting.
Under the Third Republic it was enlarged and began collecting on an encyclopedic scale. Guided by the collector Édouard Aynard, it was one of the first museums bold enough to buy from the avant-garde of the day, including Paul Gauguin's Nave Nave Mahana, in 1913 the first painting by Gauguin to enter a French museum. In the same period a new wing and a monumental staircase were built; the staircase, opened in 1884, is named for Puvis de Chavannes, the Lyon painter whose Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses hangs there. In the twentieth century, under René Jullian, it began staging ambitious exhibitions of modern art; it handed its archaeology and local history pieces to the Gallo-Roman museum and the Gadagne museum, took over rooms vacated by the fine arts school and the Lyon Academy, and at the end of the century moved its contemporary art to the new Musée d'Art Contemporain and renovated its galleries.
What you will see
About 700 paintings, chosen from a collection of 2,000, hang in thirty-five rooms in chronological order rather than by national school. The strongest sections are Venetian Renaissance painting, the seventeenth century, French nineteenth-century painting and the first half of the twentieth century.
The sculpture department shows 1,300 pieces in three places: older works on the first floor, more recent ones in the former chapel, and a few in the garden. There is also a large antiquities collection, with Egyptian, ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Etruscan pieces; decorative arts, mainly medieval but also Islamic, Asian, Art Nouveau and Art Deco; a rich coin and medal cabinet; and a department of drawings and prints from every period.
Names to look for include Perugino, whose monumental altarpiece of the Ascension is here, Rubens's Adoration of the Magi and his Saint Dominic and Saint Francis, sent by the state in 1811, Poussin, Simon Vouet, Ingres, Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Monet and Degas, and in the twentieth-century rooms Bonnard, Matisse, Braque, Léger, Picasso and Miró. Painters of the Lyon school are woven through the galleries, and a whole room is given to Louis Janmot's cycle of paintings.
The building
The Palais Saint-Pierre was the abbey of the Benedictine nuns of Saint-Pierre-les-Nonnains, rebuilt between 1659 and 1687 on the south side of the Place des Terreaux. When the old city walls were pulled down in the sixteenth century, the nuns were given permission to use their stones to repair the convent. The current director of the museum is Sylvie Ramond.
In the middle of the building is the old Benedictine cloister, now a municipal garden open to all. The fountain in its round basin is an ancient sarcophagus topped by a statue of Apollo, the god of the arts.
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