Information

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, founded in 1801, is located in the Palais Longchamp, designed by the architect Henri Espérandieu and inaugurated in 1869.

The museum’s collection was established in the early years of the French Revolution from works seized from churches and from émigrés. In 1802, a selection of masterpieces representing the great schools of Italian, French, and northern European painting was consigned to the museum by the French State. Throughout the nineteenth century, the collection was enriched by paintings that the State continued to send on a regular basis. A succession of acquisitions, legacies, and gifts during the two centuries of the museum’s existence has given the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille its current profile.

The group of Flemish and Dutch paintings reflects this collection history. The major pieces such as The Boar Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens, Gaspar de Crayer’s Hercules at the Crossroads, and The Miraculous Draft of Fishes by Jacob Jordaens were among those consigned to Marseille by the State in 1802. More modest works testify to the taste of local collectors for Flemish and Dutch art. 

One of the museum’s original approaches is to present the richness and dynamism of the Provençal school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which took in artists from northern Europe journeying to and from Italy. As a result, visitors to the museum are able to admire the paintings of Louis Finson, a native of Bruges who, on his return from Naples, introduced Caravaggism to Provence, and above all Jean Daret of Brussels, who settled in Aix-en-Provence, where he made his career, in 1636.

Luc Georget, Chief Curator (March 2025)

Collection catalogues

Parcours: catalogue guide du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille
Chomer, Gilles
Marseille 1990