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With almost two hundred paintings, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes has one of the richest collections of Flemish and Dutch art of any French museum.
Thanks to the history of this city, belonging to the counts of Hainaut and subsequently to the Spanish Netherlands, and its proximity to Belgium, the collection covers mainly Flemish painting of the seventeenth century such as Peter Paul Rubens’s Saint Stephen Triptych and Saint Eligius at the Feet of the Virgin by Gerard Seghers. However, it also includes Flemish Primitives from Hainaut such as Jan Provoost and a follower of Simon Marmion, as well as sixteenth-century Mannerists such as Maerten de Vos and Frans Pourbus (II).
The Dutch part of the collection, while more modest, is rich in works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a series of drawings by Mattheus Terwesten and paintings by Allaert van Everdingen, Cornelis de Heem, and Abraham Willaerts.
Justine Harambillet, Head of Fine Arts Collections, (March 2025)
Collection catalogues
Le musée de Valenciennes
Paris 1995
Related CODART publications
David Bronze and Patrick Descamps, “Flemish and Dutch Drawings in the Museums of Northern France”, CODARTfeatures, December 2014.