Information
The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec has a mission of acquiring, distributing and exhibiting art of the Québec region from its origins to the present day. While it is not an encyclopedic museum, it does conserve a number of foreign artworks. The collection includes some seventeenth-century paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists (or their studios) from the cities of Delft (Michiel van Mierevelt), Utrecht (Joost-Cornelisz. Droochsloot), Amsterdam (Pieter Wouwerman), Leiden (Harmen Steenwijck) and Antwerp (Jacob van Es). Furthermore there are paintings from nineteenth-century artists, such as Cornelis Springer, Johan Barthold Jongkind and Johan Scherrewitz. These works have been imported to Québec by European immigrants or have been bought on the New York art market during the first half of the twentieth century. Additionally the museum owns a few drawings (Wierts, Mauve and Jongkind), prints (Ruisdael, Melaer, Vinkeles, Vrydag) – including some early geographical maps – and photographs (Offenberg) of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Daniel Drouin, curator (march 2020)