Musée Fabre in Montpellier

Musée Fabre is located just off the Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, close to Place de la Comédie in Montpellier.  The museum was founded in 1802 when the city of Montpellier was given thirty paintings to start a modest municipal museum.  In 1825, the town accepted a large donation of works from François-Xavier Fabre, a Montpelier artist, and the current museum was based on this collection and works donated by other local artists.  On the death of Fabre in 1837, a legacy of more than a hundred pictures and drawings came to the museum to complete the collection.

Musée Fabre

The museum is now one of the largest museums in France, holding Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and French collections, painters of the Europeans schools of the 16th to the 18th centuries, offering over 800 works, 900 engravings, and 3,500 drawings in the 9,200 square meter (99,000 square feet) exhibit area.

We enter and wander, finding familiar artists and others that we do not know.  The first collections are European art.

European artists

From there, we wander into a dark room with old etchings.

Etchings

Then, it's on to French artists and we recognize many more of the artists and works.

French artists

We then stumble into a special exhibit of modern works.

Modern Europe

It's been a delightful visit!