page_title: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen
section_title: Development and first monographs
hierarchical_section_title: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen / History / Development and first monographs
caption_attribution_description: Séminaire des Eudistes sur la Place de la République, Caen
context_page_description: The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen is a fine arts museum in the French city of Caen, founded at the start of the 19th century and rebuilt in 1971 within the ducal château.
context_section_description: Starting from 1811, the new curator, Henry Elouis augmented the collections, notably thanks to a new collection of 35 paintings attributed by the Ministry of the Interior. In 1815, the Prussians camped in the ground floor of the old Eudist seminary to force the surrender of paintings confiscated in Germany. Elouis then hid the most important paintings. According to legend, he hid in particular Abraham and Melchizedek by Rubens under the very dinner table used by Prussian officers. After the Prussians had left the city following the restitution of lesser paintings, Belgium then asked for the return of paintings by great Brussels masters, but the curator and mayor of Caen, the count of Vandœuvre, were able to stem the new crisis.
  The second half of the nineteenth century was a calmer period that favored the study of collections. In 1837, Bernard Mancel wrote the first catalog, and the first monograph concerning to the collections was published in 1850. While the acquisition policy of Alfred Guillard, the successor of Elouis from 1841 to 1880, was rather uninspired, a series of bequests endowed the museum with a hundred additional artworks. The Baroness de Montaran's, which included three paintings by Boucher, twenty Gudin and one Mignard, was the most remarkable bequest of the second half of the nineteenth century.
  The largest donation in the history of the museum was bequeathed in 1872 by the Caen bookseller Bernard Mancel, who had purchased in 1845 a large part of Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon I in Rome's collection. The Mancel collection included more than 50,000 works: prints by Dürer, Rembrandt and Callot, and about thirty paintings by Perugino (The Marriage of the Virgin), Veronese (Temptation of St. Anthony) or Rogier van der Weyden (The Virgin and Child). A year later, the family of colonel Langlois bequeathed 256 paintings of battles and military views. These paintings were transferred in 1888 to the Pavillon des sociétés savantes, which had been remodeled at the expense of colonel Langlois' niece to house the museum.
caption: The old Eudist seminary.
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