I spent several hours today wandering around the excellent Musée Fabre; for a little flavour of the place, see the little video I took in one of the rooms here. The largest part of the collection is French art, particularly from the 16th to 19th century, although there are also quite a few rooms dedicated to “northern” paintings, principally of Flemish origin. The gallery was founded by François-Xavier Fabre (1766-1837) who was born and died in Montpellier but spent most of his productive life as an artist in Italy (especially Florence). Fabre gave most of his own paintings to start the gallery, and there are many of examples of his work here, but many of his contemporaries are represented too, as well as earlier French artists such as Nicolas Poussin, and later ones such as Henri Matisse. Among the non-French artists are Peter-Paul Rubens, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Wright of Derby, to name but a few.
The permanent collection is accompanied by an exhibition of modern art by Pierre Soulages, who passed away last year, and who specialized in sombre abstracts which make quite a contrast with the permanent collection.
Anyway, here is a gallery of random pictures I took. If you click on the image it will tell you who the artist was: the one by Soulages is obvious; the very fine bronze sculpture is Le Coureur (1955) by Germaine Richier, an retrospective of her work finished earlier this month (as you can see from the banner in the first picture). Check out the little boy in the very sepulchral scene depicting a vigil for the dead, who is looking at the viewer as if to say “What are you doing here?”
In the Dark 