Musee Granet

The depth is in three places: the Cezanne holdings and Aix's long reconciliation with him, the Philippe Meyer rooms with a major Giacometti group, and the Ingres and Granet paintings of the nineteenth century, backed by pre-Roman Celto-Ligurian sculpture from Entremont.

The Musee Granet stands on the Place Saint-Jean de Malte in the Mazarin quarter of Aix-en-Provence, in buildings that belonged to the priory of Saint-Jean-de-Malte. The Ministry of Culture's heritage record calls the building the Priory of the Hospitallers of Saint-Jean-de-Malte, now the Musee Granet, and dates its main building campaign to the 17th century. It is owned by the commune. Its main facade on the square and the roof above it were classified as a historic monument by an order of 7 November 1979, and the facade on the garden side was entered on the supplementary inventory by the same order.

The museum shares a garden with the church of Saint-Jean-de-Malte next door, and the two stand together on the square, the church at the left of the frontage in the photographs. A reader who arrives expecting a purpose-built gallery will find instead a calm, sober stone frontage with regular windows and a modest central doorway, reached by a short flight of steps from the cobbled square.

This page concerns that building only. The museum also runs a second site, the Chapelle des Penitents Blancs, which shows other parts of the collections and is ticketed separately. The museum's price page states that a ticket to the chapel does not grant access to the Place Saint-Jean de Malte building.

French Wikipedia records that a first museum opened in 1828 in the priory premises and was inaugurated in 1838; English Wikipedia gives 1838 as the opening, under the name Musee d'Aix. The founding holdings came mainly from the antiquities gathered by Fauris de Saint-Vincens at the end of the 18th century.

The decisive gift came in 1849, when the painter Francois Marius Granet, born in Aix in 1775, bequeathed his paintings and drawings to his native city. Under the terms of his will, 200 of the drawings were chosen for the Louvre. A further major bequest followed in 1863 from Jean-Baptiste de Bourguignon de Fabregoules, of more than 800 works according to Wikipedia. The museum's own caption for its Rembrandt self-portrait dates the Bourguignon de Fabregoules donation to 1860, a small discrepancy between the museum and the encyclopaedia that this page records rather than resolves. In 1949, on the centenary of Granet's death, the institution took his name.

The buildings grew with the collections. The Granet wing was begun in 1860, a second building was added after 1870 and a third in 1900, and the complex was enlarged again around 1940, according to French Wikipedia. The same source reports extensive renovation between 1990 and 2005, and a reopening in the summer of 2006, timed to the exhibition Cezanne en Provence, which ran from 9 June to 17 September 2006.

The museum's own account of Cezanne is frank about the history. Henri Pontier, curator of the museum and director of the Aix drawing school from 1892 to 1925, is said to have declared that no Cezanne would enter the museum in his lifetime, and the painter's work met hostility from critics and the public in Aix. The Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard was a notable exception.

That changed in 1984, when the French state placed eight Cezanne paintings on permanent loan at the Musee Granet. English Wikipedia says nine; the museum says eight and this page follows the museum. The group traces his development over nearly half a century, from The Kiss of the Muse, painted at the Aix drawing school, to mature works such as the Portrait of Madame Cezanne and The Bathers. In 2011 the museum acquired Cezanne's only known portrait of his friend the writer Emile Zola.

In 2025, after the exhibition Cezanne at the Jas de Bouffan, two galleries were given over to Cezanne with a new hanging that runs from his early work at the drawing school and on the walls of the Jas de Bouffan to the later paintings made between the Provencal countryside and the Lauves studio. The museum singles out the recent donation by Marc and Edouard Larock of Waterfall or Bathers in Front of Sainte-Victoire Mountain, on deposit from the D.G. Cazeau collection. A wall painting by the young Cezanne, Waterfall (1862-64), detached from its plaster and mounted on canvas, measures 343 by 78 centimetres.

The nineteenth-century rooms hold the museum's best-known large canvas, Jupiter and Thetis by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, painted in 1811 and 324 by 260 centimetres. The museum's caption records that it came as a state deposit in 1835 and that ownership passed from the state to the city of Aix-en-Provence in 2024.

An entire room is given to Granet himself. It is largely devoted to his Roman period and organised around the portrait of Granet that his friend Ingres painted in Rome. The museum says Granet used landscape, one of his favourite subjects, to meditate on the decline and oblivion into which civilisations fall. His large Cloister of the Charterhouse of Sainte-Marie des Anges in Rome, 198.8 by 271 centimetres, came with his 1849 bequest.

Around them the museum shows a portrait of a young boy by David, a Gericault, The Young Greek Asleep on a Rock by the Sea, 37.4 by 45.8 centimetres, and rare paintings by Duqueylard, including The Dream of Ossian. The Provencal school is represented by figures such as L'Engaliere and Loubon, with a landscape of Sainte-Victoire by Prosper Gresy.

The collection begins with archaeology. The Celto-Ligurian sculptures from the Entremont site, dated to the second century BC, show the cultural originality of Celtic Gaul in the Mediterranean region before the Romans arrived and before the founding of Aquae Sextiae, present-day Aix, at the very end of that century. A seated warrior and a group of warrior heads from Entremont are among the pieces the museum illustrates. English Wikipedia adds an Egyptian collection assembled mostly through nineteenth-century gifts and bequests, with the sarcophagus of Ptahirdis and the stela of Isetemdinakht among its highlights, and a marble mask of a woman by Francesco Laurana in the sculpture holdings.

The painting galleries of the 14th to 18th centuries were recently rehung around the genres of painting, which the museum says brings together more than 100 works, among them the portraits of the Gueydan family reunited for the occasion. Highlights named by the museum include Rembrandt's self-portrait of about 1659, a small oil on panel of about 31 by 24 centimetres, a Caspar van Wittel view of Rome, a Nicolas Mignard Mars and Venus of 1658 from the Granet bequest, and Jean Daret's Guitar Player of 1636.

The twentieth-century rooms come from the donation of Philippe Meyer, a physicist and collector who died in 2007 and gave much of his collection to French museums in 2000. The Musee Granet received 71 of the works, kept as a long-term loan from the Musee d'Orsay. The group includes Degas, Cezanne, Bonnard, Vuillard, Picasso, Leger, Mondrian, Klee and de Stael, and the museum calls the group of paintings, sculptures and drawings by Alberto Giacometti a defining part of the whole.

French Wikipedia prints the annual visitor figures. The reopening year, 2006, brought 488,775 visitors. The next year, 2007, brought 71,267, and 2009 brought 449,709. The year 2013 reached 346,796, and the late 2010s settled near 175,000, with 175,096 in 2019. The pandemic years show 68,165 in 2020 and 105,012 in 2021.

The same article records the one structural criticism of the place. Because space is limited, the museum has favoured temporary exhibitions, which the article describes as more financially rewarding. As a result several major paintings, by Jordaens, Guercino, Puget and Piazzetta, and some sculptures have been placed in storage, and the galleries that had shown them were reassigned to temporary exhibitions after the 2007 renovation. English Wikipedia adds that the large archaeological collection is intended to move to a new museum for lack of room. A visitor planning around a single painting should therefore check that it is on view.

The current temporary show is Paul McCartney photographs, 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm, with over 250 photographs and running until 3 January 2027. Entry to it is included in the standard ticket, so the price of a visit now includes the show.

Visitors consistently value the Cezanne rooms for showing his development and his tie to Aix, and the museum for being compact enough to see in about an hour. The recurring complaints are thin explanatory labelling on some displays such as the archaeology unless the audio guide is used, a collection some find modest in size, and crowding at peak times. Reviewers also note that timed entry is well organised.