Musée des Augustins
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The Musée des Augustins de Toulouse, sited in a Gothic convent in Toulouse, France, conserves a collection of sculpture and paintings from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. The paintings are metropolitan in scope, the sculptures representing Occitan culture of the region, with a particularly rich assemblage of Romanesque sculpture. The core of the collections derives from confiscation of Church property at the time of the French Revolution as well as seizures of the private collections of emigrés, in Toulouse notably the paintings of the cardinal de Bernis and Louis-Auguste le Tonnelier, baron de Breteuil. The convent was secularized in 1793; in the nineteenth century its church and chapter house were extended by exhibition galleries designed by Viollet-le-Duc, approached by a notable Gothic Revival monumental stair offering an interplay of richly complicated vaulting systems.
The Musée des Augustins de Toulouse was one of fifteen museums founded in provincial centres, by a decree of 13 Fructidor year IX (31 August 1801), which was promulgated by the minister of the interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal. Chaptal's progressive concern, an early example of cultural devolution, was intended to ensure that "each collection presents an interesting series of paintings representing all the masters, all the genres and all the schools". In a series of shipments culminating in 1811, Toulouse was enriched with works by Guercino, Pietro Perugino, Rubens, Philippe de Champaigne.
The museum's sculpture collection is in large part due to the rescue activities of antiquaries and museum curators such as Alexandre du Mège who managed to extricate sculpture from the frequent destruction of religious buildings that marked the nineteenth century.
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