| Musée Bonnat | |
|---|---|
The Musée Bonnat |
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| Established | 1897 |
| Location | 5, rue Jacques Laffitte Bayonne, France |
| Type | Art museum |
| Website | www.museebonnat.bayonne.fr |
The Musée Bonnat is an art museum in Bayonne, Aquitaine, France. The museum was created in 1891 when Bayonne-born painter Léon Bonnat gave his extensive personal collections of art – notably an exceptional drawing collection – as well as many of his paintings to the City of Bayonne.[1] Subsequent donors enriched the collections of the Bonnat Museum with major gifts in 1936, 1989, and 1992, making its holdings one of the largest collections of art in southern France.
The museum holds more than 5000 works of art including one of the most important collections of Spanish painting in France, a collection of 19th-century French painting and the finest drawing cabinet in the country after that of the Louvre.
The museum displays paintings by El Greco, Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Goya, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Filippo Lippi, Giambattista Tiepolo, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and numerous studies by Rubens. French masters of the 19th century are represented by Boudin, Corot, Courbet, David, Degas, Delacroix, Géricault, Girodet, Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes and Bonnat himself.
The drawing cabinet is unique in its kind outside Paris with more than 2000 works including drawings by Le Lorrain, Charles Le Brun, Jean Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, Antoine Watteau, Hubert Robert, Ingres, Jacques Louis David, Géricault, Delacroix, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Perugino, Pisanello, Luca Signorelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Titian, Parmigianino, Correggio, Primaticcio, Paolo Veronese, Federico Barocci, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, Pietro da Cortona, Francesco Guardi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francisco de Goya, and others.
There are also collections of decorative arts and contemporary art.