H I S T O R Y

Eugène DEVÉRIA
Portrait de Calvet

The Calvet museum came into being on 9 April 1811, created by an imperial decree. The museum was first housed in Saint Martial abbey, then transferred in 1835 to the magnificent city mansion built for the Villeneuve-Martignan family in the mid- 1700's and acquired by the City of Avignon in 1833.

Calvet museum was founded in keeping with the wishes of Esprit Calvet (1728­-1810), a physician in Avignon who left his collections to the city of Avignon at the time of his death in 1810. Esprit Calvet had carefully put together a collection of works of scholarly interest which included ancient Egyptian artefacts, pieces from ancient Greece and Rome, coins and paintings. Esprit Calvet owned one of the first pieces of carved African ivory ever seen in France.

From the origin and until 1983, Calvet museum was both an art collection and a library.

Over the past two centuries, gifts, deposits and acquisitions have enriched the museum's collections. Painters Carle and Horace Vernet, along with their friend Esprit Requien, were the source of the painting gallery. Among other gifts, Horace Vernet gave La Mort du jeune Bara, a masterpiece by David, in 1846. The Louvre gave a significant deposit in 1953 (Hubert Robert). Works by painters and sculptors including Corot, Pradier, Chassériau, Clésinger, Manet, Bonnard, Camille Claudel, Dufy, Soutine and many other artists today constitute the outstanding works displayed at the museum.

Jacques-Louis DAVID
La Mort de Joseph Bara

Calvet museum is also renowned for its archaeology collection, which started with Esprit Calvet and has continued since (see the Musée Lapidaire). The extent of the archaeology collections also caused several sculptures and paintings from the Middle Ages to be transferred to the Petit Palais museum in 1976, where they joined the Campana collection, which the French government gave to the city of Avignon.

Upon the completion of current renovation works, Calvet museum will be displaying a rich collection of ethnography and the spectacular collection of wrought iron work assembled by Noël Biret, who left his collection to the museum in 1916, making Calvet museum the second in France, after the Le Secq des Tournelles museum, in Rouen, for fancy iron work. Currently being installed in its permanent home on the ground floor of the museum, Noël Biret's outstanding collection will soon be open to the public.