Strasbourg Museum of Fine Arts

Brief information

Since 1898, the Strasbourg Museum of Fine Arts has occupied the first and second floors of the late Baroque Rohan Palace. So what matters here is not only the collection of old masters, but also its setting: the paintings and sculptures are housed inside a palace, not in a purpose-built museum building.

The present collection reads as a collection formed after losses and divisions. The first municipal collection grew out of works confiscated from closed churches and monasteries, but in 1870 it was completely destroyed by fire during the shelling of the city. Later the museum was rebuilt, and then part of the exhibition was again destroyed by a fire in 1947. So behind the familiar names of European painting lies not an unbroken history of accumulation, but several attempts to assemble the museum anew.

What to notice right away

It is worth comparing the museum’s three boundaries. The first is architectural: the exhibition occupies two floors of the Rohan Palace, and the palace setting immediately creates a more intimate scale than a separate museum building would. The second is temporal: the collection leads the viewer from the 14th century to 1870, stopping just before the period from which the separate Museum of Modern Art grew.

The third boundary is thematic. In 1931, medieval Upper Rhine and Alsatian art was transferred to the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame, located next door. Because of this, in the Museum of Fine Arts it is especially important to notice not “all the old art of Strasbourg,” but a selected part: European old masters, the Italian Renaissance, and Flemish, Dutch, French, and Spanish painting. The division of the collections helps explain why the neighboring museum is not an addition, but a missing part of the same artistic map of the city.