Musee des Beaux-Arts de Caen. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen is a fine arts museum in the French city of Caen, founded at the start of the 19th century and rebuilt in 1971 within the ducal château. On September 1, 1801, the Minister of Interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal selected 15 cities to serve as depots to display a large number of paintings confiscated from émigrés or acquired through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although the city of Caen was chosen for its academic reputation and character as cultural capital of Normandy, it showed, at first, little enthusiasm because article 4 of the Chaptal decree specified that the paintings will be sent only after the town has effected the expense for a gallery suitable to receive them. The paintings removed from churches and religious communities during the Revolution having already been stockpiled in the Sainte-Catherine-des-Arts church, the mayor Daigremont St. Manvieux first thought of installing the museum in the former Jesuit church. But on October 27, 1801, the decision was finally made to use the left wing of the former Eudist seminary, already partly occupied by the mayoralty since 1792. On October 27, 1802, the prefect of Calvados asked for the title of museum commissioner to be conferred to François-Pierre Fleuriau, a highly ranked design instructor at the Central School of Calvados. To augment the already existing collections, the new curator selected, in 1804, 46 paintings by various artists. This made the Caen collections the largest ones after those of Lyon. The curator also expended the new collections, even trying, although unsuccessfully, to have the Bayeux Tapestry transferred to Caen. The development work of the museum progressed very slowly. In 1806, the prefect Charles Ambroise de Caffarelli du Falga, disallowed the appropriations voted by the municipality for resumption of the work that had been interrupted. Only once the funds were released in the budget of 1809 could the project can be completed. In November 1809, the paintings that had been stored in the former Jesuit church were transferred and the museum was officially opened on December 2, 1809. The curator was also in charge of the municipal art school founded in 1804. Starting from 1811, the new curator, Henry Elouis augmented the collections, notably thanks to a new collection of 35 paintings attributed by the Ministry of the Interior. In 1815, the Prussians camped in the ground floor of the old Eudist seminary to force the surrender of paintings confiscated in Germany. Elouis then hid the most important paintings. According to legend, he hid in particular Abraham and Melchizedek by Rubens under the very dinner table used by Prussian officers. After the Prussians had left the city following the restitution of lesser paintings, Belgium then asked for the return of paintings by great Brussels masters, but the curator and mayor of Caen, the count of Vandoeuvre, were able to stem the new crisis. The second half of the nineteenth century was a calmer period that favored the study of collections. In 1837, Bernard Mancel wrote the first catalog, and the first monograph concerning to the collections was published in 1850. While the acquisition policy of Alfred Guillard, the successor of Elouis from 1841 to 1880, was rather uninspired, a series of bequests endowed the museum with a hundred additional artworks. The Baroness de Montaran's, which included three paintings by Boucher, twenty Gudin and one Mignard, was the most remarkable bequest of the second half of the nineteenth century. The largest donation in the history of the museum was bequeathed in 1872 by the Caen bookseller Bernard Mancel, who had purchased in 1845 a large part of Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon I in Rome's collection. The Mancel collection included more than 50,000 works: prints by Dürer, Rembrandt and Callot, and about thirty paintings by Perugino, Veronese or Rogier van der Weyden. A year later, the family of colonel Langlois bequeathed 256 paintings of battles and military views. These paintings were transferred in 1888 to the Pavillon des sociétés savantes, which had been remodeled at the expense of colonel Langlois' niece to house the museum. In 1880, the acquisition policy by the new curators, Xenophon Hellouin and Gustave Ménégoz, was uninspired, and the prestige of the museum waned. Under the influence of mayoralty of Caen, the curators acquired mostly regional works with exclusive local interest, now exhibited on the ground floor of the old Eudist seminary set up as a museum of Norman art and history. Donations became less frequent, and often consisted of minor works bequeathed more for ostentatious reasons than for the sake of art.