Condé Museum

The Condé Museum is located in Chantilly, a town about 60 kilometres north of Paris, France. It occupies the Château de Chantilly, which belongs to the Institut de France, and its origins lie with the Duke of Aumale, Henri d'Orléans, son of King Louis-Philippe I. After inheriting a very large fortune from his godfather, the Prince of Condé, including the château, the Duke gathered drawings, manuscripts and paintings throughout his life. He spent many years in exile in England, and in 1884-1886 the château and its collections passed to the Institut de France under his will and subsequent arrangements. The Duke returned to France in 1889 and held the collections in usufruct until his death in 1897.

The holdings include roughly 800 paintings, along with thousands of prints, drawings and books. By the donor's wishes, the museum does not lend works to other institutions and must keep the arrangement of its rooms essentially unchanged, so it functions in some ways as a period-room museum. This explains why it is less known outside France than its value deserves, although its old master collection is considered the second most important in the country, after the Louvre's.

Among its best-known paintings are Piero di Cosimo's Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci and Nicolas Poussin's The Massacre of the Innocents, which Francis Bacon admired. Three works by Raphael also stand out: The Graces, the Loreto Madonna and the Madonna of Orléans. Ingres is the most represented painter on the museum's website, with his Self-Portrait, Venus Anadyomene and The Illness of Antiochus. There is also a rare Virgin of Mercy by Enguerrand Quarton, along with works by Watteau, Corot and Delacroix. In illuminated manuscripts, the highlight is Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry by the Limbourg brothers.