Musée des Augustins

The Musée des Augustins is a fine arts museum in Toulouse, in southern France, housed in the former Augustinian convent of the city. Its displays span the history of art from early Christian times to the first years of the twentieth century. Around the cloister, where medieval gardens have been reconstructed, the old spaces of monastic life survive, notably the church. Opened to the public in 1793 by decree of the Convention, shortly after the Louvre, it is one of the oldest museums in France, after the Central Museum in Paris. Its first holdings came largely from state deposits and from the former Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture of Toulouse, after seizures and confiscations during the Revolution, which allowed it to gather more than 4,000 paintings and sculptures.

French painting occupies a central place, with works by Louise Moillon, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Antoine-Jean Gros, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and Gustave Courbet, and with rooms devoted to painters from Toulouse such as Nicolas Tournier, of whom the museum holds several works. Notable pictures include Virgil Reading The Aeneid before Augustus, Livia and Octavia, by Ingres, and The Death of Cleopatra, by Jean-André Rixens. Religious painting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century is displayed in the church, where Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Augustine by Pietro Perugino hangs. Italian, Flemish and Dutch works complete the collection, which also includes pictures attributed to Guercino and by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

Beyond painting, the museum is known for its collection of Romanesque sculpture, drawn from three major religious buildings in Toulouse, and for the Gothic sculptures shown in the rooms above the cloister. The 1888 wing, the monumental staircase and the exhibition rooms built by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc between 1873 and 1901 form part of the architectural ensemble that houses these collections.