Goya Museum

The Goya Museum is the main cultural institution in Castres, a town in southern France. It takes its name from the prominent place Francisco de Goya holds in its holdings, and from the collection's focus on Spanish art. The museum occupies the former episcopal palace in an old quarter of the town, built in 1675 to designs by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, one of the architects of the Palace of Versailles. The site also includes gardens laid out by André Le Nôtre.

The museum had existed since 1840, but its Hispanic character was defined in 1894, when the town received the bequest of Briguiboul, a painter and collector who admired the great Spanish masters and had gathered three works by Goya. In 1949 two Louvre deposits reinforced that specialisation: a Murillo Virgin and a Portrait of Philip IV as a Huntsman, a copy of Diego Velázquez's original in the Prado. The Castres version, whose authorship is debated and which is probably a workshop copy, is also known through an etching by Édouard Manet.

The collection holds around 200 Spanish paintings, 140 sculptures, coins and nearly 1,000 drawings and prints, among them the four main series of Goya's engravings and one by Joan Miró. In total it exceeds 5,000 items, including 420 French paintings and 612 weapons. Among the artists represented are Alonso Cano, with The Annunciation, José de Ribera, with The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, Joaquín Sorolla, Claudio Coello, Juan de Juanes, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, whose Philip III appears here, and Juan de Valdés Leal. It is the only museum of its kind in France devoted to Hispanic art and, over the last two decades, has kept growing into a reference point for the history of Spanish painting from antiquity to the twentieth century.