Atger Museum

With its thousand drawings and some five thousand prints, the Atger Museum, nestled in the heart of the historic buildings of the Faculty of Medicine, is the oldest museum in Montpellier. Its unexpected presence in this location is the result of the generosity and deliberate choice of the Montpellier collector Xavier Atger (1758-1833), an enlightened and passionate art lover.

The intellectual vitality of the School of Medicine, where an exceptional library was established at the beginning of the 19th century, explains this choice. But Atger also wanted, in a humanist vision of medicine shared by the school's professors, to allow students to open themselves up to art and in particular to study drawing, an essential technique in their training and above all an unparalleled means of exercising their powers of observation.

Atger therefore focuses on presenting a broad panorama of themes and techniques, bringing together minor and major masters of the French, Italian and Flemish schools.

The French school is of course the most represented, with artists like Fragonard , Philippe de Champaigne or Hubert Robert, but also the "southerners" Sébastien Bourdon, Charles Natoire or Raymond Lafage.

The Flemish and Nordic works are equally interesting, including a beautiful double-sided Rubens , two drawings by Van Dyck and a remarkable head of an old man by Jordaens.

The Italian school , with 150 drawings, includes such great names as Carracci, Guercino or Donatello, and the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo , whose 26 works particularly help to understand Atger's passion for drawing, this art in which he saw "an unparalleled warmth, energy and expression".

The donation of 81 drawings by the Montpellier artist Colette Richarme (1904-1991) in 2017 provides the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between contemporary works and classical art.