Atger Museum

With its 1,000 drawings and some 5,000 prints, the Musée Atger, nestled in the heart of the historic buildings of the Faculty of Medicine, is Montpellier's oldest museum. Its unexpected presence here is the result of the generosity and deliberate choice of Montpellier collector Xavier Atger (1758-1833), an enlightened connoisseur with a passion for works of art.

The intellectual vitality of the medical school, where an exceptional library had been built up by the early 19th century, explains this choice. But Atger also wanted, in a humanist vision of medicine shared by the school's professors, to open students up to the arts, and in particular to study drawing, an essential technique in their training and above all an unrivalled means of exercising their observational skills.

Atger presents a broad panorama of themes and techniques, bringing together masters of the French, Italian and Flemish schools.

The French school is of course the most represented, with artists such as Fragonard, Philippe de Champaigne and Hubert Robert, as well as the "southerners" Sébastien Bourdon, Charles Natoire and Raymond Lafage.

The Flemish and Nordic works are just as interesting, including a fine double-sided Rubens, two drawings by Van Dyck and a remarkable old man's head by Jordaens.

The Italian school, with 150 drawings, includes such great names as Carracci, Guerchino and Donatello, and the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo, whose 26 works are particularly helpful in understanding Atger's passion for drawing, an art in which he saw "unrivalled warmth, energy and expression".

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

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