Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans

The Musée des beaux-arts d'Orléans is a museum in the city of Orléans in the Loiret department and the Centre-Val de Loire region in France.

The museum owns circa 2,000 paintings (with works by Correggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Sebastiano Ricci, Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Hubert Robert, Eugène Delacroix (Head of a Woman), Gustave Courbet, 700 sculptures (Baccio Bandinelli), more than 1,200 pieces of decorative arts, 10,000 drawings, 50,000 prints and the second largest collection of pastels in France after that of the Louvre.

The museum was founded during the French Revolution by the initiative of Jean Bardin, director of the school of drawing of the city and of Aignan-Thomas Desfriches, in 1797.

The museum was installed in the Palais épiscopal d'Orléans, an ancient college, in 1799.

Several donators contributed to the enrichment of the collections of the museum during the 19th century, among which the madame of Limay, the daughter of Aignan-Thomas Desfriches, Eudoxe Marcille, and artists such as Henri de Triqueti and Léon Cogniet.