On September 1, 1801, the Minister of Interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal selected 15 cities to serve as depots to display a large number of paintings confiscated from émigrés or acquired through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Although the city of Caen was chosen for its academic reputation and character as cultural capital of Normandy, it showed, at first, little enthusiasm because article 4 of the Chaptal decree specified that "the paintings will be sent only after the town has effected the expense for a gallery suitable to receive them".

In 1806, the prefect Charles Ambroise de Caffarelli du Falga, disallowed the appropriations voted by the municipality for resumption of the work that had been interrupted.

While the acquisition policy of Alfred Guillard, the successor of Elouis from 1841 to 1880, was rather uninspired, a series of bequests endowed the museum with a hundred additional artworks.

The Baroness de Montaran's, which included three paintings by Boucher, twenty Gudin and one Mignard, was the most remarkable bequest of the second half of the nineteenth century.

The largest donation in the history of the museum was bequeathed in 1872 by the Caen bookseller Bernard Mancel, who had purchased in 1845 a large part of Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon I in Rome's collection.

These paintings were transferred in 1888 to the Pavillon des sociétés savantes, which had been remodeled at the expense of colonel Langlois' niece to house the museum.

Under the influence of mayoralty of Caen, the curators acquired mostly regional works with exclusive local interest, now exhibited on the ground floor of the old Eudist seminary set up as a museum of Norman art and history.

Despite the bequest by the mayor Fervaques, Dr. Jacquette, of paintings by Courbet, Boudin and Lepine, modern, especially impressionist artwork remained virtually unrepresented at the museum.

When his work was interrupted by the war in 1939, 360 paintings, the collection Mancel, the Bernard van Riesen Burgh chest and other artifacts were transferred to the priory of Saint-Gabriel, the abbey of Mondaye and the castle of Baillou.

In 1988, Francoise Debaisieux was succeeded by Alain Tapie who organized major exhibitions and added in 1994 a new wing built by Philippe Dubois.

The museum also accommodates, since 1997, Les Cyclopes, a Baroque musical ensemble that gives an annual series of concerts in conjunction with the institution's cultural programming.

The museum offers 64,583 square feet (6,000.0 m2) of space dedicated to the public collections with many works of Italian and Flemish, as well as French Renaissance, and of contemporary art.