there’s a few more months, the musée Girodet, Montargis, in the Loiret was given up for dead. It has re-opened its doors on the 16th of December last in the presence of the minister of Culture. Franck Riester came to celebrate with great pomp the feat of specialists managed to save the museum of the dramatic flooding that damaged the majority of the works in the museum. They are visible again.

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the unexpected Effect of this rescue: a new craze from the public. 5000 visitors marched between its walls, between mid-December and the end of the month of January. «We were at least 500 visitors per year,» says Hervé Mauplot, director of cultural Affairs Montargis to The Republic of the Center . Free entries, available until 28 February, is without doubt not for nothing. From this date, tickets will increase to 4 euros.

If the museum welcomes this effervescent, the municipality does not want to create false hopes and the table on the reasonable goal of ten thousand entries for the year 2019. «Like the other museums in our category,» says Hervé Mauplot at a regional daily newspaper.

An exceptional flood

In may 2016, an exceptional flood has brought out the Loing his bed. Montargis, nicknamed the Venice of Gâtinais, was accused of the damage unseen. The musée Girodet, which was closed for four years for work, has not been spared. 3000 out of 5000 works from the collections stored temporarily in another building, were completely immersed for at least 48 hours.

sixty of conservators and restorers are relayed to allow this rescue so exemplary that he is now a school. A pool had been launched, raising a little more than 30,000 euros. The modernisation works have been able to resume and be conducted to their end. Approximately 9.5 million euros were required, of which 1.5 million were due to the flood, the town being involved to the tune of 6.5 million euros.

French art from 1789 to 1870

The works had been completed, the exhibition space now displays the double of the area and the facade Nineteenth of the museum, called otherwise hotel Durzy, as well as the gardens attached were renovated. A gallery of 250 m2, modern structure of glass and black steel, a hitch now the view of the body of the building. At the rear, another extension has provoked the ire of some, notably that of Didier Rykner, head of the Forum of the Art, who sees it as «a mass whose banality the dispute to the ugliness».

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The museum’s collections span the history of French art from 1789 to 1870. The works of Girodet, a child of the country, are surrounded by paintings of David and Big for the neoclassical period, Géricault for romance. The museum can also boast of possessing a set of plaster casts preparatory to the sculptor Henry de Triqueti and, even more, a Saint Jerome penitent painted by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. Let’s hope they will transform this renewed interest in a sustainable attendance.