The story
In 1888 Vincent van Gogh was living in Arles, and one of the things he painted there that summer was a line of railway wagons standing in the sun. That canvas now hangs a short train ride away in Avignon, and it is often described as the only Van Gogh painting on public display in Provence. It belongs to the Musée Angladon, a private museum in the Hôtel de Massilian, an 18th-century town house in the old centre.
The collection began with Jacques Doucet, the Paris couturier who ran one of the first great fashion houses and collected on a grand scale, from 18th-century drawings to the avant-garde. In 1924 he was the buyer of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is now in New York. After his death in 1929, part of what he owned passed through his widow's family to Jean Angladon-Dubrujeaud, a painter living in Avignon, and his wife Paulette, also an artist. The couple left it to a foundation, and the museum opened in 1996.
Around the Van Gogh hangs a compact run of modern painting. There is Paul Cézanne's Still Life with a Stoneware Jug, Alfred Sisley's snowy Louveciennes, Édouard Manet's rabbit and two works by Edgar Degas, among them a laundress ironing against the light. Elsewhere in the house, rooms of period furniture and Far Eastern porcelain keep something of the feel of a collector's home.
