The story
A naked woman hauls herself over the rim of a well, mouth open in a shout, a whip in her hand. Jean-Léon Gérôme, the Paris academic painter, finished this picture in 1896, and its full title says exactly what is happening: Truth coming out of her well, armed with her whip to chastise mankind. It plays on a saying traced back to the Greek philosopher Democritus, that truth lies at the bottom of a well. The painting came to Moulins in 1978, and in 2012 the museum built a whole exhibition around it.
The building has its own claim to fame. Between 1498 and 1503, Anne de Beaujeu, daughter of King Louis XI and once regent of France, built this pavilion with her husband Pierre, Duke of Bourbon, on the courtyard of their castle. It is one of the earliest Renaissance buildings in France, and one of the few parts of that castle still standing. The museum moved in in 1910.
Its collections run from Gallo-Roman finds and medieval Bourbon sculpture to German and Flemish altarpieces and local faience. Next door is the Maison Mantin, a villa the collector Louis Mantin left to the town in 1905 as a record of how a wealthy household lived at the end of the 19th century. After decades shut, it reopened in 2010.
