Musée d'Art de Toulon

Two young women sit close together on a sofa, reading a letter from their father. They are Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte, nieces of Napoleon, and their father Joseph, once king of Spain, was then living in America. Jacques-Louis David, himself an exile in Brussels, painted the original in 1821 and then two copies by his own hand. The original is in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The version in Toulon is the second copy, and it differs in one small detail, with golden crosses on the sofa where the copy in Rome has bees.

The museum around them opened in 1888 in a neo-Renaissance building by the Toulon architect Gaudensi Allar, with open loggias and a grand double staircase, and it was built to house the town library as well. A renovation from 2018 to 2021 tripled its exhibition space.

Much of what hangs here is landscape, with a strong group of 19th-century painters from Marseille and Toulon such as Émile Loubon and Paul Guigou, and scenes of travel around the Mediterranean by Félix Ziem and others. Gustave Doré, better known for his book illustrations, is represented by mountain landscapes with torrents and grazing flocks.