The story
The museum sits in the Logis du Roi, the old commander's residence built over the Grand'Porte, the drawbridge gate into the walled upper town of Granville. During the Revolution the building served as the town hall, and the defence against the attack by the royalist Vendéen army in 1793 was organised from here. It has housed the town museum since 1936, long known as the Musée du Vieux Granville and renamed in 2013.
For now the galleries are closed. Work on the entrance in 2015 revealed structural problems in the building, and the museum has stayed shut while it is studied and consolidated. A small Maison du Projet in an outbuilding explains the work, and parts of the collection appear in exhibitions elsewhere in the town.
What is kept here tells the story of a port: fishing, sea bathing, Normandy costume, and paintings, among them a view of Lake Geneva painted by Gustave Courbet in 1876, during his last years of exile in Switzerland.
