The story
A child lies dying in his mother's arms, struck on the head in a fall during a tightrope act, while his father sits a little behind them in silence. Gustave Doré, the illustrator of Dante and the Bible, painted this huge canvas, The Acrobats, in 1874, and told an interviewer that the parents had killed their child for money and only then discovered they had hearts. It is one of the signature works of the Musée d'art Roger-Quilliot in Clermont-Ferrand.
The building has had more lives than most. In the old quarter of Montferrand it housed a law court, a Jesuit college, an Ursuline convent from 1638, a seminary, a military hospital in the First World War and finally a gendarmerie until 1982. The architects Adrien Fainsilber and Claude Gaillard rebuilt it around a central atrium under a great glass roof engineered by Peter Rice, and the museum opened in 1992. It was later named after Roger Quilliot, the city's long-serving mayor.
Around 750 works trace art from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, from Romanesque sculpture of the Auvergne to Corot, Chassériau and Marie Laurencin. The surrounding mountains appear on the walls too, in the Impressionist Armand Guillaumin's views of the Sancy massif under snow, painted around the village of Saint-Sauves.
