The story
When Amiens set out to build a museum in the 1850s, it did something new. The Musée de Picardie, finished in 1867 under Napoleon III, is often described as the first building in France raised specifically to be a fine-arts museum, at a time when most collections lived in converted palaces and churches. It is a grand Second Empire pile designed by Henri Parent and Arthur Diet.
The young Puvis de Chavannes painted vast allegorical murals for its staircase and hall, calm pale figures that helped make his name. Deeper in hang the museum's oddest treasures, the Puys d'Amiens, large devotional paintings given to the cathedral each year in the 16th century by a local brotherhood of poets devoted to the Virgin. They are crowded with kneeling donors, and each carries that year's refrain, a line of French verse. The collection runs on through Fragonard and Spanish and Italian painting, and down into the archaeology of Picardy, from prehistory to the Romans.
