The story
The two round towers at the gate of the Musée de l'Oise in Beauvais were paid for by the townspeople, though not by choice. After a riot in the town at the very start of the 14th century, Bishop Simon de Nesle used the fines imposed on the citizens to fortify his palace with an entrance flanked by those towers. The palace itself goes back to the 12th century. It stands on the old Roman rampart, right beside the town's tall Gothic cathedral.
In the 16th century Bishop Louis de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam gave the courtyard a Renaissance face and had new cellars dug. The Revolution seized the building in 1791 and filled it with the offices of the new département of the Oise. Today it is the departmental museum, known as MUDO. Its upper floors closed in 1997 because of problems with the timber roof frame, and only in March 2025 were all three levels open to visitors again.
The collection runs mainly through French art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its centrepiece is The Enrolment of the Volunteers of 1792 by Thomas Couture, the history painter, a huge canvas commissioned in 1848 by the new Second Republic for the National Assembly. Couture never finished it, and after the coup of Louis-Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, the state never bought it. Around it are landscapes with local roots, among them Camille Corot's view of the ruined château of Pierrefonds, a castle in the Oise later rebuilt for Napoleon III, and Alfred Sisley's boatyard at Moret on the Loing.
