Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers

The fine arts museum of Béziers shows its 19th-century collection in a family house with a striking past. The Hôtel Fayet belonged to a wealthy landowning family of the town, and Gabriel Fayet, a painter and collector, fitted it out with rooms for art. His son Gustave Fayet became one of the first serious collectors of Paul Gauguin, owned works by Odilon Redon and Cézanne, and in 1901 took charge of the Béziers museum itself. The family gave the house to the town in the 1960s, and today its floors are filled with sculpture by Jean-Antoine Injalbert, a Béziers-born sculptor whose widow left his work to the town in 1934.

The museum is older than its present home. A local learned society founded it, and it opened in the town hall in 1859 before moving into the mansion left to the town by Auguste Fabrégat, a lawyer and mayor. Its old masters owe much to the bequest of the collector Adalbert de Faniez in the 1890s, and they include a scene of an overturned cart by Jan Brueghel the Elder. The Hôtel Fabrégat has been closed to the public since 2018 and now serves as a conservation centre.

The 19th-century holdings include works by Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, and the museum also keeps the modern art collection of Jean Moulin, the Resistance leader born in Béziers, which came to it in 1975.