The story
The fine arts museum of Dole works in an 18th-century military building, the Pavillon des Officiers, a fine piece of Franche-Comté army architecture. The museum dates from 1821 and moved here in 1980. Its top floor is given to the art of the 1960s and after, above all Narrative Figuration and Critical Figuration, the French painters who turned images of politics, advertising and daily life into their subject. The museum has been buying and exhibiting these artists since the early 1980s.
The floors below look further back. Dole was the capital of the Franche-Comté until the French conquest of 1678, and the old-art galleries reflect that past, with Burgundian and Comtois art from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, French, Italian and Northern pictures, and 19th-century landscapes by the Barbizon painters and local masters. Gustave Courbet, the realist painter from the same province, is represented too, among others by The Wayfarer.
