The story
In 1886 Jean-Paul Mazaroz gave his hometown a large canvas by Gustave Courbet. Mazaroz, born in Lons-le-Saunier, had made his name in Paris as a cabinetmaker and furniture designer, and he was a friend and patron of the painter. The German Huntsman, signed and dated 1859, shows a hunter holding his dog on a leash, caught in surprise beside a dead stag at the edge of a stream. It still hangs in the museum, joined by Courbet's portrait of Mazaroz himself, which entered the collection in 2005, and by The Sarrazine Grotto, one of his views of rock and water in Franche-Comté, the painter's home region.
The museum, founded in 1817, fills a wing of the town hall on the Place Philibert de Chalon. Its ground floor belongs to sculpture, above all to Jean-Joseph Perraud, a Jura-born academic sculptor who won the Prix de Rome in 1847 and left the town his works and his own collection. Upstairs, about 30 paintings from the French, Italian and Northern schools include a Census at Bethlehem by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
