The story
This museum in the Breton town of Quimper exists because of one condition in a will. Count Jean-Marie de Silguy, a local man, left the city an enormous collection, 1,200 paintings and thousands of drawings and prints, on the single condition that Quimper build a home to keep them together. The city agreed, and the museum opened in a classical palace in 1867.
Silguy's old masters still fill the ground floor, but what makes the museum distinctive is Brittany itself. It holds one of the fullest collections of Breton-inspired painting in France, including the Pont-Aven school that formed around Gauguin in a nearby village in the 1880s, drawn by the region's costumes, faith and light.
An upstairs room is given to Max Jacob, the poet and painter born in Quimper, a friend of Picasso who died in 1944 in a camp at Drancy.
