The story
Valenciennes, near the Belgian border, gave France two very different artists, the painter Antoine Watteau and the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, and its museum is built around that local pride. Carpeaux, the 19th-century sculptor of restless, twisting figures, is held here in depth, from finished marbles to the rough clay sketches where you can still see his thumbprints.
The painting galleries lean toward the Flemish 17th century, natural for a town that changed hands between France and the Low Countries. The centrepiece is a huge Rubens altarpiece of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, taken during the Revolution from the abbey of Saint-Amand nearby.
The present building, a grand stone hall, opened in 1909 and was rebuilt inside in the 1990s, with a basement of Gallo-Roman and medieval archaeology beneath the paintings.
