The story
At the top of Le Suquet, the old hilltop quarter of Cannes, a medieval watchtower rises over the bay, and visitors who climb its 109 steps look out across La Croisette to the Lérins Islands. The tower and the buildings around it belonged to the monks of Lérins, whose abbey stands on one of those islands, and since 1919 they have housed a city museum. It was called the Musée de la Castre until 2021, when it took its present name.
It is primarily a museum of other cultures. Its core was given to Cannes in 1877 by Baron Tinco Lycklama, a Dutch collector who had travelled widely in the East, and the small connected rooms now hold Mediterranean antiquities, Orientalist paintings, art from Qajar Iran, objects from Oceania, the Americas and the Himalayas, and a chapel lined with musical instruments from around the world.
Art lovers usually come for one painting. Judith and Her Maidservant by Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian Baroque painter, shows the moment after Judith has beheaded the general Holofernes, as her servant pushes the head into a sack. Painted in the early 1640s, it is the second of three versions of this scene by her, the others being in Detroit and Naples. It came to the museum in 1933 as a gift from a Madame Derive, and the curators have been unable to trace who she was.
