The story
François-René de Chateaubriand, the writer born in Saint-Malo, left his home town his portrait by Anne-Louis Girodet, a painter of Napoleon's time. It shows him with windswept hair before the ruins of Rome, and it joined a gallery of famous natives that the town had set up in 1838. That gallery hung in the old town hall, and when Saint-Malo was bombarded in 1944 almost everything there was destroyed. The Chateaubriand survived because the State had moved it away for safekeeping.
After the war, as the walled city was rebuilt, the town gave its collections a home in the castle's Great Keep, a horseshoe-shaped tower begun in 1424 for John V, Duke of Brittany. The history museum opened there in 1950 and told the story of a seafaring port: Newfoundland cod fishing, privateers, the explorer Jacques Cartier, and, from 2002, objects raised from 18th-century wrecks off the coast. The collection also holds paintings by the Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac and the Fauve painter Othon Friesz.
The museum in the keep closed in November 2019. The city's maritime collections, some 13,000 objects, are being prepared for a new maritime history museum inside the ramparts, planned for around 2028, and Girodet's portrait remains in the city's collection.
