The story
In the church of Sainte-Madeleine in Montargis, an urn holds the heart of the painter Anne-Louis Girodet. His body lies in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. In the 1840s his heirs sent his home town some of his personal belongings, and they are still on show upstairs in the museum, in a rococo cabinet with his brushes and palette.
The museum occupies the Durzy foundation, a school and library built between 1859 and 1864 and named after its founder, the officer Philippe-François Durzy. It has carried Girodet's name only since 1967. At its heart is the work of this pupil of the neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, born in Montargis in 1767: around 30 paintings and about 130 drawings, the largest group of his drawings after the Louvre's. Around him hang his contemporaries, among them Géricault's still life of three skulls, along with an older treasure, a penitent Saint Jerome by the Spanish painter Zurbarán. A whole room is given to Henry de Triqueti, a sculptor from the area who helped shape the early collection.
In spring 2016 the river Loing flooded the building in the middle of its renovation, and the stored works had to be rescued and cleaned one by one. The museum reopened in December 2018.
