The story
Between 1953 and 1955, Pablo Picasso came back several times to a town house on rue de l'Ange in Perpignan, as the guest of the Count and Countess de Lazerme. That house, the Hôtel de Lazerme, has held the city's art museum since 1979, and in 2017, after three years of work, the museum reopened joined to the neighbouring Hôtel de Mailly.
The museum itself dates from 1833 and is named after Hyacinthe Rigaud, the portraitist of Louis XIV, who was born in Perpignan in 1659, the year the Treaty of the Pyrenees made Roussillon French. His work anchors the old-master rooms, including his portrait of Cardinal de Bouillon and a self-portrait with a black ribbon.
The 20th century has a strong local accent here. Raoul Dufy painted in Perpignan in the 1940s, and Aristide Maillol, the sculptor from nearby Banyuls, is well represented. One of the most personal pictures is a small self-portrait by Paul Gauguin, inscribed to his friend Daniel, the painter George-Daniel de Monfreid, who looked after Gauguin's affairs in France while he lived in Tahiti. Gauguin gave it to him in 1897, and it hangs here on long-term deposit from the Musée d'Orsay.
