Musée Jeanne-d'Aboville

In La Fère, a small town in the Aisne with fewer than 3,000 people, hangs the only painting by Albrecht Dürer, the great German Renaissance master, that you can see anywhere in the Hauts-de-France region. It is a Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John and a kneeling donor, and for a long time it was not recognised as his. Specialists now date it to around 1492 or 1493, when the young Dürer was working in the Upper Rhine, and the new attribution made enough of a stir that the panel was lent for an exhibition at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar.

The museum exists because of one collector. Gabrielle d'Héricourt, a countess, bought pictures on the Paris art market around 1850 and gave them to La Fère on one condition, that the museum carry the name of her mother, Jeanne d'Aboville. It was founded in 1868. Her taste ran north, and the rooms still lean towards Dutch and Flemish painting, with an imaginary church interior by Emanuel de Witte, the Dutch painter of architecture. A French note comes from Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette's portraitist, with her portrait of Madame Adélaïde, a daughter of Louis XV.

The First World War cost the collection more than 100 paintings, which simply disappeared. A decade of restoration on the surviving pictures was put on show in 2024.