musée Max Claudet
Salins-les-Bains, France
The story
The Musée Max Claudet in Salins-les-Bains, a salt town in the Jura, has been closed to the public since 2003 and no longer exists as a separate museum. In 2016 its collection was formally merged with the salt museum at the Grande Saline, the town's old saltworks, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The museum was named after Max Claudet, a 19th-century sculptor and ceramist who settled in Salins, made the winegrower statue for one of its fountains and became a friend of the painter Gustave Courbet. Its holdings, about 800 objects, combine religious art from the town's churches, Salins faience and Claudet's own work. The best-known piece is Courbet's Rotten Rock of 1864, a study of a geological fault above Salins painted at the request of Jules Marcou, a geologist. That canvas came to the town in 1928 as a bequest from the Marcou family and now belongs to the museum collection of the Grande Saline.
