The story
In September 1855 French troops took the Malakoff, the stone tower guarding Sevastopol in the Crimean War, and the general who led the assault, Patrice de MacMahon, came from a château near Autun. The town council wanted its hero on canvas, and in 1856 it commissioned Horace Vernet, the leading battle painter of the day. His picture, finished in 1858, shows MacMahon on the captured height while a zouave plants the flag. The general points at the ground, a nod to the line he is supposed to have said there, "Here I am, here I stay."
That painting belongs to the Musée Rolin, founded in 1878 by the town's learned society and housed in the 15th-century mansion of Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the Dukes of Burgundy. Its most famous object is far older. Around 1130 the sculptor Gislebertus carved a reclining Eve on the lintel of the north door of Autun's cathedral, one hand raised to her cheek as she reaches back for the fruit. The doorway was taken down in 1766 and its blocks were sold as building stone. Eve turned up about a century later, built into the wall of a house in town.
The collection runs from Roman Autun, with mosaics and a 4th-century glass cage cup, through a Nativity painted around 1480 by the Master of Moulins for Cardinal Jean Rolin, the chancellor's son, to 19th-century pictures like Vernet's. The museum is now closed for a long rebuilding that will join the Rolin mansion to the old courthouse and a 19th-century circular prison under a new name, the Panoptique.
