The story
Eugénie Dubreuil, an artist and teacher, started buying works by women in the 1990s, struck by how rarely they turned up in art history lessons or on museum walls. She called her collection La Musée, giving the French word for museum a feminine article, and in 2024 more than 500 of its pieces came to the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers. Most are prints, photographs and drawings, with Berthe Morisot and Suzanne Valadon alongside artists almost nobody has heard of.
The museum that took them in is a brutalist building of concrete and glass by the architect Jean Monge, opened in 1974 on the ground of the abbey of Sainte-Croix, the convent founded by Queen Radegund in the 6th century. The visit runs from prehistory to the 20th century. The Roman rooms have the marble Minerva of Poitiers, found in the town. Among the paintings hangs The Death of Hyacinthos by Jean Broc, a pupil of David, shown at the Salon of 1801, in which Apollo holds the young man he has just killed by accident with a discus. There are also paintings by Sisley and Vuillard, and seven works by the sculptor Camille Claudel, in bronze and terracotta, among them portrait busts.
