The story
Four women sit with their needlework on a sunny terrace at Yerres, the family estate outside Paris where the painter Gustave Caillebotte spent his summers. He painted Portraits in the Countryside in 1876, the year he first showed with the Impressionists, and it came to Bayeux in 1947, a gift from a local couple descended from his cousin Zoé. It hangs in a room named after him, near a later Caillebotte, Landscape at Argenteuil, from 1889.
The museum fills the old bishop's palace beside Bayeux Cathedral, built and rebuilt between the 11th and 16th centuries, and reopened after a full renovation in 2013. The visit runs in 14 stages, from prehistoric finds and Roman wall paintings under Romanesque vaults to the bishops' former courtroom with its 17th-century oak ceiling. One room belongs to Baron François Gérard, the portrait painter trained by Jacques-Louis David, and David himself is here with an early study of a bearded old sage known as The Philosopher.
The name honours a different man, Baron Henri-Alexandre Gérard, the painter's heir and a deputy for Bayeux, who gave 37 paintings in 1899 and is counted as the real founder. Two local crafts have rooms of their own, the black silk bobbin lace that made Bayeux fashionable in the 19th century and the porcelain fired in the town from 1812 to 1951.
