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When Amiens set out to build a museum in the 1850s, it did something new. The Musée de Picardie, finished in 1867 under Napoleon III, was the first building in France raised specifically to be a fine-arts museum rather than a converted palace or church, a grand Second Empire pile designed by Henri Parent and Arthur Diet.
The young Puvis de Chavannes painted vast allegorical murals for its staircase and hall, calm pale figures that helped make his name. Deeper in hang the museum's oddest treasures, the Puys d'Amiens, large devotional paintings commissioned each year through the 16th century by a local religious brotherhood for the cathedral, crowded with kneeling donors and Latin mottoes. The collection runs on through Fragonard and Spanish and Italian painting, and down into the archaeology of Picardy, from prehistory to the Romans.
