Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The project of a museum in the Deux-Sèvres was born in 1792, when Bernard d'Agesci was commissioned by the Convention to inventory works of art and scientific objects seized in national property (abbeys, churches, emigrant houses). He proposes to install these collections in the Church of the Carmelite Convent of Niort, coupled with a drawing school, but the Minister of Interior rejects the project. The works, provisionally stored at the former College of the Oratory, suffered dispersals and losses between 1795 and the 1800s, especially during restitutions to churches or requisitions for subsistence.

In 1836 the Niort Society of Statistics, Science, Letters and Arts revived the constitution of the collections by recovering the remains of the "revolutionary museum". Between 1839 and 1843, it enriched funds through purchases and donations, such as that of Charles-Amédée Chabosseau (109 works in 1843). In 1868, the municipality built a gallery dedicated to the site of the former Oratorian convent: the ground floor houses natural history, the floor art. Despite enlargements in 1872 and conservation work after 1886, institutional instability persisted, marked by the dissolution of the Statistical Society in 1892 and successive management transfers.

The museum's municipalization in 1939, followed by its closure in 1993 for old age, preceded its move in 2006 to the former Jean Macé High School, now the Bernard d'Agesci Museum. The latter now unites collections of natural history, fine arts and science, heirs of revolutionary confiscations and local bequests. The building, designed in 1897 by Georges Lasseron, combines architectural innovation (feathers, terracotta) and heritage vocation, symbolizing the desire to preserve a multidisciplinary museum complex.

External links