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Calais

The Musée des Beaux-Arts of Calais

The museum that tells how Rodin arrived at The Burghers of Calais

The hall of the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Calais and its orange wall covered in paintings

The essentials

Where
Calais
How long
One to two hours
Price
Charged
  • Sculpture
  • Rodin
  • Contemporary art
  • Indoors

Everyone knows The Burghers of Calais — Rodin's bronze group outside the town hall, showing six notables setting out to surrender themselves to the English king in 1347, ropes around their necks.

What the Musée des Beaux-Arts adds is the road that led there: the studies, the trials, the successive states. You see a sculptor searching, and that's more instructive than the finished result.

What you’ll see

  • A sculpture collection from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Rodin's preparatory works
  • Old and modern painting
  • Contemporary art and temporary exhibitions
  • Calais's history, a town destroyed and rebuilt after 1944

Worth doing next

Rodin's group itself is a few minutes' walk away, outside the town hall with its listed belfry. Seeing the studies then the finished work, in that order, takes half a day and is the best route through this town.

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