Musée de Valence

The Musée de Valence is housed in a handsome 17th-century former bishop's palace adjoining the cathedral, which gives it an architectural head start on most regional French museums. The permanent collection covers local archaeology, fine arts, and decorative arts from Roman times through the 19th century. The archaeological rooms contain finds from the Roman colony of Valentia, including mosaics and everyday objects that document the town's importance as a stopping point on the Via Agrippa.

The fine arts collection is weighted toward French regional painting of the 17th–19th centuries, with some surprisingly strong pieces. The Hubert Robert drawings are the highlight — a large collection of red chalk studies made during his Italian travels, full of the romantic enthusiasm for ruins that made him famous in his lifetime. The museum has been renovated in recent years and is now one of the better presented regional collections in the Rhône-Alpes area.

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A story
The museum's most prized possession is a collection of red chalk drawings by Hubert Robert, an 18th-century French painter who specialised in romantic ruins — crumbling temples, overgrown colonnades, the aesthetic of picturesque decay. He made over a hundred drawings while travelling through Italy on the Grand Tour. Valence's museum holds a significant portion of the surviving corpus, acquired because Robert spent time in the city. It's an unexpectedly fine collection for a regional museum of this size.