Free opening of the Château-Musée de Saumur

Name: Free opening of the Château-Musée de Saumur
Start: 2022-09-17T10:00:00+02:00
End: 2022-09-18T18:00:00+02:00
Location: Saumur

Free public access to the museum of decorative arts and horse. The museum is municipal, and has the label «Musée de France». Its collections are very varied

Access the event online

17 and 18 September 2022Passed

Château-Musée de Saumur

Free public access to the museum of decorative arts and horse.

Since 1912, the castle has been home to the rich collections of the Municipal Museum, increased in the late 1950s by the donation of the collections of the Horse Museum.
The Saumur Museum is a municipal museum, with the label «Musée de France». Its collections are very varied (decorative arts, fine arts, ethnology, archaeology, natural sciences) and of high quality.
Its strong points are: ceramics (one of the most beautiful collections of earthenware in France), tapestries (from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, most of which are classified among the Historical Monuments) and, Saumur obliges, the harness of the horse gathering ancient pieces, Engravings, veterinary or swamp works.

About the location

Saumur

Rue des remparts

Maine-et-Loire
Pays de la Loire

Resting on its «emerald rock» for René I d'Anjou, the castle of Saumur, which welcomed kings as prisoners, is one of the most beautiful and last intact testimonies of the princely architecture of the Middle Ages.
Owned by the Counts of Anjou and then the Plantagenets, it was transformed into a royal fortress at the beginning of the thirteenth century at the time of King Saint Louis. During the second half of the 14th century, Duke Louis I of Anjou (brother of King Charles V) transformed it into a sumptuous castle-palace. The miniature depicting him in the famous «Very rich hours of the Duke of Berry» gives us a precise picture.
King René, the last duke of Anjou, resides there periodically. After his death in 1480 the castle returns to the royal domain.
Until the end of the Ancien Régime, the building served as a residence for the various governors of the city. The most famous of them, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, was appointed in 1589\. The town of Saumur has just been conceded to the Pr