Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille
museum in Marseille, France

The Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille (Occitan: Museu dels bels arts de Marselha) is one of the main museums in the city of Marseille, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.
It occupies a wing of the Palais Longchamp, and displays a collection of paintings, sculptures and drawings from the 16th to 19th centuries.
History
The museum is one of five created by the Consulate in 1801, in the main cities of France.
The basis for the collection was the seizure by revolutionaries of state property after the consular decree of 1 September 1800.
Successive deposits of state property were made in 1814, 1817, and 1819, and throughout the rest of the 19th century.
In 1856, the Borély collection was acquired by the museum.
In 1869, the museum moved into the left wing of the Palais Longchamp. After more than 130 years of existence, a complete renovation of the Palais Longchamp and the museum was necessary. A long restoration started in 2005, and completed in June 2013, has restored all its luster to this complex.
Building
The museum is located in the right wing of the Palais Longchamp, built by the architect Henri-Jacques Espérandieu between 1862, and 1869 to commemorate the arrival in the city of waters of the Durance river through the Canal de Marseille.
“Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille” enters the record as museum in Marseille, France. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Musée, beaux-arts and Marseille can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q83013. VIAF identifies the subject as 168097615. The Library of Congress control number is n84143784. Authority coordinates are 43.304, 5.394. 5 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1801, 1800, 1814 and 1817.
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This entry incorporates text from “Musée des beaux-arts de Marseille” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.