Tuesday, 09-July-2024


The two main attractions of Aix en Provence were the Méjanes library, and the Musee Granet.

The library was just a “walk up and check it out” situation, so we visited it first, after finding suitable parking… but the Musee, well, we had a feeling it may be a bit more of an adventure. We found some food, steeled ourselves, and charged inward to glorious art!

There was a lot of art.

Three floors of art, if I recall correctly, complete with a cool sub-basement that held (as is tradition) my favorite pieces in the museum. Not the most famous, or the weirdest, but definitely my favorites.

It was lovely; the main gallery was primarily religious, which isn’t quite my jam, but it was definitely interesting walking through and reading about all the details – Everything was purely in French, so I’ll include my translation-photos along for clarification. Of interesting note – one of the paintings, from 1661, is actually the first French portrait of a hunter! Kind of neat, showing how the vocation evolved over time.

Ohh also there was a sculpture of a guy without skin, from a doctor’s office in 1853. So… that’s a thing I’ve seen, now.

We perused, walked, explored, and enjoyed. We were able to make our way pretty much completely through the museum before getting saturated, too, which was a nice change of pace for me… by the time we were getting hungry, we’d finished up and were ready to head back to Cassis for some lovely dinner by the lapping waves.