Musée Camille Claudel, Art museum in Nogent-sur-Seine, France
The Musée Camille Claudel is an art museum in Nogent-sur-Seine, a small town southeast of Paris, dedicated to the sculptor Camille Claudel and her contemporaries. It holds around forty sculptures by Claudel herself alongside works by other French artists active in the decades around 1900.
A municipal museum opened in Nogent-sur-Seine in 1902 after sculptors Paul Dubois and Alfred Boucher donated their collections. Looted around 1940 and put into storage in 1950, it reopened in 1975 as the Musée Dubois-Boucher. In 2008 the town bought the 18th-century house where Camille Claudel lived as a teenager and acquired 43 of her works from Reine-Marie Paris; architect Adelfo Scaranello converted the complex, and the Musée Camille Claudel opened on 26 March 2017.
Camille Claudel grew up in Nogent-sur-Seine, and the town has kept a close connection to her work. The sculptures on display show how she portrayed bodies in motion and emotion, often in ways that were unusually direct for her time.
The museum sits in the center of Nogent-sur-Seine and can be reached on foot from the train station in a few minutes. It is worth checking closing days before you go, as the museum is not open every day of the week.
The museum's Claudel collection was bought in 2008 from her great-niece Reine-Marie Paris and Philippe Cressent, and the 2017 opening displayed 43 of these works. The building incorporates the 18th-century house on the îlot Saint-Epoing where the Claudel family lived for three years from 1876, when Camille was twelve.
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