Avallon's free town museum, from local archaeology to the Art Deco silver of Jean Després and a rare Yao collection.
€295one way from Beaune with a private driver
Private driver from Beaune: 1 h 22 by road (113 km), €295 one way for the whole car.
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The Musée de l'Avallonnais Jean Després occupies the town's former school, beside the clock tower in the old centre of Avallon. Its rooms run from the archaeology of the Avallon area to paintings, sculpture and the jewellery and silverware of the goldsmith Jean Després. Entry is free.
The archaeology room follows people in the Avallon area from the Palaeolithic to the Merovingian period, with stone tools, Bronze Age ornaments, an Iron Age armlet found at Noyers and a pair of bird-shaped Merovingian brooches set with garnets. The fine arts rooms show paintings, drawings, prints and about a hundred 19th- and 20th-century sculptures, by artists such as Pierre Vigoureux and Georges Loiseau-Bailly. One room is given to Jean Després, whose pewter and silver pieces draw on modernism and Art Deco. The Yao rooms show embroidered textiles, silver jewellery and objects of Yao Taoism.
The Société d'Études d'Avallon, a society of local scholars, founded the museum in 1862 and first set it up in the upper room of the Tour de l'Horloge. Gifts from collectors built up the collections, among them the coins gathered by the teacher Alfred Bardin, which today form a set of nearly 24,000 coins and medals. In 1912 the museum moved with the town hall to the Hôtel de Gouvenain, and in 1946 it became a municipal museum.
In 1971 the collections moved into the old collège, where generations of Avallon pupils had studied. The museum received the Musée de France label in 2002. In 2011 seven new rooms opened for a collection of about 2,500 objects from the Yao Mien and Yao Mun peoples of southern China and South-East Asia, given to the museum in 2008. In 2017 it added to its name that of Jean Després, the goldsmith who lived and worked in Avallon until his death in 1980.
Checked on on the official site.
Allow about an hour. The museum is in the historic centre of Avallon, about 1 hour 15 minutes from Beaune, with one entrance on rue du Collège and another from the Jacques Schiever garden, on either side of the clock tower. Entry is free. It opens on Wednesday to Sunday afternoons in season, and closes for several weeks in spring, in early autumn and in winter, so check the calendar before you go. Only the ground-floor rooms are accessible to wheelchair users.
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Musée de l’Avallonnais Jean Després is about 1 h 22 from Beaune by road (113 km). With a private driver, the trip from Beaune starts at €295 for the whole car, up to 4 guests.
Did you know? Jean Després began an apprenticeship with a Paris goldsmith at 14 and spent his evenings at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, where Georges Braque became his closest friend.
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€295 one way from Beaune · up to 4 guests
