Museums - Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres

The Musée de Chartres has one of the most important Oceanic collections in France. It is composed of some 400 pieces left to the museum in 1970 by Emma Quille, the widow of governor Louis-Joseph Bouge (1878–1960), which is complemented by the collection of the musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Histoire naturelle de Châteaudun of the Marquis Louis Charles Léonce de Tarragon (1813–1897). Particularly noteworthy among its pieces from the Marquesas Islands, the Banks Islands, New Caledonia, Polynesia, and New Guinea are a group of Polynesian pounders, a rare New Caledonia mask, an exceptional Korwar drum from northwestern New Guinea, Austral Islands paddles, Fijian clubs, Tahitian fly whisks and tapas, a Maori feather box and flute, and a rare lei niho palaoa from the Hawaiian Islands. Since 1992, the Oceanic collection has been enhanced by a series of acquisitions, in particular by that of a New Caledonian talé doorjamb. The ethnographic collections also include African objects. There are some fifteen pieces from the Maurice de Vlaminck collection, as well as several Canadian Huron and Abenaki belts and collars, offered ex-voto at the end of the nineteenth century at Notre-Dame de Chartres. The museum also has one of the most important European collections of documentation on the Pacific, the Antilles, and Guyana.