Museums - Musée du Château, Boulogne-sur-Mer

This museum’s Arctic collections have been world famous since being shown at the Musée National de l’Art d’Afrique et d’Océanie in Paris in a 2002 exhibition titled Kodiak, Alaska. The Yupik and Inuit objects in this collection were brought to Europe by Alphonse Pinart in the 1870s. These, along with objects in Cambridge, Berkeley, Washington, and Munich museums, are among the most important bodies of material in existence from these areas. A group of Yupik masks, the only ones known to have survived the destruction wrought by the Russian Orthodox, form the heart of this collection. The museum’s Oceanic collections are less well known but include important works donated by Viscount Isidore Leroy de Barde, and by Englishmen Bright and Hamy. Noteworthy among them are a Palauan (Caroline Islands, Micronesia) wooden vessel with shell inlay, a large male Tiki figure from the Marquesas Islands, a funerary Korwar statue from Geelvinck Bay, New Guinea, and a Mortlock Islands mask of breadfruit wood.