Museums - Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle Clément Lafaille

Created in 1770, beginning with the curiosity cabinet of naturalist Clément Lafaille, this is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful natural history museums in France. Its collections have been enriched over the course of the centuries, most extensively in the nineteenth century by the acquisition of the Musée Fleuriau and by gifts of famous navigators and local collectors. With 6,500 pieces (a fifth of which are archaeological) of an ethnographic nature from all five continents, the museum is noteworthy for its holdings in this area. They include material from the former French colonies in the Congo, Cameroon, Senegal, Gabon, Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, island Indonesia, Oceania, and the Americas. The ethnographic collections were mostly formed starting in 1921, when Etienne Loppé became head curator. Many pieces that came into the museum in the twentieth century were collected in the nineteenth by travelers, military personnel or missionaries, or were donated by colonial administrators and collectors. Of particular interest in the archaeological collection are 650 Sao pieces from the Lake Chad area and dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These include anthropomorphic and zoomorphic terracotta statuettes, funerary urns, and ornaments from tombs excavated Ernest Bouyer in the 1950s, which are complemented by gifts by Jean-Gabriel Gauthier and Roger Gatau. Pre-Columbian art is also well represented with 250 Prehispanic works from the Nazca, Tumaco, La Tolita, Chimu, Chancay, and Inca cultures, acquired through gifts made between made 1930 and 1956. Other objects of note include two objects from Easter island, a rare two-headed moai kavakava collected by Dumont d’Urville, a lava statue collected by Pierre Loti, a wooden statuette from the Gambier islands also collected by d’Urville, and the famous Kwele mask that so fascinated André Malraux.