The Musée Dobrée is a museum in Nantes, in the quartier Graslin in the immediate outskirts of the city centre and very close to the city's Natural History Museum. It was given to the city by Thomas Dobrée and now belongs to the Conseil général de la Loire-Atlantique. In January 2010, the Conseil général began a project to restructure and modernise the museum, which is planned for completion in 2015.
The museum of fine arts and archeology of Dole was founded in 1821. Since 1980, the museum is installed in the House of the Officers, an example of military architecture of Franche-Comté at the 18th century.
"Musée des Beaux Arts" is a poem written by W. H. Auden in December 1938 while he was staying in Brussels, Belgium, with Christopher Isherwood. It was first published under the title "Palais des beaux arts" in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing, a modernist magazine edited by John Lehmann. It next appeared in the collected volume of verse Another Time , which was followed four months later by the English edition . The poem's title derives from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, famous for its collection of Early Netherlandish painting. Auden visited the Musée and would have seen a number of works by the "Old Masters" of his second line, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
