National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec
Four-pavilion art museum in Battlefields Park, holding the largest collection of Quebec art.
Known in French as the Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec, the museum opened in 1933 as the Musee de la Province and is the principal art museum of Quebec province. It occupies four linked pavilions at the western end of the Plains of Abraham, inside the National Battlefields Park. The oldest, the Gerard Morisset Pavilion, is a stone building of 1933; the Charles Baillairge Pavilion is a former provincial prison of 1867 whose cell blocks were converted for museum use in the 1990s.
The Pierre Lassonde Pavilion, opened in June 2016, was designed by OMA with Provencher_Roy and steps down from Grande Allee towards the park in three stacked glass volumes joined by a long cascading staircase. It roughly doubled the exhibition space and houses the contemporary art, decorative arts and design, and Inuit art collections, including the Brousseau collection. The museum holds more than 40,000 works, with particular strength in Quebec art from the seventeenth century to the present, including a large group of works by Jean Paul Riopelle.
Highlights
- Glass Pierre Lassonde Pavilion by OMA, opened in 2016
- Charles Baillairge Pavilion inside a converted 1867 prison
- Brousseau collection of Inuit art
- Extensive holdings of work by Jean Paul Riopelle
