Louvre Lens
The Louvre’s Outpost in Northern France
One of the nice things about France is that most of its cultural highlights are concentrated in & around its capital, so that you just need to visit Paris to see the crème de la crème of what the country has to offer. But if you’re French & you live outside Paris, you might find it not so nice that none of the great museums is nearby. To accommodate non-Parisians, the French government decided in 2003 that the Louvre, the world’s largest art museum, should establish an outpost in some remote part of the country. Nine years later, the Louvre Lens, located on an abandoned coal-mining site in Lens, in northern France, opened its doors. Lens is only a small detour on your way from Belgium to Paris, and the museum provides an excellent destination for a 1½-hour break.
The Louvre Lens showcases more than 250 works from the fourth millennium BC to the mid-19th century. Compared to the Parisian mother ship, the museum has hardly anything top-notch, but the Gallery of Time is very good anyway. Among its highlights are Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s four paintings of winter, spring, summer and autumn, Venus and Amor by one of Rembrandt’s followers or his studio, The Young Martyr by Paul Delaroche, two statues of a dog and a wild boar, Aphrodite’s head, Francesco Laurana’s bust of a young woman and Augustin Pajou’s bust of the royal botanist Georges Louis Leclerc, a high relief of a funeral ceremony, and two models of a granary and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. As for the oliphant hunting horn pictured above, it’s really nice, but not as nice as the oliphant that is on display in Paris.
www.louvrelens.frReader Comments
Annabelle
One cannot compare the Louvre Lens to the ‘mother ship’ in Paris, because it serves a different audience. Two-thirds of the visitors to the Louvre Lens are from the northern Hauts-de-France region, and more than half report that they have had little or no exposure to museums. This is why the Louvre Lens offers an experience that is easy to understand & appreciate, and why visitors enjoy free access.
Laurence
An important difference between the Louvre Lens and the Louvre in Paris is that in Lens you can just walk in, whereas in Paris you have to stand in line forever to pass the security checks. (Unless you bring your own inclined hoist to skip the queue.)
Dominique
My favourite object on display at the Louvre Lens is a clay tablet from the fourth century BC. It comes from Uruk, a city in present-day Iraq, and it contains a divinatory text that describes how to predict the future by observing animal organs. It is engraved in Sumerian, the oldest known written language, using cuneiform writing. Its symbols, consisting of nails & chevrons, represent both sounds & ideas.
Elaine
Lens, population 30,000, was a booming industrial centre after coal was discovered there in 1849. Then World War I rolled over the city, leaving some of the worst destruction on the French front. For those who want to focus on the Great War, head four miles west from the Louvre Lens to the hill called Notre Dame de Lorette. The art-deco-inspired basilica and Notre Dame de Lorette Cemetery — the largest French national war cemetery — honour the more than 42,000 French soldiers who died in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region during World War I. A small visitors’ and history centre is down the hill, and also nearby is the Ring of Remembrance, an international memorial with the names of almost 580,000 soldiers who died in the region between 1914 and 1918. Four miles south is the Canadian National Memorial with the Vimy monument, which pays tribute to the 66,000 Canadian soldiers who died in France during the Great War. Visitors can walk through reconstructed trenches.