NORMANDY 

Rouen-Tour Jeanne d'Arc-Musee Secq des Tournelles-Musée des Beaux-Arts

History and WWII

Cathedral

Gros Horloge and Place Vieux Marché

Palais de Justice Bourgtheroulde

St.Maclou-Aitre St.Maclou

Church Saint Ouen-Musée des Antiquités

Tour Jeanne-Musée Secq des Tournelles-Musée des Beaux Arts

Musée de Faience-Musée Flaubert

Philippe Auguste, king of France, built a castle in the 13th century with seven towers. Only one tower remains and is piously called “TOUR JEANNE D’ARC” since legend assures it is here that she was brought from her prison cell in the Tour de la Pucelle and, in a scene reminiscent of early cinema melo-drama, she was confronted wit her instruments of torture.  In fact it’s untrue, she was held prisoner in another tower. (The Jeanne d’Arc adulators should go to 102, rue Jeanne d’Arc to fondle the basements of the tower with devotion.) The Tour is located rue du Donjon, it’s conical roof thrusts like a rocket’s nose cone above the surrounding modern buildings. Stones hurdled from the wooden hoarding of the top of the tower today would make holes in the roof. Used a long time as a stone quarry, it became a convent and then a cotton mill. Now nuns run a girl’s school after making more demolitions to make a garden.
In 1920 a man named Henri Le Secq bequeathed his entire blacksmith art and iron wrought collection to the city of Rouen. Being a clerk he dedicate all his leisure hours to the iron, which entered really his soul, and he conceived a passion for blacksmith’s art. The collection found a home in the redundant church of Saint-Laurent in the rue Jacques Villon, now the MUSEE LE SECQ DES TOURNELLES. More than 20,000 pieces: from keys to corkscrews, flatirons to jewellery, locks from all eras to utensils of daily life. Decorative ironwork from forgotten buildings, even a chastity belt.
Opposite the church is the MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS, one of the most impressive in France. The MUST of the region. Vast, airy, luminous, well organized this stunning museum offers us a perfect example of European painting from the 14th centuryto nowadays.

Velazques

It thinks of itself as a new inviting and fresh look at the work of the great and famous artists from the Spanish, Italian, French and Flemish schools like Caravaggio, Veronese, Velasquez, Rubens Ruysdael, Ingres, Gericault, Delacroix.. Closer to us you can renew acquaintance with Sisley, Monet, Dufy, Modigliani, Duchamp. In the sculpture garden, classic figures pose, in a frozen immobility under a glass roof. If you’re interested to see how Pierre Corneille looked like there he is in terracotta, and looking rather fierce, in oils.
A curiosity signalled by one of my guides figuring in the bibliography:
an anamorphosis realized in the 16th century from an “Elevation to the Cross” by Rubens, which means that the painting is only visible on a cylindrical mirror on which it is projected! Don’t miss this museum!!

Bibliography

A holiday history of France, by Ronald Hamilton (London-Hogarth press), Region Normandie, ses merveilles, ses cicatrices, by Louis Letellier (ed. Cloison, Rouen 1995), Routard 1998 (Hachette, Paris), Rouen, ville martyr, by Patrick Deware (Ed. Dargelle, 1998)-France today, by John Ardagh (Secker and Warburgh, London)The Identity of Normandy, by Fernand Braudel (Fontana Press, London)