Other collections
The musée des Beaux-Arts decorative art collection includes furniture, tapestries and a few ceramic objects. An inventory of the collections has revealed an ensemble of coins, medals and jewellery, along with a few ethnographic and archaeological objects.
In addition to the Daum collection, the decorative art collection includes thirty pieces of Baccarat and Saint Louis crystal, some earthenware items and a deposit of 19 pieces from the Sèvres factory, most dating from the Art Nouveau period. There are also some tapestries dating from the 18th Century and other more modern works such as those of Jean Lurçat (Knowledge’s struggle against ignorance) and Francis Gruber, along with furniture, consoles, tables and chairs, mostly from the 18th Century.
The investigations undertaken as part of the collection inventory led to a few discoveries: the museum holds a store of coins, medals and tokens totalling 850 items. Most of these arrived via donations and bequests: the Asian coins in the Cartier-Bresson bequest in 1936, over 600 European coins, medals and tokens in the Delesalle donation of the same year and the Barrigue de Montavallon bequest in 1952 consisting of medals and plaques, some of which were presented at theme-based exhibitions relating to commemorations of the centenary of the First World War. An unusual collection of ethnographic objects, headdresses and jewellery, has also recently been discovered.
Finally, the archaeological digs that took place as part of the museum renovation project in 1999 uncovered remains that formed part of Nancy’s modern fortifications, along with a number of day-to-day objects. These finds are currently on display in a cabinet in the museum basement, in the auditorium formed by the bastion.
