25/08/2017
The Palais Lascaris, a beautiful baroque jewel, is a seventeenth-century aristocratic building in the old town of Nice, not far from Nice-Art-House. Currently, it is a musical instrument museum. Located in the old town of Nice, it houses a collection of over 500 instruments, which makes it France’s second most important collection.
Built in the first half of the seventeenth century and altered in the eighteenth century, the palace was owned by the Vintimille-Lascaris family until 1802. In 1942, it was bought by the city of Nice to create a museum. The restorations began in 1962 and were completed in 1970, when the museum was opened to the public.
There is mysterious link between Nice-Art-House, which address is 1 rue Antoine Gautier, and Palais Lascaris...
The bequest of the collection of Antoine Gautier
The historical musical instrument collection is formed around the bequest of the nineteenth-century niçois collector Antoine Gautier (1904).
Antoine Gautier was born in Nice in 1825, son of Joseph Octave Gautier, rich wood merchant, and Félicité Rossetti, daughter of the préfet Rossetti and granddaughter of the senator Rossetti .
Following studies in classics at the Jesuit College (today the lycée Masséna), he became a jurist. An amateur musician, Antoine Gautier played the violin and the viola, and at the age of eighteen founded a quartet with his brother Raymond, in which Antoine played the viola. At that time he began to hold a musical salon and also began collecting instruments in his home on the rue Papacino :
Rue Papacino, we were in the Temple. Everything called for solemn consideration, the large library where the carefully bound and arranged collections were preserved alongside rare editions; the display cases exhibiting the gongs, hawaiien guitars, marine trumpets, archlutes, quintons, oboes d'amore, instruments by Maggini or Guarnieri, the four large oak music desks and the imposing Pleyel piano, elicited the visitors' admiration
Many famous musicians visited his salon. In 1903, the Gautier Quartet celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. The following year, Antoine Gautier died at his home, at the age of seventy-nine, leaving to the city of Nice his musical collections consisting of more than 225 instruments and a rare musical library.
The Gautier collection was bequeathed to the city of Nice in the testament of 26 May 1901 and by a codicil dated 8 June 1901. It was accepted by the city of Nice in a special session of the city council, on 19 September 1904. The article of the testament that treats the bequest is succinct :
Wanting to encourage the creation in Nice, the city of my birth, of a well-organised institution of musical education, I leave to the city of Nice sixty-thousand (60.000) francs, as well as my collections of musical instruments and accessories, scores and books music, on the sole condition of allotting six hundred (600) francs per year to a luthier charged with the maintenance of the instruments ; I believe that Mr. Francois Bovis, luthier, would be the most fitting for this task.
Following the Antoine Gautier bequest, the city of Nice has continued to enrich this collection, which has been successively exhibited or preserved at the Musée des beaux-arts de Nice, the Musée Masséna, the Conservatoire de Nice, and today at the Palais Lascaris.
