Saint-Michel Abbey has stood over the Tarn for close to a thousand years, and each generation has looked at it in its own way. It’s that gaze, more than the stone itself, that the Fine Arts museum puts on show: the way engravers, painters and photographers fixed the monument, from the romantic view of the nineteenth century to today’s documentary shot.
The hang gathers works from the municipal collections and from private holdings — old engravings, architect’s drawings, canvases, photographs — all devoted to a single subject seen over time. You follow the changing fabric (the rebuilt façade, the bell tower, the surroundings), but above all the changing ways of seeing: what each age chose to show, to magnify or to leave out.
The exhibition is held in the Château de Foucaud, and flows naturally into a visit of the permanent collections of the Fine Arts museum. The up-to-date programme and dates are published on gaillac.fr.