Created in 1887, the Henri Chapu museum included works that the sculptor had given to the village of his birth from 1865. Built some distance from the first building, it fell unfortunately into disrepair. The new museum was inaugurated on the 19th February 1977.

Since 1983, the Henri Chapu museum has undergone a real revival with a programme that combines improvements in visiting conditions and restoration acquisitions policy - drawings, bronzes, plaster casts, marble - and participation by loans of sculptures in major exhibitions.

And major part of the collection comprises original plaster casts. It opens with young works that are followed by funeral and decorative sculptures that are almost exclusively feminine or where allegory dominates over realism and ends with monuments and busts. Chapu showed excellent qualities as a portrait painter. Born on 30th September 1833 closed to the current museum, Henri Chapu had classical training in the Paris School of Fine Arts. In 1855, he received the first Rome Prize. This reward open the doors of the Villa Medici in Rome. Henri Chapu, like Rude, Carpeaux, Moreau and many others, participated in the decoration of public and private buildings and monuments during the Second Empire and under the third Republic.