The history of the museum is closely linked to the life of the man after whom it was named : Adrien Dubouché.
Born in Limoges in 1818, Adrien Dubouché, whose real name was François-Louis Bourcin-Dubouché, was the son of a cloth merchant. He very quickly became involved in the family trade, giving him a real background in business.
After his marriage to Ermance Bisquit, he settled in Jarnac (in the Charente region), working alongside his father-in-law in his Cognac company.
He made the most of his business trips to Paris to explore his taste for the arts and made friends with many well-known people.
In 1862, he purchased a property near Limoges where he spent a good deal of his free time. In the same year, he became President of the Limousin Society of Friends of the Arts, then took over the management of the museum on a voluntary basis from 1865.
In 1868, Dubouché founded a School of art in the same building as the museum, so that the collections could be used to inspire the artists and artisans who would end up working in the porcelain manufactories, which were rapidly expanding at the time.
At the Paris World Fair in 1848, Dubouché was a member of the panel for the ceramics section. He was recognised as “the man in France, and perhaps the world, who knows the most about the subject”. He used this occasion to enrich the museum’s collections, once again. One year before his death, he purchased a final collection from his friend Paul Gasnault, the curator of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris.
Adrien Dubouché died suddenly in November 1881 at the age of 63, and was buried in Jarnac.
