France Guide
Normandy
The Musée des Beaux-Arts
Opening time: Daily except Tues 10am–6pm
Price: €3 combined ticket for Musée de la Céramique and Musée Le Secq des Tournelles €5.35)
Rouen's imposing Musée des Beaux-Arts commands the square Verdrel from just east of the central rue Jeanne-d'Arc. The grand edifice is home to a varied and absorbing permanent collection, as well as regular temporary exhibitions, for which there is sometimes an extra charge. Unexpected highlights include dazzling Russian icons from the sixteenth century onwards, and an entertaining three-dimensional eighteenth-century Nativity from Naples. Many of the biggest names among the painters – Caravaggio (the centrepiece Flagellation of Christ), Velázquez, Rubens – tend to be represented by a single minor work, but there are several Modiglianis and a number of Monets, including Rouen Cathedral (1894), the Vue Générale de Rouen and Brume sur la Seine (1894). The central sculpture court, roofed over but very light, is dominated by a wonderful three-part mural of the course of the Seine from Paris to Le Havre, prepared by Raoul Dufy in 1937 for the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.