France Guide
The Loire
Musée des Beaux-Arts
Opening time: Daily except Tues 9am–12.45pm & 2–6pm
Price: €4
Just south of the cathedral, the Musée des Beaux-Arts is housed in the former archbishop's palace. Other than Mantegna's intense, unmissable Agony in the Garden (1457–59), in the basement, there are few celebrity works in the large collection. Even Rembrandt's much-advertised Flight into Egypt is a small oil study rather than a finished work. But the stately, loosely chronological progression of palatial seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rooms, each furnished and decorated to match the era of the paintings it displays, is extremely attractive. Local gems include Boulanger's portrait of Balzac, and the engravings The Five Senses by the locally born Abraham Bosse, which have been interpreted as full-size canvases in the handsome Louis XIII room. It's also worth a look at the utterly out of place remnants of an elephant in the old stables, acquired from P. T. Barnum in faintly mysterious circumstances in the nineteenth century.