France Guide
The Rhône valley
Musée des Beaux-Arts
Address: 20 place des Terreaux
Opening time: Mon– Thurs, Sat & Sun 10am–6pm; Fri 10.30am–6pm
Price: €6
The Musée des Beaux-Arts, housed in a former Benedictine abbey, has collections second in France only to those in the Louvre. The museum is organized roughly by genre, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculpture in the ex-chapel on the ground floor. There's a fine collection of medieval French, Dutch, German and Italian woodcarving on the first floor along with antiquities, coins and objets d'art. Twentieth-century painting includes works by Picasso and Matisse, and there are also Braques, a brace of typically domestic Bonnards and a gory Francis Bacon. The nineteenth century is represented by the Impressionists and their forerunners, Corot and Courbet; there are works by the Lyonnais artists Antoine Berjon and Fleury Richard, and from there you can work your way back through Rubens, Zurbarán, El Greco, Tintoretto and a hundred others.
Behind the Hôtel de Ville, on the edge of several linked squares, stands Lyon's opera house (tours every other Sat at 1pm; €9, book through the tourist office on place Bellecour). Radically redesigned in 1993 by the architect Jean Nouvel, its original Neoclassical elevations are now topped by a huge glass Swiss roll of a roof, and the interior is now entirely black with silver stairways climbing into the darkness.