Canada Guide
Québec City
Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec
Address: Western edge of the Parc des Champs-de-Bataille
Opening time: June to early Sept daily 10am–6pm, rest of the year Tues– Sun 10am–5pm, all year Wed until 9pm
Price: $12
Telephone: 418/643-2150 or 1-866/220-2150
Website: www.mnba.qc.ca
Canadian art had its quiet beginnings in Québec City and the full panoply of this output can be found in the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec. The Grand Hall, with its cruciform skylight, connects the museum's two buildings (its original home, the Pavillon Gérard-Morisset, and a renovated Victorian prison renamed the Pavillon Charles-Baillairgé) and also serves as the main entrance.
For a chronological tour, start with Gallery 7 on the second floor of the Pavillon Gérard-Morisset, which provides a good survey of Québecois art from the early seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries. Gallery 8, opposite, covers the period from 1860 to 1945, while other galleries cover more modern painters. A new, but permanent, addition to the museum is the remarkable Brousseau collection of Innuit Art. Collected over 50 years from across the Arctic, the collection traces the development of Inuit art from the naive works of the mid-twentieth century to the highly narrative and intricately carved sculptures by contemporary artists