Goya-Museum

Castres, a small town in southern France, is an unexpected place to find a museum of Spanish art, but the Goya Museum has been just that since 1947. It fills the town's former bishops' palace, a dignified building of 1675 laid out to a design by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, one of the architects of Versailles, with formal gardens by Le Nôtre behind it.

Goya anchors the collection. Alongside a few of his paintings, including a self-portrait, hang the great print series where his imagination turned dark, Los Caprichos and the Disasters of War, sheet after sheet of nightmare and cruelty. Around him the museum builds the widest Spanish holding in France after the Louvre, with Murillo and works tied to Velázquez, some of them deposited long ago from Paris. The Le Nôtre gardens are part of the ticket, a slice of French order behind a house full of Spanish intensity.