Alte Nationalgalerie

On Berlin's Museum Island, a cluster of great museums on a spit of land in the river Spree, one building looks like a Greek temple raised on a high plinth, with a bronze king on horseback riding up its front steps. This is the Alte Nationalgalerie, designed by Friedrich August Stuler and opened in 1876 to hold 19th-century art, much of it seeded by a banker's bequest.

Inside, the heart of the collection is German painting of that century. Caspar David Friedrich's still, spiritual landscapes are here, and so is Adolph Menzel, whose 'The Flute Concert' shows Frederick the Great playing by candlelight in his palace at Potsdam.

The gallery reaches into France as well, with Manet, Monet and Renoir bought early by a bold German director, at a time when official taste in Berlin still frowned on them. One room holds Arnold Bocklin's eerie 'Isle of the Dead', a boat carrying a shrouded figure towards a rock crowned with dark cypresses, a picture Berliners of 1900 hung as prints in their parlours.