The story
Brest, a naval port on the Atlantic tip of Brittany, was among the most heavily bombed cities of the Second World War, and on a July night in 1941 a British raid on the German warships in its harbour destroyed the fine-arts museum entirely. Only a few evacuated pieces, some Asian works and Sèvres porcelain, survived the fire.
What the city did afterward is the interesting part. From almost nothing it rebuilt both a museum, opened in 1968, and a collection, buying steadily until Brest became one of the best places in France to see the Pont-Aven school and the Nabis, the painters who followed Gauguin into flat, bright colour and Breton subjects. 17th- and 18th-century Italian painting fills out the rest of the rooms, most of it acquired since the war.
For now those rooms are closed. Mould found on paintings during the winter break kept the museum from reopening in early 2025, and it is not expected to reopen before 2033 or 2034, once the 1968 building has been renovated and enlarged.
