Collection Bemberg

The Bemberg collection lives in one of Toulouse's grandest Renaissance houses, built in 1555 by Pierre d'Assezat, who made his fortune in pastel, the blue woad dye that was the city's oil for a century. Four hundred years later his mansion took in an outsider's collection.

Georges Bemberg was a French-born Argentine, heir to a brewing and banking fortune, who spent a long life quietly buying pictures and lent the whole hoard to Toulouse in 1994. It runs from Venetian Renaissance canvases by Veronese and Tintoretto down through the Impressionists.

Its surprise is a whole floor given to Pierre Bonnard. Bemberg gathered around thirty of his paintings, warm interiors and gardens and his wife in the bath, one of the largest groups of Bonnard in any museum. Seeing them hung together in a 16th-century merchant's house is the reason many people climb the stairs.