Gothenburg Museum of Art

At the top of Gothenburg's grand avenue, closing the view up Kungsportsavenyn, stands a stepped brick facade from 1923, the city's art museum. Climb through it and the reward at the top is a single room that art historians travel for: the Furstenberg Gallery.

Pontus Furstenberg, a Gothenburg merchant, and his wife Gothilda were the great patrons of Scandinavian painting in the 1880s and 90s, buying directly from the young artists who were dragging Nordic art into the open air. Their collection came to the museum, and it holds many of the defining pictures of that generation, Anders Zorn's nudes in cold water, Carl Larsson's sunlit families, the long northern light of Prince Eugen and P.S. Kroyer.

Below that summit the galleries range wider, with Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso, but it is the Nordic rooms, one of the strongest gatherings of that moment anywhere, that give the place its character.