The story
The museum in Douai, in French Flanders, sits inside a former charterhouse, the walled home of Carthusian monks who lived in silence and solitude. After the Revolution swept the order away, the town's art collection eventually moved in, and paintings now hang where monks once kept to their cells.
The pride of the collection was made by a local man. Around 1512 Jean Bellegambe, born in Douai and nicknamed the master of colours, painted a great folding altarpiece for the nearby abbey of Anchin, nine panels centred on the Trinity. It is displayed in the monks' former refectory, its deep blues and reds built up in glazes.
The rest reaches through Flemish, Dutch and Italian painting gathered largely from churches and abbeys emptied in the 1790s, among them a Veronese and works by the Bruegel family.
