Musée des Augustins

The Musée des Augustins in Toulouse has been a museum since 1795, one of the oldest in France, opened just after the Revolution seized the Augustinian friary it still occupies. The Gothic convent itself, with its cloister and vaulted halls, is half the reason to go.

The city was a great centre of Romanesque art, and when its old churches were rebuilt or pulled down their carved capitals were rescued and brought here. The result is one of the richest collections of Romanesque sculpture in France, rooms of stone columns topped with carved beasts and Bible scenes, saved from the cloisters of Saint-Sernin and other Toulouse churches. A gently smiling limestone Virgin, the Notre-Dame de Grasse of around 1470, is a favourite.

Upstairs the painting galleries run from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, hung close in a long red-walled hall built into the old convent church.