Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux

Bordeaux set up its fine-arts museum in 1801, one of a batch of provincial galleries Napoleon's government created by shipping crates of confiscated paintings out to the regions. It settled into two garden wings behind the Palais Rohan, the archbishop's palace that is now the city hall.

The walls run from the 15th century to the 20th, with a Titian, Rubens and a famous Delacroix, his Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, a woman in white standing over the rubble of a Greek town the Ottomans had crushed while Europe watched.

Bordeaux also honours its own. Odilon Redon, who drew dreams and floating eyes, was born here, as were Albert Marquet, painter of quiet ports and rivers, and Andre Lhote, a theorist of Cubism. Their home-town rooms give the museum a thread the imported old masters cannot.