Musée des Beaux-Arts de Carcassonne

Carcassonne is known for its great double-walled medieval fortress, and most visitors never look past it. The town's fine-arts museum sits down in the lower city, in the Présidial, the old royal court building it moved into at the end of the 19th century. Its roots go back to 1836, and it is a quiet provincial collection worth the detour.

Its rooms hold French and Flemish painting from the 17th to the 19th centuries, including Dutch still lifes, works by Chardin, and a group of paintings by Jacques Gamelin, a Baroque artist born in Carcassonne. There is also a room of Orientalist canvases and 19th-century French landscapes, the kind of collection built up steadily from state deposits and local bequests, with no single famous gift at its origin.