The story
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, founded in 1836 in a former court building, 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 rather than a single famous gift.
