The story
Marseille's oldest museum sits in one wing of the Palais Longchamp, a grand nineteenth-century monument built to celebrate the arrival of fresh water in the city, its central colonnade framing a great fountain and cascade. The museum opened in 1804, one of the first set up across France under Napoleon.
Its collection leans local and southern. Pride of place goes to Pierre Puget, the seventeenth-century Marseille sculptor and painter whose muscular Baroque work made him the city's own old master. Around him hang Provençal painters, French and Italian Baroque, and the biting caricatures of Honoré Daumier, who was born in Marseille.
The building is as much the draw as the pictures, and after the galleries visitors spill out onto the terraces of the Longchamp to look back at the fountain the whole palace was built to crown.
