Musée des Beaux-Arts de Morlaix

In the autumn of 1886 Claude Monet spent more than two months on Belle-Île, an island off the south coast of Brittany, painting the Atlantic in every kind of weather. One picture from that stay, a view of rain driving across the island, belongs to the museum in Morlaix. On Belle-Île Monet also met John Peter Russell, an Australian painter who had made his home there, and in 1927 the Morlaix museum acquired 19 paintings and four drawings by Russell.

The museum opened in 1889 in the Jacobins, a former Dominican convent in the town centre that passed to public hands after the French Revolution. Besides the Monet it owns a portrait of Madame Andler by Gustave Courbet, a squall at sea by Eugène Boudin, and a large collection of Breton folk art. The convent has been closed for a long renovation, so for now part of the collection is shown at the Espace des arts in the town's old tobacco factory, and at the Maison à Pondalez, a 16th-century merchant's house whose tall central hall is wrapped around a carved wooden staircase.