Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Rouen's fine-arts museum was created in 1801, when Napoleon ordered a set of major provincial museums stocked with paintings gathered up during the Revolution. It grew into one of the richest collections in France outside Paris, housed since the 1880s in a grand purpose-built palace by the local architect Louis Sauvageot.

Its single greatest picture is a Caravaggio, the Flagellation of Christ, painted around 1607 after he fled Rome for Naples with a death sentence over his head, the torso lit hard against near-black shadow in his late manner.

Rouen is also Monet's cathedral town, where he set up across the square to paint the west front through the changing light of the day, and the museum holds a strong body of Impressionist work, with Sisley, Pissarro and Monet himself.