Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie de Besançon

Besançon can claim the oldest public museum in France, older than the Louvre by almost a century. In 1694 a local abbot, Jean-Baptiste Boisot, left his art and books to the town on the condition that they be opened to the public two days a week, and that arrangement makes this the first real public museum the country had.

The collection grew far beyond him. Its cabinet of drawings runs to thousands of sheets, with work by Dürer, Rembrandt and Delacroix, and its paintings take in Bellini, Titian, Rubens, Goya and Fragonard, alongside a good deal of Gallo-Roman archaeology dug from the region.

All of it hangs inside a striking interior: in 1970 a pupil of Le Corbusier ran raw concrete ramps up through the old covered market that houses the museum, and a refit finished in 2018 opened the space to daylight while keeping that bold grey structure.