Musée Fabre

The museum takes its name from François-Xavier Fabre, a painter from Montpellier who trained in Paris, spent years in Italy, and came home late in life with the art he had gathered along the way. In 1825 he offered it to his native city, and the museum opened three years later.

What lifts it above a local gallery is a later gift, from Alfred Bruyas, a Montpellier collector who backed living painters when few others would. He befriended Gustave Courbet and bought his work, and the museum now holds one of the largest groups of Courbet anywhere, including "The Meeting," in which the artist paints himself being greeted on a dusty road by Bruyas, his patron. The collection runs from old masters to Frédéric Bazille, an early Impressionist and another son of Montpellier.