The story
The fine-arts museum in Cherbourg, on the tip of the Cotentin peninsula, is named for Thomas Henry, an art expert who in the 1830s gave his home town a large collection of old master paintings, including a small panel by Fra Angelico of the conversion of Saint Augustine.
Its deepest local claim, though, is Jean-François Millet. Millet was born in a village just up the coast, and Cherbourg's art teachers spotted his talent and helped send him to Paris. The museum holds the second largest collection of his work in France after the Orsay, keeping his early portraits and studies, the pictures from before he became the painter of peasants at their labour.
The rest reaches from Italian and Flemish primitives through Poussin and Chardin to the 19th century, a bigger and older collection than a town of this size would usually keep.
