Museum of Grenoble

Grenoble did something no other French museum outside Paris dared. In the 1920s and 30s its curator, a former newspaper cartoonist known as Andry-Farcy, began buying living modern artists for a provincial town, bringing in Matisse, Picasso, Léger and the Surrealists while most French museums still waited for painters to be safely dead.

That gamble sits on top of a much older collection. The museum, founded in 1798, is among the first in France, and its earlier rooms are strong in 17th-century painting, with Georges de La Tour, Philippe de Champaigne, Rubens and a great Zurbarán. The modern galleries hold the reward of Andry-Farcy's boldness, among them Matisse's Interior with Aubergines.

In 1994 the whole collection moved into a long low building on the bank of the Isère, with the wall of the Alps rising directly behind it.