Museum of John Paul II Collection

This Warsaw museum owes its existence to a single gift. In 1987 a Polish emigre couple, Janina and Zbigniew Carroll-Porczynski, who had made their life and money in Britain, donated some 400 European paintings and sculptures to the Catholic Archdiocese of Warsaw, and the collection was named in honour of the Polish pope, John Paul the Second. It opened in a monumental former bank building on Bank Square.

The collection is arranged around big names, with works shown under attributions to painters from Titian and Rembrandt to Renoir and Van Gogh. Some of those attributions have been debated by scholars over the years, and a few reassessed, with one small Van Gogh landscape confirmed as genuine only recently.

The setting is part of the appeal, the grand columned halls of a 1930s bank, still marble and echoing, now hung with pictures a Polish couple abroad spent a lifetime assembling to give back to their home country.