Nantes Museum of Arts

The art museum of Nantes was raised in 1900 as a proud Beaux-Arts palace and reopened in 2017 after the British architects Stanton Williams cleaned out its old skylights and added a cube of white marble for its newest art. What it is best known for arrived earlier and by luck.

After the Louvre, no museum owns more paintings by Georges de La Tour, the 17th-century master of candlelit scenes who was half-forgotten for centuries and rediscovered only in the 1900s. His Hurdy-Gurdy Player, a blind street musician grinding out a tune, is one of the great things here.

The collection carries on through Delacroix, Courbet and Monet, and holds a surprising depth of Kandinsky, eleven works from his years teaching in Germany between the wars. The old palace and the new marble cube are joined by a 17th-century chapel the museum swallowed, now used to show contemporary installations.