National Museum Cardiff

Wales is not the first place you would look for Monet and Van Gogh, which is what makes the picture rooms in Cardiff such a surprise. They were largely the gift of two sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, granddaughters of a Welsh coal and railway magnate, who from around 1908 became some of the first collectors in Britain to buy French Impressionism.

In 1920 Gwendoline paid a little over 2,000 pounds each for a Cézanne still life and for Van Gogh's Rain at Auvers, a grey downpour of slashing diagonal strokes painted in the last weeks of his life. Renoir's La Parisienne, the woman in brilliant blue, hangs nearby, along with Monet's Rouen Cathedral and several of his views of Venice, and a bronze cast of Rodin's The Kiss.

The sisters left the whole collection, some 260 works, to the national museum in 1951 and 1963. Those Impressionist rooms now sit under the same roof as the museum's natural-history galleries, dinosaurs and all.