Von der Heydt Museum

Wuppertal's picture gallery sits in a building that once ran the town. It occupies the former Elberfeld town hall, a Neoclassical block from the 1840s that was turned into a museum in 1902, and it takes its name from the von der Heydts, a local banking dynasty who were as serious about collecting art as about finance.

Their taste ran to 19th-century France, and it shows. The rooms hold three landscapes by Monet, a Sisley canal scene, a Signac harbour at Saint-Tropez, and works by Pissarro, Degas and Renoir, along with three early paintings by van Gogh from before he found his full colour. Around them the collection widens into German Romantics, Expressionists and postwar art.

Elberfeld and neighbouring Barmen were merged into the city of Wuppertal in 1929, the town now best known for the overhead railway that swings above its river, and the gallery was formally given the banker family's name in 1961.