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Orléans set up its picture gallery in 1797, only a few years after the Revolution had emptied the region's churches and abbeys of their altarpieces. The first holdings were exactly those confiscated works, gathered by a local collector, Aignan-Thomas Desfriches, and the painter Jean Bardin, and the museum has grown on that base ever since.
What sets it apart today sits in a quiet suite of rooms upstairs: the second-largest collection of pastels in France after the Louvre, fragile 18th-century portraits in coloured chalk that are kept in low light and rotated so they do not fade. Downstairs the walls run from 15th-century Italy through the Dutch and Flemish schools, with a Velázquez head of an apostle among the Spanish pictures.
The paintings moved into their present concrete-and-glass building near the cathedral in 1984, after two centuries spread across older houses in the town.
