Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans

The Fine Arts Museum occupies a purpose-built building near the cathedral and holds a collection strong in French painting from the 16th to 19th centuries, with particularly good rooms devoted to Dutch and Flemish works. The collection of pastels — portraits, mainly, by 18th-century French artists — is genuinely rare and worth seeking out.

The museum is large enough to spend two hours in without rushing, and the permanent collection is well displayed with clear labelling in French and English. There is usually a temporary exhibition alongside the permanent galleries. The building itself has good natural light in the upper floors, and the sculpture terrace has a view over the cathedral.

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A story
The museum holds one of the finest collections of French pastel portraits outside Paris, most of them dating from the 18th century. Pastels were the fashionable medium of the rococo era — portable, quick, and capable of capturing the translucency of skin in a way oil paint then could not — and Orléans's collection gives a remarkable picture of aristocratic France before the Revolution.