The Musée de Picardie is one of the finest regional museums in northern France, housed in a magnificent Second Empire building from the 1860s. The collections cover three main areas: Greek and Roman antiquities from the region, medieval art including an outstanding set of Grisaille paintings from the cathedral, and French paintings from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.
The painting collection is the strongest. It includes a room of pure seventeenth-century French works, a substantial nineteenth-century French section, and — unexpectedly — a good collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century work including pieces by El Greco, Fragonard, and Tiepolo. The museum also holds the largest collection of Puy d'Amiens paintings anywhere — a series of annual votive offerings made to the cathedral by the confraternities of Amiens from 1500 to 1800, giving an extraordinary record of local artistic production over three centuries.