Musée des Beaux-Arts

Rouen's fine-arts museum is one of the strongest provincial collections in France. The Italian Renaissance galleries, the 17th-century Caravaggio, and a Velázquez are the headline old masters; the Impressionist room — Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro — is the unmissable reason most visitors come.

The museum also collects local artists, including a thoughtful gallery devoted to Théodore Géricault, who was born in Rouen. The building is 19th-century neoclassical and the rooms are quiet even on weekends. Allow two hours.

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A story
The museum's Impressionist room holds one of Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings — the painter's gift to his home region — and a Caravaggio that turned up by accident in a parish church near the city in the 1950s and was identified by the museum's curators as one of fewer than seventy paintings firmly attributed to him.