Musée d'Arts de Nantes (Nantes Museum of Fine Arts)

The Musée d'Arts de Nantes is the fine arts museum of Nantes in western France, at 10 rue Georges Clemenceau between the cathedral and the Jardin des Plantes. Its roughly 13,000 works span the 13th century to today, shown across a 1900 palace, a 17th-century chapel and a contemporary wing. It suits art lovers spending a day in Nantes, and its Thursday late opening makes an easy evening visit.

A decree of 31 August 1801 created it as one of fifteen provincial museums founded under the Consulate to share out works gathered during the Revolution. In 1810 the city bought the collection of the Cacault brothers, which added more than a thousand paintings. The collection later moved into a purpose-built palace by the Nantes architect Clément-Marie Josso, opened in 1900, with galleries around a glass-roofed courtyard reached by a double staircase.

The museum closed in December 2011 for expansion. Groundwater problems delayed the work, and it reopened on 23 June 2017 under its present name.

Three buildings, one route

The Palais holds the historic collections. The 17th-century Chapelle de l'Oratoire hosts exhibitions and installations. The Cube, a contemporary building by the British firm Stanton Williams, chosen in 2009, is given over to contemporary art.

About 900 works are on show. Highlights include three paintings by Georges de La Tour, Ingres's portrait of Madame de Senonnes, Courbet's The Wheat Sifters and Rodin's The Three Shades. Monet and Delacroix hang in the 19th-century rooms, and the modern collection includes Picasso and eleven paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, an unusual holding for a French regional museum.