Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy is the fine arts museum of Nancy in Lorraine, housed in one of the eighteenth-century pavilions on Place Stanislas, the UNESCO-listed square at the heart of the city. Founded on 16 May 1793, it is one of the oldest museums in France. It suits visitors who want European painting from the fourteenth century to today plus Nancy's Art Nouveau glass in a two-hour visit.

A 1999 wing over the old Haussonville bastion

A contemporary wing by the agency of Laurent Beaudouin, inaugurated in February 1999, roughly doubled the floor area. Excavations for it uncovered remains of the fortifications of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, including the Haussonville bastion, which visitors now walk through on the lower level. Felice Varini's wall painting Ellipse orange évidée par sept disques (2000), made on site, plays with the architecture of the new wing.

Caravaggio's Annunciation and the early Italians

The galleries run from early Italian painting through French, Flemish and Dutch works to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Caravaggio's Annunciation (about 1607 to 1610) is the best known picture, and Perugino is represented among the early Italians. Lorraine painters are well covered: Claude Gellée, known as Le Lorrain, with a Pastoral Landscape (1635), and Émile Friant with Les Amoureux (1888).

Other highlights listed by the museum include François Boucher's Aurora and Cephalus (1733), Jean-François de Troy's The Rest of Diana (1737), Édouard Manet's Autumn (1882), Delacroix's Battle of Nancy, works by Modigliani, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon's sculpture Cheval majeur. A reconstructed student room from Nancy's Cité universitaire de Monbois (1930 to 1932) shows interwar design.

The Daum glass collection

The vaulted lower spaces hold a large collection from the Daum glassworks, founded in Nancy. Its centrepiece is the Tristan and Isolde vase of 1897, made with Jacques Gruber in layered, acid-etched and engraved glass. These rooms link the museum with the Art Nouveau School of Nancy, explored further at the Musée de l'École de Nancy 2 km away, one of the city's three sister museums along with the Musée Lorrain and the Palais Poirel.