Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

One of the largest art museums in France outside Paris, this grand palace holds a wide-ranging collection from medieval sculpture to nineteenth-century painting. Its galleries display works by Flemish, Dutch, French, and Italian masters, alongside a celebrated set of eighteenth-century relief maps of fortified northern towns. The imposing late-nineteenth-century building has skylit halls and a monumental staircase. A basement gallery reveals scale models of frontier cities once used for military planning.