Musée de la Chartreuse de Douai

This fine arts museum occupies a former Carthusian monastery, its galleries arranged around cloisters and a chapel in a northern town scarred by both world wars. The collection is strong in Flemish and Dutch painting, reflecting the region's historic ties to the Low Countries. Renaissance altarpieces and French nineteenth-century works fill the upper rooms. A distinctive detail is the polyptych by the Antwerp painter Bellegambe, a local master whose luminous panels form the heart of the collection.