THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

The Arras Museum of Fine Arts, which occupies a large section of the Saint-Vaast Abbey, possesses some of the most remarkable collections held in provincial museums: rooms displaying seventeenth century paintings by the French School and old Low Countries masters (among them Champaigne, Vignon, Lebrun, Largillière and Rubens) and a set of large-scale French religious seventeenth paintings, unique in France, including seven “Mays” from NotreDame Cathedral in Paris. The museum also holds the finest testimonies of Arras’s history: Medieval sculptures, eighteenth-century Arras porcelains, landscape paintings by the Arras School (among them Corot, Dutilleux and Desavary) and a unique example of the high-warp tapestries (Arrazi) that made the town’s reputation in the fifteenth century.