Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon

The museum's own description of itself as the largest fine-arts museum in France outside the Louvre is not marketing shorthand; on the evidence gathered here it holds up room by room. The paintings department carries the collection's reputation, with an unbroken sweep from fourteenth-century Italian and Flemish primitives through the great seventeenth-century schools - Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, Guercino - into the nineteenth-century Lyon school, French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and on to Matisse, Picasso and Chagall in the twentieth. The antiquities department is unusually strong in Egyptian material for a museum outside Paris, built around excavated architecture from Medamoud rather than purchased fragments alone, and the coin cabinet's roughly 50,000 pieces make it the second such collection in the country. Depth this consistent across five separate departments, inside a single building that is itself a listed seventeenth-century monument, is what specialists mean when they rank this collection above every other French museum bar one.

The building the museum occupies was not designed to hold paintings. It began as the abbey of Saint-Pierre-les-Nonnains, a Benedictine convent recorded from around the sixth century, whose church and outbuildings stood inside their own walled precinct at the edge of what is now place des Terreaux. In 1659, under Louis XIV, the abbess Anne de Chaulnes secured the funds to rebuild the whole complex, and the Avignon architects known as Royers de la Valfeniere designed a large four-winged building around a central cloister, modelled on Italian precedent and completed in 1685. Up to sixty Benedictine nuns lived there under an abbess usually drawn from the high nobility, supported partly by rents from shops built into the ground floor, until thirty-two remaining sisters were expelled at the Revolution in 1792. The building survived only because the city council, needing somewhere to store confiscated paintings, medals, bronzes and other art works seized from churches and emigre households, designated it a repository that same year - a decision that saved it from sale or demolition and set it on the path to becoming a museum. The formal founding act came on 14 Fructidor Year IX by the revolutionary calendar, in 1801: the Chaptal decree, issued by the interior minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal, which established museums of painting in fifteen provincial French cities at once. Lyon's share of that programme opened to the public in 1803, when the Musee du Louvre began sending paintings to fill the new institution's walls.

The nineteenth century turned the former abbey into a public monument in its own right. From 1834 the architect Rene Dardel reworked the interior, producing a decorative scheme whose one surviving example is the room now used as the coin and medal cabinet, formerly a hall of modern marbles. At mid-century, new state deposits and the rise of the Lyon school of painting - a distinct local nineteenth-century movement the museum still collects in depth - filled out the galleries considerably. The most consequential rebuilding came under Abraham Hirsch, appointed architect from 1875, who restructured the south wing to house Paul Chenavard's monumental preparatory drawings for a never-completed Pantheon decoration in Paris, and who in 1881 commissioned the Lyon-born painter Puvis de Chavannes to decorate the grand staircase with an allegorical mural, Le Bois sacre cher aux arts et aux muses, still in place today. Through the early twentieth century, several institutions that had shared the building since the Revolution moved out: the natural history museum left in 1914, the city's own historical holdings transferred to the new Musee de Gadagne in 1921, and the school of fine arts departed in 1935, each departure freeing more of the abbey for the art collections alone. The most recent transformation ran from 1990 to 1998, when the curator Philippe Durey and the architects Philippe-Charles Dubois and Jean-Michel Wilmotte carried out a complete restructuring in five phases, timed so the museum never had to close entirely. The result, unchanged in its essentials since, is a building of roughly 14,500 square metres in total, with the public galleries themselves covering about 7,000 square metres across seventy rooms - large enough that the museum is routinely described as the biggest fine-arts museum in France after the Louvre.

What fills those seventy rooms is organised into five curatorial departments, a structure the museum states plainly on its own site: antiquities, objets d'art, coins and medals, sculpture, and paintings, the last of which it calls its own principal collection. Between them the departments hold more than 8,000 antiquities, roughly 3,000 objets d'art, close to 50,000 coins and medals, about 3,000 paintings, some 15,000 works on paper and around 1,000 sculptures - a total the museum itself frames as five thousand years of art and history under a single roof. The antiquities rooms move from pharaonic Egypt and the Near East through Greece to Roman Italy; the objets d'art rooms cover fourteen centuries of ivory, goldwork, enamel, glass and furniture, including a notable holding of Islamic ceramics and Hector Guimard's Art Nouveau bedroom suite; the coin cabinet is the second-largest numismatic collection in the country after the Bibliotheque nationale's own in Paris; and the sculpture rooms run from Romanesque church carving to Rodin, Bourdelle and Canova. All of it sits inside a building whose own fabric - the baroque refectory and staircase decorated by Thomas Blanchet in the 1670s and 1680s, the Romanesque and Gothic remains of the deconsecrated abbey church, the arcaded cloister itself - is as much a part of the visit as anything hung on its walls.

The paintings galleries, spread across the second floor, are where the museum's international reputation mostly rests. The founding 1803 gift from the Louvre - which included Rubens's Adoration of the Magi, Guercino's Circumcision and Philippe de Champaigne's Invention of the Relics of Saint Gervase and Saint Protais - set a precedent of depth in seventeenth-century European painting that later acquisitions and further state deposits kept building on, so that Rembrandt, Poussin, Perugino, Veronese and Tintoretto all hang here alongside the Rubens. The nineteenth-century rooms track the rise of the local Lyon school of flower and figure painting through Antoine Berjon and others, run into Romanticism with Delacroix and Gericault, and arrive at Impressionism and its aftermath with Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Degas and Courbet, before a Post-Impressionist run that includes Van Gogh's Peasant Woman with a Green Shawl and Gauguin's Tahiti-period Nave Nave Mahana. The twentieth-century rooms carry the collection forward again, with paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Delaunay, Foujita and Leger extending the department into the art of the last hundred years. It is this unbroken run, from a fourteenth-century primitive to a twentieth-century modern master without a serious gap along the way, that specialists cite when they call the paintings department the museum's strongest single holding, and the reason its own five-department, seventy-room total is usually shortened in the press to one line: the largest museum in France after the Louvre.

The museum's cloister garden is the clearest surviving trace of the building's life before it held any of this. Laid out inside the seventeenth-century cloister where Benedictine nuns once walked, it was opened to the public after the Revolution, first used to display fragments of Roman inscriptions under its arcades, then reworked from 1832 with a stone balustrade and plaster casts of the Parthenon frieze mounted above the arches, and reworked again by Hirsch between 1879 and 1883 with painted vault decoration by Louis Bardey. What visitors walk through today is effectively an open-air annex of the sculpture department: works by Rodin, Bourdelle, Chinard and a dozen lesser-known nineteenth-century sculptors stand among lime and birch trees around a circular fountain topped with an antique sarcophagus, a setting reviewers and visitors alike single out as the single best place in the building to sit down. It is a fitting close for a museum built almost entirely out of things given, deposited or transferred into it rather than commissioned for it - the abbey itself handed over rather than sold, the founding paintings sent down from the Louvre, the Egyptian temple gate excavated and shipped from Medamoud. Not every transfer in that history is settled. Francois Boucher's Light of the World, seized during the Second World War and deposited here by the Louvre in 1955 pending restitution, still carries its M.N.R. inventory number rather than an ordinary one: eighty years on, the museum's own label states plainly that it is holding the painting for legitimate owners who have not yet been found, a small, exact reminder that a collection this large was not assembled by acquisition alone.

Visitors consistently describe the museum as bigger and richer than its city-break reputation suggests, repeatedly invoking its billing as the largest fine-art collection in France outside the Louvre. The nineteenth-century and Impressionist rooms draw the most praise, alongside the quiet, sculpture-filled cloister garden used as a mid-visit break from the galleries. Recurring complaints centre on partial gallery closures on any given day, inconsistent labelling and lighting in some rooms, and signage that leans heavily on French with limited English translation.