Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Stand for a moment on the Place de la République and listen. Trams hum, footsteps cross the paving, and pigeons lift from the lawns in front of you. Across the square rises a long, pale stone palace. Its facade is busy with sculpted figures, carved garlands and tall arched windows. It looks like a building made to impress, and it was. This is the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, the city's great museum of fine art.

Many French visitors will tell you this is one of the largest art museums in France, often ranked just behind the Louvre. That surprises people who arrive expecting a modest regional gallery. The collection began in the early nineteenth century, in the Napoleonic era. At that time the French state sent paintings out to museums in major provincial cities, and Lille received its share. Over the following decades, gifts and purchases turned that first group of pictures into something much larger.

The building came later. The palace you are looking at went up at the end of the nineteenth century, in the confident style of the Belle Époque. That was a period of prosperity in France before the First World War. Lille was rich then. Its textile mills and factories made the city one of the industrial centres of the country. A grand art palace was a public statement. It said that this northern city of work and trade also valued beauty and learning.

Look at the facade again. Notice how it is organised in a strict, symmetrical rhythm. A central entrance sits between two long wings, with heavy stonework at the base and lighter, more decorative detail higher up. This kind of design comes from the French academic tradition, which looked back to classical Greece and Rome. On the square opposite stands the Préfecture, a government building of the same period. Together they frame the square like two partners facing each other.

Now step inside, and the mood changes. In the 1990s the museum went through a major renovation. The architects kept the old palace, but they opened it up with light. The central atrium is wide and bright, with a pale stone floor that carries the sound of voices up toward the ceiling. Here is the first detail most visitors miss. Behind the atrium stands a modern glass building. Its surface works almost like a mirror and shows the old facade back to itself.

That reflection is deliberate. It lets the nineteenth century and the late twentieth century look at each other across the courtyard. Stand in the atrium and turn slowly. You will see sculpture placed around the open space, white figures against warm stone. On busy days the atrium fills with families, school groups and students sketching in notebooks. On quiet mornings it feels more like a covered town square. Either way, it is a good place to pause and plan your route.

The painting galleries upstairs hold a long sweep of European art. Flemish painting is especially strong here, and that makes sense. Lille sits very close to Belgium, and for centuries this region shared its culture, trade and rulers with Flanders. Look for the work of Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish master of the seventeenth century. His Descent from the Cross was originally made for the Capuchin friars of Lille. The body of Christ falls in a heavy diagonal, supported by many hands.

Now for the second surprise. Among the Spanish paintings hang two works by Francisco de Goya, the Spanish court painter who later turned a sharp eye on society. One shows young women, fresh and bright. The other shows old women, painted with a harsh and almost mocking honesty, while a figure of Time stands behind them. The two canvases hang as a pair. Look at one, then the other. The contrast between youth and age is the point, and it is not gentle.

French painting fills many rooms as well. One large canvas by Gustave Courbet, the nineteenth-century realist, shows a group of men after a meal in his home town of Ornans. Realism, in this sense, meant painting ordinary people at the scale once reserved for kings and saints. The room is dark, the men are tired, and someone plays a violin. There is also work by Eugène Delacroix, the leading French Romantic painter, whose colour and drama make a strong contrast with Courbet's quiet scene.

The museum also holds a remarkable collection of drawings. A large part of it came from Jean-Baptiste Wicar, an artist born in Lille who spent much of his life in Italy. He collected drawings by Italian Renaissance masters, including Raphael, and left them to his home city. Drawings are fragile and sensitive to light, so they are not always on display. If you do see some, lean in close. A single quick line can show how a great artist was thinking.

Now go down to the lower level for one of the strangest rooms in the building. Here you will find large relief models of fortified towns. They are like giant three-dimensional maps, with tiny houses, churches, fields and star-shaped walls. They were made for the French crown in the age of Louis XIV, when northern France was a land of sieges and shifting borders. Generals used them to study defences. Today children press their faces close to the glass, looking for tiny streets.

The lower level also holds older treasures from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Among them is a small marble relief by Donatello, the Florentine sculptor of the fifteenth century. It shows the feast of King Herod, and it plays with perspective so the shallow stone seems to open into deep rooms. Nearby you will find ceramics, metalwork and religious objects. This part of the museum is often quieter than the painting galleries, and the dim light suits the old materials.

When you leave, take a few minutes to walk around the outside of the palace. From the side streets you can see how the old building and the new glass block meet. The square in front is a meeting place for the city, close to the metro and the shopping streets of central Lille. In early September the city holds its huge Braderie, a street market and flea market, and these streets fill with stalls and crowds.

Before you go, stand once more on the square and look back. Notice the carved stone, the tall windows, and perhaps your own reflection in a glass door. Behind those walls hang centuries of faces, saints, soldiers and ordinary people at their tables. Out here, the trams still pass and the pigeons still land on the grass. Lille built this palace to hold its treasures. As you walk on, you carry a little of what you saw inside with you.