Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec

Listen for a moment. The traffic of Grande Allée fades behind you, and the air carries cut grass and wind from the river. Under your feet the paths of a great park slope away toward the cliffs above the Saint Lawrence. Ahead, glass and grey stone catch the light at different angles. This is the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the national museum of fine arts for the province, and it sits inside one of the most historic landscapes in North America.

The ground here matters. You are standing in Battlefields Park, the green expanse that holds the Plains of Abraham. In 1759, British and French armies fought a short and decisive battle on these fields. That battle helped decide that this territory would pass from French to British rule. Today joggers, families and dog walkers cross the same lawns. The museum chose to live here, in the middle of that memory, and the setting shapes how you meet the art inside.

The museum is not one building. It is a family of pavilions, each from a different era, joined together like rooms added to an old house over many decades. Some are classical stone. One was once a prison. The newest is a bold stack of glass boxes. Walking between them is part of the visit. You move through almost a century of ideas about what a museum should look like, and what a public building owes the city around it.

The oldest exhibition building is the Gérard-Morisset pavilion, with its formal stone front and classical columns. It opened in 1933 as the province's first museum. Its style is calm, symmetrical and a little solemn — the kind of architecture that told visitors, in that era, that art was serious business. It was named for Gérard Morisset, a historian and curator who spent his life recording the churches, silverwork and craft traditions of Quebec. His work helped the province see its own heritage as worthy of a museum.

Now for the first surprise. The Charles Baillairgé pavilion, the other stone building in the complex, was built in the nineteenth century as the city's prison. For decades, inmates lived behind these thick walls. When the museum took over the building and converted it, the designers did not erase that past. A section of the original cell block has been kept. You can still walk past narrow cells, and in places you can see marks left by people who were held here long ago.

There is something quietly powerful in that choice. A building made to confine people now exists to open up the imagination. Take a moment in that preserved corridor if you find it. Notice how small the spaces are, how heavy the doors feel, how little light enters. Then step back into the bright galleries. The contrast says more about change in this city than any label could. The architect it is named for, Charles Baillairgé, was a prominent figure in nineteenth-century Quebec City.

The newest building faces Grande Allée, one of the city's main avenues. This is the Pierre Lassonde pavilion, opened in 2016 and designed by the international firm OMA, working with Quebec architects. Look up at it from the street. Three glass volumes are stacked on top of each other. Each one is smaller than the one below, and each one reaches out further, as if the building is stepping forward toward the park. The upper floors seem to hang in the air above you.

Here is the second surprise. The Lassonde pavilion does not connect to the older buildings above ground. To reach the historic pavilions, you go down. A long underground passage runs beneath the park lawn, so the green space above stays open and unbroken. It is a clever answer to an old problem: how to grow a museum without swallowing the landscape it belongs to. Inside the new pavilion, a broad staircase rises through the building, and the glass walls frame views of the city and the trees.

So what is on the walls? The museum's mission is the art of Quebec, and the collection covers roughly four centuries. You can find religious sculpture and silverwork from the days of New France, when Quebec was a French colony. You can find nineteenth-century landscapes and scenes of winter life, including work by Cornelius Krieghoff, who painted sleighs, snow and taverns with a storyteller's eye. Together they show how artists here learned to paint their own light, their own cold, their own people.

The twentieth century is where the collection becomes especially strong. In the 1940s, a group of Montreal artists called the Automatistes broke with tradition. Their name comes from the idea of painting automatically, letting the hand move without planning. Paul-Émile Borduas led the group, and in 1948 they signed a manifesto called Refus global, or Total Refusal. It challenged the church and the conservative society of the time. Many historians see it as an early sign of the great changes that later reshaped Quebec.

One young member of that circle became the province's best-known painter: Jean-Paul Riopelle. The museum holds a large body of his work. Look for his thick, crusted surfaces, where paint is pressed on with a palette knife until it forms ridges and tiles of colour. His late work, L'Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg, is a long, frieze-like sequence of panels filled with the shapes of birds, especially geese, sprayed and stencilled in dark tones. Walk the length of it slowly, and the images begin to move.

Do not leave without visiting the Inuit art. The museum holds an important collection of works by Inuit artists from the North, much of it carved in stone. These are sculptures of hunters, mothers carrying children, bears, birds and spirits. Many are small enough to hold in two hands, yet they feel heavy with weight and presence. The polished dark stone, the smooth curves and the rough unfinished bases sit side by side, and they show a very different relationship between artist, material and land.

When you are finished, step back outside and let your eyes adjust to the daylight. Behind you stand the glass boxes of the new pavilion, the stone columns of 1933, and the old prison walls. In front of you the park rolls toward the river, where soldiers once lined up and where children now run. Take a slow walk across the grass. Look back once more at the buildings — and notice how the art, the history and the landscape all share the same ground.