Much fanfare has greeted the fact that when the new Eurostar terminal opens at St Pancras, in three days’ time, it will bring Paris even closer to London. What has been rather overlooked is that the grand old city of Lille will be brought practically next-door by the new route – just one hour and twenty minutes away, to be precise, the merest of commuter hops. As a result, the people of England might be said to have suddenly acquired a new and rather grand local museum. Its name is the Palais des Beaux-Arts; it occupies an imposing fin-de-siecle building, complete with pillars and pediments and vast sloping mansard roofs, in the heart of the old town; and it contains one of the best collections of painting and sculpture in all of France . To borrow that discreet phrase favoured by the green Michelin guides, this is a museum that “vaut la visite”. In fact for a person interested in art who might also have a penchant for beer and exceptionally heavy food – cheese pies, tripe sausage, beef carbonnade, mussels with cream, and chips with more or less everything – Lille is just about the ideal daytripper’s destination.

The city has a vividly multicultural past. Over the centuries it has been ruled by the Normans and the Spanish, has been part of the great Burgundian empire and was once the capital of Flanders . All this is reflected in the holdings of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, which, as well as containing numerous masterpieces of French art, also has fine collections of Dutch and Flemish painting, some wonderful Spanish pictures, and one of the rarest and most brilliant works of the early Florentine Renaissance (more of which later).

Although its collections range from the Middle Ages to the...

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