Just south of the Grande-Place is place Rihour
, a largely modern square with an old palace that now houses the
tourist office, hidden behind an ugly war monument of gigantic
proportions. Close by, the busiest shopping street, rue de Béthune , leads into place de Béthune, which has some excellent cafés, and beyond to the Musée des Beaux-Arts
on place de la République (Mon 2-6pm, Wed-Sun 10am-6pm, Fri till 7pm;
€4.57). The recent redesign is rather disappointing - too sleek and
spacious to create any coherence to the collection - but the museum
does contain some important works. Flemish painters form the core of
the collection, from "primitives" like Dirck Bouts, through the
northern Renaissance to Ruisdael, de Hooch and the seventeenth-century
schools. Other works include Goya's interpretation of youth and old
age, Les Jeunes et Les Vieilles , and a scattering of
Impressionists, including Monet and Renoir. Ceramics are well
represented in one of the two rooms on the ground floor; the other room
displays a small collection of nineteenth-century sculpture.
A couple of blocks to the south of the museum, on rue de Fleurus, is Maison Coilliot
, a ceramics shop and one of the few houses built by Hector Guimard,
who made his name designing the Art Nouveau entrances to the Paris
métro. Built at the height of the Art Nouveau movement, it's as
striking today as it obviously was to the conservative burghers of
Lille (there are no other such buildings in Lille), but it also
displays the somewhat muddled eclecticism of the style, coming over as
half brick-faced mansion, half timber-framed cottage. East of the
museum, near the triumphal arch of Porte de Paris , the city's Hôtel de Ville
is also worth a quick look, executed in a bizarre, Flemish Art Deco
style, with a tall belfry and viewing platform (closed at the time of
writing - check for details with the tourist office).
Copyright Rough Guides Ltd as trustee for its authors. Published by Rough Guides.
All rights reserved.The Rough Guides name is a trademark of Rough Guides Ltd.
