Musée National Marc Chagall

The Musée National Marc Chagall is one of the few museums in the world created for a single cycle of works by a living artist, and it was conceived with him. In the 1960s Chagall gave the French state his Biblical Message, a series of seventeen large paintings, and a museum was built on the Cimiez hillside to house them; it opened in 1973 with the artist present. The building, by the architect André Hermant, is low, white and full of natural light, set in a garden of olive trees, cypresses, lavender and agapanthus, and it was designed so the paintings could be seen in the order and the atmosphere Chagall intended. The great first room holds twelve canvases illustrating Genesis and Exodus — the Creation, Paradise, Noah's Ark, Abraham and the three angels, Jacob's dream, Moses receiving the Tablets of the Law — painted in Chagall's floating, dreamlike style, with blue, red and green fields of colour, flying figures and the animals, villages and lovers of his Russian-Jewish childhood. A smaller hexagonal room holds the five red-toned paintings of the Song of Songs, dedicated to his wife Vava, and many visitors find this the most moving space in the museum. Beyond the Biblical Message, the national collection includes hundreds of works — paintings, gouaches, drawings, washes and pastels — making it the largest public collection of Chagall in the world, shown in rotation. The building also includes an auditorium with stained-glass windows by Chagall on the theme of the Creation of the World, and a mosaic reflected in a pool in the garden. Temporary exhibitions run through the year. Visitors under 18 enter free, and adult admission is a modest fee. The museum is closed on Tuesdays, and in winter it closes for a lunch break.

Practicalities: the museum stands on Avenue du Docteur Ménard at the corner of Boulevard de Cimiez, about fifteen to twenty minutes' walk uphill from the central station or a short bus ride. From November to April it opens from 10am to 1pm and from 2:30pm to 5pm (closing at 4:30pm in March), daily except Tuesday; from May to October the afternoon session runs to 6pm. Ticket sales stop thirty minutes before closing. The museum closes on a few public holidays including Christmas Day and New Year's Day. An hour to ninety minutes is enough for most visitors; allow longer if a temporary exhibition is on.

How to see it: start in the main room and give it time; the paintings are large and full of detail, and the free audio or printed guide helps decode the stories and symbols. Then the Song of Songs room, then the auditorium windows if open, and finally the garden, which is a pleasant place to sit. Photography without flash is usually allowed in the permanent galleries. Families find Chagall surprisingly approachable: flying cows, goats playing violins and floating lovers appeal to children, and the museum often runs family workshops in school holidays.

Pairing it: the Musée Matisse is a bus ride or a twenty-minute uphill walk further into Cimiez, so the classic plan is to ride up to Matisse first, then walk down to Chagall, and continue down into the city. Both museums are closed on Tuesdays, so plan your art day for another day of the week. For the full Chagall story on the Riviera, visit his grave in the small cemetery of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he lived for nearly twenty years, and see the Fondation Maeght, which holds his work too. With MAMAC closed for renovation until 2028, Chagall and Matisse together are the core of any art day in Nice.