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Ninety seconds on Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
As of October 2026, the museum opens from 10am to 6pm, except on Fridays, when it opens at 10.30am. The ticket desks close at 5.30pm and the rooms start to clear at 5.50pm. On 24 and 31 December it shuts at 5pm.
No. The museum is closed every Tuesday and on French bank holidays, among them 1 January, Easter Monday, 1 and 8 May, 14 July, 15 August, 1 and 11 November and 25 December.
No. Online ticketing is currently unavailable because of a technical issue, so tickets are bought on site at the museum on the day of the visit.
Visitors spend 2 hours 45 minutes on average. The collections run across three floors, from antiquities to modern art, and one to three temporary exhibitions are shown each year.
Metro lines A and C both stop at Hôtel de Ville - Louis Pradel, beside the museum. The entrance is at 17 place des Terreaux, on the square in front of the building.
Yes. The museum audioguide comes with the admission ticket, and free audio tours of the collections in English, Italian and Chinese can also be downloaded online before a visit.
France's most important museum after the Louvre fills a seventeenth-century abbey, so on the way to the paintings you pass through its cloister, its chapel and its grand stairs.
Before it was a museum, the building was a royal abbey, laid out in the Italian manner as four wings around a cloister. Parts of the abbey survive in the rooms you walk through. Thomas Blanchet's refectory and grand staircase are among the finest Baroque work in Lyon.
The abbey's private prayer chapel, with its pink marble columns, now holds the Greek vases.
Puvis de Chavannes, a Lyon painter, decorated the monumental stairs with The Sacred Wood, Dear to Art and the Muses. Upstairs, the second floor carries the great names: Rubens, Fragonard, Géricault, Delacroix, Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse.
Look for Perugino's Ascension of Christ and for The Adoration of the Magi by Rubens. The south wing shows Chenavard's large preparatory drawings for the Pantheon in Paris.
Away from the paintings, decorative arts bring Hector Guimard's Art Nouveau bedroom, Islamic art and Far Eastern ceramics. In the cloister garden, casts of Parthenon friezes and of the Nereids from Xanthos sit above the arcades. Lime trees, birches and a giant oak shade the paths around a circular fountain set with an ancient sarcophagus.
Ask at the desk for the free booklet, which leads you through the galleries on one theme: Masterpieces, Nature, or the colour black. Put coats and bags in the self-service lockers in the cloister before you go in.
For a first visit, follow the museum's own must-sees in order. Begin in the garden, then take in the coins and medals room and the chapel.
Climb the Puvis de Chavannes staircase to the gallery of large-format paintings, and end in the Flowers gallery.
Plan a break at the tearoom-restaurant, whose terrace overlooks the garden and its sculptures. It serves from 10am to 5.45pm, with tables outside in summer, and like the museum it is closed on Tuesdays.
The traboules of the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse come down to the Terreaux, so you can walk down through them and finish here, on the square.
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