Villa Vauban

You're standing in front of Villa Vauban, the City of Luxembourg's art museum, in a villa of 1873 set inside Édouard André's park. It takes its name from Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, the French engineer who rebuilt the fortress in the 1680s: one of his forts stood exactly here, and a stretch of its wall is still in the museum's basement. When the fortifications came down, the ground was free, and Gabriel Mayer, an Alsatian glove manufacturer, had the city architect Jean-François Eydt build him this house on it.

The house has had an unusual run of tenants. A steel family, the de Gargans, bought it in 1874. The Nazis seized it in the war and ran their agriculture ministry from it. The city bought it at auction in 1949 to house its art — and then lent it to Europe: from 1952 to 1959 the Court of Justice of the new Coal and Steel Community sat here, the ancestor of the court now on Kirchberg. It became the museum in 1959, and served one more turn as a residence from 1991 to 1995, when Grand Duke Jean lived here while his palace was being restored. The copper-clad extension, pierced like lace, was added in 2010.

Inside, the collection comes from three bequests to the city: the Paris banker Jean-Pierre Pescatore's seventeenth-century Dutch paintings — Jan Steen, Gerrit Dou — and his French contemporaries; the nineteenth-century French art of Leo Lippmann, with Delacroix among them; and the pharmacist Jodoc Hochhertz's eighteenth-century portraits and still lifes. It's a small, quiet museum, which is part of its appeal: you can walk the whole thing in an hour without feeling rushed, and the park outside is a good place to sit down afterwards.