The Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne has been described by renowned art historian Pierre Rosenberg as housing “the most beautiful collection between Paris and Madrid”. Known as the ‘Little Louvre’, it reopened at the end of 2025 after a fourteen-year expansion and renovation costing €35 million.

Founded in 1891, the museum was named after the two painters, Léon Bonnat and Paul César Helleu, whose bequests of their works and collections between 1922 and 2011 laid the foundation for the museum, which is now home to around 7,000 works, spanning from Antiquity to the twentieth century. The museum’s graphic arts collection is one of the best in the world with more than 3,500 works on paper by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ingres, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Paolo Veronese.

Maître de Bonnat ‘Saint Martin’ (c.1475)

El Greco ‘Presumed Portrait of the Duke of Benavente’ (1597 – 1603)

El Greco ‘Saint Jerome’ (c.1590 – 1610)

José de Ribera ‘Desperate Woman’ (1638)

Francisco de Goya ‘Self-Portrait with Spectacles’ (c.1800)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ‘ The Bather’ (1807)

Théodore Géricault ‘Study of a Male Nude’ (1812 – 17)

Edgar Degas ‘Portrait of Léon Bonnat’ (c.1863)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ‘The Virgin of the Host’ (1866)

John Singer Sargent ‘Portrait of Paul Helleu’ (c.1880)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes ‘Sweet Country’ (1882)