The museum is located in one of the wings of the second of the three cloisters in the Monastery of Brou, in Bourg-en-Bresse prefecture of the Ain department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in Eastern France.

[3] The main collection of the museum was originally made up of 120 paintings donated in the middle of the 19th century by Thomas Riboud [FR] (1765–1835), lawyer and deputy of Ain who saved the abbey from destruction and protected it as a national monument.

[2] The collection of Flemish and Dutch paintings includes four paintings by the official painter of the Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, two of which are the portraits of young Charles V and Margaret of Austria,[2] the founder of the monastery of Brou, as well as 15th and 16th century works by Jan de Beer, Adrien Ysenbrandt, Jan Brueghel the Elder,[5] Frans Snyders, Frans Franken, Pieter Codde, Adam Frans van der Meulen, Adriaen van der Kabel, Gerard Seghers, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Pieter Neefs the Younger and Melchior d'Hondecoeter.

Featured French paintings up to the 18th century include works by Benoît Alhoste and Jacques Bizet's Nature morte aux vieux livres (English: Still life with old books) as well as works by Jean Jouvenet, Nicolas Pierre Loir, René-Antoine Houasse, François de Troy and Nicolas de Largillierre.19th-century French paintings include paintings in the troubadour style by Fleury François Richard, Pierre Révoil, Gustave Moreau, Gustave Doré (and also one of his sculptures), Jean-François Millet, Elisa Blondel, and Louis Janmot.

French 20th century paintings include works by Jacques-Émile Blanche, Pierre Soulages and Olivier Debré.