Paris Apartment, Hotel and Accommodation, city guide

Museums in Paris

A touch of culture and art is always good to complete your sightseeing day. Paris is an artistic city and offers you plenty of museums and art galleries to go.
Check out our list of the main museums in Paris.


Carnavalet Museum

Located in the Marais district, the city museum of Paris should be housed in the grandest of all the 'hôtels particuliers'. The museum explores ancient and medieval Paris, with shop signs, and reproductions of rooms including the bedchamber of Marcel Proust, the ballroom of the Hôtel Wendel, the Fouquet jeweller's from Rue Royale and a private room from the Café de Paris. Another section has paintings.


Picasso Museum

It is housed in the Marais district, in the Hôtel Salé, the 'Salted place', which takes its name from its original occupant, Jean Bouiller, a collector of the hated 'gabelle' (salt tax) for Louis XIV. Picasso's heirs donated most of the work here to the state in the 1970s in lieu of inheritance taxes. There are few really famous pictures, but representational works can be seen from all Picasso's diverse styles. One room of the museum contains paintings from Picasso's personal collection, incluiding works by Corot, Matisse and Cézanne. There is also a sculpture garden of Picasso's work from many periods.


Modern Art National Museum

The museum is located in the Centre Pompidou. This superlative collection of 20th-century art takes up where the Musée d'Orsay leaves off : at the turning point of modernity in 1904, when the 'Fauves' (Derain, Vlaminck, Matisse, Marquet) liberated colour from its age-old function of representing nature. Van Gogh had blazed a trail by using colour to express emotions. The Fauves went a step beyond, applying coulour and line on a two-dimensional surface as an intellectual expression, the way a poet uses words on a piece a paper.
The excellent audioguide is especially helpful on the lower floor, 'Post 1960', where the familiar images of Pop-Art and new realism and displays of space-age plastic furniture give way to explorations of artists' cautionary responses to technology in the 1960s. The art on this floor is participatory, kinetic, interactive.


The Louvre Museum


 'Louvre' was the name of the area long before any palaces were dreamt of. The original castle was built some time after 1190 by Philippe-Auguste. Charles V rebuilt and extended it in the 1360s. During the worst of the Hundred Years War, 1400-30, the kings abandoned the Louvre and Paris. The first to return was François Ier, in 1527 ; he demolished the old castle and began what is known today as the Vieux Louvre, the easternmost part of the complex, in 1546. Henri IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV all contributed in turn to the palace. The next royal resident was a reluctant Louis XVI, brought here by force from Versailles in October 1789 and installed in the Tuileries.Republican governments kept their offices in the Tuileries after 1795 ; they consolidated the art collections and made them into a public museum in 1793. Napoleon moved in in 1800, and started work on the northern wing. During the next 15 years his men looted the captive nations of Europe for their finest paintings and statues.
The Louvre was 350 years in building and the best parts are the oldest.
The Louvre houses greatful collections : Egyptian Art, Middle Eastern Art, Classical Antiquity, Sculpture, French Painting, Flemish, Dutch and German Painting, Italian Painting (The Grande Galerie), The Salle des Etats, Late Italian and Spanish Painting...


Orsay Museum

The Gare d'Orsay is a monument born on the cusp of the 19th century : a daring work of iron weighing more than the Eiffel Tower, with a nave taller than Notre-Dame, thrown up in two years for the 1900 World Fair. Unfortunately, its platforms were too short for modern trains, and the station was abandoned in 1960. It opened as a museum in 1986, nine years after the design was approved. The core exhibits came from the former Jeu-de-Paume Museum and the 19tg-century rooms of the Louvre. here under one huge roof are gathered all its combative schools of painting and sculpture from 1848 to 1910, rounded out with a magnificient array of furniture, decorative arts, architectural exhibits and photography. Highlights of the collections include : sculptures, the Salle de l'Opéra, dedicated to Garnier's extraordinary folly ; the greatest works of Gustave Courbet, Impressionist Paintings before 1870, late Impressionists, Postimpressionism, Salle Toulouse-Lautrec...

Whatever you like -art and history, litterature, Egyptian culture -you will find a museum that suits your tastes. You also have to know that all museums organize special and temporary exhibitions and that most of them are free on the first Sunday of each month.

We propose you hotels in Paris, located near all the museums.