The Paris Water Pavilion is a building at 77 avenue de Versailles in the Auteuil quarter of the 16th arrondissement. It is a building from the nineteenth century that originally housed a steam-driven pump to bring up water from the Seine for the then-independent towns of Auteuil and Passy. It now Read More …
Lieutenant Nissim de Camondo (1892-1917) was a French military pilot in the First World War. He died in aerial combat in 1917 and was later buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. His grieving father, the banker and art collector Count Moïse de Camondo (1860-1935), determined in his will that Read More …
The Cernuschi Museum has a sub-title: “Museum of the Asian arts of Paris.” This surprised me, because I thought that was what the Guimet Museum was, but it turns out that the Guimet is a ‘national’ museum, belonging to the French state, whereas the Cernuschi belongs merely to the city Read More …
The Carnavalet Museum in the Marais district of Paris re-opened in May 2021 after four-and-a-half years of intensive renovation. This is a free museum about the history of Paris. It belongs to the city of Paris and is located in two historic mansions that were built four-and-a-half centuries ago, in Read More …
In the middle of May 2021, museums in France began to re-open following the third coronavirus lockdown. Soon, articles started appearing in the French press suggesting that this would be a good time for residents of Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France to visit popular museums such as the Louvre, since Read More …
The Cluny Museum, also known as the National Museum of the Middle Ages, was founded in 1843. It is located in the Latin Quarter in a much older building, the former Cluny Abbey, built in the late fifteenth century on the site of the Gallo-Roman baths from the first to Read More …
The most famous and most intriguing exhibit in the Cluny Museum is “La Dame à la licorne” (The Lady and the Unicorn). This exhibit consists of six large tapestries on display in a special rounded room with subdued light. Five of these tapestries show the five senses; Taste, Sight, Touch, Read More …
Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) was the French scholar who founded the study of Egyptology by being the first to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He published his translation and analysis of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822 and 1824. Shortly thereafter he took on the task of establishing a new department of Read More …
After twelve densely packed rooms of the thematic tour of ancient Egypt, a long staircase (or an elevator for people with restricted mobility) leads down to room 13, where a huge royal tomb is on display. It is the red granite tomb of pharaoh Ramses III, who ruled Egypt from Read More …
At the back end of the ground floor of the Musée d’Orsay, I was surprised to find an exhibit on the construction of the then-new 19th century opera house which was commissioned by the Emperor Napoleon III and designed by the young architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898). The model in my Read More …