Paris has finally found a good use for its Bourse de Commerce, an impressive circular building that was originally used as a wheat market in the eighteenth century. (I imagine that this was where Balzac’s Père Goriot made his fortune as a wholesale grain dealer during the French Revolution.) François Read More …
The Cluny Museum (National Museum of the Middle Ages) in the Latin Quarter of Paris has reopened after being closed for a year and a half. The displays have been totally reorganized and are now mainly in chronological order. Ramps and elevators have been installed to connect the different levels Read More …
There are said to be 38,000 works of art on display in the Louvre in Paris, so it’s sort of like the internet or the Frankfurt Book Fair — you can’t possibly see them all, so you have to navigate to see what you want, or take potluck. And don’t Read More …
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 …
This building from the year 1931 is now something of an embarrassment (anyone who isn’t embarrassed ought to be) because the whole front façade is covered by crass propaganda bas-reliefs glorifying the French colonial system, which at that time was still in full operation even though revolts had already started 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 …
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 room with subdued light. Five of these tapestries show the five senses; Taste, Sight, Touch, Smell and Read More …