The Lorraine Museum (Musée Lorrain) is a regional museum located in two buildings just a short walk north of Place Stanislas in Nancy. The first of these buildings is the former palace of the Dukes of Lorraine, which now houses a large collection of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, scientific instruments 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 …
The area around Friedberg is known as the Wetterau, not because of the German word Wetter meaning weather, but because there is a small river named the Wetter (a tributary of the Nidda) which flows through this region not far from Friedberg. The Wetterau Museum documents the archeology and history 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 …
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 …