In the last years of his life, Gustave Moreau turned his family townhouse in the 9th arrondissement into a museum of his own work, designed it down to the hanging of the paintings, and left the whole thing to the French state. It opened in 1903 and has barely changed since. Almost nowhere else in Paris can you stand inside an artist's complete world, arranged by the artist himself.
Moreau was the great painter of myth in late nineteenth-century France, Salome, Orpheus, Jupiter, the Sphinx, rendered in jewel-like colour and obsessive detail. He taught Matisse and Rouault, fascinated the Surrealists, and filled this house with thousands of paintings, watercolours and drawings. The visit moves from the small family apartment on the first floor to the two vast studio floors above, joined by one of the most photographed spiral staircases in Paris.
What you will see
The studios. Two double-height floors hung from floor to ceiling with Moreau's large mythological canvases, the monumental Jupiter et Sémélé among them, joined by the cast-iron spiral staircase he installed between them, an emblem of the museum in its own right. Set into the walls are the hinged panels he designed to hold thousands of drawings and watercolours, which can still be leafed through like the pages of a book.
The apartment. On the floor below, the small, dense family rooms are kept with their furniture, portraits and memories, a quiet portrait of the man behind the myths.
The grand studios · the spiral staircase · the drawing cabinets
Pépin's advice
Come for the place as much as the paintings. Moreau composed this museum the way he composed a canvas. The hanging, the staircase, the drawing cabinets, everything is part of the work, and the tour reads the house itself as his last masterpiece.
Pair it with the neighbourhood. The museum sits in the Nouvelle Athènes, the quarter of Romantic Paris where Chopin, George Sand and Delacroix lived. A short walk before or after the visit completes the picture, and Montmartre begins a few streets further up.
