Jean-Jacques Henner was one of the most celebrated painters in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. He won the Prix de Rome, exhibited at the Salon for forty years, accumulated prizes and commissions, and died in 1905 surrounded by admirers. Within twenty years of his death he was almost completely forgotten.
The Musée Henner, in a private mansion in the 17th arrondissement, was established by his grandniece and holds around five hundred works, the luminous, dreamlike portraits of women with auburn hair that were his signature, the Italian landscapes from his years in Rome, and the large allegorical paintings that won him his reputation. It is one of the quietest museums in Paris, and one of the most surprising.
What you will see
The paintings. Henner's signature works are his portraits of women with auburn hair and pale skin set against dark grounds, intimate, technically extraordinary, and out of fashion for the better part of a century. Alongside them hang the landscapes and figure studies from his years at the Villa Medici in Rome, which shaped everything that came after.
The house, and the question it raises. The setting is the Hôtel de Reyer, a late nineteenth-century private mansion kept with its original decoration and furniture. The tour also asks how a painter this celebrated could vanish so completely, and what his eclipse tells us about how taste is made and unmade across a century.
The auburn portraits · the Roman years · a reputation lost
Pépin's advice
This museum is genuinely unknown. Most Parisians have never heard of Henner, and most visitors to Paris have never heard of Henner. The museum is quiet to the point of solitude, and that is precisely the point.
Allow time to sit with the paintings. The portraits reward prolonged attention in a way that more celebrated works do not, and there is no crowd to hurry you on.
