Museum · La Muette · 16e arrondissement

Musée Marmottan Monet

The buildingStill standing

Getting inHours or admission

What's there nowStill the same

The former townhouse of the Duc de Valmy at the edge of the Ranelagh gardens, bought by Jules Marmottan in 1882 and opened as a museum in 1934.

Address: 2 rue Louis-Boilly, 75016 Paris
Years: 1882–present

Illustration The garden façade of the Musée Marmottan Monet in colour — pale limestone, slate mansard and turret dome, sculpted swags above the windows, a lawn and clipped hedges in front

The garden front today: pale stone and slate, at the edge of the Ranelagh gardens in the 16th.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

The house stands where the Rue Louis-Boilly meets the Ranelagh gardens, in the quiet residential blocks of La Muette between the Bois de Boulogne and the river. It was the townhouse of the Duc de Valmy when Jules Marmottan, a mining director from Valenciennes, bought it in June 1882 as a home for himself and his collection of early paintings and medieval objects.

His son Paul Marmottan, an art historian devoted to the Napoleonic era, inherited the house the following year and spent decades reshaping it around his own holdings of Empire furniture, bronzes, and paintings, rebuilding it around 1910 into the residence-gallery it remains. On his death in 1932 he left the house and everything in it to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the museum opened to the public on 21 June 1934.

The building has been extended twice below ground rather than above: the Wildenstein illuminations and, later, the underground Monet gallery were fitted into the house without altering its scale from the street. From the Ranelagh side it still reads as what it was — a private house of the western 16th, holding one of the most valuable painting collections in Paris.

Key facts

Bought by Jules Marmottan: 7 June 1882, from the estate of the Duc de Valmy
Remodeled: c. 1910, by Paul Marmottan
Bequeathed: 1932, to the Académie des Beaux-Arts
Museum opened: 21 June 1934

Documentary photographs

Archival and present-day photographs, reproduced with rights verified.

The Musée Marmottan Monet from the rue Louis-Boilly: a nineteenth-century townhouse behind railings and trees, with the museum's banner at the entrance — The museum from the rue Louis-Boilly, 2026 — still recognizably the private house Paul Marmottan left to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1932.2026 · Chabe01, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Musée Marmottan Monet seen from the Ranelagh garden — a two-storey stone mansion with a domed corner turret, mansard roof, and a colonnaded wing to the right — The former townhouse seen from the Ranelagh gardens, its corner turret and garden façade unchanged from the street.Editorial illustration

The garden façade of the Musée Marmottan Monet in colour — pale limestone, slate mansard and turret dome, sculpted swags above the windows, a lawn and clipped hedges in front — The garden front today: pale stone and slate, at the edge of the Ranelagh gardens in the 16th.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1882
Jules Marmottan buys the Duc de Valmy's former townhouse by the Ranelagh gardens.
1932
Paul Marmottan bequeaths the house and collections to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
1934
The Musée Marmottan opens to the public on 21 June.