Musée Marmottan Monet

At the edge of the Ranelagh gardens in the residential 16th arrondissement, the Musée Marmottan Monet holds the world's largest collection of works by Claude Monet — by the museum's own description — including Impression, Sunrise, the 1872 harbor view whose title gave Impressionism its name. It also holds what it calls the world's leading collection of Berthe Morisot. Neither collection was purchased; like the house itself, both arrived by bequest.

The museum began as a house. Jules Marmottan, a mining director from Valenciennes, bought the former townhouse of the Duc de Valmy beside the gardens in 1882. His son Paul Marmottan, an art historian devoted to the Napoleonic era, filled it with Empire furniture, bronzes, and paintings, and on his death in 1932 left the house and everything in it to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Musée Marmottan opened to the public on 21 June 1934 as a museum of the First Empire.

Impressionism entered in 1940. Victorine Donop de Monchy, daughter of Doctor Georges de Bellio, gave the museum Impression, Sunrise that May, and ten more Impressionist canvases from the family collection followed by 1947. The gift redirected the museum's history: a house of Napoleonic decorative arts became the home of the movement's founding picture.

The decisive bequest came in 1966, when Claude Monet's second son Michel died and left the museum everything he had inherited from Giverny — over a hundred canvases, including the large-format Water Lilies panels that had never been shown in the painter's lifetime. The state's museums had declined to buy the late work when Michel offered it; the Marmottan took it whole. It is now the only institution holding the final paintings of The Japanese Bridge and The House Seen from the Rose Garden, the near-abstract canvases of Monet's last years.

Berthe Morisot's collection arrived the same way, from inside the family. In 1993 the descendants of her daughter Julie Manet — the Rouart family — bequeathed twenty-five of her oil paintings and some seventy-five watercolours, with pastels, drawings, and works by Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas from the family's walls. Morisot is thinly represented in most museums; here she has rooms.

On the morning of 27 October 1985, five armed men took nine paintings from the galleries in about five minutes — Impression, Sunrise among them, with four other Monets, two Renoirs, and a Morisot. All nine were recovered in December 1990 in an apartment near Porto-Vecchio, in Corsica, and returned to display after conservation treatment.

The rest of the house keeps its layers: Jules Marmottan's medieval and Renaissance panels, Paul's Empire rooms, and the 322 illuminated miniatures Daniel Wildenstein donated in 1981. The practical case for the Marmottan is the pairing: the Orangerie shows the Water Lilies as a single monumental ensemble, while the Marmottan shows where they came from — the whole arc of late Monet, at the scale of a private house.