Musée Picasso

Museum · Le Marais (3rd)Paris,France

A seventeenth-century salt-tax mansion in the Marais holding the work Picasso kept for himself, taken by the state in lieu of inheritance tax.

The Musée Picasso holds the art Picasso kept for himself: paintings, sculptures, ceramics and fifteen hundred drawings that stayed in his own studios. The vestibule, the great stair and one seventeenth-century salon survive, and Roland Simounet fitted modern galleries into the old rooms without adding a new wing. Diego Giacometti designed the benches, tables and chandeliers you sit among. The house is the Hôtel Salé, finished in 1659 for the man who collected the king's salt tax; salé means salted. Picasso died without a will, leaving tens of thousands of pieces in his houses and studios. French law lets an estate settle an inheritance bill in artworks instead of money, and under it the state chose first — that choosing is how this collection exists. The heirs had already given France the pictures Picasso bought or swapped from other painters, so you also see what he hung on his own walls. Much of what is here is drawing and print, which cannot sit in daylight, so the display changes. Do not come for the two famous ones: Guernica is in Madrid, the Demoiselles in New York.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come in the first hour after opening — The galleries are the rooms of a house, not a purpose-built museum, so they are small and fill faster than you would expect.
Read the dates on the labels — Picasso dated most work to the exact day and numbered the versions made in one sitting, so you can watch an idea change across a week.
Do not walk past the ceramics — Picasso spent years at a pottery in Vallauris in southern France, turning plates and jugs into owls and faces. The museum holds over a hundred.
Bring a pencil and draw in the rooms — Sketching in front of the works is allowed, but ink, pastel, charcoal and watercolour are not, so leave those at home.
The garden opens only in the warm months — You reach it from the lower floor of the museum, and it gives a clear view of the long back of the house.

Things to do

1
Find the carved beasts outside the house
Walk in through the carriage arch on rue de Thorigny and stop in the courtyard, set on a curve rather than a straight line, with low wings and a stone balustrade running round it. Look up at the huge carved pediment: a coat of arms packed into acanthus leaves, fruit and flowers, with sphinxes and cupids below. In the warm months the garden opens off level -1, and the scrolled buttresses on its boundary walls each carry a carved lion with a small child astride it, taming the beast. Parisians mocked the owner by naming the house after the salt tax he collected, and mapmakers were still printing Hôtel Salé a century later.
2
Pick out the plaster figures around the great stair
The white figures around the stairwell are stucco, not carved stone. The brothers Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy modelled them in place at the end of the 1650s, together with Martin Desjardins. Look for life-size youths lounging on top of the pilasters, oval medallions holding a head in profile, flying children carrying flower garlands, and eagles gripping thunderbolts. The plasterwork and the wrought-iron handrail are protected by law as historic monuments, and both were restored for the museum's reopening in 2014.
3
Climb to the top floor for the bare roof frame
The collection runs over five levels, and the top one sits directly under the roof. Here the ceiling is left open, so the old oak frame stands over you: heavy hand-cut beams, a run of rafters meeting at the ridge, and white plaster between them. The attic was closed to the public until the rebuilding that reopened the museum in 2014.