Explore Paris

Musée Cognacq-Jay is an 18th-century decorative arts museum in the Hôtel Donon, a Renaissance mansion in the Marais. The roughly 1,200-item collection, formed between 1900 and 1925 by department-store founders Théodore-Ernest Cognacq and Marie-Louise Jaÿ, includes paintings by Fragonard, Chardin and Boucher alongside porcelain and jewellery.

A museum of the history of Paris, opened in 1880 in the 16th-century Hôtel Carnavalet and extended in 1989 into the neighbouring Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. Its roughly 625,000 objects trace the city from prehistory through the Enlightenment and the Revolution to the 20th century, displayed across forty rooms after a 2021 renovation.

The Musée national Picasso-Paris occupies the Hôtel Salé, a 17th-century mansion in the Marais district, and holds the museum's collection devoted to Pablo Picasso. Its roughly 5,000 works span paintings, sculpture, drawings, ceramics and prints, alongside the artist's personal archive. Most pieces came from his estate after his death in 1973.

The Monnaie de Paris is the institution that produces France's coins, established in the 9th century and housed since the 1770s in a neoclassical building on Quai de Conti by architect Jacques-Denis Antoine. Coin production moved to Pessac in 1973, and the Paris building now holds a museum of numismatic collections.

Bourse de Commerce is a circular 18th-century building in central Paris, built in 1763-1767 as a grain exchange and topped by a dome rebuilt in copper and glass in the 19th century. Since 2021 it has housed the Pinault Collection of contemporary art, with galleries arranged around the domed rotunda under a 50-year lease from the city.

Maison de Victor Hugo is a writer's house museum on Place des Vosges, in the apartment where Victor Hugo lived from 1832 to 1848. Its rooms include a Chinese-style living room he decorated himself and a medieval-style dining room, leading to a reconstruction of the bedroom where he died in 1885.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers is a science and technology museum in the 3rd arrondissement, founded in 1794 and partly housed in the former priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. Its collection includes Foucault's pendulum, early aircraft by Louis Blériot and Clément Ader, and Blaise Pascal's calculating machine.

The Louvre is a national art museum housed in the former Louvre Palace on the Right Bank of the Seine. Its collection spans antiquity to the mid-19th century and includes the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. The glass pyramid entrance in the Cour Napoléon was added in 1989.

A contemporary art institution founded in 1984 by the Cartier luxury house. It moved in 2025 to a new building on Place du Palais-Royal, opposite the Louvre, designed by architect Jean Nouvel. The space shows changing exhibitions of contemporary art and holds a collection of over 1,500 works.

The Grande Galerie de l'Évolution is a natural history gallery in the Jardin des Plantes, inside a glass-roofed hall built in 1889. A 1994 renovation turned it into a display on evolution and biodiversity, with around 9,500 taxidermied specimens arranged over several floors, including a herd of African savanna animals in the central nave.

A gallery of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes, designed by Charles Rohault de Fleury and opened in 1841 as France's first purpose-built museum building. Its "Treasures of the Earth" exhibition shows around 600 minerals, gemstones and giant crystals from a wider collection of some 770,000 specimens.

A wax museum on the Grands Boulevards, founded in 1882 by journalist Arthur Meyer and named after caricaturist Alfred Grévin, its first artistic director. It displays around 450 wax figures of historical and contemporary personalities, and includes the Palais des Mirages, a mirrored hall built for the 1900 World's Fair.

A museum of French art from 1848 to 1914, housed in a former railway station, the Gare d'Orsay, built in 1898-1900 to designs by Victor Laloux and others. It opened as a museum in 1986 and holds the world's largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, alongside sculpture and decorative arts.

The Musée Zadkine occupies the house and garden studio of sculptor Ossip Zadkine in the 6th arrondissement, near the Luxembourg Gardens. It became a public museum in 1982 and shows around 300 of his sculptures together with drawings, photographs and tapestries, with more works displayed in the garden.

An exhibition space at Place de la Concorde built in 1861 as a court for jeu de paume, a precursor of tennis, and converted into a gallery in 1909. Renovated in 1991, it is now France's national centre for photography and media arts, mounting changing exhibitions of contemporary photographers and video artists.

The Musée de l'Orangerie is an art gallery in the west corner of the Tuileries Garden, in a former orangery built in 1852 to shelter the garden's citrus trees. It houses eight large Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet, installed in two oval rooms, alongside works by Cézanne, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Renoir and Soutine.

The Musée Rodin occupies the Hôtel Biron, an 18th-century mansion in the 7th arrondissement, and its surrounding garden. It holds the sculptor Auguste Rodin's work, including bronze casts of The Thinker and The Gates of Hell displayed outdoors. The museum opened in 1919, after Rodin donated his collection to the French state.

A military museum inside the Hôtel des Invalides, a complex Louis XIV ordered built in 1670 to house disabled soldiers. Formed in 1905 from two older collections, it covers military history from antiquity to the Second World War, and its Dome Church holds Napoleon's tomb, completed in 1861, twenty years after his remains returned from Saint Helena.

The Musée Bourdelle preserves the working studio of sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, who used it from 1885 until his death in 1929, at 18 Rue Antoine Bourdelle. It opened as a museum in 1949 and was later extended by architects Henri Gautruche and Christian de Portzamparc. The collection holds more than 500 of his plaster, marble and bronze works.

The Musée de la Libération de Paris – Musée du Général Leclerc – Musée Jean Moulin occupies former toll pavilions at Place Denfert-Rochereau, above the bunker that served as Colonel Rol-Tanguy's command post in August 1944. It moved to this address in 2019 and covers the liberation of Paris and the wartime Resistance.