Musee Jacquemart Andre

By parisian on 20/08/2009 in Attractions

Musee Jacquemart Andre inside view

The Musee Jacquemart Andre is a public museum located at 158 Boulevard Haussmann in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The museum was created from the private home of Édouard Andre (1833 – 1894) and Nelie Jacquemart to display the art they collected during their lives.Edouard Andre, the scion of a Protestant banking family, devoted his considerable fortune to buying works of art. He then exhibited them in his new mansion built in 1869 by the architect Henri Parent, and completed in 1875.He married a well-known society painter, Nelie Jacquemart, who had painted his portrait 10 years earlier. Every year, the couple would travel in Italy, amassing one of the finest collections of Italian art in France. When Edouard Andre died, Nelie Jacquemart completed the decoration of the Italian Museum and travelled in the Orient to add more precious works to the collection. Faithful to the plan agreed with her husband, she bequeathed the mansion and its collections to the Institut de France as a museum, and it opened to the public in 1913.

The visit is divided into five major parts:

The State Apartments The State Rooms were designed by the Andres for their most formal receptions. They reflect their fascination for the French school of painting and 18th century decorative art.

The informal Apartments The Andres would receive their business relations in a series of smaller, more informal salons. These were decorated in a refined style, testifying to their talents as collectors.

The winter garden The Winter Garden is remarkable on more than one count and testifies the artistic skill of the architect Henri Parent, who was seeking to surpass Charles Garnier, the builder of the then new Opera Garnier.

The Italian museum The Sculpture Gallery houses collections of 15th and 16th century Italian sculpture, with masterpieces by Francesco Laurana, Donatello, Luca Della Robbia and others. The Florentine Gallery is both a place of worship, containing works on religious themes — choir stalls, reredos and funerary monuments — and a picture gallery focusing on the Florentine school, with works by Botticelli, Botticini and Perugino, and Ucello‘s celebrated St George and the Dragon. The Venetian Gallery attests to the Andres’ love of 15th century Venetian artists. Dominated by a coffer ceiling attributed to Mocetto, paintings by Mantegna, Bellini or Carpaccio recreate the typical setting of a Venetian Palazzo.