Magnin Museum (Musée national Magnin)

What you will see

Walk through rooms furnished like a home, with paintings hung close together in the 19th-century manner and no explanatory labels, as the Magnins wished. The French, Italian and Northern schools are kept strictly apart. Look for works by Eustache Le Sueur and Laurent de La Hyre, and for the anonymous Young Girl with a Jet Necklace, one of the finest portraits here.

History

Étienne Lantin, a counsellor at Burgundy's Chambre des comptes, inherited the land in 1652, and construction is documented from 1663. The plot was too cramped for the usual layout between courtyard and garden, so the unknown architect, perhaps to compensate, created a monumental staircase beneath a stucco dome. Jean-Hugues Magnin bought the house in 1829, and his grandchildren Maurice and Jeanne grew up here before the family moved to Paris.

Jeanne Magnin, a painter and art writer, and her brother Maurice, a senior official at the Cour des comptes, bought mostly at auction, on a deliberately limited budget. They favoured lesser-known masters and unfashionable schools. The architect Auguste Perret turned the outbuildings into galleries in 1930 and 1931, and Maurice left the whole collection to the French state at his death in 1939.