Behind the Montparnasse tower, in a street that carries his name, is the yard Antoine Bourdelle worked in from 1885 to 1929, the year he died. The studios have stayed where they were, so has the garden, and inside you will find more than five hundred works: plasters, bronzes, marbles, paintings, pastels.
The thing worth knowing straight away is that the permanent collection is free, as in every City of Paris museum. The museum closes on Mondays and last admission is at 17:15, forty-five minutes before closing time, which is a wider margin than usual and worth keeping an eye on.
What is left of a sculptor’s studio once the sculptor has gone?
Let’s begin!
1. The garden, where the sculptures live outdoors
Start outside. One side of the yard is closed by a red brick loggia, and standing figures fill its arches; out of the greenery rises a bronze horse’s head, its mane in heavy locks and the harness across the muzzle.
That head is the piece that explains the museum better than any label. It is the fragment of a monument meant to stand in a square, and here you find it at eye level, in a garden shut in between apartment blocks. Look at the surfaces: that is the patina of the open air, the one that would never form in a gallery.
2. The Héraklès archer, and the study it came from
How do you hold up a figure that is pushing with its whole body?
The Héraklès archer was modelled between 1906 and 1909, and at the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts of 1910 it made Bourdelle famous in a single evening. The museum keeps the studies that prepared it, and they are more interesting than the result.
Get close to this one, a small bronze sitting on a shelf: one knee presses into the rock, the other leg stretches out and pushes against the bow, the arm holding the bow is stretched to its limit, and the whole body turns into a single diagonal. Try to find one point of support that is not under tension: there is none. The large bronze, the one almost everyone has seen, is at the Musée d’Orsay: compare them and you will notice that the pose is already complete in the study, and that the rest of the work was only enlarging it.
3. The twenty-one Beethovens, an obsession forty years long
You will count twenty-one studies of Beethoven. Not twenty-one versions of an official portrait: twenty-one attempts, spread over forty years, at getting the same head out of the material.
Stop at this one, which is in stone. The head emerges from a block Bourdelle left rough: the hair is still flakes of stone, one fist is held against the chin and the other rests on the edge, and all around are the chisel marks, close together and parallel. It is not an unfinished work left there by accident. It is the method put on show: you see at the same time the point the figure has reached and the block it is coming out of.
4. The studios, which have stayed studios
The rooms Bourdelle worked in have not been turned into galleries, and you notice it as soon as you walk in. The easels are still there, the stools, the modelling stands, the plasters propped against the walls and the plaster dust on the walls themselves.
There is a difference here that changes the visit: in an ordinary sculpture museum you see finished bronzes: the last stage. Here you see the original plasters, the stage at which the work already exists but has not yet been translated into metal, and it is from those that the casts are taken. And that is why sculptors come to this museum and tourists do not.
5. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, born in this yard
Where were the most looked-at sculptures in Paris invented?
In here. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées opened in 1913, and the reliefs on its front and its atrium had been designed by Bourdelle; for that work he had modelled, between 1910 and 1912, an Apollo with three of the nine Muses.
The museum keeps the studies from that campaign, and it is where you understand something you cannot see from the street: those reliefs are not decoration applied to a finished building, they were born together with Auguste Perret’s architecture, in the same year that the Rite of Spring was premiered in that theatre.
6. Rodin, and the two pupils everybody knows
The last part is a chain of names, and keep it in mind as you walk. Bourdelle entered Auguste Rodin’s studio in September 1893 and stayed fifteen years, until 1908: not as a pupil, but as a praticien, the sculptor who translates the master’s models into marble.
Then he began teaching at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a little further on, and Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier passed through his classes. From Rodin to Giacometti the line is short, and it runs through this yard. To see the other end of it, the Musée Rodin is on the far side of the district.
Practical information
Data checked on 24 September 2026 on the official website bourdelle.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. Access to the permanent collections is free for everyone. Temporary exhibitions are paid for, and the price changes from one to the next: you will find it on the page of the exhibition on at the time. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, and last admission is at 17:15. Closures. It closes on Mondays, and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Getting there. The entrance is at 18 rue Antoine Bourdelle. The stops are Montparnasse - Bienvenüe on lines 4, 6, 12 and 13 and Falguière on line 12. How long to allow. The six stops take an hour and a half, and the garden alone is worth a quarter of that. One tip. Come on a clear day: the studios take their light from the glazed walls, and the white plasters read far better.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
From here on
Five minutes away on foot, still in Montparnasse, is the district’s other house-studio, the Musée Zadkine, also free; and the Musée de la Libération is at Denfert-Rochereau, ten minutes further. For the other end of the Rodin chain there is the Musée Rodin, and for a painter’s house rather than a sculptor’s the Musée Delacroix. Of Bourdelle’s own generation, and of the opposite idea of sculpture, is Aristide Maillol, who takes movement out where Bourdelle loads it in: his works are at the Musée Maillol.
Photo credits: garden and loggia by Velvet (CC BY-SA 4.0); Beethoven in stone and the study for the Héraklès archer by Romainbehar (CC0), from Wikimedia Commons.
