The man who had this white villa built had fled Milan after one revolution and Rome after another, and he reached Paris as an exile. Today the house of Henri Cernuschi is the Musée Cernuschi, the museum of Asian arts of the City of Paris: it looks onto the parc Monceau, it has an arched doorway and two mosaic medallions on the front, and inside there is still, in good part, what its owner bought in Asia.
One thing is worth knowing before you plan the day, because it changes the bill: the permanent collection is free, as it is in the museums of the City of Paris, and right now so is the only other thing on show, the three works by Matsutani Takesada in the Painting room. From 20 November 2026 the Korea exhibition will be charged, 10 euros. The museum closes on Mondays.
What is a Japanese Buddha four metres forty high doing inside a Paris villa?
Let’s begin!
1. The Milanese revolutionary who ended up a banker in Paris
The life of Henri Cernuschi explains the house better than any guide. Born in Milan in 1821, he took part in the 1848 rising against the Austrians and then in the Roman Republic of 1849, where he held a seat in the assembly. When the Republic fell he took refuge in France, where he made a second life as an economist and a financier: in 1865 he published Mécanique de l’échange, and after the fall of the Empire, in 1870, he became a French citizen.
That part of his life is written on the front of the building, and almost nobody reads it. On the leaves of the door there are two plaques with the names of two months, Février and Septembre: they are the months of the French revolutions of 1848 and 1870. A gentleman who has a mansion built and has the months of his own revolutions carved on it is not an ordinary collector.
Look up while you are standing there: above the first-floor windows, two large mosaic medallions hang from a ribbon coming out of the mouth of a lion mask, and they carry the portraits of Leonardo da Vinci and Aristotle, art and science. Higher still, a row of bearded atlantes holds up the cornice.
2. The journey that made the museum
How long does it take to put a museum together?
Cernuschi needed sixteen months. He left in September 1871 with the art critic Théodore Duret, the man who would soon be defending the Impressionists, and came back in January 1873 with some five thousand objects bought in Japan and China. This was not a study trip with a shopping list: it was a round-the-world journey made by a rich and curious man, at a moment when Japan had only just reopened and collections were forming fast. That explains what you will find in front of you, the choices of one person rather than the fruit of excavation campaigns.
On his return he bought the last free plot on avenue Vélasquez from the Péreire brothers and gave the house to the architect William Bouwens van der Boijen, who built it between 1874 and 1876 in a neoclassicism of Lombard taste. Look at it from the park, as in the photograph above: the balustrade runs the whole length of the roof and the arched windows are as tall as a room. When he died, in 1896, Cernuschi left the villa and the collections to the City of Paris, and the museum opened on 26 October 1898.
3. The Meguro Buddha, four metres forty of bronze
This is the piece that decides your visit. The Amida Buddha is an eighteenth-century Japanese bronze 440 centimetres high and 255 wide, seated cross-legged on a double lotus flower, the right hand raised with the thumb touching the index finger, the left resting in the lap in the same gesture. Behind the head a great ring opens out, the halo. The earlobes are long and pierced, the hair is a cap of curls, and rows of characters run across the lotus petals.
Cernuschi bought it in 1871 in a temple in the Meguro district, then on the edge of Tokyo, a city that had stopped being called Edo three years earlier. It arrived in Paris taken apart and was put back together by the Barbedienne foundry, the Paris workshop that reproduced the sculptures of European museums in bronze: picture the crates coming off the ship and the building site inside a house only just finished.
Then look for the plaques with the names of cities, on the wall behind the Buddha and above the cornice. They are the stops of the 1871 journey, cut into the house like the names of battles on a monument. In the photograph above, taken in 2018 and therefore before the 2020 rehang, you can read one of them, KANG-CHAU.
4. The Tigress, and the man she holds between her paws
The second famous piece does not come from the Asian journey: the museum bought it in 1920, at the liquidation of the sequestered stock of the antique dealer Adolphe Worch. It is a ritual vessel of the you type, a container for the wine of ceremonies, from the eleventh century BC, some thirty centimetres high, and it comes from Hunan, from the area of Mount Weishan near Changsha.
To look at, as in the photograph, it is a crouching animal with an enormous head, round bulging eyes, upright ears and a flat muzzle: every centimetre of the surface is covered with squared spirals and small kui dragons, and an arched handle, like the handle of a basket, rests on two horned masks. On the lid there is a horned goat with wide ears, and the back of the vessel is an elephant’s head.
The thing the photograph does not show, and that you will have to look for by walking round it, is on the front: the tigress holds a small crouching man between her forepaws, and she holds him with a calm that does not look at all like a meal. Scholars disagree about what it means, and the label will not tell you: some read a legend of the kingdom of Chu, the one about a child raised by a tigress, and some a sacrifice.
5. The imperial bodhisattva, the musician from Yungang and Sarah Bernhardt’s tiger
Which other pieces are worth looking for, in a museum where you get in free and therefore have no hurry?
Three, and they are nothing like one another.
The gilt bronze bodhisattva comes from the Chinese imperial workshops of the Yongle period (1403-1424), is 137 centimetres high and carries inscriptions in three scripts, Chinese, Tibetan and lantsa: it is the proof that the Ming court spoke to the Tibetan world through objects too, not only through ambassadors.
The gandharva, feitian in Chinese, is a celestial musician in sandstone from the end of the fifth century, 43 centimetres high, and it comes from the caves of Yungang: it belonged to a company of musicians and dancers carved around the great religious figures, and it holds a pipa, the Chinese lute.
The tiger in lacquered and gilded wood of the Edo period, 137 centimetres long, has a Paris history: before it came here it belonged to Sarah Bernhardt. The eyes are inlaid, and nineteenth-century collectors used to mention it for its movement, as if the animal had been caught in the act of turning.
6. The house, which is half the museum
In 2020, after nine months of work, the museum reopened with a redesigned route, and the best thing about the rehang is that the house can be seen again. Just inside, two pale columns frame the staircase: stone steps with a red carpet, a wrought iron banister all scrolls curving upward, and under your feet a mosaic floor in white, black and brick-red Greek keys. To the right of the stairs, a display case as tall as the ceiling holds a dark tiered object with a gilded tip.
If you look at the walls you realise that the distinction between the container and the contents does not hold here: the great room facing the park was made for the Buddha, and the Buddha has been in it since 1898.
7. Guimet or Cernuschi, if you only have time for one
And what if this were the wrong Asian museum for you?
It is worth saying plainly, because Paris has two museums of Asian art and neither website explains the difference. The Musée Guimet is national, covers the whole of Asia from India to Japan by way of South-East Asia and the Himalayas, and is paid for. The Cernuschi is municipal, it is almost all China and Japan, with a fine Korean and Vietnamese section, its strength is the archaic Chinese bronzes, and it is free.
If you have a single morning and you care about ritual bronzes, Chinese painting and the Japan of the late nineteenth century, come here. If you are after Khmer Buddhas and Himalayan art, go to the Guimet. If you have a whole day, they are about twenty minutes apart by metro.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site cernuschi.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The permanent collection is free and needs no booking. Temporary exhibitions cost 10 euros, 8 euros reduced, and are free for under-18s. What you pay for right now. Until 13 December 2026 the Hashigakari display with the three works by Matsutani Takesada is inside the Painting room, so you see it free. On 20 November 2026 the exhibition Corée. Le royaume des lettrés opens, and that one is charged. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 to 18:00, and the ticket office closes at 17:15. Closing days. It closes on Mondays and on French public holidays: 1 January, 1 May, 8 May, 14 July, 15 August, 1 and 11 November, 25 December. Paris Museum Pass. The museum does not accept it, and you do not need it: the permanent collection is free for everyone. Getting there. The entrance is at 7 avenue Vélasquez. The stops are Villiers, on lines 2 and 3, and Monceau, on line 2. How long it takes. The permanent collection takes an hour and a half, and the parc Monceau in front takes as long as you give it.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The Cernuschi’s big brother is the Musée Guimet, on place d’Iéna, which tells the whole of Asia and charges for it. If Japan is the reason you came, the Albert-Kahn museum in Boulogne has the Japanese garden of Paris, and the Musée du quai Branly has the non-European arts this museum leaves out. In the same district, ten minutes away along the boulevard Haussmann, is the Musée Jacquemart-André, the other great collectors’ house of the plaine Monceau, and further north the Musée Jean-Jacques Henner.
Photo credits: facade by Daderot (public domain); Meguro Buddha by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); the Tigress vessel by Ismoon (CC0); staircase by Neoclassicism Enthusiast (CC BY-SA 4.0); villa from the park by Thomon (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
