The founder of the Samaritaine, the department store on the riverfront, bought 18th-century art for twenty-seven years and then left it to the city. The Musée Cognacq-Jay is that collection: two hundred paintings, sculptures, pieces of furniture and objets d’art, inside a 16th-century Marais mansion that has nothing to do with the 18th century and works all the better for it.
It is a small museum, an hour is enough, and it is free when there is no temporary exhibition on. There are two things to know first, though: it is closed on Mondays and it is not accessible to visitors with reduced mobility, which the museum states on every page of its website.
How did an 18th-century collection end up in a house built in 1575?
Let’s begin!
1. The hôtel Donon, which was nearly pulled down
The house was built around 1575 for Médéric de Donon, controller of the king’s buildings, a familiar of Catherine de’ Medici and son-in-law of the sculptor Girolamo della Robbia. The «Histoire de Paris» plaque on the wall tells the rest: the courtyard front has two large twin, almost Palladian bays under a broken triangular pediment, the street front was rebuilt in the early 17th century, and the building, in a sorry state and under threat of demolition, was restored to house the museum.
The museum, for its part, moved: the collections left the boulevard des Capucines, where they had been since the founder’s day, to come here. Look at the ceiling as soon as you step into one of the small rooms: the painted beams are 16th-century, and the paintings underneath are from two centuries later.
2. Who Cognacq and Jaÿ were
Ernest Cognacq founded the Samaritaine department store. In 1872 he married Marie-Louise Jaÿ, at the time head saleswoman in the ready-to-wear department of the Bon Marché, which is to say of the rival store. Between 1900 and 1927 they bought 18th-century art, and in 1928 the collection was left to the Ville de Paris.
Why would a collector not keep his collection at home?
Bear in mind another curious decision of the founder’s, which the museum records: Cognacq did not leave the whole collection in his own house, but chose to show a selection of 18th-century pieces in a separate building. The collection has not been closed since: the museum still buys, and its acquisitions hang alongside the founder’s.
3. Canaletto’s Grand Canal
Start here, because it is the painting the museum puts first among its masterpieces and it is stated to be on display: The Grand Canal seen from the Rialto Bridge, oil on canvas, 48.5 × 79 centimetres, painted around 1725, inventory number J 17.
Who bought a view of Venice in the 18th century?
It comes from the collection of the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, and so from the market of Grand Tour travellers, who bought views the way we buy photographs. Move closer and look for the scaffolding: the museum points out that you can see the scaffolds on the palaces under repair, and the morning crowd on the market square of the Erberia. Canaletto tidies nothing away, and that is why his view also works as a document.
4. Huet’s Milkmaid and Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait
Put them side by side, because they show the two ways the French 18th century looked at women. La Laitière, the milkmaid, is by Jean-Baptiste Huet and dated by the museum between 1750 and 1800: it is the pastoral world, the kind of thing painted for drawing-room walls.
The Portrait of Marie-Louise-Adélaïde-Jacquette de Robien, vicomtesse de Mirabeau is from 1774 and is by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who was nineteen at the time and would become Marie Antoinette’s portraitist. A woman painting another woman, in a museum where almost every other picture was painted by a man.
5. The perfume pistol
The fourth work with an official entry is an object, and it is there to remind you that this is not only a museum of paintings: a pistolet à parfum by Jean-François Bautte, around 1800. Bautte was a Geneva watchmaker and jeweller, and the pistol, instead of firing, sprayed scent.
Look at it closely: it is the kind of thing the 18th century turned out in quantity and that almost no museum shows. Here it sits beside the porcelain, the miniatures and the boxes, which make up a good part of the collection.
6. The rooms, from the salon bleu to the salon Boucher
Since 1 October 2022 the collection has been spread over all fourteen rooms of the hôtel Donon, in a thematic route, and the museum names eight of them: salle des portraits, salon bleu, couloir des portraits, salon d’honneur, salon des exotismes, petits objets de luxe, galerie des Antiques, salon Boucher.
Keep two things in mind. The first is that the route is thematic and not chronological, so do not look for an order by date. The second is that a free app comments on about twenty works in French, in English and in French Sign Language: download it beforehand, because the labels in the rooms are minimal.
Practical information
Data checked on 23 September 2026 on the official website museecognacqjay.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The permanent collection is free, except during temporary exhibitions: then a single ticket covers exhibition and collection, 11 euros full and 9 euros reduced. Before you set off, check the website for an exhibition, because that is what decides whether you pay. Opening hours. From Tuesday to Sunday the museum opens at 10:00 and closes at 18:00. The ticket desk closes at 17:15 and the shop at 17:45. It is closed on Mondays. Accessibility. The museum is not accessible to visitors with reduced mobility, and says so itself: it is a 16th-century house with stairs and changes of level. Booking. For exhibitions the museum strongly advises a timed ticket on the Paris Musées ticket office; with no exhibition on, you do not need one. Getting there. The entrance is at 8 rue Elzévir. The nearest stops are Saint-Paul on line 1 and Chemin Vert on line 8. How long to allow. The six stops need an hour. This is the museum to slot in between two more demanding ones.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
You are in the middle of the Marais, and everything else on this route is walkable: the Musée Picasso and the Musée Carnavalet are a few minutes away, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is on rue des Archives, the mahJ on rue du Temple and the Maison de Victor Hugo on place des Vosges. If the 18th century has got hold of you, the next stop is the Musée des Arts décoratifs, which keeps whole rooms of the same century.
Photo credits: rooms of the museum by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta (CC BY-SA 4.0), Siren-Com (CC BY-SA 3.0) and VladoubidoOo (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
