There is a little square in Saint-Germain-des-Prés that fits whole into one photograph: four paulownias, a lamp post with five globes, and that is all. It is called place de Furstenberg, and at number 6 of the street that gives it its name Eugène Delacroix spent the last five and a half years of his life. The flat, the studio he had built in the garden and the garden itself are now a national museum, and you will find them as small as they were.
The museum closes on Tuesdays and on weekdays opens at noon, which means a morning here is not something you can plan: it is the same choice Delacroix made, since he worked in this house in the afternoon. And if you already have a Louvre ticket in your pocket, you do not pay to get in, on one precise condition I set out further down.
Why does an established painter move house at fifty-nine?
Let’s begin!
1. The move, and the church that decided it
Delacroix arrived here on 28 December 1857. He did not do it for the square: he left the studio on rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette because it was too far from Saint-Sulpice, where he was painting the chapel of the Holy Angels, a commission received in 1849 and finished only in 1861.
Go and see what was at stake: the church is eight minutes away on foot, entry is free, and the first chapel on the right as you go in is his. On the left wall is Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, on the wall facing it Heliodorus Driven from the Temple, and on the ceiling Saint Michael Slaying the Dragon. Look at how Jacob is built. The two wrestling figures take up the bottom left corner and are small; all the rest is an enormous oak filling the arch, and on the right, in the distance, Jacob’s caravan walks away up the slope without noticing a thing. A painter who gives twelve years to a chapel and then puts his protagonists in a corner knows exactly what he is doing.
2. The studio he had built at the end of the garden
There was no room to work in the flat, as you will see, so Delacroix had the studio built in the garden. It is the pavilion you meet when you open this page: a low building with a gridded window that takes up almost the whole upper half of the front, which is the only reason anyone could paint in that room.
Stand in the middle of the garden and look at it from outside before you go in. Two reliefs are set into the walls and, under the window, a frieze of figures: an artist who builds himself a studio builds himself a set as well. Inside, the room is smaller than the window leads you to expect, and that is the first thing that will surprise you: the enormous canvases in the Louvre were not born here.
3. The Magdalene in the Desert, a painting made of one head
What is left of a painting when you take away everything but the face?
This is the answer, and it is from 1845: a head thrown back, eyes closed, lips barely parted, on a blue-green ground that will not say whether it is sky or rock.
Go up to within a hand’s breadth of the canvas. You will see the craquelure running across the whole surface and the brushstrokes on the cheek, broad and visible one by one: Delacroix does not hide his hand. Then step back three paces and the face reassembles itself. This is the same painting that in those years was making his critics angry, and in a room this small you can test it by walking back and forth.
4. Morocco, the journey that changed his colours
In 1832 Delacroix left for Morocco with a diplomatic mission, and came back with notebooks, watercolours and objects. The museum keeps part of them, and it is the section almost everyone walks through in a hurry: you slow down.
Hold on to one thing, then read again the paintings you saw at the Louvre: before that journey his colours came from the masters, afterwards they came from a light he had seen with his own eyes. That is where the difference starts: this house is not a museum of mementoes, it is the place where the parts of his painting are still spread out on the table.
5. Painters saved the house
How do you save a flat nobody is interested in?
At the end of the 1920s the flat you are standing in was under threat of demolition. What stopped it was the Société des amis d’Eugène Delacroix, led by Maurice Denis and made up of artists, historians and collectors: Henri Matisse and Paul Signac were among its members.
The rest is a chronology worth reading slowly, because it took thirty years: the society bought the flat, the studio and the garden in 1952, gave them to the State in 1954, the place became a national museum in 1971, the garden was redone in 1999, and since 2004 the museum has been run by the Louvre. The distinction holds: there are museums born from a bequest and museums born from a campaign. This one is of the second kind, and painters made it for a painter.
6. The garden, which is the reason people stay
The circuit closes without works. It is the garden between the flat and the studio, square, walled in, with low box hedges, roses and a few green chairs.
Sit down for ten minutes before you leave. From here you see the two things together, the house he died in, on 13 August 1863, and the room he worked in, twenty paces apart. It is also the quietest spot in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which two steps from the boulevard is no small thing.
Practical information
Data checked on 24 September 2026 on the official website musee-delacroix.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. Entry costs 9 euros and covers the flat, the studio and the garden. The Louvre ticket. The museum writes that a Louvre entry ticket gives free access to the Delacroix on the day of the Louvre booking or the next opening day. It is not forty-eight hours and it is not a week: if you buy the Louvre for a Friday, you have to come here on the Friday or the Saturday. Opening hours. From Monday to Friday it opens at 12:00 and closes at 17:30; on Saturday and Sunday it opens at 10:00 and closes at 17:30. Closures. It closes on Tuesdays, and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Free admission. Under-18s get in free, as do EU residents under 26, teachers in service in the relevant subjects, Louvre card holders, jobseekers, people on minimum social benefits, and disabled visitors with their companion. Paris Museum Pass. The museum accepts the pass, so with one you do not pay the 9 euros. Getting there. The entrance is at 6 rue de Furstenberg. The stop is Saint-Germain-des-Prés on line 4, three minutes on foot, and Mabillon on line 10 is a little further. How long to allow. The six stops take an hour, and the detour to Saint-Sulpice adds another.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
From here on
Delacroix’s life and paintings are told in Eugène Delacroix, and his large masterpieces are at the Musée du Louvre, which also owns this museum. If artists’ houses in Paris interest you, Montparnasse has the Musée Bourdelle and the Musée Zadkine, both free; and the Musée de Cluny is on the other side of boulevard Saint-Germain.
Photo credits: studio seen from the garden by Chatsam (CC BY-SA 3.0); Jacob Wrestling with the Angel and the Magdalene in the Desert by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra and xiquinhosilva (CC BY 2.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
