Three hundred works on three floors, almost all by an Alsatian who was hugely famous in the nineteenth century and whom few people know today: this is the Musée national Jean-Jacques Henner, and it occupies a painter’s house in the plaine Monceau, with a gilded coffered ceiling, pale stone columns and a winter garden under a glass roof.
The museum closes on Tuesdays and opens at 11:00, an hour later than most Paris museums: if you line it up after another museum in the morning, you risk finding it still shut. On the other hand its ticket, 8 euros, opens two of them, because it also works at the Musée Gustave Moreau.
Why has a painter’s studio house never been that painter’s house?
Let’s begin!
1. The house belongs to somebody else, and that is the first misunderstanding to clear up
The front is narrow and four storeys tall, wedged between two modern blocks, with the number 43 and the inscription MUSEE NATIONAL J.J.HENNER carved on the lintel. On the first-floor balcony there is a bronze bust between two flags, and at the top, above a slate-clad level, a large sloping glass roof appears, which is the cover of the studio.
Henner never lived in this house. The architect Nicolas-Félix Escalier built it between 1876 and 1878 for another painter, Roger Jourdain, who sold it to a third painter, Guillaume Dubufe. It was Dubufe who, in 1889, turned the courtyard into a winter garden with the glass roof and the mosaic floor. Henner died in 1905: that the house would carry his name was somebody else’s decision, almost twenty years later.
The museum comes from a stubborn widow. Marie Henner, the widow of Jules Henner, the painter’s nephew, bought the mansion from Dubufe’s heirs in 1922 in order to make it her husband’s uncle’s museum. On 19 June 1923 she gave the State the house and 440 paintings, drawings, pieces of furniture and objects of the painter, and the museum was inaugurated on 7 March 1924. It is the opposite of the artist’s house you expect: first the museum, then the house cut to fit it.
2. The winter garden, which is why the museum closed for almost three years
What do you redo in a museum, when you close it for almost three years?
The Henner closed on 17 September 2013 and reopened on 21 May 2016, with the architect Sylvie Jodar and the museography of Hubert Le Gall. The heart of the work is what you see in the photograph at the top: the winter garden has a new glass roof, the mosaic floor has been restored and the walls are back to their original colours, found again through colorimetric analysis.
Stop on the threshold of the drawing room before you cross it. The ceiling is coffered in grey-green with gilded frames and friezes, the walls are a deep slate blue, the globe sconces light the left-hand wall, and the herringbone parquet carries you towards four pale columns. Behind the columns the light changes all at once: the winter garden is white, with palms in ceramic pots and a pale mosaic on the floor. On the right, in the foreground and cut by the frame, there is the dark bronze of a bust, seen in profile.
3. L’Alsace. Elle attend, the painting that became a flag
If one thing stays with you from this museum, it will be this canvas. A girl in black looks straight at you, wearing the large Alsatian bow headdress that opens two black wings at the sides of her head, with a small red cockade pinned to the knot. Her hair is strawberry blonde, her skin very pale, a black shawl wraps her shoulders and her hands, clasped, are still at waist height. On the grey-brown ground, at the top, the painter wrote the date, 1871, on the left, and ELLE ATTEND on the right.
1871 is the year Alsace passed to the German Empire, and Henner had been born at Bernwiller, in Alsace. The painting was commissioned by the wives of the industrialists of Thann, on the initiative of Eugénie Kestner; Henner offered to paint it. It is not the portrait of a girl: it is a personification, and what the young woman is waiting for is the return of Alsace to France.
The painting was offered to Léon Gambetta, who had an engraving made from it by Léopold Flameng so that it would circulate everywhere, and who, according to a report in Le Siècle of July 1871, would show it and say: «There is my fiancée». From then on that black headdress was Alsace in every French home.
4. Henner’s redheads, and why you recognise them from ten metres away
If you find yourself mixing up his paintings, know that it is almost inevitable: the rest of his work is made of one single thing, repeated for forty years: a female figure with red hair, very pale skin, on a dark, blurred ground. This Salomé, a late variant of 1904, is the clearest example: the coppery hair falls loose on her shoulders, the robe is a bright orange-red, her right hand holds a fold of golden drapery and the background is a petrol green without a single detail.
Notice what the painting does not do: there is no head of the Baptist, no platter, no dance. Henner takes the most theatrical subject of late nineteenth-century painting and removes the theatre from it, until only the pale flesh and the hair are left.
On the first floor, in the red studio, you find the official career: portraits, mythological scenes and sketches by the painter who won the Prix de Rome in 1858 and passed through the Villa Medici. On the third, in the grey studio, there is the work: pieces left half done and his own furniture.
5. The easel, which is the most eloquent object in the museum
In the photograph above, taken in 2012 and therefore before the 2016 reorganisation, there is Henner’s large studio easel: dark wood, four legs on castors, a side crank to raise and lower the canvas, and on its feet the paint stains of someone who really worked at it. Resting on it is a horizontal painting, Les Naïades, seven nude female figures in a clearing by the water: one standing, seen from behind, with one arm bent behind her head; four seated on the left; two on the right, one in profile with long red hair.
Go up with this in mind: an easel with a crank is not a piece of furniture, it is a working tool for large canvases, and it tells the trade of a nineteenth-century painter better than any label.
6. One ticket, two museums, and a duration the sources disagree on
How long does the ticket that also opens the Musée Moreau really last?
Since 1 January 2024 the entrance ticket sold here and at the Musée Gustave Moreau has been a single ticket: you pay at one and you get into the other. On the duration, though, the two houses say different things, and it is as well to know it before you plan. The general terms of sale, which are the document the two museums share, and the Moreau’s practical page speak of 72 hours; the Henner’s opening-hours page says seven days.
Go by the cautious figure, three days, and if you can do the two museums in the same afternoon: they are about twenty minutes apart by bus, and together they tell the same late nineteenth-century Paris from two opposite points of view, the official artist and the visionary.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site musee-henner.fr and on the general terms of sale shared by the Henner and Moreau museums. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The full price is 8 euros, the reduced price 6 euros, and the same ticket also opens the Musée Gustave Moreau. Free admission. Under-18s get in free, as do under-26s resident in the European Economic Area, Paris Museum Pass holders, people on minimum social benefits and jobseekers. On the first Sunday of the month the permanent collection is free, from 11:00 to 17:45. Opening hours. The museum opens every day except Tuesday, from 11:00 to 18:00, and the last entry is at 17:30. Late opening. On the second Thursday of the month, from September to June, it stays open until 21:00. Closing days. It closes on Tuesdays, plus 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Paris Museum Pass. It is accepted: with the pass you get in without paying. Getting there. The entrance is at 43 avenue de Villiers, in the 17th. The stops are Malesherbes and Wagram on line 3 and Monceau on line 2; RER C stops at Pereire. How long it takes. The three floors take an hour, and the winter garden deserves ten minutes of sitting down.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The twin of this museum is the Musée Gustave Moreau, which shares its ticket and which is the studio house of a painter who built his own museum while he was alive. In the same district, around the park, are the Musée Cernuschi, which is free and tells Asia, and the Musée Jacquemart-André, the house of the two collectors of the boulevard Haussmann. And if the Paris of painters is what you are after, Montmartre begins a few streets from here.
Photo credits: drawing room and winter garden by Hartl-Meyer for the Musée national Jean-Jacques Henner (CC BY-SA 4.0); facade by Celette (CC BY-SA 4.0); the artist’s easel by Copyleft (CC BY-SA 3.0); L’Alsace. Elle attend and Salomé by Jean-Jacques Henner (public domain), from Wikimedia Commons.
