Two people spent their lives buying Italian art in Italy, and then left the lot to the Institut de France, house included: what remains is the Musée Jacquemart-André. The mansion on the boulevard Haussmann was built for Édouard André and Nélie Jacquemart, and inside there are a Paolo Uccello, a Mantegna, a Rembrandt and a Tiepolo fresco lifted from a Venetian villa.
Two things are worth knowing before you arrive, because this museum does not work like the others in the district: the ticket costs 19 euros and covers both the collection and the exhibition on, and the Paris Museum Pass does not work here, because the museum is private, owned by the Institut de France. On the other hand it opens every day, which in Paris is almost a rarity.
How do you build a house around paintings you have not bought yet?
Let’s begin!
1. A banker, a portraitist and a house built for the collection
Édouard André (1833-1894) came from a family of Protestant bankers, one of the great fortunes of the Second Empire. In 1868 he commissioned the architect Henri Parent to build a mansion on what was then a brand-new boulevard, and the house was inaugurated in 1876, when the interior decoration was not even finished.
Nélie Jacquemart (1841-1912) entered this story as a painter: in 1872 she made André’s portrait, and nine years later, in 1881, she married him. From then on they bought together, and above all they bought in Italy, where they went every year: Florentine and Venetian Quattrocento, sculpture, furniture, and then Dutch painting and French eighteenth-century arts. Widowed in 1894, Nélie carried on alone, and in 1912 she left the house and the collections to the Institut de France: the museum opened the following year.
While you wait your turn at the entrance, read the facade, because it says it all already: pale stone, a mansard roof, a balustrade running above the first floor, fluted Corinthian pilasters and tall arched windows on the ground floor. Behind the black railing with the gilded spikes there are palms in pots. It is a mansion that wants to be looked at, and indeed the house was made for receiving: keep that in mind when you go in, because almost everything you will see was meant for guests.
2. The double staircase, which in 1876 was the coup de théâtre
What made the guests of the first evening stop and stare?
This. Two red granite columns with gilded Corinthian capitals frame a curved marble landing, with a wrought iron banister in black with scrolls and gilded rosettes; the steps carry a sea-green carpet with a gold border, and on the right a dark bust rests on a white marble pedestal. The stair splits and climbs on two sides, and that improbable balance was the surprise of the 1876 inauguration.
Go up slowly, because the thing to look at is not the stair: it is the wall at the top.
3. The Tiepolo that comes from a villa on the Brenta
Above the staircase opens Henri III Received at the Villa Contarini, by Giambattista Tiepolo, and it is neither a copy nor a piece painted for this house: it comes from a Venetian villa.
Take a minute to read it, because it is full of people. At the centre a loggia of pale columns opens onto the water, with the red roofs of a few buildings and the boats. On the left a group of aristocrats in sixteenth-century dress, the women in wide pale gowns, the men in ruffs, welcomes a young man dressed in pink; above them there is a red banner and a parasol, at their feet a small white and brown dog. On the right an attendant in a red doublet strides forward holding something out towards a group of men in dark cloaks, and behind him the white head of a horse appears. On the cornice to the left, if you look for it, a parrot is perched. The colours are all muted, dusty pink and grey-blue.
The scene tells of the passage of Henri III of Valois through the Veneto in 1574, on his way back from Poland to take the crown of France: Tiepolo painted it a hundred and seventy years later, around 1745, for the Contarini. Nélie Jacquemart bought it in 1893 from the owner of the villa and had it lifted from the wall and transferred onto canvas, a job of months, to be mounted again here.
4. The musée italien, and Paolo Uccello’s Saint George
Upstairs is what the two of them called the musée italien, and it is the part that justifies the visit on its own. In the Salle Florentine, on pink and white brocade wallpaper, Saint George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello hangs in a gilded frame between two panels. On the left, in a polygonal frame, there is a crowded scene inside a pink architecture; on the right, in a round frame, a Nativity with the Virgin kneeling under a wooden roof.
Look at the panel closely, because the composition is all horizontal, like a stage set. On the right the knight in dark armour, on a rearing white horse with red harness, drives his yellow lance into the dragon’s mouth; the dragon is green, winged, its wings dotted with dark circles, and it rears on its hind legs in front of a large rock, which has the black mouth of a cave at its foot. On the left the princess, in a deep red gown with a long train, holds her hands clasped and watches. Behind, the landscape is a mosaic of ploughed fields divided by rows of pines, rising to a white crenellated wall with a gate, and above it all a midnight blue sky.
Please note: there is no agreement on the date. The museum says 1430-35, other scholars put it around 1465, and the version of the same subject at the National Gallery in London is later anyway, from the 1470s. If you have read that the Paris one is «the first», be aware that this is the museum’s dating, not a settled fact.
5. Mantegna’s Ecce Homo, and the frame that makes it look like an altar
Andrea Mantegna died in 1506, and this Ecce Homo belongs to his last period. Christ is shown half length at the centre, with the plaited crown of thorns and his wrists bound by a thick rope; at his sides two tormentors, an old bearded man in profile on the left and on the right a man in an orange-yellow turban who keeps a hand on his shoulder and shouts, mouth wide open. In the upper corners the painter wrote two scrolls with the words of the crowd, CRUCIFIGE and TOLLE EUM, which mean «crucify him» and «take him away».
Step up to the frame, because it is not a detail: it is a gilded tabernacle with spiral columns and panels painted with grotesques, and it turns a painting into an object of devotion. In a nineteenth-century bourgeois house the effect is strange, and it is exactly the effect the two of them were after.
6. Rembrandt’s Pilgrims at Emmaus, painted at twenty-three
The best known of the Dutch paintings in the house is the one of the Pèlerins d’Emmaüs, the pilgrims at Emmaus, and Rembrandt painted it in 1629, at twenty-three.
It is a scene that is almost entirely black. On the right Christ sits in profile and you see him against the light, like a silhouette cut out against a glowing ochre wall: the light does not come from him, it comes from behind him, from a source you cannot see. Facing him, on the other side of the table laid with a white cloth, an old bald man pulls back and stares at him open-mouthed, in the moment he understands who he has in front of him. On the left, almost invisible in the dark, a stooping figure is busy with something at the back.
Note this date, 1629, for when you go and see at the Louvre the version Rembrandt painted of the same subject twenty years later: there the light is soft and explained, here it is a flash in a dark room.
7. What changed with the reopening of 6 September 2024
The museum closed for more than a year and reopened on 6 September 2024. The work redid the dining room, today the museum café, with another Tiepolo on the ceiling; then the fumoir and the staircase; and the courtyard was replanted.
It is worth knowing for a practical reason: the photographs of the museum you find online are often earlier, and the rooms you will see have different colours from those in the photographs. The images in this article, except the facade, are from 2025 and 2026.
8. Why the ticket costs what it costs
Is it worth 19 euros, in a city where half the municipal museums are free?
The answer changes with what you put into it. The ticket covers the permanent collection and the temporary exhibition together, and the exhibition here is not a side dish: until 24 January 2027 there is Éternel Tintoret. The museum is private, it belongs to the Institut de France, so the Paris Museum Pass does not cover it and there are none of the free admissions of the French national museums.
Honestly: if you love the Italian Quattrocento it is worth it, because this is the densest place in Paris after the Louvre, and if what interests you is mainly the nineteenth-century house, five minutes away is the Musée Cernuschi, which is free.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site musee-jacquemart-andre.com. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The full price is 19 euros and covers the permanent collection and the exhibition on. Over-65s pay 18 euros; the reduced price is 16 euros and applies to students, jobseekers and young people aged 19 to 25; from 7 to 18 the price is 10 euros. The family ticket, two adults and two children, costs 51 euros. Free admission. Children under 7 get in free, as do disabled visitors and their companion, members and staff of the Institut de France, journalists, tour guides and holders of the ICOM, ICOMOS or SNELAC card. Opening hours. The museum opens every day, from 10:00 to 18:00. During exhibitions there is a late opening on Friday until 21:30, and the ticket office closes half an hour before the museum. Paris Museum Pass. It is not accepted: the museum is private and it does not appear among the free admissions on its own rates page. Getting there. The entrance is at 158 boulevard Haussmann. The stops are Miromesnil, on lines 9 and 13, and Saint-Philippe du Roule, on line 9. How long it takes. The house and the musée italien need an hour and a half, and the temporary exhibition another good half hour.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Ten minutes on foot, on the other side of the park, is the Musée Cernuschi, the house of another collector of the same district, who gathered Asian art instead and whose permanent collection is free; a little further up is the Musée Jean-Jacques Henner. The Italian Quattrocento you see here in twenty metres of wall goes on at the Louvre, and the Paris of rich late nineteenth-century houses is also told by the Musée Carnavalet. And if Paolo Uccello really interests you, his story is in this guide.
Photo credits: facade by Thomon (CC BY-SA 4.0); staircase, Tiepolo fresco and Salle Florentine by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 4.0); Mantegna’s Ecce Homo photographed by Matthieu.lett.ube (CC BY 4.0); Paolo Uccello, Saint George and the Dragon, and Rembrandt, The Pilgrims at Emmaus (public domain), from Wikimedia Commons.
