A financier who collected the king’s salt tax had himself a mansion built on rue de Thorigny, and Parisians promptly nicknamed it the hôtel Salé, the salted one. Three centuries later those rooms ended up holding the «Picassos of Picasso»: the works Pablo Picasso had kept for himself, which the French State received through two dations, in 1979 from the artist’s heirs and in 1990 from Jacqueline Picasso’s, in lieu of inheritance tax. The museum opened in 1985.
I take you through ten works, chosen from those the museum itself puts at the top of its collection, from the first self-portrait of 1901 to Massacre in Korea of 1951. The museum is closed on Mondays and rotates the hang of the collection, so here it is up front: the work you are after may be in store, and its entry on the website tells you before you leave whether it is out.
What is a mansion full of Baroque stucco doing in a museum devoted to the painter who took the human figure apart?
Let’s begin!
The hôtel Salé, the house creditors fought over for sixty years
The art historian Bruno Foucart called it «the largest, the most extraordinary, not to say extravagant of the great Parisian mansions of the 17th century», and the museum puts that line at the top of the page telling its history. Pierre Aubert de Fontenay bought the land on 16 May 1656 for 40,000 livres from the nuns of Saint-Anastase, and picked an unknown young architect, Jean Boullier de Bourges. The work was finished in the last days of 1659. Aubert collected the gabelle for the king, the tax on salt, and that office gave the house the nickname it still carries.
Look at the courtyard before you go in: the facade is not flat but curved, and the central block rises through three storeys to an enormous pediment loaded with acanthus, fruit and flowers. The museum calls this Mazarin architecture, the moment when the Italian Baroque brought in by Cardinal Mazarin met the lesson of François Mansart.
Aubert enjoyed his house for barely any time at all: he was a protégé of Nicolas Fouquet and fell with him in 1663. Creditors fought over the building for sixty years, during which it was rented to the Republic of Venice, which used it as its embassy.
The staircase, which quotes Michelangelo
Climb slowly. The carved decoration is by the brothers Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy and by Martin Desjardins, and the museum names the model for the staircase: it is the system Michelangelo invented for the Laurentian Library in Florence, which you can see in San Lorenzo and the Laurentian Library. No enclosed well, but two imperial flights, a balcony that juts out and then a gallery.
Look up and count the figures: eagles gripping thunderbolts, genii with garlands, deities reclining on the cornices, Corinthian pilasters. The architectural historian Jean-Pierre Babelon described this stucco as «a sort of three-dimensional translation of Annibale Carracci’s paintings in the Farnese Gallery».
Warning: you will not find photographs of the paintings in this guide. Picasso’s works are in copyright and no free images of them exist, so the photographs here are of the building. It is also why, when you look this museum up online, what you mostly find is staircases and pediments.
The Blue Period: the 1901 self-portrait and the Celestina
Look for two works that tell the beginning and the end of the same moment. The Self-portrait of 1901, oil on canvas, 81 × 61 centimetres, is the first great blue painting, and there is a death behind it: on 17 February 1901, after an evening at the café L’Hippodrome on the boulevard de Clichy, his friend Carles Casagemas shot himself. The same collection holds The Death of Casagemas, painted that year. Beside the picture the museum puts a line of Picasso’s: «It was thinking about Casagemas that got me started painting in blue».
La Célestine, of 1904, closes that season. Note the second title the museum records it under, La Femme à la taie, which names the film over one of her eyes. It is a portrait of Carlotta Valdivia, who kept a brothel in Barcelona, and the museum explains where the name comes from: Celestina is the procuress in the tragicomedy by Fernando de Rojas, the woman paid to further Calisto’s love for Melibea. Picasso painted it shortly before leaving Barcelona for Paris.
Gósol and Cubism: the two brothers and the caned chair
Between May and August 1906 Picasso spent the summer at Gósol, a village in upper Catalonia you could then reach only by mule. The Two Brothers, gouache on cardboard, 80 × 59 centimetres, comes from there. Look for the drum at the bottom, cut in half by the edge: it is what remains of the saltimbanque years, while the figure already has the solidity of the new style.
What is a real piece of rope doing inside a painting?
Six years later, in 1912, comes what the museum calls the turning point: Still Life with Chair Caning, a mere 29 × 37 centimetres. Inside the oval frame are two things that are not painting: a length of rope running round the picture and a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern. Look for the three letters JOU, which stand for journal, newspaper, and also for jouer, to play. Picasso called it a «trompe-l’esprit», a trick played on the mind.
The return to order: Olga, the pipes of Pan and Paul as Harlequin
In 1917 Picasso went to Italy to work for the Ballets Russes and met the dancer Olga Khokhlova. The Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, of 1918, is a canvas of 130 × 88 centimetres with a neoclassical air: if you came expecting nothing but broken forms, this is where the museum wrong-foots you.
Why is the largest painting on this route a scene of shepherds by the sea?
The Pipes of Pan, of 1923, is the largest painting on this route: 205 × 175 centimetres, painted over the summer at Cap d’Antibes. Two male figures by the sea, among plain geometric pieces of architecture, are at once fishermen contemporary with Ulysses, shepherds out of Virgil’s Eclogues and young men in white swimming trunks.
Paul as Harlequin is from 1924 and shows his son Paulo, born on 21 February 1921. The line the museum sets beside it explains the costume better than any label: «Youth is a time when you dress up, when you hide your personality. It is a time of sincere lies».
The war: the man with a sheep, the goat, the massacre
Follow the dates one after another, because on their own they say what was going on. Man with a Sheep is from February 1943, from occupied Paris: a bronze 202 centimetres high, one of Picasso’s very few full-length sculptures, modelled in plaster in the Grands-Augustins studio with the help of Paul Éluard. After the war Picasso gave a cast to the town of Vallauris, and Tristan Tzara compared it to the ancient Moschophoros, the calf-bearer. Picasso denied there was any symbol in it.
The Goat, of 1950, is 120 centimetres tall and made of a palm leaf, metal and plaster, in mixed media. Picasso’s own words, reported by Françoise Gilot, explain how it works: «I start from the basket and I arrive at the rib cage. I go from the metaphor to reality».
Massacre in Korea carries an exact date, 18 January 1951. Look at how it is built: two groups face each other, on one side naked women and children, already a corpse-like grey; on the other soldiers whose guns look like harquebuses and whose helmets recall those of medieval knights, one of them brandishing a sword. The museum states the ancestry: the composition quotes Goya’s Tres de Mayo, in the Prado, and Manet’s Execution of Maximilian.
Practical information
Data checked on 23 September 2026 on the official website museepicassoparis.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. A full ticket costs 16 euros. The family rate costs 12 euros per adult and applies to one or two adults with a child. The collection audio guide costs 5 euros, 4 reduced, and is free for members. Free admission. The museum is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month, with no booking. Under-18s go in free, as do under-26s who live in the European Union or are citizens of it, on showing a document. Opening hours. From Tuesday to Sunday it opens at 9:30 and closes at 18:00, with last admission at 17:15. The rooms start closing at 17:40. It is closed on Mondays, on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. When it is quietest. The museum publishes an hour-by-hour table of how busy it is: 9:30-10:30 is the emptiest slot on almost every day, while from 10:30 to 11:30 the crowd is rated heavy on Tuesdays and Sundays. Works on show. The hang of the collection rotates. If you are coming for one particular work, open its entry on the website before you set off. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is one of those covered: with the pass you do not pay the 16 euros of the full ticket. Getting there. The entrance is at 5 rue de Thorigny. The museum lists three stops: Saint-Paul on line 1, Saint-Sébastien - Froissart and Chemin Vert on line 8. How long to allow. The ten works, with time to look at the staircase, need two hours. There is a café on the roof, open from 10:30 to 17:30 Tuesday to Friday and from 10:00 to 17:30 at weekends.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The Marais is walkable, and the other five museums on this route are all within a quarter of an hour: the Musée Carnavalet is five minutes away and tells the story of Paris, the Musée Cognacq-Jay is one collector’s 18th century, the Maison de Victor Hugo is on place des Vosges, the mahJ fills another 17th-century mansion and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is the strangest of the lot. To see where Picasso’s Paris came from, there is Montmartre, and his Guernica is not here but in Madrid, at the Museo Reina Sofía.
Photo credits: garden front by LPLT (CC BY-SA 3.0); staircase stuccoes by François de Dijon (CC BY-SA 4.0); courtyard by DiscoA340 (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
