At the end of a paved lane, behind a gate on the rue Chaptal, a courtyard opens with a yellow two-storey house, arched windows on the ground floor and shutters of a pale brown. This is the Musée de la Vie romantique, the museum of Romanticism of the City of Paris, and before that the house where the painter Ary Scheffer lived for almost thirty years.
As in the other municipal museums of Paris the permanent collection is free, and you only pay for the temporary exhibition, which makes this one of the easiest places to slip into a morning with no plans. If you look the museum up in the photographs going round online, though, you will find another one, with green shutters: it closed on 16 September 2024 and reopened on 14 February 2026 after seventeen months of work, with a new route and a repainted front. The museum closes on Mondays.
What is a cast of one of Chopin’s hands doing in the house of a Dutch painter?
Let’s begin!
1. An Italian-style house at the end of a lane
From the rue Chaptal you can see the dark green iron gate, with its spear finials, and next to it a canopy of glass and green metal with the name of the museum in gold letters, which is the new reception built during the restoration. On the wall to the left, the blue street plaque and the brown Histoire de Paris lozenge devoted to the hôtel Renan-Scheffer. Go through and walk on the cobbles: the lane rises a little, between two cream walls, with a wooden trellis covered in green on the left, and after twenty metres the courtyard opens.
The pavilion was built in 1830 in the Italian style, and in July of that year the painter Ary Scheffer, a Dutchman from Dordrecht who had come to Paris as a boy, moved in as a tenant. He stayed until his death, in 1858. In the courtyard he had two studios built with light from above: the big one, which he shared with his brother Henry, for painting and for teaching, and the small one, which became famous for another reason.
2. The Fridays of the small studio
Who used to meet in that courtyard on a Friday evening?
Between 1831 and 1858, every Friday, Scheffer filled the small studio with people: Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Eugène Delacroix, Gioachino Rossini, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens when he passed through Paris. It was not a society salon with carriages queuing outside: it was a painter’s workroom, with stools and the smell of turpentine, and people came to listen to somebody play. Picture Chopin at the piano with a few people around him, and you have the scene. When you go in it will seem small to you, and small it really was.
Carry that image with you as you cross the courtyard, because it is the key to the whole museum. This is not the house of an artistic movement rebuilt by a curator: it is a place those people really passed through, and the distance between the piano and the canvas was three metres.
3. Chopin’s left hand
Here is the answer to the question at the top, and it is a family story. The cast is from 1849, the year Chopin died, and it was made by the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, who was George Sand’s son-in-law: he had married her daughter Solange two years earlier. Chopin and Sand had been together for almost ten years.
Look at the plaster closely: the hand is seen at an angle, the wrist cut off, the fingers extended and barely curved, as if they were still resting on a keyboard. On the back you can see the knuckles, the nails and the small scratches the plaster has picked up in a hundred and seventy-seven years. It is a small object and an uncomfortable one to look at, because it is not a portrait: it is an impression taken from a body.
4. George Sand, who lived two streets away
If you are coming for George Sand, your part is the ground floor, where the new route devotes a whole section to her, and it is not a token tribute. Sand (1804-1876) belonged to this district: in 1839 she was living on rue Pigalle, from 1842 on the square d’Orléans, and she came here as a neighbour. Her keepsakes reached the museum from the family, and they are the kind of objects that tell a person better than her books do: jewellery, casts, watercolours by her and by her son Maurice.
The floor above, since the reopening, is organised around four themes, and if you know them before you go up the rooms read better: nature and landscape, feeling, literature and the fantastic. It is a way of saying that Romanticism was not only painting, and indeed among the pictures you find music and books.
5. Scheffer’s Faust, and why the fantastic has a room
If you are looking for a single work that explains the house, this is it. In Faust dans son cabinet, of 1848, Scheffer puts at the centre a man with an auburn beard and a dark robe over a white shirt with a ruffled collar, seated in a carved wooden armchair with red upholstery: his face is turned up to the left, one hand buried in his hair and the other abandoned lower down. Behind the chair back, almost in the dark, a figure appears with a face hollowed out like a skull, raising its fingers to its mouth.
Now look at the table at the bottom right, because that is where the painting says what it has to say: on an orange-red cloth lie a skull, scattered papers, a rolled document and the neck of a stringed instrument. Goethe’s Faust was the book of the Romantic generation, and Scheffer painted it more than once: if you know the text, you will recognise the scene of the pact.
6. The conservatory, the garden and the green table
Behind the house there is a small garden, and at the end of it a conservatory of iron and glass painted green, with a barrel-vaulted roof, which houses the tea room. In the photograph above, which is from 2012 and therefore earlier than the works, you can see the structure as it still is: the diamond trellis on the wall behind, the counter with the cake display inside, and outside, on the gravel, a round green table with wrought iron chairs of the same colour.
The garden and the conservatory are open during museum hours and they do not ask you for a ticket. In hot weather it is one of the few places in the 9th arrondissement where you can sit in the shade without having to order something.
7. What changed on 14 February 2026
Is it worth going back, if you have already been?
Yes, and the reason can be seen before you go in. The work cost about 3.8 million euros and redid the roof structure, the roof covering and the facades, lime-rendered with the nineteenth-century technique; the shutters are back to their original brown-beige, after years of green. The permanent route has been redone from scratch on two levels, the reception is new and the garden paths towards the tea room have been made more accessible.
One thing, though, could not be done, and it is as well to know if you have trouble walking: there is no lift, because the building has been a listed monument since 1956 and the structure did not allow it. The ground floor and the garden remain accessible.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site museevieromantique.paris.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The permanent collection is free and needs no booking. Temporary exhibitions are charged, through the Paris Musées ticket office. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 to 18:00, and the rooms are cleared at 17:50. Closing days. It closes on Mondays, plus 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Garden and tea room. They are open during museum hours. Accessibility. There is no lift: the house is visited by stairs, while the courtyard, the garden and the temporary exhibition spaces are accessible by wheelchair, which the museum lends free of charge. Getting there. The entrance is at 16 rue Chaptal. The stops are Saint-Georges, Pigalle and Blanche, on lines 2 and 12; the buses are the 68 and the 74. How long it takes. The house takes an hour, and the garden another half hour if you sit down.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Five minutes from here, in the same Nouvelle Athènes, is the other studio house of the district, the Musée Gustave Moreau, which closes on Tuesday instead of Monday. Delacroix, who was a regular at these Fridays, has a museum of his own on the left bank, the Musée Delacroix, and a biography here on the site. Going north you reach Montmartre; going down towards the park, instead, you find the Musée Jean-Jacques Henner and the Musée Cernuschi.
Photo credits: courtyard and entrance by Mbzt (CC BY 4.0); conservatory by Parizpropokrocile (CC BY-SA 3.0); cast of Chopin’s hand by Auguste Clésinger, photograph by the Musée de la Vie romantique (CC0); Ary Scheffer, Faust dans son cabinet (public domain), from Wikimedia Commons.
