After Picpus Cemetery, we took the metro across the city to the Musee Marmottan Monet in the Paris section of Passy,. The museum has a significant selection of impressionist art, including what is is the biggest collection of Monets in the world.
Even though "Marmottan" sounds like a rodent, it's actually a former townhouse built for a duke in the 1860s. Upon his death, the mansion was sold to Jules Marmottan in 1882. Director of a mining company, Marmottan loved art, so he collected it over time. He died less than a year after purchasing the house, bequeathing it to his son. The son built on to the house, making it significantly larger.
The son (Paul) married, the wife died and he had no children. The woman he planned to marry next died, so he was not only unlucky at love, but had no heirs. Paul Marmottan acquired many more art pieces. Upon his death, his house was bequeathed to the Academie des Beaux-Arts and became a museum in 1934.
(Editor: Is this going anywhere? Writer: Now that you mention it, not really).
Anyhow, it's an art gallery and has art. There's a bunch of Monets, including his famed "Impression: Sunrise" which gave rise to the word "Impressionism."
In 1966, the museum hit paydirt. Michel Monet, Claude's second son and only heir, donated over 300 Monets (only a small number are on display at any time).
If you want to see a whole bunch of Monets with a much smaller crowd than Musee d'Orsay, it's worth making the trip to Musee Marmottan Monet, even if you think of a rodent.
Great Related Story
As a sidebar, this from Wikipedia is worth reading, especially in light of my joke linked to here.
On October 27, 1985, during daylight hours, five masked gunmen with pistols threatening security and visitors entered the museum and stole nine paintings from the collection. Among them were Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, the painting from which the Impressionism movement took its name. Aside from that also stolen were Camille Monet and Cousin on the Beach at Trouville, Portrait of Jean Monet, Portrait of Poly, Fisherman of Belle-Isle and Field of Tulips in Holland also by Monet, Bather Sitting on a Rock and Portrait of Monet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Young Woman at the Ball by Berthe Morisot, and Portrait of Monet by Seiichi Naruse. The stolen paintings were valued at $12 million.
A tip-off led to the arrest in Japan of a yakuza gangster named Shuinichi Fujikuma who had spent time in French prison for trafficking heroin and was sentenced for five years. There he met Philippe Jamin and Youssef Khimoun who were part of an art syndicate. Fujikuma, Jamin and Khimoun planned the Marmottan theft. In Fujikuma's house, police found a catalog with all the stolen paintings from the museum circled. Also found were two paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot stolen in 1984 from a museum in France. This led to the recovery of the stolen paintings in a small villa in Corsica in December 1990.
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