Jules and Paul Marmottan

Vue du jardin intérieur

Paul Marmottan dans sa bibliothèque

First Empire
Primitives

Formerly the hunting lodge of Christophe Edmond Kellermann, Duke of Valmy, the Marmottan Monet Museum was bought in 1882 by Jules Marmottan. His son Paul made it his home and extended it to show the Napoleonic paintings, furnishings and bronzes he collected in the course of his life.

In his will - he died in 1932 - he left the Académie des Beaux-Arts (the Paris School of Art) the wealth of historical documents making up his Boulogne library, all his collections and his town house, which became a museum two years later.

Initially devoted to the First Empire, the Marmottan Museum was to become over the years an impressionist shrine.

In 1957 the Marmottan Monet Museum was presented with the painting collection Victorine Donop de Monchy had inherited from her father, Doctor Georges de Bellio. Of Rumanian extraction, de Bellio had been physician to Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Renoir and one of the first lovers of impressionist painting.
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In 1966 Michel Monet, the painter's second son, left the family property at Giverny to the Académie des Beaux Arts and the collection of pictures inherited from his father to the Marmottan Museum. This gave the Museum the world's largest collection of works by Claude Monet. To provide an appropriate setting for this collection Jacques Carlu, architect, member of the French Academy and then curator of the Museum, built an exhibition hall based on that of the "Grandes Décorations" in the Orangery at the Tuileries Gardens.

Through the generosity of Nelly Duhem the collection was complemented in 1987 by that of her parents, Henri Duhem and Mary Sergeant. Himself a painter and brother-in-arms of the post-impressionists, Henri Duhem was a passionate collector of the works of his contemporaries.

In 1996, the Denis and Annie Rouart Foundation was established at the Marmottan Museum in response to Annie Rouart's wish that the public should have access to major works by Berthe Morisot, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir and Henri Rouart.

Moreover, what had first been a temple to Napoleon and later - through the extraordinary generosity of a few art-lovers - to impressionism, is now home to the donation made by Daniel Wildenstein in 1980 of his father's exceptional collection of illuminations.

Since its founding in 1934 the Marmottan Museum's collection has been enriched by further substantial bequests from:

Emile Bastien Lepage, Vincent Bouguereau, Henri Le Riche, Jean Paul Léon, André Billecocq, Gaston Schulmann, the Florence Gould Foundation, Roger Hauser, Cila Dreyfus and Thérèse Rouart,

as well as by the generous patronage of:

The Reader's Digest, Mr Yosoji Kobayashi, Club Pommery, Mr Geoffrey Huang, Friends of French Art, the San Francisco Fine Art Museum, Mrs Françoise B. Richardson, Mrs Boss, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Phoenix Art Museum.