Musee Nissim de Camondo

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Right beside the Cernuschi, with its entrance at no. 63 rue de Monceau, is the Musee Nissim de Camondo (Wed-Sun 10am-5:30pm; €6; M° Monceau/Villiers), an impressive collection of eighteenth-century decorative art and painting, built up by Count Moise de Camondo, son of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish banker who had emigrated from Istanbul to Paris in the late nineteenth-century. In order to provide a fitting showcase for his treasures, the count commissioned a mansion in authentic eighteenth-century style, modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles. The ground-floor rooms, decorated in original eighteenth-century paneling, overflow with Gobellin tapestries, paintings of pastoral scenes by Huet and Vigée-Lebrun, gilded furniture and delicate Sévres porcelain; an excellent free audioguide, available in English, helps you get the most out of the exhibits. The upper-floor rooms, where the family spent most of their time, are homelier and less museum-like; here and there some of the anachronistic mod-cons of an early twentieth-century aristocratic home surface, such as the count’s well-appointed bathroom. These rooms take on a progressively melancholy air, however, as you learn more about the Camondo family and its fate: after a few years of marriage Moise’s wife left him for the head groom; his beloved son, Nissim, after whom the museum is named, died on a flying mission in World War I, while his remaining child, Béatrice, perished together with her children in the camps in World War II.