Musee de la Vie Romantique and Musee Moreau
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Musee de la Vie Romantique and Musee Moreau
To get the full flavour of the neuvième’s nineteenth-century heyday, make for the Musée de la Vie Romantique, at 16 rue Chaptal (daily except mon. 10am-6pm, closed public hols; €9 during exhibitions, otherwise free, Mo St-Georges/Blanche/Pigalle), which sets out to evoke the Romantic Period in what was once the painter Ary Scheffers’s house. The shuttered building is a delightful surprise, facing onto a cobbled courtyard at the end of a private alley, while the interior preserves the rich colours of a typical bourgeois home of the nineteenth century. George Sand used to visit here, and the ground floor consists mainly of bits and pieces associated with her, including jewels, locks of hair and a cast of her lover Chopin’s surprisingly small hand. Scheffer was art tutor to Louis-Philippe’s children, and upstairs are a number of his hideously sentimental aristocratic portraits.
A short way south down rue de la Rochefoucauld, you’ll find the curious and little- visited Musée Moreau (daily except Tues 10am-12:45pm & 2-5:15pm; €5; www.musee-moreau.fr; Mo St-Georges/Blanche/Pigalle), dedicated to the fantastical Symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau. The museum’s design was conceived by Moreau himself, to be carved out of the house he shared with his parents for many years; you can visit her tiny, stuffy apartment rooms, crammed with furniture and trinkets. The paintings get more room – two huge, studio-like spaces connected by a beautiful spiral staircase – but the effect is no less cluttered. Moreau’s canvases hang cheek-by-jowl, every surface crawling with figures and decorative swirls – literally crawling in the case of The Daughters of Thespius – or alive with deep colours and provocative symbolism as in the museum’s pièce the résistance, Jupiter and Séméle. For all rampantly decadent symbolism, some viewers haven’t quite convinced. Degas, for one commented that Moreau was "a hermit who knows the train timetable".
