Monday, May 15, 2006

A Terrific Small Museum

This private collectors' home is a favourite of mine, with a very good audio tour and an elegant restaurant with a Tiepolo ceiling and a terrace. Although the grand public rooms are spectacular, I especially enjoyed looking at the living quarters of Edouard and Nelie.

"Since the Jacquemart-Andre Museum was refurbished and brought back to life five years ago, it's been the talk of the international art world. And even those die-hard Parisians who have never stepped foot into the Louvre love the Jacquemart, if only because it boasts the only restaurant where you can eat beneath an original Tiepolo ceiling.


A house-museum, whose five thousand works of art and antiquities range from the Lower and Upper Egyptian Kingdoms to the Italian Quattrocentro to the Dutch School of Old Master painting and the Rococo of Boucher, Fragonard and Greuze, the Jacquemart-Andre is in a class by itself. The sumptuous edifice, built in 1869 by the architect Henri Parent (second runner-up after Charles Garnier to the Paris Opera) was commissioned by Edouard Andre the sole heir to a colossal banking fortune. It was so colossal that in 1871, he and the Baron Rothschild ponied up in a single week--5 billion francs in gold as a war indemnity to Bismarck, a payoff that prevented the Prussian army's occupation of Paris. "

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