Paris of the Second Empire. Ladies in ball gowns with dizzying necklines and huge crinolines, monsieurs in black tails and high cylinders, glittering courtesans. Verdi’s music and Maupassant’s short stories,
the World’s Fair, the Salon des Misérables, Manet’s Olympia, the beginning of Impressionism, Sarah Bernhardt. The city center, turned into a giant construction site – Grand Opera Charles Garnier, two new theaters on the old Place du Châtelet, the great boulevards of Baron Osman. Luxurious mansions on the boulevards with wide halls, marble staircases, attics, stucco, fireplaces, parquet and openwork (“French”) balconies. Mansions where successful financiers (Rothschilds, Perreras…) and famous cocottes of the time organized magnificent celebrations.
One such mansion in the center of the new – “Ottoman” – Paris, located between the Parc Monceau and the Grand Opera House, belonged to Madame and Monsieur Jacquemart-André. In their house with a wide courtyard, winter garden, living room with windows on the boulevard, smoking room in the Turkish style and the original, almost “weightless” staircase of architect Henri Parran gathered the most exquisite society. Having no children, Nelly Jacquemart and Edouard André devoted all their time and energy to collecting works of art. Their passion was Italy. In consultation with specialists from the Louvre, they assembled in their mansion the richest collection of Italian art of the XVth century (the second most important in France after the Louvre), as well as masters of French art of the XVIIIth century and the Dutch of the “Golden Age”.
Before her death, Nelly Jacquemart, motivated by the idea of preserving her collection, bequeathed both the mansion and the collection to the Institut de France, which opened a museum here. Visiting it, you will plunge into the world of the Second Empire and enjoy masterpieces of world art. You can finish the tour with a “sweet pause” in the museum’s exquisite tea salon with Tiepolo’s frescoes or with lunch at the newly opened La Païva restaurant on the Champs-Élysées, located in the mansion where the famous Russian courtesan of the time hosted “the whole of Paris”.
