Musée Magnin

Tucked into the 17th-century Hôtel Lantin a few minutes from the Palace of the Dukes, the Musée Magnin is a small national museum with the feel of a private house. Paintings are crowded onto walls floor-to-ceiling in salon style, furniture and ceramics fill the rooms, and the labels are deliberately minimal. The collection of around 2,000 works includes Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French paintings from the 16th to the 19th century.

It is an antidote to the scale of the Beaux-Arts and a much quieter visit. Allow an hour. Closed Tuesdays; modest admission.

things to do museum
A story
Maurice and Jeanne Magnin, a brother and sister with no formal art training, spent fifty years buying paintings nobody else wanted — minor 17th-century Italian masters, second-tier Dutch landscapes, school-of works of every kind. In 1938 they bequeathed it all to the French state on condition that the collection stay in their home, in the order they had hung it. The instruction has been honoured ever since.