Marmottan Monet Museum

Marmottan Monet Museum, 2013

Claude Monet:
Impression, soleil levant

The Musée Marmottan Monet (also Musée Marmottan ) is an art museum in the 16th arrondissement of Paris . The museum, which belongs to the Académie des beaux-arts , emerged from various private collections and is located in a 19th-century city villa near the Bois de Boulogne . It houses the largest collection of works by the painter Claude Monet , including the painting Impression, soleil levant , from which the name of the art movement Impressionism is derived.

history

The hunting lodge of Christophe Edmond Kellermann, duc de Valmy , originally stood on the site of today's museum . Jules Marmottan bought the property in 1882, but died the following year. His son Paul Marmottan inherited the building and had it converted into an elegant town house. Paul Marmottan lived in the house and housed his steadily growing collection of furniture and art from the Napoleonic era in it. Together with the works of art of the Renaissance he inherited from his father, he left all his possessions to the Académie des beaux-arts on his death in 1932, which opened the house as a museum in 1934 .

The large collection of Impressionist painting began in 1957 with the foundation of Victorine Donop de Monchy . Her father, Georges de Bellio , was the doctor of Édouard Manet , Claude Monet , Camille Pissarro , Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir and was one of the first to put together a collection of their works. The highlight of this collection is Monet's Impression, soleil levant . Michel Monet , the son of Claude Monet, donated an extensive group of works with works by his father in 1966. An underground exhibition area was specially created for the Monet collection, which is now the largest in the world with 80 paintings.

In 1980 , 228 medieval miniatures came to the museum from Daniel Wildenstein's collection , the editor of Monet's catalog raisonné, before the museum's development reached its low point in the mid-1980s. On October 27, 1985, a spectacular art theft occurred when armed robbers stole Monet's paintings Impression, soleil levant and eight other works during the museum's opening hours . The pictures were not found again until five years later.

The heirs of the painter Berthe Morisot , Denis and Annie Rouart, donated additional Impressionist paintings to the museum in 1996. In addition to numerous works by Berthe Morisot, some works by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir also came to the museum.