Two Museums

Notre Dame and the tourist boats

July 9: Another day to explore Paris.  After a late start we took the train to St. Michel/Notre Dame, crossed the Seine, and walked along the river, past the Louvre, through the Tuileries, to the Petit Palace.  This was designed by Charles Girault and built for the Universal Exposition of 1900, and retains its elegant interior and exterior.  Aside from a small collection of Greek and Roman antiquities and Renaissance pieces, the museum houses mainly 18th and 19th paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts.  The exhibition rooms surround an inner courtyard garden and cafe where we lunched upon arrival.

Leaving at 4:15 we walked north to the Boulevard Haussmann and the Musee Andre-Jacquemart. I'm including a brief history of the house and collections:

entrance hall of the Petit Palais

Édouard André, the scion of a Protestant banking family, devoted his considerable fortune to buying works of art. He then exhibited them in his new mansion built in 1869 by the architect Henri Parent, and completed in 1875.

He married a well-known society painter, Nélie Jacquemart, who had painted his portrait 10 years earlier. Every year, the couple would travel in Italy, amassing one of the finest collections of Italian art in France. When Edouard André died, Nélie Jacquemart completed the decoration of the Italian Museum and travelled in the Orient to add more precious works to the collection. Faithful to the plan agreed with her husband, she bequeathed the mansion and its collections to the Institut de France as a museum, and it opened to the public in 1913.

winter garden of the Musee Andre-Jacquemart

Leaving the museum and needing a sit-down, we walked to the Parc Monceau, filled on this late afternoon with children riding ponies and feeding the ducks. After coffee, ice cream, and a rest, we found a bus to take us to the Place de Trocadero from which we viewed and then walked to the Eiffel Tower.  Lines stretched out under the tower waiting for the elevator, and packed Bateau-Mouches carried tourists along the Seine.  The weather was close to perfect today.  We noticed, as usual, the need for people to take their own photo in front of every interesting site.  Street vendors sold selfie-sticks but everyone seemed to have theirs already.

We picked up a bus to take us back to our Metro stop but traffic slowed it nearly to a stop so we decided to walk the 2.5 k along the left bank of the Seine, finally catching our train to Bures at 8:45 and arriving home an hour later.  A long but quite satisfying day--our last look at Paris for this year.