Musée Marmottan Monet: The World's Largest Monet Collection

The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris holds the largest collection of Claude Monet's work in the world: about ninety paintings in our catalogue, including Impression, Sunrise (1872), the picture that gave Impressionism its name, and the canvases his son Michel inherited from the studio at Giverny. The museum itself describes about a hundred works by Monet bequeathed by his family and friends.

No other museum lets you follow Monet so far into old age. Alongside a handful of famous early pictures, the Marmottan has dozens of late works he kept for himself: water lilies, weeping willows, the Japanese footbridge, the rose arches and the house seen from the garden, painted with growing freedom as his eyesight failed. This guide explains how the collection came together, what to see first and how to plan a visit.

From a Napoleonic mansion to a Monet museum

The museum occupies a nineteenth-century mansion on the edge of the Ranelagh gardens, near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris's 16th arrondissement. It was the home of the art historian and collector Paul Marmottan, who filled it with furniture and paintings of the Napoleonic era. At his death in 1932 he left the house and collection to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which opened it as a museum in 1934.

Monet arrived by gift, in two waves.

• 1940: Impression, Sunrise. Victorine Donop de Monchy, daughter of the doctor and collector Georges de Bellio, gave the museum her father's Impressionist paintings. De Bellio, a Romanian-born physician who treated and supported Monet, Renoir and Pissarro in the lean years, had bought Impression, Sunrise in 1878. The gift turned a museum of the First Empire into a place of pilgrimage for Impressionism.
• 1966: the studio at Giverny. Michel Monet, the painter's younger son, died in a car accident in 1966 and left his entire inheritance to the Académie: the paintings his father had never sold, many of them large late canvases from the Giverny studio, along with works Monet had owned by friends such as Renoir, Boudin and Jongkind. The museum added Monet's name to its own and built a dedicated gallery to show the collection.

Later gifts brought works by Berthe Morisot and a celebrated group of illuminated manuscripts, so the Marmottan is far from a one-painter museum. But Monet is why most visitors come.

What to see first

Impression, Sunrise (1872). Start here, and give it time: it is smaller than most people expect, about 48 by 63 centimeters, and the orange sun, barely thicker than a smear of paint, seems to float off the surface. The small canvas of Le Havre harbor at dawn, an orange sun and its broken reflection above gray-blue water and dark boats, is the museum's emblem. It was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where the critic Louis Leroy's mocking review used its title to name the whole group. Stolen from the museum in 1985, it was recovered in Corsica in 1990.

The Paris and Argenteuil pictures. Pont de l'Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) shows the iron bridge over the railway tracks half lost in locomotive steam, part of the Gare Saint-Lazare series. Train in the Snow (1875) catches a locomotive at Argenteuil station, its headlights glowing through the winter murk. The Tuileries (1876) looks down on the gardens from an apartment on the rue de Rivoli.

The 1880s. Sailboat, Evening Effect (1885) silhouettes a single boat on a yellow-green sea; The Barque (1887) looks down on an empty rowing boat among reflections and water plants on the Epte, a startling, almost abstract composition. Field of Yellow Irises at Giverny (1887) is one of the first pictures of the new home.

The late work. This is the heart of the collection. The Marmottan holds the largest group anywhere of the paintings Monet made at Giverny in his last two decades: water lilies large and small, from the early Water Lilies, Evening Effect (1897) to the vast late canvases such as Water Lilies and Agapanthus (1914–17); weeping willows; wisteria; several versions of the Japanese footbridge painted around 1918–24, in which the bridge almost disappears in a blaze of red, orange and green; and the house and rose arches seen from the garden. Many were never exhibited in Monet's lifetime. They are often unfinished, painted fast and thick, and they are the best place to understand what the cataracts of his last years did, and did not do, to his color.

The museum also has London pictures (a Houses of Parliament with reflections on the Thames, and Charing Cross Bridge in smoke and fog), a Rouen Cathedral façade, views of Norway from 1895 and a rare group of family portraits, including his sons Jean and Michel as children.

How to visit

• Address: 2 rue Louis-Boilly, 75016 Paris.
• Opening times (from the museum's website): Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm, last admission 5 pm; late opening on Thursdays until 9 pm, last entry 8 pm. Closed on Mondays. Check the website before you travel, as the museum can close at short notice and holiday hours vary.
• Where the Monets are: the Monet collection is shown in its own gallery, apart from the period rooms of the Marmottan mansion. Impression, Sunrise is the one picture everyone looks for; the late Giverny canvases fill the main Monet room.
• Combine it with: the Water Lilies rooms at the Orangerie and the Musée d'Orsay, both in central Paris. Seeing the Marmottan's late studies before or after the Orangerie panels makes each more legible.

Current exhibitions (verified on the museum's website): Histories of Landscape: From Monet to Hockney, from 24 September 2026 to 31 January 2027, part of the centenary of Monet's death, links Monet to later landscape painters before traveling to the Musée de Grenoble (5 March to 4 July 2027). Running alongside it, Monet / Soriano: Mapping Mont Kolsås, also until 31 January 2027, sets a large wall drawing by Peter Soriano against Monet's Norwegian pictures of 1895.

Why the Marmottan matters

The Orsay shows Monet's career as the public saw it: the Salon pictures, the Impressionist exhibitions, the great series sold through dealers. The Marmottan shows what stayed in the studio. It is the closest thing to walking into Giverny after Monet's death, and it is where the line from the Water Lilies to modern abstraction is easiest to see. For a guide to other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.