Musée Hébert

The Musée Hébert sits behind a quiet stone wall on the rue du Cherche-Midi, marked by the weathered, classical facade of the eighteenth-century Hôtel de Montmorency. It houses the paintings of Ernest Hébert, a nineteenth-century portraitist who captured the faces of the Parisian elite. In eighteen seventy, Hébert watched from his window as a stray shell from the Franco-Prussian War landed in his courtyard. The explosion shattered his studio windows, leaving his collection of sketches and canvases covered in fine, white limestone dust.