Musée de la Légion d'honneur

The museum stands within the Palais de la Légion d'honneur, a building that originally served as an aristocratic mansion known as the Hôtel de Salm. When the structure was under construction in the seventeen eighties, the American founding father Thomas Jefferson lived in Paris and grew obsessed with its design. He was so captivated by the building that he visited it daily to watch its progress and later used its elegant, neoclassical features as inspiration for his own home at Monticello and for government buildings in Washington D.C.