Musée National Picasso-Paris

The Hôtel Salé holds the Picasso museum within a seventeenth-century salt tax collector's mansion. Pierre Aubert de Fontenay grew wealthy enough from that unpopular tax to build this limestone facade covered in carvings of fruits and flowers. When the French state seized the mansion, it held a collection of tax records and eventually served as a school. Picasso himself never lived here, but his heirs donated his massive private collection to the state in nineteen seventy-three, settling their inheritance taxes with masterpieces instead of cash.