Musée Cernuschi

The museum you are approaching was once the private residence of an Italian banker named Henri Cernuschi. In the early eighteen seventies, Cernuschi found himself in a precarious political position following the collapse of the Paris Commune and decided to leave France for a long journey through the Far East. He spent seventeen months traveling across Japan, China, India, and other parts of Asia, amassing over five thousand works of art during his trip. Upon his return to Paris, he commissioned this neoclassical mansion specifically to house and display his collection, eventually bequeathing both the home and its treasures to the city of Paris upon his death in eighteen ninety-six.