The Musée Guimet was the brain-child of Emile Guimet (1836-1918), a Lyons industrialist who devised the grand project of opening a museum devoted to the religions of Ancient Egypt, Classical Antiquity, and Asia. Guimet visited Egypt and Greece before traveling around the world in 1876, stopping off in Japan, China and India. In the course of his travels he acquired extensive collections of objects which he put on display in a museum opened in Lyon in 1879. These collections were subsequently (...)

Our task was to give back to the building its former readability, to re-assert its structure in a clear and lucid way. The role of a museum is to offer hospitality to its works as much as to its visitors; this is especially so on the case of in Asian art, where it is the spacing, the blank spaces in-between, that irrigate the subject itself. And, as in painting, it is emptiness that brings a subject to life, falling into streams, winding itself into the trees and gathering under the (...)

19, Avenue d’Iéna, 75116 Paris
Tel: +01 40 73 88 11
Open every day except Tuesday, from 9.45 a.m. until 17.45 p.m.
Admission free
In 1955, the Ministry of National Education acquired the former mansion of Alfred Heidelbach. Entirely restored in 1991, the building, now known as the “Galleries of the Buddhist Pantheon”, houses the Guimet Museum’s original collection, as conceived by the founder Émile Guimet (1836-1918) from a collection of works brought back from his travels in Japan in the (...)

59 avenue Foch, 75116 Paris
Tel: 01-45-53-57-96
Closed for renovation work
The museum houses a collection of 17th, 18th and 19th centuries Far Eastern objects built up in the latter half of the 19th century by Madame Clémence d’Ennery, wife of the famous playwright Adolphe d’Ennery. In late 1875, Mme d’Ennery had a townhouse built, partly to further her husband’s career, but also to provide a suitable setting for her "treasures". The latter were displayed in superb showcases with panels (...)