Musée National Gustave Moreau, Paris

The Musée Gustave Moreau is the only museum in Paris entirely conceived by its subject. Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) first gained fame with Oedipus and the Sphinx at the 1864 Salon. From the 1880s, he increasingly withdrew from public exhibition, focusing on transforming his childhood home in the Nouvelle Athènes district into a museum. In 1895, he commissioned architect Albert Lafon to convert the building, adding glass-roofed studios on the upper floors.

Moreau bequeathed the house and all its contents to France in 1897, hoping posterity would "appreciate the culmination of the artist's lifelong work and labour." The museum opened on January 14, 1903, with roughly 14,000 works including 1,200 paintings and 4,830 drawings stored in specially designed cabinets. Jupiter and Semele (1895) and The Apparition rank among his masterpieces. The first floor preserves the family apartment with its original furnishings. A wrought-iron spiral staircase connects the two-story studio space where Moreau taught Henri Matisse at the École des Beaux-Arts.