Musée Jacquemart-André

Banker Édouard André commissioned this Paris mansion from architect Henri Parent in 1869, completing it in 1875 as a showcase for his growing art collection. After marrying the portrait painter Nélie Jacquemart, the couple made repeated trips to Italy, filling room after room with Renaissance sculpture and painting. Jacquemart bequeathed the house and its contents to the Institut de France, and it opened as a public museum in 1913.

The collection leans heavily on 15th and 16th-century Italian art, including sculpture by Donatello and Luca della Robbia and Paolo Uccello's Saint George and the Dragon. Among the paintings is Ecce Homo by Andrea Mantegna, a somber depiction of Christ before the crowd rendered with the hard, sculptural line typical of the artist's late work.

The mansion also holds French 18th-century decorative arts and Northern European paintings by Rembrandt and Frans Hals, giving visitors a sense of the range one wealthy Parisian couple could assemble in a single lifetime.