Musee Picasso Paris

French law allows heirs to settle death duties with works of art, and when Picasso died in 1973 his family used it, which is why this collection exists: around five thousand works and tens of thousands of archive pieces, drawn from what he had chosen to keep rather than what dealers had selected to sell, so it covers every period and every medium including sculpture, ceramics, notebooks and prints. His own collection of other artists came too, with Cezanne, Matisse, Rousseau and Degas among them. The setting is the Hotel Sale, a seventeenth-century mansion built for a salt-tax collector, restored and reopened in 2014.

What you actually see

• The works he kept - a collection shaped by the artist rather than the market.
• The sculpture and ceramics - media under-represented in most Picasso holdings.
• His own collection - Cezanne, Matisse, Rousseau and Degas that he owned.
• The Hotel Sale - a seventeenth-century Marais mansion with a grand stair.

When to go

Year-round; the museum closes on Mondays. Weekday mornings are quietest. Booking a timed slot in advance is worthwhile in summer.

Honest expectations

Displays rotate frequently and are often thematic, so a particular famous work may not be showing. The mansion's layout makes the route confusing. Queues build at weekends.

Nearby

Place des Vosges lies south; the Marais surrounds it.