Musée Guimet, Asian art on the place d’Iéna since 1889

The Musée Guimet, France’s national museum of Asian art, opened in 1889 on the place d’Iéna as the Museum of Religions. The Lyon industrialist Émile Guimet moved here the collection he had shown in Lyon since 1879, in a building by Charles Terrier drawn on the plans of his Lyon museum.

His travels to Egypt and Greece, then around the world in 1876, by way of Japan, China and India, formed the core of the collection. In 1927 the museum joined the Musées de France; in 1945 it received almost all of the Louvre’s Asian art department, including Ernest Grandidier’s porcelain, and handed its Egyptian antiquities to the Louvre.

Khmer pieces brought back by Louis Delaporte joined the collection, and later the textiles given by Krishna Riboud. Henri and Bruno Gaudin remodelled the museum entirely from 1994 to 2001. Its façade, roofs and library have been listed as historic monuments since 1979.

In the 16th arrondissement, its collections, among the most complete in the world, run from India to Japan by way of Cambodia, China and Tibet. The library rotunda, open since 1889, shows Indian miniatures and Japanese prints in rotation, and the museum also runs the nearby Hôtel d’Heidelbach.