Musée Gustave-Moreau, a Nouvelle Athènes studio house since 1903

The Musée Gustave-Moreau opened on 14 January 1903 on rue Catherine-de-La Rochefoucauld, in the house and studio of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, in the heart of the Nouvelle Athènes. On 10 September 1897 the painter had left the building and everything in it to the State.

His parents bought the house in 1852 in the name of their son, then 26, on the street where his teacher François-Édouard Picot had his studio. In 1896 Moreau added a storey to show his large paintings, keeping the family apartment on the first floor. He died on 18 April 1898; his heir, the poet Henri Rupp, carried on preparing the museum.

Georges Rouault was its first curator, until 1922, and George Desvallières followed in 1930. The apartment, restored exactly, opened to the public in 1991, the reception room in 2003. Renovated, the museum reopened in 2015 with the ground floor returned to its original state..

In the 9th arrondissement, visitors climb three floors from the family apartment to the great studios: Jupiter and Semele, The Chimeras, The Return of the Argonauts. Thousands of drawings sit in cabinets with pivoting panels that Moreau numbered himself, near Degas’s portrait of him.