Musée Picasso: The Salt Tax Palace
Why is it significant?
Step into the cobbled forecourt on rue de Thorigny and face a grand, honey-coloured mansion of the 1650s, all tall windows and carved stone, set back behind its courtyard like a country château dropped into the middle of the city.
Key Facts
| Place | Musée Picasso: The Salt Tax Palace |
|---|---|
| Address | 5 Rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85990, 2.36210 |
| Part of Walk | Princes, Rebels and the Pletzl: The Marais of Paris, from Hôtel de Ville to Bastille |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the cobbled forecourt on rue de Thorigny and face a grand, honey-coloured mansion of the 1650s, all tall windows and carved stone, set back behind its courtyard like a country château dropped into the middle of the city.
It was built between 1656 and 1659 for Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, a financier who had grown rich collecting the gabelle, the hated royal tax on salt. Parisians, who paid that tax on every pinch of salt they used, nicknamed his house the Hôtel Salé, the salted mansion, and the joke has outlived him by more than three and a half centuries.
Inside is one of the most magnificent staircases of the century. Since 1985 the house has held the Musée national Picasso. When Pablo Picasso died in 1973, his heirs owed the French state an enormous inheritance tax. A law passed in 1968, championed by the culture minister André Malraux, allowed such taxes to be paid in works of art instead of money. Experts chose from everything the artist had kept for himself: paintings, sculptures, drawings, sketchbooks, the private Picasso he never sold. Together with later gifts, the result is the largest collection of his work anywhere in the world, around five thousand works.
There is a lovely irony in it. The young Spaniard who painted in a freezing Montmartre studio with one tap for the whole house ended up in a palace built by a tax collector... having paid his family's last tax with his own pictures. The museum was renovated and reopened in 2014, and its rooms move through his whole life, from the Blue Period to the last fierce paintings of his old age.
Picasso never lived in the Marais, but the district suited him: it was poor and full of workshops when he was young, and full of galleries by the time the museum arrived. Now walk a few streets south, past the little garden of Square Georges-Cain, to rue de Sévigné and the mansion where the whole history of Paris is kept.