Best Museums in Paris

Paris has 23 museums worth knowing about — from world-famous collections to smaller specialist institutions that most visitors miss entirely. This guide covers opening hours, ticket prices, Oslo Pass eligibility, and honest advice on which are worth your time.

Louvre Museum
4.7
museum

Louvre Museum

The world's largest and most-visited museum — home to the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and roughly 35,000 other works spread across a former royal palace so big that seeing it all in one visit is genuinely impossible.

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Musée d'Orsay
4.7
museum

Musée d'Orsay

The world's finest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, housed in a converted Belle Époque railway station on the Left Bank of the Seine.

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Musée Rodin
4.7
museum

Musée Rodin

Auguste Rodin's former home and studio, now a museum of his sculpture set around a 3-hectare garden where The Thinker sits in the open air.

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Musée de l'Orangerie
4.7
museum

Musée de l'Orangerie

A small, single-focus museum in the Tuileries Gardens built to house Claude Monet's eight enormous Water Lilies murals exactly as he wanted them displayed.

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Musée Marmottan Monet
4.7
museum

Musée Marmottan Monet

A former hunting lodge on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne holding the world's largest collection of Monet paintings, including the work that gave Impressionism its name.

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Musée Jacquemart-André
4.7
museum

Musée Jacquemart-André

A lavish 19th-century private mansion, still furnished as its art-collector owners left it, holding an outstanding collection of Italian Renaissance and French 18th-century art.

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Centre Pompidou
4.6
museum

Centre Pompidou

France's national modern art museum, instantly recognisable for its inside-out 'high-tech' architecture — closed for a five-year renovation until 2030, with the collection touring partner venues in the meantime.

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Musée de Cluny — Musée national du Moyen Âge
4.6
museum

Musée de Cluny — Musée national du Moyen Âge

France's national museum of the Middle Ages, built into a medieval abbey mansion on top of Roman-era baths — home to the celebrated Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.

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Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris
4.6
museumFree

Musée Carnavalet — Histoire de Paris

The free museum of Paris's own history, spread across two connected Marais mansions, tracing the city from prehistory through the Revolution to the present day.

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Musée Picasso Paris
4.6
museum

Musée Picasso Paris

The world's largest public Picasso collection, spanning his entire career, housed in a 17th-century Marais mansion known as the Hôtel Salé.

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Musée de l'Armée — Les Invalides & Napoleon's Tomb
4.6
museum

Musée de l'Armée — Les Invalides & Napoleon's Tomb

France's national military history museum, sharing the vast Hôtel des Invalides complex with Napoleon Bonaparte's monumental tomb beneath its golden dome.

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Musée des Arts et Métiers
4.6
museum

Musée des Arts et Métiers

France's oldest science and technology museum, set inside a former medieval priory, tracing three centuries of invention from early scientific instruments to Foucault's original pendulum.

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Petit Palais
4.6
museumFree

Petit Palais

Paris's free fine arts museum, built for the 1900 World's Fair, holding a broad collection from antiquity through the 19th century inside an elegant Beaux-Arts palace with its own interior garden.

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Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris
4.6
museum

Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris

A museum inside Yves Saint Laurent's original haute couture studio, tracing his revolutionary fashion career — currently closed for renovation until autumn 2027.

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Fondation Louis Vuitton
4.6
gallery

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Frank Gehry's billowing glass-sailed building in the Bois de Boulogne, home to LVMH's contemporary and modern art foundation and major touring exhibitions.

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Musée de la Musique — Philharmonie de Paris
4.6
museum

Musée de la Musique — Philharmonie de Paris

A museum of more than 8,000 musical instruments and objects tracing 500 years of music history, set inside the Philharmonie de Paris concert hall complex in the Parc de la Villette.

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Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac
4.5
museum

Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac

A striking Jean Nouvel-designed museum of indigenous and non-Western art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, wrapped in a living wall of vegetation near the Eiffel Tower.

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Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie
4.5
museum

Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie

Europe's largest science museum, set in the Parc de la Villette, with a giant mirrored geodesic cinema dome, a submarine you can tour, and hands-on exhibits built for curious minds of every age.

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Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris
4.5
museumFree

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

The City of Paris's free modern art museum, occupying one wing of the Palais de Tokyo, with a strong Fauvist and Cubist collection anchored by Matisse's monumental La Danse.

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Musée National Eugène-Delacroix
4.5
museum

Musée National Eugène-Delacroix

The Romantic painter's last home and studio, tucked into a quiet courtyard just off the Place Furstemberg in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

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Palais de Tokyo
4.4
gallery

Palais de Tokyo

Europe's largest contemporary art centre, occupying a deliberately raw, unfinished-looking 1937 exhibition building with some of the longest opening hours of any museum in Paris.

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Musée de l'Homme
4.4
museum

Musée de l'Homme

France's museum of human evolution, biology and cultural anthropology, occupying one wing of the Palais de Chaillot directly across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

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Musée Grévin
4.3
museum

Musée Grévin

Paris's Belle Époque wax museum on the Grands Boulevards, where visitors pose alongside more than 200 wax figures of celebrities, historical figures and French icons.

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