Musée Picasso Paris

The Hôtel Salé was built in the 1650s for a salt-tax collector — hence its nickname, 'the salted mansion' — and stands as one of the grandest surviving private townhouses in the Marais. The French state acquired the building in 1964 and converted it, after a long restoration, into a museum for the Picasso collection accepted by France in lieu of inheritance tax after the artist's death in 1973, a dation that included works his family and estate had kept rather than sold.

The resulting collection is unmatched anywhere for its scope: roughly 5,000 works spanning Picasso's entire seven-decade career, from early Blue and Rose Period paintings through Cubism, Neoclassicism, and his late-life ceramics and sculpture, alongside Picasso's own personal collection of works by artists he admired, including Cézanne, Matisse and Rousseau.