Musée Marmottan Monet, the Monet Museum in Paris: Impression, Sunrise and the Water Lilies

The house began as a speculation. In 1863 François Christophe Edmond Kellermann, duke of Valmy, bought a plot beside the new Ranelagh garden in Passy and planned three townhouses on it, keeping the largest for himself, with an English-style garden behind it. After his death in 1868 his wife and daughter could not afford the upkeep, and on 7 June 1882 the property was sold to Jules Marmottan for 260,000 francs.

Marmottan, born in Valenciennes in 1829, had made his name running the Bruay mining company in northern France. He was also a collector, and through the dealer Antoine Brasseur he bought some forty paintings by pre-Renaissance artists from Italy, Flanders and Germany, among them a rare Descent from the Cross by Hans Muelich.

He barely lived to enjoy the house. Jules died in Bordeaux on 10 March 1883, less than a year after the purchase, and left the mansion on Avenue Raphaël and all his collections to his only son, Paul, who would give them a very different direction.

Paul Marmottan, born in Paris in 1856, gave up a career in public service after his father’s death and devoted himself to the art of 1789 to 1830. He became a recognised specialist of the Consulate and Empire years, wrote a monograph on the painter Louis Léopold Boilly and redecorated his rooms in the Empire style himself, filling them with furniture from the Tuileries Palace and from the Neapolitan palace furnished for Napoleon’s sister Caroline.

Around 1910 he extended the house and redesigned its salons, adding a bed that once belonged to Napoleon I, the Chandelier with Musicians and a Sèvres geographic clock. The street along the side of the house was named after Boilly in 1913.

Marmottan left no heirs. At his death on 15 March 1932 the house and its collections passed to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which opened them to the public as the Musée Marmottan on 21 June 1934, after clearing the kitchens and bathrooms to make room for visitors.

The irony is that Paul Marmottan disliked the Impressionists. In 1886 he complained that painters no longer drew but sketched, and the Académie had shut them out of the Salon. Then, between 1940 and 1947, Victorine Donop de Monchy gave the museum works from the collection of her father, Georges de Bellio, one of Monet’s first supporters, and Impression, Sunrise arrived with ten other Impressionist canvases.

The biggest change came in 1966. Michel Monet, the painter’s only surviving son, had struggled to interest French museums in his father’s late Water Lilies and left more than a hundred Monets to the Marmottan instead. A room was dug under the garden to show the large canvases, which went on display in 1970, and the museum took the name Marmottan Monet.

Other gifts followed: Daniel Wildenstein’s illuminations in 1981, Nelly Sergeant-Duhem’s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works in 1985, and in 1993 the Rouart family’s Berthe Morisot bequest, which brought the painter’s work back to the neighbourhood where she had lived.