Musée National Picasso-Paris: The Hôtel Salé and the World’s Richest Public Picasso Collection

The house was built for Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, a financier and protégé of Nicolas Fouquet who farmed the salt tax on the king’s behalf. He bought land in the Marais from a convent, chose a young, little-known architect, Jean Boullier de Bourges, and moved in at the end of 1659.

The result was, in the words of the historian Bruno Foucart, the grandest if not the most extravagant of 17th-century Parisian houses. Its central staircase, modelled on Michelangelo’s design for the Laurentian Library in Florence, rises beneath sculpted stucco by the Marsy brothers and Martin Desjardins.

Aubert barely enjoyed it. In 1663 he fell in the same scandal that ruined Fouquet, and his creditors fought over the house for sixty years, during which the Republic of Venice used it as its embassy.

After its sale in 1728 the house passed through many hands. During the Revolution it was used to store and sort books seized from the local convents, and from 1797 it belonged to a single family until 1962, which leased it out.

The tenants are a cross-section of Paris: a boarding school where the young Honoré de Balzac studied, the École centrale des arts et manufactures from 1829 to 1884, which altered the interior heavily, bronze-makers until 1941 and, from 1944, the city’s school of fine crafts.

The City of Paris bought the house in 1964 and it was listed four years later. None of its original furnishings survive, which is partly why it could be reinvented as a museum.

In 1968 France changed the law so that heirs could settle inheritance tax with works of art, an initiative launched by the culture minister André Malraux. When Picasso died in 1973, his heirs used it to transfer a huge body of work to the State, in a first dation in 1979 and a second, from Jacqueline Picasso’s estate, in 1990.

The Hôtel Salé was chosen to hold them in 1974. The architect Roland Simounet set a modern museum inside the listed building without extending it, and the museum opened in October 1985.

After a renovation and extension led by Jean-François Bodin, which kept it closed for five years, it reopened on 25 October 2014 with a new hang and much more exhibition space.