The story
The collection here was bought with the takings of a department store. Ernest Cognacq founded La Samaritaine, the great shop by the Pont Neuf, and with his wife Marie-Louise Jay he spent decades buying the 18th century back: more than 1,200 paintings, drawings, sculptures, pieces of furniture and small precious objects, all of it French taste of the 1700s. He left the lot to the city of Paris when he died in 1928.
Since 1990 it has been shown in the Hotel Donon, a townhouse in the Marais built in 1575 and altered by every century since. The rooms are small and domestic, which suits the objects, and the effect is closer to walking through a private house than a public gallery. Among the paintings are Tiepolo's banquet of Cleopatra and two Venetian views by Canaletto, hung in rooms two centuries older than the pictures on their walls.
