The story
In one room of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, the ceiling is covered in owl feathers, a work by the Belgian artist Jan Fabre. That sets the tone. The museum, in the Marais district of Paris, mixes stuffed animals, hunting weapons, old master paintings and contemporary art, arranged around the animals themselves, with a Room of the Boar, a Cabinet of the Wolf and an alcove given over to the unicorn.
It was created by François Sommer, an industrialist, and his wife Jacqueline, hunters who after the Second World War worked to bring big game back to their estate in the Ardennes. Their own collection of nearly three thousand hunting objects is its core. The culture minister André Malraux opened the museum in 1967 in the Hôtel de Guénégaud, built in the 1650s and the only Paris town house by the architect François Mansart to survive complete.
Among the paintings, look for Claude Monet's The Hunt of 1876, a large canvas of a forest path opening onto a patch of light, and the goddess Diana with her nymphs in pictures by the Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Hendrick van Balen. Gustave Courbet's Hunting Scene in the Snow, dated 1864, arrived recently as the first Courbet in the collection.
