The story
Behind the front of a 17th-century Dijon townhouse, the Hotel Lantin, is a museum that a brother and sister built out of their own taste. Maurice Magnin, a magistrate at the national audit court, and his sister Jeanne, a painter and critic, spent decades from the 1880s buying pictures other collectors overlooked, and in 1938 they left the house and its contents to the French state.
The works are shown much as the Magnins lived with them: paintings and drawings hung close together across salons furnished with the family's own furniture, mostly French and Italian old masters from the 16th to the 19th century, many by minor or unattributed hands the pair enjoyed tracking down.
