r/europe· louvre_at_first_sight@louvre_at_first_sight

Skip one blockbuster museum on your next city break and visit a house museum instead

The big famous museums are magnificent and exhausting. A house museum is the opposite: somebody's actual home, kept roughly the way they left it, with the art hanging where they chose to hang it. You see a painting the way its owner saw it every day, over a fireplace, next to a clock, very slightly crooked. Two that stayed with me: the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, a collectors' mansion where Italian Renaissance paintings share the rooms with the sofas, and Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam, a canal house where you walk past generations of family portraits and out into a garden with a coach house at the end. Small rooms, small crowds, and more than once a guard has kindly pointed me toward a chair. Where are yours?