Picasso Museum in Paris

A baroque mansion in the Haut-Marais

The Picasso Museum is installed in the Hôtel Salé, at 5 rue de Thorigny, in the 3rd arrondissement, in the northern half of Le Marais that we call the Haut-Marais. The Carnavalet Museum is about 285 metres away in a straight line. Our Marais guide notes a high concentration of museums within about 500 metres: the Archives nationales, the Picasso Museum, the Carnavalet, the Cognacq-Jay and the Museum of Hunting and Nature, with the Museum of Jewish Art and History to the west.

Photo: Guillaume Baviere, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Planning the visit

• Book a time slot. The museum gives priority access, guaranteed within half an hour, to visitors with a timed online ticket, and notes that the busiest hours are 10.30 to 11.30 a.m. and 2.30 to 4.30 p.m.
• Mind the garden. It is open only from 1 April to 30 September, so it is closed in October. The rooftop café keeps its own hours, listed above.
• Check your rate. Under-18s and EU residents under 26 are admitted free on proof, according to the official list; the first-Sunday free entry needs no booking.

Photo: Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What is in the data for 2026

The museum announces neither closure nor works. At €16, Tiqets’ “Priority Entry” ticket matches the official full price, and GetYourGuide’s public catalogue lists an entry ticket and several guided visits. We do not link them from this page because we have not checked their dates; the museum’s own online ticket office is the reference.

A short history of the Hôtel Salé

The mansion was built from 1656 to 1659 for Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, who collected the gabelle, the salt tax. The nickname “Salé”, “salted”, comes from the source of that fortune, according to Wikipedia. The architect was Jean Boulier, known as de Bourges. The building was listed as a historic monument on 29 October 1968.

The house then went through several lives. From 1829 to 1884 it held the École centrale des arts et manufactures; it later housed a bronze-maker’s workshops, and the City of Paris expropriated it in 1964. Its restoration ran from 1974 to 1984, and Roland Simounet, who won the 1976 competition, converted it into a museum. The Picasso Museum opened on 28 September 1985.

How the collection reached the State

Pablo Picasso died in 1973 leaving some 40,000 works. His heirs paid the inheritance tax through a dation, a transfer of works to the State instead of cash. That first transfer included 203 paintings, 158 sculptures, 88 ceramics, about 1,500 drawings and 1,600 prints. A second dation followed in 1990, after the death of Jacqueline Roque, and the artist’s personal archives were given to the State in 1992. The museum counts about 5,051 catalogued objects today, 4,838 of them by Picasso.

What not to miss

• Picasso’s own collection. He owned works by painters he admired, now shown in the museum: eight Matisse, seven Renoir, four Douanier Rousseau, three Cézanne and three Corot, among others. They explain where his work comes from as much as the paintings do.
• The Giacometti details. The sculpted staircase, the furniture, the chandeliers and the benches were designed by Diego Giacometti for the museum.
• A work in every medium. The collection holds 307 paintings, 223 sculptures, 1,879 drawings, 2,237 prints and 108 ceramics, according to Wikipedia.
• The building itself. The visit takes place inside a seventeenth-century mansion, restored over ten years before the museum opened; the architecture is part of what the ticket pays for.

The museum closed in September 2011 and reopened on 25 October 2014 after a renovation by Jean-François Bodin and Stéphane Thouin that tripled the exhibition surface.

Getting there

The nearest stop is Saint-Sébastien–Froissart on line 8, about 385 metres away in a straight line, which is six to seven minutes on foot at the method our site uses (straight-line distance × 1.3, at 80 m a minute). Saint-Paul (line 1) and Chemin Vert (line 8) are both about 499 metres away, and Filles du Calvaire (line 8) is 507 metres away. The address is 5 rue de Thorigny, in the 3rd arrondissement.

Choosing your moment

The museum notes that the busiest hours are 10.30 to 11.30 a.m. and 2.30 to 4.30 p.m. The first free Sunday of the month needs no booking, which also means a queue; a timed online ticket is the better plan on any other day. The garden is open only from 1 April to 30 September. Plan the roof café, 10.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. on weekdays and from 10 a.m. at weekends, as a pause rather than a meal.

Combining the visit with a walk

On foot, in a straight line, the other museums are close, and the figures below are computed from the coordinates in our data.

• Musée Cognacq-Jay: 174 metres, about 3 minutes.
• Carnavalet Museum: 284 metres, about 5 minutes.
• Museum of Hunting and Nature: 355 metres, about 6 minutes.
• Rue des Rosiers: 350 metres, about 6 minutes.
• Archives nationales and the Hôtel de Soubise: 386 metres, about 7 minutes.
• Place des Vosges: 524 metres, about 9 minutes.

Two museums in a day is a sensible limit: the Picasso Museum and the Carnavalet, which share the same northern part of the quarter, make a natural pair. For a longer route, our Marais walking tour links the sights in order.

Where to stay near the museum

Six hotels of our database stand within 400 metres, five of them classified four stars. The nearest is Boudoir des Muses, 180 metres away, followed by Hôtel du Petit Moulin (221 m), Maison Saintonge (245 m), Hôtel Suzie Blue (281 m) and Villa Beaumarchais (320 m). The three-star Hôtel Les Tournelles stands 328 metres away. Distances are straight-line, calculated from coordinates. The full ranking is in hotels near the Picasso Museum; for the whole arrondissement, see hotels in the 3rd arrondissement.