Paris beyond the Louvre.

The national museum of medieval art, built into a Roman bathhouse and a fifteenth-century abbey on the Left Bank. The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, six panels woven in the southern Netherlands around 1500, are among the finest surviving examples of medieval textile art. The permanent collection covers goldsmithing, ivory, stained glass and sculpture from the sixth to the fifteenth century. Visitors to Paris who are interested in anything before the Renaissance have no better destination.

The Hotel Biron, an eighteenth-century mansion in the seventh arrondissement where Rodin lived and worked from 1908 until his death in 1917, left to the state on the condition it become a museum of his work. The Thinker, The Kiss, The Gates of Hell in bronze in the garden. The interior rooms hold plasters, marbles and drawings arranged in the order Rodin himself established. One of the few museums in Paris where the building, the garden and the collection form a single coherent environment.

The largest collection of Monet's work in the world, in a hunting lodge converted into a museum on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. The paintings donated by Monet's son Michel in 1966 cover every phase of his career, with particular depth in the late series: the water lilies, the Rouen Cathedral studies, the Japanese bridge at Giverny. The museum also holds a substantial collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works by Berthe Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte and others, rarely included in accounts of the collection.

The studio and home of Gustave Moreau, left to the state on his death in 1898 with the instruction that it become a museum of his work. The building holds more than 1,200 paintings and 10,000 drawings arranged as Moreau himself intended, in rooms he designed for the purpose. Jupiter and Semele, The Apparition, Salome. A museum that operates as a total artistic environment rather than a collection of objects on walls.