In two restored Marais townhouses, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature sets historic hunting art beside taxidermy, curious objects and contemporary installations. Its intimate rooms turn a collection into an ongoing question about how people represent, use and live alongside animals.
Quick facts
André Malraux inaugurated the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature at the Hôtel de Guénégaud on 21 February 1967; the neighboring Hôtel de Mongelas joined the museum route in 2007.
François and Jacqueline Sommer founded the museum around collections spanning hunting arms, tapestries, ceramics, sculpture, books, drawings and paintings, later continually enriched with modern and contemporary art.
Joan Fontcuberta’s installation La Licorne uses fabricated 1954 newspaper articles and photographs to tell an invented encounter with a unicorn, deliberately testing how documentary images persuade us.
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A fox lounges on a Louis XVI chair; nearby, an old hunting picture shares a room with a contemporary work. At the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, the first surprise is not simply that animals appear indoors. It is that the rooms ask you to consider how people have pictured, pursued, collected and cared for them. This is a museum about hunting, but its larger subject is the changing relationship between humans and the living world.
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