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Address Palais du Louvre - 107, rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris tel: 01 44 55 57 50 Access for disabled visitors : 105, rue de Rivoli Transports |
The largest of the three museums is the Museum of Decorative Arts. Founded in 1877, this is an enormous museum, except by the standards of the building housing it - the Louvre - of which it takes up the Tuileries end of the north wing. However, the museum is being reorganized and alterations will be going on until 1997. The museum is filled with all sorts of items that illustrates the decorative skills from the Middle Ages to the 1990s. The contents ranges from objects of French interiors such as beds, blankets, cupboards, tools, stainglass and lampshades, to furnishings and fittings. The meagre contemporary seaion has been added to recently - principally works by French, Italian and Japanese designers. You can also find several pieces from the twentieth century such as a bedroom by Guimard, Jeanne Lanvin's Art Deco apartments, and a salon created by Geoges Hoentschel for the 1900 Expo Universelle. You can also go back and explore the nineteenth century with the foreign and love of vivid colouring, to the intricate wood-carving of the eighteenth century, to seventeenth-century marquetry and Renaissance tapestries and ivories. And, not to forget the Museum store, where you can find books, clothes, accessories, playing cards and other amusements, though not cheap. The collections of this museum focus on the art of living from the Middle Ages to the present day. Some 220 000 pieces - ceramics, glassware, goldsmith work, jewellery, furniture, wallpaper, drawings and toys - are kept in its various departments, housed since 1905 in the Marsan wing of the Palais du Louvre.
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