Musée Cognacq-Jay

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The Musée Cognacq-Jay is an art museum in Paris, housed in the Hôtel de Donon in the Marais (8 Rue Elzévir, 75003). It was created from a collection formed between 1900 and 1925 by Théodore-Ernest Cognacq and his wife Marie-Louise Jaÿ, founders of La Samaritaine department store.

Cognacq gave the collection to the City of Paris, and the museum opened in 1929 at 25 boulevard des Capucines. The building there was designed specially to display the collection in a home-like setting, not as a traditional museum. In 1990, the City decided to move the collection to the Hôtel Donon, arguing that the Capucines site was not part of a cultural circuit. The move occurred with some disagreement from the Cognacq-Jay heirs. The Hôtel Donon, dating from around 1575, now hosts the collection in twenty paneled rooms spread over four floors, arranged in the styles of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

The renovation of the building was led by Paris’s chief architect Bernard Fonquernie, with interior work by Reoven Vardi. The museum’s collection includes about 1,200 items, with a focus on 18th-century France. It features European and Chinese ceramics, jewels, and snuffboxes, as well as paintings by artists such as Louis-Léopold Boilly, François Boucher, Canaletto, Jean-Siméon Chardin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Hubert Robert, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, and Jacques-François-Joseph Saly are on view, along with fine furniture attributed to Jean-François Oeben and Roger Vandercruse Lacroix. The collection also includes 17th-century works (including two Rembrandts) and 19th-century pieces by Camile Corot, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas.

Since January 2013, the Cognacq-Jay Museum has been one of the 14 museums part of the public institution Paris Musées. In November 2024, several artefacts were stolen from the museum after thieves broke a display case with axes and bats.