Frequent visitors to Paris will have no doubt seen the big-hitters like the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. And while it’s true that one could visit them dozens of times and still have more to see, the sheer breadth of their collections can be overwhelming. Smaller – and often lesser-known – museums dotted across the city can make for a more intimate experience and reveal how Paris has inspired and been home to artists, writers, and architects across the centuries.

The Left Bank: Following in the footsteps of artists

Musée Eugène-Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix’s former home and studio in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was at risk of demolition until the painter Maurice Denis spearheaded a mission in the 1920s to buy it and turn it into a museum. The space acquired, the group of admirers then faced a conundrum: Delacroix had insisted that all of his belongings be auctioned off after his death. So, while this isn’t a house-museum in the traditional sense since it has only a smattering of the artist’s personal effects, it gets around this with a smart focus on the relationships the painter had with family, fellow artists, and famous friends like George Sand. The cavernous atelier displays sketches and studies that never went on show in Delacroix’s lifetime.

Musée Zadkine

You would not be the first person to accidentally walk past the Musée Zadkine, hidden as it is at the end of a small street just steps from the Jardin du Luxembourg. The French-Russian artist Ossip Zadkine lived and worked here in an atelier made of the quintessential glass and steel that characterized so many artists’ studios in Montparnasse in the 1920s. Curving around a compact lush garden, the small space provides a brief introduction to Zadkine’s career as well as that of his life partner Valentine Prax, who was a talented artist in her own right. It’s easy to imagine Zadkine working on his Surrealist sculptures inside this greenhouse-like studio, the trees outside tapping at the glass.

Ateliers-musée Chana Orloff

The home-studio that French-Ukrainian sculptor Chana Orloff called her ‘travailloir’ is bursting with her lively busts and portraits, models for larger monuments, and some of her more kitsch renderings of animals and children. The space was built for her in 1926 by her friend, the architect Auguste Perret, and it was here that she brought up her son alone, while forging a successful career for herself as a portraitist of Paris’s high society. As a Jew, she had to flee Paris during the Second World War – warned by an acquaintance just a day before the Vélodrome d’Hiver round-up. When she returned, she found that more than 140 of her sculptures had been looted or destroyed by German soldiers; only three of them were ever recovered.

The West of Paris: Modernism and literary retreats

Maison La Roche

Auguste Perret crops up again in the context of another great artist’s career: Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier). He did a work placement with Perret, who was a pioneer of reinforced concrete. Le Corbusier immediately saw the material’s potential, and used it for Maison La Roche. This site of experimentation for the young architect was built for the banker and art collector Raoul La Roche, with an adjoining house for his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret. It is a fascinating look into Le Corbusier’s early thinking about the organization of interior space, purist color schemes, and how to craft light.

Maison de Balzac

From Maison La Roche, walk toward the Seine and the Passy neighborhood, which in the early 19th century was a small village on the outskirts of Paris. The novelist Honoré de Balzac lived in a modest apartment here, and this is where he would work for 20 hours a day on his masterpiece La Comédie Humaine (1829-1847). Now a museum sitting in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, it delves into the author’s richly-peopled novels and their impact on popular culture, and sheds light on how he was viewed by his contemporaries, including Gustave Flaubert who is said to have quipped: ‘What a man Balzac would have been, if only he’d known how to write!’

The Right Bank: Writers, romantics, and hidden collections

Maison de Victor Hugo

A contemporary of Balzac, Victor Hugo’s writings enjoyed a far better reception within their author’s lifetime. Hugo lived for 16 years in a 270-square-meter apartment on the Place des Vosges, and not an inch of it escaped his artistic eye. The first floor is used these days for small, focused temporary exhibitions on themes adjacent to the writer’s work, such as his passion for architecture or his skill as a decorator. The second-floor apartment is an insight into Hugo’s somewhat zany aesthetic tastes, including an entirely Chinese-themed sitting room and copious amounts of headache-inducing patterned wallpaper.

Musée Jean-Jacques Henner

This private mansion dedicated to Jean-Jacques Henner’s work is little-known even to Parisians, and yet the Alsatian painter was the toast of Paris society in the second half of the 19th century. Henner never actually lived in the house; his family bought it to display his work after his death. His striking portraits of the people of Alsace reflect his heartbreak at the region being handed to Germany, while Italian scenes were inspired by his stay at the Villa Medici after being awarded the Prix de Rome in 1858. Henner had a penchant for painting diaphanous, pale-skinned women with long red hair – a trope you will see in his works all over the house.

Musée Gustave Moreau

This is another private mansion that has been transformed into a celebration of one artist’s work. Gustave Moreau was an incredibly prolific Symbolist painter: thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings cover every wall of the house – so much so that they’re even hung behind doors or cabinets for lack of space. The real surprise comes however on the second floor, where the poky apartment rooms erupt into a huge, sumptuous space replete with the artist’s large-scale allegorical and mythical paintings, with an elaborate twisting staircase at one end.

Musée de la Vie Romantique

A few streets north is a museum dedicated to Romantics with a capital R. It is nonetheless also deemed to be romantic in mood and is often recommended for dates, in part because of its picturesque tearoom that spills out into a rose garden. Clematis grows on trellises around the courtyard and vines frame the doorways of the house that used to belong to the Dutch-French Romantic artist Ary Scheffer. His famous Friday-night salons brought together artists, poets, and composers such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Frédéric Chopin. The museum reopened on Valentine’s Day this year after a 17-month-long renovation, returning the building to how it would have looked upon its construction in 1830. The closure provided an opportunity for the restoration of many works and a rehang that takes visitors through thematic rooms creating a broad picture of the Romantic movement.

Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature

This has to be one of the wackiest museums in Paris. Come if you love animals and nature, and come anyway even if you don’t! The curators cleverly blend temporary exhibitions into the permanent collection, meaning you often don’t know where one starts and another one ends. Contemporary installations and sculptures share space with a huge taxidermied polar bear rearing up on its hind legs and a stuffed fox curled into an upholstered chair. This is the kind of place where you keep doing double takes – was that really a stuffed hare carrying binoculars and its own hunting rifle? Yes, yes it was.