The Louvre in France and around the world

Tucked away in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood, this small museum occupies the apartment and studio where Eugène Delacroix spent the last six years of his life, from late 1857 until his death on 13 August 1863. The garden alone is worth the detour: a quiet courtyard that opens onto the facade of the studio Delacroix designed and decorated himself.

How it survived

More than 60 years after Delacroix died, painter Maurice Denis founded the Société des Amis d'Eugène Delacroix to save the studio from demolition. Denis first rented, then bought the premises, and organised exhibitions there while assembling a tribute collection. The museum became part of the Louvre in 2004.

What you will find inside

Paintings, drawings, prints, and personal letters by Delacroix and his contemporaries. Among the works on display: Mary Magdalene in the Desert (which Baudelaire admired), The Education of the Virgin, Romeo and Juliet, and the fresco Bacchus with a Tiger. There are also lesser-known pieces that show how he worked: studies after Goya's Caprichos, medieval book bindings, an oriental jacket, and architectural models he created for the decorative programmes of the Palais Bourbon library and the Luxembourg Palace.

Copies of his most famous canvases (The Death of Sardanapalus, Women of Algiers in their Apartment) made by friends and admirers like Henri Fantin-Latour are on view as well.

Visiting

The museum rotates its displays annually around a new theme. It also runs lectures, workshops, guided tours, talks, and evening events with live music. If you've just seen Liberty Leading the People at the Louvre, the Delacroix studio makes a natural next stop.

Opened in 2019 in Liévin, in the Hauts-de-France region right next to the Louvre-Lens, this facility was built to solve a practical problem: the Louvre's original storage rooms sit underground along the Seine, and they flood. Rather than keep spreading the collection across sixty scattered locations around Paris, the museum consolidated everything in a single purpose-built centre.

What it does

The Conservation Centre stores, preserves, restores and studies artworks. By 2024 it housed around 250,000 works, making it one of the largest study and research facilities of its kind in Europe. The building accommodates museum professionals, conservators, photographers, researchers, and visiting academics.

The building

Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the centre sits on a 40,000 m² plot and covers 18,500 m² of floor space, of which 9,600 m² is dedicated to storage. It uses a bio-climatic design: heat pumps running on geothermal energy supply roughly a third of the building's power.

The Louvre-Lens opened in December 2012 in the former mining basin of northern France, about 200 km from Paris. The idea was to create a Louvre "away from base" where a different kind of museum could be developed from scratch, and to contribute to the cultural and economic revival of a region that needed it.

Why Lens

In 2003, the Louvre decided to build an off-site museum. The enthusiasm of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region (now Hauts-de-France) and local authorities made Lens the obvious choice. When the museum opened nine years later, it was seen as a commitment by a centuries-old institution to help revitalise a community through culture and education.

The building and the Galerie du Temps

The museum was designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Japanese studio SANAA. Its main exhibition space, the Galerie du Temps, is a single open gallery of 3,000 m² displaying over 200 artworks on loan from the Louvre in Paris. The works span from the 4th millennium BC to the mid-19th century and provide a regularly renewed overview of the history of art. Since 2012, the Louvre has lent more than 3,000 works to the Louvre-Lens, more than to any other museum.

Attendance

With over 4 million visitors since opening, the Louvre-Lens has become the second most visited museum outside Paris, after the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, which sits in a more densely populated and touristic area.

Website: louvrelens.fr

Inaugurated in November 2017, the Louvre Abu Dhabi is France's largest cultural project abroad. It grew out of a 2007 intergovernmental agreement between France and the United Arab Emirates and involved thirteen French institutions, coordinated through Agence France-Muséums. The list includes the Louvre, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Orsay, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée du Quai Branly, Versailles, the Musée Guimet, and several others.

The building

Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel designed the museum, drawing on the specific character of Saadiyat Island: a lagoon setting between sand and sea, shadow and light. The architecture plays with these contrasts throughout.

The collection

The permanent collection holds around 700 artworks spanning prehistoric to contemporary periods. On top of that, about 300 works rotate on loan from French institutions, with the Louvre contributing 100 different pieces each year. The exhibition design follows a chronological and thematic thread that traces connections between civilisations and cultures rather than separating them by geography.

Visitors

By 2019, the Louvre Abu Dhabi had attracted 2 million visitors, making it the most visited museum in the Arab world.

Website: louvreabudhabi.ae

The Louvre lends nearly as many artworks as it has on display: around 35,000. A large part of these go to partner museums across France, a practice that dates back to the 19th century with long-standing relationships with institutions like the Petit Palais in Avignon and the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne.

Where the works go

Over the years the network has expanded well beyond traditional partners. Louvre works now travel to overseas territories (Réunion), western France (Bordeaux), eastern regions (Vic-sur-Seille near Nancy, Strasbourg), and cities undergoing museum renovation projects: Nantes, Montauban, Amiens, Besançon, Dijon, and Montargis among them.

What the Louvre provides

Beyond lending objects, the museum offers scientific advice to regional institutions, organises touring exhibitions, and coordinates research networks. One example is the Réseau d'Art Islamique en France (RAIF), run by the Louvre's Islamic Art Department, which works to raise awareness of Islamic art heritage in collections across the country.

Find a Louvre work near you

An interactive map called "C'est accroché près de chez vous" on the Louvre website lets you search for Louvre artworks currently on display at partner museums near your location.

Exhibitions abroad

Over the past eight years, the Louvre has organised roughly 70 exhibitions across about 20 countries, either on its own or in partnership with local institutions. Together they have drawn close to a million visitors. The subjects range widely: "Roads of Arabia" toured the United Arab Emirates, while "El Greco: Ambition and Defiance" was co-produced with the Art Institute of Chicago.

The museum maintains collaborative relationships with institutions in 75 countries, organising joint exhibitions, artwork loans, and expert assessments. These partnerships serve four broad purposes: scientific research, diplomatic exchange, reaching new audiences, and diversifying the museum's resources.

Archaeological excavations

The Louvre has been running archaeological digs since the 19th century, and the number of active projects has doubled since 2013. Recent and ongoing excavations include sites in Egypt (Saqqara, Bawit), Sudan (El-Hassa), Uzbekistan (Paykend), Bulgaria (Apollonia Pontica), Romania (Orgame), Italy (Gabii), Lebanon (Byblos), and Iran (Khorasan).

Heritage protection: the ALIPH foundation

In 2015, the Louvre's leadership co-authored a report recommending the creation of a foundation to protect cultural heritage in conflict zones. Two years later, the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH) was formally established following conferences in Abu Dhabi and Paris. Funded with over 80 million dollars, primarily from France and the UAE, ALIPH became fully operational in 2018 and has since supported restoration projects including the Mosul Museum in Iraq and the National Museum of Beirut in Lebanon.