Artists’ residence

Envisioned by Antoine Bourdelle in the 1920s, the museum dedicated to his artworks would only see the light of day in 1949, inside the very rooms where he used to live and work his entire life. In January 1885, the sculptor rented his first studio at number 16, Impasse du Maine, future Rue Antoine-Bourdelle, within an artists’ residence where painters, engravers, and sculptors lived side by side in an inspiring state of effervescence. “If you’re looking for the studio and house where Bourdelle used to work, you must head towards the end of a badly cobbled impasse, where the ground is muddy, uneven, and almost as bumpy as in the country, in a very much Faubourg-like Parisian neighbourhood,” wrote Doctor Julia in 1930. Bourdelle always remained faithful to this place, taking over most of the studios for his increasingly monumental commissions, over the years.

This building opening onto the street at number 16, Rue Antoine-Bourdelle was the old entrance to the museum. It is one of the oldest buildings in the museum complex. On the street-side façade, a marble plaque installed in 1933 – meaning four years after the artist’s death – commemorates his presence.
In 1879, the carpenter Pierre Auguste Paillard, owner of this plot, asked the architect Henri Fernoux to build a studio flanked by two two-storey pavilions. Their shape and decorative vocabulary would be inspired by classical architecture: pyramidal hip roofs, cornices indicating the storeys, quoins adorned with pilasters.
Bourdelle rent an apartment on the first floor of the street-side pavilion to accommodate his parents, who had moved in from Montauban. On the ground floor, beside the concierge’s lodge, his father set up his cabinet-making shop. Bourdelle then converted the space into his painting studio. 
The pavilion flanking the studio on the northern side was destroyed in the 1950s. 
Instead of the current fence, there used to be a porte-cochère with a cobbled passageway leading up to the artists’ residence.