The Story of the Walter-Guillaume Collection

The man behind the Orangerie's basement collection was Paul Guillaume, one of the great art dealers of the 20th century — though he hardly came from money. As a young man, he worked as an auto mechanic.

His life changed course when he stumbled across African sculptures in a shipping crate from Africa. At the time, such works were widely dismissed as folk craft, but Guillaume recognized real artistic value in their distinctive forms and powerful expression. He began displaying the sculptures in his garage window to introduce them to the public, and this modest display caught the eye of the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who introduced him to avant-garde artists including Picasso.

That encounter set Guillaume on the path to becoming an art dealer, and his eye proved exceptional. He was among the first to recognize the importance of African art — the very tradition that inspired Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — and he believed in and supported then-unknown painters like Modigliani and Soutine, helping them continue their work. He died young, at 42, without ever realizing his dream of founding a modern art museum open to the public.

After his death, his wife, Domenica, inherited the collection. She later remarried the wealthy architect Jean Walter, and together they continued expanding it, adding new works over the years. When Walter also passed away, Domenica made a decisive choice: she would donate the collection to the state, both to fulfill her husbands' shared dream and to resolve a hefty inheritance tax bill. She did so through a distinctly French mechanism known as dation en paiement, which allows inheritance tax to be paid in artworks rather than cash. The result is the collection seen at the Orangerie today — built on Paul Guillaume's extraordinary eye, and preserved through Domenica's determination to see his dream through.