Paris's Museum of Hunting and Nature Turns the Trophy Cabinet Strange

The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature — the Museum of Hunting and Nature — has stood in Paris since 1967. A married couple founded it. Both were hunting enthusiasts. That pairing of facts explains almost everything about the place, including why visitors keep calling it, as the museum's own reputation has it, wild and "a little weird."

The name alone does honest work. This is a museum of hunting, and a museum of nature, held together by two people who loved one and presumably admired the other. The founding couple built the collection in 1967, and their enthusiasm set the institution's dual character from the start.

What kind of museum is it?

It is a museum founded by hunters, which is not the usual biography for a Parisian cultural institution. Hunting museums tend toward the taxidermic and the technical. Here, the founders' private passion shaped the displays, and that personal origin is the source of the museum's eccentric register — its willingness to sit somewhere between celebration and curiosity.

The "little weird" label is doing precise critical work. It signals a museum that doesn't fit the Louvre-and-Orsay template of the city's art landscape. Visitors who arrive expecting a conventional natural history display instead find an institution born from one couple's obsession, opened in 1967, and still trading on that unrepeatable founding logic.

Why does the founding date matter?

1967 places the museum in a very specific Paris: pre-louvre-pyramid, pre-tourist-boom, a city where a private couple could still will a singular institution into existence around a niche passion. The museum's continued existence — under its full name, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature — suggests the founders' idiosyncratic vision has outlived them intact.

That's the quiet achievement here. Plenty of museums flatten into generic programming after their founders depart. This one is still described in terms its hunting-enthusiast founders would recognize: wild, a little weird, and entirely their own. For travelers tiring of Paris's blockbuster circuit, a 1967 cabinet of hunting and nature, built by two devoted amateurs, remains an argument for the singular over the institutional.