Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro

The Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro, also called simply the Musée du Trocadéro) was the first anthropological museum in Paris, founded in 1878. It closed in 1935 when the building that housed it, the Trocadéro Palace, was demolished; its descendant is the Musée de l'Homme, housed in the Palais de Chaillot on the same site, and its French collections formed the nucleus of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, also in the Palais de Chaillot. Numerous modern artists visited it and were influenced by its "primitive" art, in particular Picasso during the period when he was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

The museum was founded in 1878 by the Ministry of Public Education as the Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques (Ethnographic Museum of Scientific Expeditions) and was housed in the Trocadéro Palace, which had been built for the third Paris World's Fair that year. The palace, whose architect was Gabriel Davioud, had two wings flanking a central concert hall. The Musée national des Monuments Français was created at the same time in the other wing.

The first director of the anthropological museum was Ernest Hamy, an anthropologist with the Natural History Museum who had urged the foundation of such an institution in Paris since 1874. Other French cities already had such museums, and there were many collections of materials brought back by French explorers, particularly from South America. A temporary museum was housed in the three rooms of the Palace of Industry at the Exposition from January to mid-March 1878, featuring a major collection of Peruvian artifacts recently brought back by Charles Wiener, Columbian and Equatorial exhibits contributed by Edouard André, American exhibits contributed by Jules Crevaux, Léon de Cessac, and Alphonse Pinart, a collection from Central Asia contributed by Charles-Eugène Ujfalvy, Cambodian inscriptions from Jules Harmand, exhibits from the Celebes contributed by de La Savinière and de Ballieu, and items from the Canary Islands from René Verneau. These were exhibited with large paintings of locations in Peru and Colombia by de Cetner and Paul Roux and plaster casts of archeological artifacts made under the direction of Émile Soldi. The success of this temporary exhibition and the advantage for a country then in the midst of colonial expansion of encouraging popular interest in distant places persuaded the Ministry to make the museum permanent. It was assigned a budget in 1880. Together with Hamy, Armand Landrin was appointed as a second official and there were five attendants and an official artist and model-maker.

...
Wikipedia