Free museums on the first Sunday of the month in Paris

Paris can enjoy masterpieces such as La Celestina, The Suppliant or Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Set in the great 17th century Hôtel Salé in the heart of the historic Marais area, Picasso’s masterpieces hang on the walls of bright, spacious exhibition rooms. First opened in 1985, the Musée Picasso is one of the city’s most precious and prestigious institutions.

The Orsay collection picks up where the Louvre leaves off (around 1848) and stops just before the Centre Pompidou begins (around 1914). In just over 60 years of art history, spanning Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the School of Pont-Aven, the museum attracts more than 3 million visitors annually and occupies nearly 35,000 square meters beneath soaring glass ceilings.

Among its 150,000 works, you’ll find true masterpieces like:

• L’Origine du monde by Courbet
• Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Manet
• The Floor Scrapers (Les Raboteurs de parquet) by Caillebotte

Monet’s Water Lilies. Set plenty of time to spend in the two oval rooms that house the Water Lilies: there’s a really special energy in there, somewhere between awe and total calm. It’s probably the effect Monet was hoping for: he designed the installation as a continuous circle, so your eye never stops taking it all in. It’s like watching the four seasons unfold before you. In total, the Orangerie has eight panels displayed end-to-end – each one is two metres high and between six and 17 metres long – covering a surface area of several hundred square metres. This is the master work of a genius, and it’s certainly worth the queues.

Surrounded by trees on the banks of the Seine, this museum, housed in an extraordinary building by Jean Nouvel, is a vast showcase for non-European cultures. Dedicated to the ethnic art of Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas.

Founded by industrialist Emile Guimet in 1889 to house his collection of Chinese and Japanese religious art, and later incorporating oriental collections from the Louvre, the museum has 45,000 objects from neolithic times onwards. Lower galleries focus on India and South-east Asia, centred on stunning Hindu and Buddhist Khmer sculpture from Cambodia.

The Rodin museum occupies the hôtel particulier where the sculptor lived in the final years of his life. The Kiss, the Cathedral, the Walking Man, portrait busts and early terracottas are exhibited indoors, as are many of the individual figures or small groups that also appear on the Gates of Hell.

This wonderful museum combines the small private apartment of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826-98) with the vast gallery he built to display his work - set out as a museum by the painter himself, and opened in 1903.

This collection includes small oil paintings, free pastel studies of skies, sketches and lithographs, as well as Eugène Delacroix palette.

The permanent collections here trace over 200 years of immigration history. There are thought-provoking images (film and photography), everyday objects (suitcases, accordions, sewing machines and so on) and artworks that symbolise the struggles immigrants had to face when integrating into French society.