Visiting the Louvre’s Hidden Gift Shop—and the Atelier Where Its Prints Are Made

BHidden on the second floor of the Louvre is one of the most original spaces in the museum: a repository for more than six hundred prints (or, as the museum refers to them, engravings) made from fourteen thousand copper plates in the Louvre’s permanent collection. These are rendered on museum-quality paper and guaranteed to last a hundred years. The space also displays small casts of famous sculptures, including miniature jewel-colored copies of the Venus de Milo and the Nike of Samothrace. The engravings and casts are on sale here at this shop, perhaps the Louvre’s best, or online.

For me the prints are the draw—glorious old maps of Paris, images of the gardens and galleries of Versailles, engravings of Napoleon’s military campaign in Egypt, decorative art and botanical prints. On sale as well are museum-quality prints by contemporary artists. In 1989, as part of the Grand Louvre renovation, the museum commissioned engraved copper plates from living artists, a practice that continues to this day. Every year, contemporary artists are chosen to create a printed work for the museum; these have included Pierre Alechinsky, Louise Bourgeois, JR, Giuseppe Penone, and Jenny Holzer. If the boutique does not have the image in stock, it will order and custom print it.

You don’t have to make an appointment to see the prints. Many of them are framed and hung as if this were an art gallery. Others are filed in dozens of folios, each wrapped in heavy plastic that gives off the smell of an old print shop. No one tells you this, but you can get into the boutique—and this annex—without paying the price of museum admission.

The engravings are inked, and the small sculptures molded, in an industrial site that the public can visit once a month on Fridays, in the ethnically and racially rich working-class suburb of La Plaine Saint-Denis. At one atelier there, called La Chalcographie du Louvre, print-makers use traditional techniques to produce prints that look exactly the way they did centuries earlier from the same copper plates. The Louvre created La Chalcographie inside the museum in 1797, four years after the museum opened, and after moving many times, it settled here in 2007. At the Louvre’s Sculpture Casting Atelier, a separate team of artisans create moulages—molds—that replicate marble statues in plaster or resin.

The Louvre doesn’t widely advertise the two ateliers, which are administered by an arm of the Ministry of Culture. The ateliers are not on the everyday tourist route; I’ve rarely found a Parisian who knows of their existence. But they are as exciting as they are offbeat, worthy of discovery. And some day, perhaps the Louvre will organize shuttle buses to make it easy to get there.

The first time I made the trip, I took the No. 12 Métro line to the Front Populaire stop, then walked about fifteen minutes to a large factory with windows framed in red. The waiting room is a showroom of sculpture. Backlit replicas of busts struggle for space on wooden shelves that reach the ceiling; larger, faithful replicas, including a wingless Nike of Samothrace, fill much of the empty floor space.