Visiting the Louvre's Hidden Gift Shop—and the Atelier Where Its Prints Are Made | Condé Nast Traveler

All products and listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you purchase something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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.

At the Louvre’s Sculpture Casting Atelier, a team of artisans create moulages—molds—that replicate marble statues in plaster or resin.

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 La Chalcographie and the Sculpture Casting Atelier.

Both ateliers are as exciting as they are offbeat, worthy of discovery.

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.

I was there to meet Sophie Prieto, the manager of both workshops. She had studied art history in Paris and used to live in Brooklyn. Unlike the more formally dressed female curators and administrators at the Louvre, she favors a uniform of jeans, a black T-shirt, and sneakers.

These two atelier are administered by an arm of the Ministry of Culture and not on the everyday tourist route.

We started with the Casting Atelier. It produces perfect replicas not only for the Louvre but also for Versailles, other museums in France, and art schools, museums, and private clients around the world. Copies of some of the most fragile statues in the Tuileries are molded in this atelier, while the delicate originals have been moved inside the Louvre or tucked away in storage. I followed Prieto through darkened storage rooms, passing hundreds, maybe thousands, of sculptural casts, including Sphinxes and aristocrats, a Statue of Liberty, a Michelangelo Moses, and more than a dozen Venus de Milos.

Then she opened the door to the patina workshop. Hanging on one wall are about 150 small sculpted wings in the colors and finishes that can be ordered from the moulages studio—from semi-translucent stone to a velvety royal blue. Each work can be made to look like marble, wood, terra-cotta, gilded wood, bronze, or stone—or even rendered in frivolous pop colors.

One artisan brushed layers of paint and varnishes on an oversized mold of a Barbie doll. Near her sat a row of busts of Brigitte Bardot depicted as Marianne, the imaginary figure who is France’s embodiment of freedom. The Bardot-Mariannes, designed with V-necked see-through garments that reveal full breasts and nipples, were waiting for a blue, white, and red patina. They are among the atelier’s best-sellers.

Prieto explained the art of statuary casting. The artisan works from a physical imprint or a computer scan of the original piece to produce a “negative imprint,” or mold. This is used to make perfect copies, many of them in resin, which is more durable than plaster, especially in outdoor installations.

I wanted to stay and watch the molders as they massaged wet plaster in large mixing bowls, but Prieto promised that the best was yet to come—the Chalcographie du Louvre. The word “chalcography” is of Greek origin—from khalkos, copper, and graphein, to write. Much of France’s collection of plates, engraved from the sixteenth century to the present, are stored here, including thousands of copper plates commissioned by Louis XIV about subjects including royal marriages, châteaus, artworks, military victories, and portraits. When Louis sent Jesuit missionaries to Beijing in the 1680s, they brought with them, as gifts for the emperor, engravings made from copper plates. “It was French royal propaganda for the world,” Prieto said.

She led me through a series of corridors and two sets of doors up the stairs into a locked room lined with metal shelves holding original copper plates. A sophisticated ventilation system keeps the temperature and humidity constant. She found a château mural in the style of Louis XIV.

“Look! I hold in my hands a seventeenth-century piece of art!” she said.

Then she pulled out plates at random. “Here is a portrait of King Louis-Philippe, I think, from the nineteenth century,” she said. “Here is a family’s coat of arms! Architectural plans, battle scenes! Even I don’t know them all. It is a huge collection. Alas, we cannot print from the oldest plates anymore. But now, on to the atelier!”

At the Casting Atelier, artisans create perfect copies of sculptures, many of them in resin, which is more durable than plaster, especially in outdoor installations.

She opened the door to a printing studio with a wall of windows flooded with light, and called on Marius Tessier, a young printmaker, to demonstrate his craft. He wore a dark blue work apron over his jeans and T-shirt and sported oversized gold-rimmed glasses, a mustache, and a bun. His hands were dark with ink. His worktable was piled high with rags, jars, ink bottles, cleaning products, and tools: spatulas, rollers, needles, paintbrushes. One end of the table was pushed up against a sink with soap and brushes so that he and his colleagues could scrub their hands clean at the end of the day.

Framed contemporary prints produced over the years cover the walls. Three iron presses built more than a century ago dominate the center of the room. The presses were once manually operated, requiring two workers to turn their wheels. Their giant gears have been preserved, but the presses are now electrically powered. Printmaking requires several operations. Tessier inks a copper plate, removing the excess with a piece of muslin. He uses the palm of his hand to remove the last traces of excess ink before placing the inked plate on the press plate. Then a pristine artisanal sheet of moistened paper passed under a roller while ink is transferred from each of the holes in the plate to the paper: ink touching paper is described as being “in love with the paper.” Tessier removes the wet proof to reveal the print: a line drawing of a bull on its side.

“Even when the system is all set up it takes several hours to get a print right,” he said. “You want to put your hands into the ink and work with, play with the materials. The paper has to capture every detail of the perfectly measured ink, so it has to be precise. But the paper must be wet, so as to be more flexible, more loving.”

Ink touching paper is described as being “in love with the paper.”

And that’s when magic happens. “A spirit exists in this studio,” Tessier said. “You don’t really see the final print as it’s being made. And then it appears, and you have something concrete in your hands. It’s manual work, all about flexibility, precision, balance. But it’s artistry, too.”

“To put your hands in the ink, how exquisite,” I said. “Do you want to be an artist yourself?”

The iron presses at La Chalcographie were once manually operated by two workers, but are now electrically powered.

Tessier said that he had just finished his studies at the only engraving school in Paris. “I do some work on the side, yes. Do you want me to show you?” he asked. He looked at Prieto for approval; she encouraged him to go on. He explained that he uses a combination of steel tools, drypoint needles, and sandpaper to engrave on copper plates; he then turns the work into prints. He pulled out his phone. “Here are the engravings for my diploma! It is really different from what I do here.”

Angular, modern, some looked like construction sites. Others were so detailed they could have been photographs.

“Congratulations, Marius!” I said.

It was time to move on. I didn’t think much about Marius Tessier after that. But a few months later, a small artists’ association in my neighborhood organized an exhibition and sale of works by more than a dozen engravers and printmakers. Prieto invited me to go with her to the opening. There was Tessier, who finally could show me his own work. I fell in love with Fenêtres, an engraving of two stark, darkened windows, one on top of the other. How could I not support a young artist? It now hangs on a wall in my apartment.

Excerpted from Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum by Elaine Sciolino. Copyright © 2025 by Elaine Sciolino. Excerpted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.