Description
The Musée de l'Orangerie is a small art museum at the edge of the Tuileries Garden, next to Place de la Concorde, best known for Claude Monet's Water Lilies. It is easy to visit in a short stop and rewards you with one of the calmest rooms in Paris.
Upstairs, two oval rooms shaped like the sign of infinity hold the Water Lilies: eight huge panels, two meters high and 91 meters long in all, wrapping around you with water, lilies, willows and sky. Daylight comes from above, as Monet demanded.
Downstairs hangs the collection of the dealer Paul Guillaume and of Jean Walter: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Rousseau and Soutine, so the museum covers a good stretch of modern French painting. The two men were, one after the other, husbands of the same woman, Domenica.
The building was born for lemon trees. In 1852 Napoleon III had it built to shelter the citrus trees of the Tuileries Garden in winter, all glass on the Seine side and almost windowless to the north wind. After World War I, it found a new purpose.
Monet was painting the Water Lilies for the French State, meant for the Musée Rodin. The head of the government, Georges Clemenceau, wanted them here instead. The donation was finalized in 1922, and Monet worked with the architect Camille Lefèvre on the design of the rooms.
The rooms run east to west, along the path of the sun, the same axis that joins the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. The museum opened in May 1927, a few months after the painter's death, as the Musée Claude Monet.
In the 1960s two floors were added for the Walter-Guillaume collection, and a renovation between 2000 and 2006 took the added floors out of the Water Lilies' rooms, bringing natural light back to the paintings.
Upstairs, two oval rooms shaped like the sign of infinity hold the Water Lilies: eight huge panels, two meters high and 91 meters long in all, wrapping around you with water, lilies, willows and sky. Daylight comes from above, as Monet demanded.
Downstairs hangs the collection of the dealer Paul Guillaume and of Jean Walter: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Rousseau and Soutine, so the museum covers a good stretch of modern French painting. The two men were, one after the other, husbands of the same woman, Domenica.
The building was born for lemon trees. In 1852 Napoleon III had it built to shelter the citrus trees of the Tuileries Garden in winter, all glass on the Seine side and almost windowless to the north wind. After World War I, it found a new purpose.
Monet was painting the Water Lilies for the French State, meant for the Musée Rodin. The head of the government, Georges Clemenceau, wanted them here instead. The donation was finalized in 1922, and Monet worked with the architect Camille Lefèvre on the design of the rooms.
The rooms run east to west, along the path of the sun, the same axis that joins the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. The museum opened in May 1927, a few months after the painter's death, as the Musée Claude Monet.
In the 1960s two floors were added for the Walter-Guillaume collection, and a renovation between 2000 and 2006 took the added floors out of the Water Lilies' rooms, bringing natural light back to the paintings.