Description
The Musée d'Orsay is the museum of French art from 1848 to 1914, in a grand railway station on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris. It holds the world's largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, about 3,000 works, and fills the gap between the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre.
Monet is here with 86 paintings, Renoir with 81, Cézanne with 56 and Degas with 43. Don't miss Manet's Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass, Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette, a Sunday afternoon in Montmartre, and Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, among his 24 paintings in the museum.
There is also sculpture, with over 2,200 pieces, Rodin's Gates of Hell among them, plus decorative arts and photography. The old platforms of the nave have become a gallery of sculpture under the great iron-and-glass vault.
The building is a work of art too. Look for the giant clock in the main hall, a transparent face that frames the Seine outside, and for the model of the Opéra district, at 1:100 scale, under a glass floor.
The architect, Victor Laloux, hid a huge hall of iron and glass behind a stone facade worthy of a palace, so as not to spoil the banks of the Seine. Built for the 1900 World's Fair, only electric trains could come in: steam would have blackened the richly decorated vault.
But the platforms soon proved too short for modern trains, and from 1939 the station served only commuters. It became a parcel depot in the war, a set for Orson Welles's The Trial, a theater, an auction house. Then came the plans to demolish it.
Saved at the last minute and listed as a monument, it was turned into a museum. Gae Aulenti designed the interior under the great vault, and Mitterrand opened it in December 1986.
Many of the Impressionists came from the Jeu de Paume. Here they hang beside the academic painters of their day, by the curators' choice, so you can compare them.
The museum welcomes about 3.9 million visitors a year, and Courbet's The Artist's Studio and Gauguin's Tahitian paintings are among its other big names.
Don't miss
• Manet's Olympia.
• Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette.
• Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.
• The clock.
Did you know?
• The names of the eighteen main cities the station served, from Bordeaux to Quimper, are still carved on its facade.
• Le Corbusier proposed replacing it with a block of apartments.
• Trains still run underneath: the RER C has a station in the old one's basement.
Monet is here with 86 paintings, Renoir with 81, Cézanne with 56 and Degas with 43. Don't miss Manet's Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass, Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette, a Sunday afternoon in Montmartre, and Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, among his 24 paintings in the museum.
There is also sculpture, with over 2,200 pieces, Rodin's Gates of Hell among them, plus decorative arts and photography. The old platforms of the nave have become a gallery of sculpture under the great iron-and-glass vault.
The building is a work of art too. Look for the giant clock in the main hall, a transparent face that frames the Seine outside, and for the model of the Opéra district, at 1:100 scale, under a glass floor.
The architect, Victor Laloux, hid a huge hall of iron and glass behind a stone facade worthy of a palace, so as not to spoil the banks of the Seine. Built for the 1900 World's Fair, only electric trains could come in: steam would have blackened the richly decorated vault.
But the platforms soon proved too short for modern trains, and from 1939 the station served only commuters. It became a parcel depot in the war, a set for Orson Welles's The Trial, a theater, an auction house. Then came the plans to demolish it.
Saved at the last minute and listed as a monument, it was turned into a museum. Gae Aulenti designed the interior under the great vault, and Mitterrand opened it in December 1986.
Many of the Impressionists came from the Jeu de Paume. Here they hang beside the academic painters of their day, by the curators' choice, so you can compare them.
The museum welcomes about 3.9 million visitors a year, and Courbet's The Artist's Studio and Gauguin's Tahitian paintings are among its other big names.
Don't miss
• Manet's Olympia.
• Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette.
• Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.
• The clock.
Did you know?
• The names of the eighteen main cities the station served, from Bordeaux to Quimper, are still carved on its facade.
• Le Corbusier proposed replacing it with a block of apartments.
• Trains still run underneath: the RER C has a station in the old one's basement.