Musée d'Orsay

From looking at a map in our hotel room, the Musée d’Orsay seemed like a rather long walk – certainly longer than we felt like walking in our present condition. Instead we walked to the St-Michel Metro station, the one which seemed partially closed on our arrival the day before. As it turned out, the Metro part of the station was fully closed, leaving the prospect of an even longer walk than we’d have had from the hotel. But fortunately the people running the Metro had supplied an alternative, a free bus which travelled the portion of the Metro route that was closed. They’d even supplied some multi-lingual young people wearing Metro t-shirts to answer questions. After a short wait, we boarded the next bus and rode along the left bank of the Seine to a stop just past the museum, where we exited.

Musée d’Orsay
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Bob and Museum Sign
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From the outside the Musée d’Orsay doesn’t look as much like a museum as it looks like a train station. Oddly enough, this is exactly what it used to be. It was built from 1898-1900 on the site of a government building (the Palais d’Orsay) which had been burned down during the Paris Commune of 1871. The station (the Gare d’Orsay) was intended to be functional for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, and it was completed just in time. For the next few decades the Gare d’Orsay served as the arrival and departure point for all trains between Paris and the southwest of France. But by 1939, the longer-distance trains had become too long to fit in the station, so this traffic was moved to other stations, and the Gare d’Orsay was used strictly for suburban routes. By the 1970’s the station had clearly become obsolete for its original purpose, and a tentative decision was reached to tear it down and put up an ugly 1970’s hotel in its place. But an idea was hatched to repurpose the building as an art museum, and in 1977 this idea was adopted, at the urging of President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Renovation work commenced, and the Musée d’Orsay opened in December of 1986.

The Musée d’Orsay is home to artworks completed between 1848 and 1915, and houses the largest collection of French impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces in the world. There are substantial representations of artists like Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh. The American painting known as Whistler’s Mother is here too. Other genres and artistic media of the period are also on display. We’d show you some of this, but one other thing the museum has is a strict no-photography rule. If you'd like to see some of the art, you might check out the museum's web site and go to the "Collections" link, though many of the works are well-known enough to appear in many other places around the Internet. Just not here. We were, however, able to sneak a few general interior photos.

Bob in the Museum Med Lrg	Bob and Orangina at Museum Café Med Lrg
Museum Clock Med Lrg	Nella and Van Gogh Poster Med Lrg
Central Hall Med Lrg Xlg	Sculpture in Central Hall Med Lrg

Outside the museum there is a square with a number of bronze sculptures dating from the same period. There is a set of allegorical continent-themed bronzes, originally produced for the 1878 Exposition Universelle.

Allegorical Bronzes Med Lrg	South America, Aimé Millet (1877) Med Lrg Xlg
North America, Ernest Eugène Hiolle (1878) Med Lrg Xlg	Africa, Eugène Delaplanche (1878) Med Lrg Xlg

There are also some bronze animals.

Young Elephant Trapped, Emmanuel Fremiet (1878)
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Rhinoceros, Alfred Jacquemart (1878)
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Nella and Horse Harrow, Pierre Rouillard (1878)
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By the time we’d finished with the Musée d’Orsay it was 7 PM. But the sun stays up late in Paris in July, so we decided to walk across the river and explore the Champs-Elysées with the daylight and energy we had remaining.