In 1900 the Exposition Universelle drew 1000’s of artwork lovers to Paris, lots of them arriving by prepare on the new Gare d’Orsay. Who amongst them would have thought that the prepare station the place they disembarked would change into an illustrious establishment holding the best assortment of Impressionist artwork on the planet? Opened in 1986 and positioned on the Left Financial institution of the River Seine reverse the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay as we speak is dwelling to some 100,000 works courting from 1848 to 1914.
Earlier than being reworked right into a showcase for work by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, and lots of extra, the Victor Laloux–designed constructing performed a number of roles within the lifetime of the town. After being decommissioned as a station, it served as a reception middle for prisoners after World Conflict II, was a movie set for Orson Welles’s 1962 film The Trial, and was used as an public sale venue whereas the Hôtel Drouot was closed. Its conversion right into a museum was led by architects Renaud Bardon, Pierre Colboc, and Jean-Paul Philippon.
Listed below are 25 masterpieces within the Musée d’Orsay’s assortment. (Please be aware that not all of those works are on view at a given time—now we have indicated these which might be presently displayed and the place they might be discovered on this map.)
-
Honoré Daumier, The Celebrities of the Juste Milieu (1832)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. The 36 Celebrities of the Juste Milieu are the remaining items of a sequence of 40 busts that Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) produced in response to a fee from Charles Philipon, the founding father of Le Charivari and La Caricature newspapers. The artist used these painted clay works as fashions for his lithographs, which had been printed in each satirical shops. The caricatures ridicule politicians of the July Monarchy (the post-Revolution reign of Louis-Philippe in France), together with lawyer André Dupin, banker and naturalist Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert, and historian François Guizot. In 1927 the busts had been bought by Philipon’s grandson to artwork writer Maurice Le Garrec, who had them restored. They had been acquired by the Musée d’Orsay in 1980.
(Floor Ground, Room 4)
-
Auguste Clésinger, Lady Bitten by a Snake (1847)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean. This bare lady with a snaked coiled round her wrist—is she squirming from ache or from uncontrolled ardour? Due to this ambiguity, she was, alongside Thomas Couture’s portray The Romans in Their Decadence, the speak of the 1847 Salon. Auguste Clésinger’s mannequin for this controversial sculpture was Apollonie Sabatier, aka La Présidente, a Parisian magnificence and muse of Baudelaire who held a salon in Paris. The artist was harshly criticized for molding her physique from life; within the Nineteenth-century artwork scene, this was synonymous with laziness or an absence of integrity. Actually, for painter Eugène Delacroix, Lady Bitten by a Snake was nothing however a “sculpted daguerreotype.” The determine’s idealized face and outrageously real looking curves, all set on an ornate pedestal, make this work an consultant instance of Eclecticism in sculpture.
(Floor Ground, Sculpture Corridor)
-
Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / RMN. In the summertime of 1849, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) began his first monumental work, the depiction of a funeral that came about in his birthplace, the town of Ornans. The horizontal format and using black tones counsel that the artist drew inspiration, respectively, from Seventeenth-century Dutch portraits similar to Frans Hals’s Meagre Firm and from Spanish masters together with Diego Velázquez. Who had died? In keeping with varied sources, it was both Courbet’s grandfather or a member of the Proudhon household, who had been buddies of the painter. On the 1850–1851 Salon, many known as out the “ugliness” of the characters and the triviality of the topic. Courbet was additionally criticized for utilizing the size normally reserved for historical past work to depict an earthly occasion. The composition was interpreted by church as anticlerical, and by a few of Courbet’s contemporaries as a manifesto for democratic beliefs. In different phrases, whereas A Burial at Ornans could have foreshadowed the tip of Academism, it additionally foretold the beginning of Realism.
(Floor Ground, Room 7)
-
Jean-François Millet, The Angelus (1857–1859)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. A person and a girl have stopped digging potatoes and dropped their instruments to be able to recite the Angelus, a prayer that commemorates the Annunciation—the biblical episode when Gabriel tells Mary she is going to give God a son. The scene, by Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) had its roots in a childhood reminiscence: “The concept for The Angelus got here to me, as a result of I remembered that my grandmother, listening to the church bell ringing whereas we had been working within the fields, at all times made us cease work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed,” he recalled in 1865. The realist painter, identified for his humanizing depictions of farmers, was under no circumstances a churchgoer himself. However on this portray, as in lots of his different works, he imbues his depiction of agricultural staff within the panorama with a sense of the chic. The portray was bequeathed to the French State in 1910 and moved to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986.
(Floor Ground, Room 4)
-
Alexandre Cabanel, The Beginning of Venus (1863)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. This portray by Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889), which nods to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1808 Venus Anadyomene and to 18th-century masters similar to François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, options the Roman goddess of affection coming to existence on water, as a grown lady, accompanied by cupids. The titular occasion was, like many different mythological episodes, a Nineteenth-century excuse for the artist to painting a nude lady in a titillating pose. Although acquired by Napoleon III on the 1863 Salon, and doubtless accountable for Cabanel’s subsequent rent as a professor on the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, this classical scene gave rise to a lot controversy. One critic was French creator Émile Zola, who didn’t admire Venus’s complexion: “The goddess, drowned in a sea of milk, resembles a scrumptious courtesan, however not of flesh and blood—that will be indecent—however made from a kind of pink and white marzipan.”
(At the moment not on view)
-
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, The Dance (1868)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.
In 1863 architect Charles Garnier commissioned his pal Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), who had received the Grand Prix de Rome, to sculpt a piece for the façade of the Parisian opera home. Whereas François Jouffroy, Eugène Guillaume, and Jean-Joseph Perraud had been respectively assigned the themes of concord, instrumental music, and lyrical drama, Carpeaux was to signify dance. Decided to seize motion—which he lastly did by combining each a vertical momentum and round movement—the artist produced many sketches and fashions earlier than taking motion. For the central determine surging from a hoop of maenads, Carpeaux is alleged to have borrowed the physique from a carpenter who labored for him and the smile from Princess Hélène von Racowitza. The general public was shocked by the realism of these nude figures. A bottle of ink was even thrown on the reduction and its withdrawal was requested, however the battle of 1870 and the sculptor’s passing introduced the controversy to a detailed.
(Floor Ground, Sculpture Corridor)
-
James McNeill Whistler, Association in Gray and Black No. 1 (1871)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was born in America however spent most of his profession in London and Paris, getting into Charles Gleyre’s studio on the École des Beaux-Arts in 1856. He was a pal of Henri Fantin-Latour, who thought-about him one of many leaders of the French avant-garde. Association in Gray and Black No. 1, also called Portrait of the Artist’s Mom, options Anna Mathilda McNeill Whistler clad in a protracted black costume, sitting in left profile within the artist’s London studio. The muted palette could replicate her austerity, however given the Whistler etching “Thames River, Black Lion Wharf (1859) that hangs within the background, it might even be interpreted because the continuation of the artist’s experiments with printmaking. The portray was acquired by the French State in 1891.
(At the moment not on view)
-
Berthe Morisot, The Cradle (1872)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.
The Cradle, by Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), is an intimate depiction of Morisot’s sister Emma and Emma’s new child child, Blanche. At 31 years outdated Morisot herself was nonetheless single, not marrying Eugène Manet till 1874 and changing into a mom herself solely in 1879. The Cradle was proven on the 1874 Impressionist Exhibition—the group’s first—and had little affect on the time. It might have gone completely unnoticed if not for a couple of critics delicate to its delicate palette. It didn’t promote till 1930, when the Louvre acquired it from the artist’s household.
(Floor Ground, Non permanent Exhibition Galleries)
-
Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Towards the tip of 1871, Édouard Manet (1832–1883), who’d been unable to color whereas serving within the nationwide guard in the course of the Franco-Prussian battle and the Paris Commune, was in a position to resume working and reconnect together with his former fashions. These included fellow artist Berthe Morisot, whom he had met on the Louvre in 1868. Manet made a dozen portraits of Morisot, who married his youthful brother and joined the Impressionist motion in 1874. This one exhibits her fully clad in black—a stylish coloration in late-Nineteenth-century trend—and holding a bouquet of violets. Its execution is a sworn statement to Manet’s admiration for Spanish masters, chief of whom was Diego Velázquez.
(High Ground, Room 30)
-
Gustave Caillebotte, The Ground Scrapers (1875)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Franck Raux. For The Ground Scrapers Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) drew from his tutorial coaching to depict an on a regular basis scene of laborers at work. His method to perspective could have been conventional and his topics harking back to Greek statues, however the content material of the portray didn’t please the jury of the 1875 Paris Salon, which thought-about it “vulgar.” Nevertheless, the 28-year-old artist offered the work on the second Impressionist Exhibition, in 1876, together with one other model of the composition executed earlier that very same yr. Critics of the day had been lower than welcoming. Emile Zola, as an illustration, thought the portray was “anti-artistic”, and “so correct that [it] made it bourgeois”. It was initially donated to the French State by Caillebotte’s household in 1894, transferred to the Louvre in 1929, and moved to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986.
(High Ground, Room 31)
-
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance on the Moulin de la Galette (1876)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. This widespread scene is undoubtedly one in all Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s most necessary works. The artist (1841–1919) offered it on the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition. It was bought two years later by his counterpart Gustave Caillebotte, who bequeathed it to the French State in 1894. The artwork critic Georges Rivière, who seems within the portray, mentioned: “It’s a web page of historical past, a treasured monument to Parisian life [painted] with rigorous accuracy.” Even when Renoir included a few of his buddies within the composition, similar to painters Norbert Goeneutte and Franc-Lamy, his purpose was to seize not a second of his personal life however the ambiance of a selected venue, the Moulin de la Galette within the Montmartre district. Three areas are depicted: the seated characters within the foreground having a dialog, the group behind them dancing, and the band performing in some sort of enclosure on the again. The blurry impact created by this layering was to not everybody’s style then. Right this moment it might be exhausting to disclaim the modernity of the piece.
(Floor Ground, Non permanent Exhibition Galleries)
-
Claude Monet, The Saint-Lazare Station (1877)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. In 1877 Claude Monet (1840–1926) arrived in Paris from Argenteuil, the place he had spent the earlier six years. The transfer from peaceable countryside to hectic capital metropolis caused a change in his subject material. Freshly settled within the Nouvelle Athènes space, the artist started to color on the Saint-Lazare prepare station, discovering in it a brand new supply of inspiration. This work was the primary of a sequence of 12 work of the identical topic executed from varied viewpoints. Monet despatched the primary eight to the third Impressionist Exhibition, when the group made the time period Impressionism its personal.
(Floor Ground, Non permanent Exhibition Galleries)
-
Edgar Degas, Little Dancer of 14 Years (unique c. 1878–1881)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. When Edgar Degas (1834–1917) died, 150 wax and clay sculptures had been present in his studio. None of these works had been offered in public earlier than, aside from Little Dancer of 14 Years, which the artist confirmed on the 1881 Impressionist Exhibition. The three.2-foot-tall bronze statue—one in all 28 copies forged after Degas’s passing and now within the collections of museums and galleries all over the world—options Belgian dancer Marie van Goethem, a scholar from the Opéra de Paris ballet college, wearing an precise tutu and with an actual ribbon in her hair. Not all of the critics who noticed Little Dancer of 14 Years in 1881 greeted it with open arms. Joris-Karl Huysmans could have known as it “the primary really trendy try at sculpture,” however the determine was additionally known as “bestial” and in comparison with a monkey. Critic Paul Mantz even referred to her as a “flower of precocious depravity” with a face “marked by the hateful promise of each vice” and “bearing the indicators of a profoundly heinous character.”
(High Ground, Room 32)
-
Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell (1880–1917)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay / Sophie Crépy. Sure, Auguste Rodin has his personal museum in Paris, however one in all his works has a specific connection to the Musée d’Orsay. In 1880 the French State commissioned the sculptor to design doorways for a brand new museum of ornamental arts. Initially, this museum was to be constructed inside the ruins of the Palais d’Orsay, which was destroyed in the course of the Paris Commune. In keeping with Rodin’s plan, its monumental foremost doorways could be embellished with 11 low reliefs impressed by Dante’s “Inferno,” the primary a part of the poet’s Divine Comedy. Three years later the museum challenge was deserted, and a prepare station was constructed as a substitute—one that will ultimately be reworked into the Musée d’Orsay. For his or her half, the Gates turned an ongoing work in progress, with the artist basing new sculptures on a number of the figures within the piece, together with The Thinker (Dante himself), The Three Shades, and The Kiss. Round 1890 Rodin stopped engaged on the Gates, however in 1917 was satisfied by the curator of the brand new Musée Rodin to finish the work and have it forged in bronze. Rodin died, nonetheless, with out ever seeing the consequence. Right this moment, a plaster forged comprised of the 1917 bronze is on long-term mortgage to the Musée d’Orsay, on the bottom it was initially meant to occupy.
(Second Ground, Sculpture Terrace)
-
Vincent van Gogh, Starry Sky (1888)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Of the greater than two dozen works by Vincent van Gogh on the Musee d’Orsay, together with Room in Arles and Portrait of the Artist, it’s virtually not possible to decide on a favourite, however Starry Sky (1888) is excessive on the listing. As quickly as he arrived in Arles, in February 1888, Van Gogh (1853–1890) began specializing in “evening results.” In a letter to his brother Theo in April 1888, he wrote: “I would like a starry evening with cypresses or possibly above a area of ripe wheat.” To a sister, he confided in September: “Usually it appears to me evening is much more richly coloured than day.” Later that month, the artist lastly achieved this blue-dominated view of the Rhône River, the place stars and the lights of the town sparkle in concord. The equally named—and extra turbulent—Starry Night time, which he painted shortly afterward on the Saint-Paul de Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy belongs to the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York.
(At the moment not on view)
-
Paul Sérusier, The Talisman (The Bois d’Amour at Pont Aven) (1888)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. In the summertime of 1888, Paul Sérusier (1864–1927) left Paris for the town of Pont-Aven with a letter of introduction from the painter and author Émile Bernard. That is the place he produced The Talisman (1888) beneath the tutelage of Paul Gauguin. Painter Maurice Denis would later report that Gaugin suggested Sérusier, “How do you see these timber? They’re yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, fairly blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these crimson leaves? Put in vermilion.” Upon his return to Paris, Séruzier confirmed his buddies, the longer term Nabis, the piece. It turned the logo for his or her motion, which believed {that a} portray, past anything, was an association of colours on a flat floor. In entrance of this work, mentioned Denis, he and his buddies felt “liberated from all of the yokes that the thought of copying delivered to [our] painters’ instincts.”
(High Ground, Galerie Françoise Cachin)
-
François Gauzi, Lili Grenier in a Kimono in Albert Grenier’s Studio (c. 1888)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Alexis Brandt.
In 2022 the Musée d’Orsay acquired picture albums that includes greater than 100 footage of artist’s mannequin and socialite Noémi Amélie Sans, aka Lili Grenier, taken by François Gauzi (1862–1933). A part of this acquisition is presently on show, together with a portrait of her sporting a kimono. Identified for her blissful disposition, she began sitting for painter Fernand Cormon, who appreciated her freckled pores and skin and her luxuriant hair. She lived with artist Albert Grenier within the Montmartre district. The couple had been well-known for throwing extravagant costume events, typically attended by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who lived with them for some time, and lots of different artists.
(At the moment not on view)
-
Edward Burne-Jones, The Adoration of the Magi (1890)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Commissioned in 1886 by the rector of Exeter School, Oxford, this biblically themed composition was the primary tapestry to be designed by Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898); his preliminary sketch is now held on the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. William Morris, a number one determine of the British Arts & Crafts motion, with whom Burne-Jones had been working for10 years, arrange a workforce of weavers at Merton Abbey to deliver the work to life. Different research had been meant to be tailored into stained glass home windows. The Adoration of the Magi was accomplished in 1890 to huge reward. 9 variations had been crafted between 1890 and 1907.
(At the moment not on view)
-
Paul Gauguin, Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ (1890–1891)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Patrice Schmidt. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) painted Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ (1890–1891) on the eve of his first journey to Tahiti. This pivotal work could possibly be thought-about a triple self-portrait. The artist occupies the middle of the composition, his expression hinting at his willpower to flee his private {and professional} issues. (Success had not but discovered him, and his spouse had left him to return to Denmark with their kids.) Within the background are two contrasting items painted the earlier yr: A struggling Christ made within the painter’s picture and the anthropomorphic Pot within the Type of a Grotesque Head. The artist referred to the latter canvas as “Head of Gauguin the Savage,” as if he already knew what sort of life he would make for himself within the colonies.
(At the moment not on view)
-
Paul Cézanne, The Card Gamers (1890–1895)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Through the Eighteen Nineties, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) tackled the topic of card gamers, which he could have borrowed from Caravaggio and from the Le Nain brothers. Of the 5 variations of The Card Gamers Cézanne painted, what strikes one first on this one is the symmetrical posing of his fashions, peasants whom the painter would see on the Jas de Bouffan, his father’s property close to Aix-en-Provence. The bottle on the desk marks the middle of the composition and accentuates the silent face-off between the 2 opponents.
(High Ground, Room 35)
-
Odilon Redon, Timber on a Yellow Background (1901)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. French Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) made this panel portray—and greater than a dozen others—for a chateau belonging to Baron Robert de Domecy, one in all his most supportive patrons. The fee got here at a turning level within the artist’s evolution, when the 60-year-old Redon was transferring from darkish prints and charcoal drawings to vibrantly coloured pastels and oils. With the chance to work on a bigger scale, he started blurring the road between artwork and ornament. “I’m masking the partitions of a eating room with flowers, flowers of goals, fauna of the creativeness,” he wrote to his pal, the collector Andries Bonger. In its scale, remedy of house, and mixture of mediums—together with oil, tempera, charcoal, and pastel—this portray seems to be startlingly modern.
(High Ground, Galerie Françoise Cachin)
-
Camille Claudel, Maturity (c. 1902)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. A younger lady on her knees has simply let go of a person whom an older lady appears to be carrying away. This sculptural group is likely to be interpreted as an allegory of ageing, with youth behind and loss of life straight forward, however Maturity may also be seen as autobiographical. In it, Camille Claudel (1864–1843) is assumed to have sculpted herself deserted by her mentor and former lover Auguste Rodin, who couldn’t deliver himself to depart his future spouse, Rose Beuret. Writer and diplomat Paul Claudel wrote of this work: “My sister Camille, imploring, humiliated, on her knees, that very good, proud creature, and what’s being wrenched from her, proper there earlier than your very eyes, is her soul.” After he left Camille, Rodin helped her get this fee from the French State, her first, in 1895.
(At the moment not on view)
-
André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge (c. 1906)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. On the 1905 Salon d’Automne, André Derain (1880–1854) was featured in the identical gallery as contemporaries Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Kees van Dongen. a sculpture by Albert Marque, a critic is alleged to have shouted: “Look, it’s Donatello amongst wild beasts!” (which interprets to fauves in French). This anecdote explains the origin of the time period Fauvism, one adopted by a bunch of younger—amongst them Derain—who believed within the energy of pure coloration to precise sensations and emotion. Just a few months later, Derain went to London and produced about 30 work, together with Charing Cross Bridge, which exhibits autos navigating a activate the Victoria embankment. The dabbing approach used to color the yellow-heavy sky and the water exhibits the affect of neo-Impressionism, whereas the slight distortion of the vehicles offers an virtually Futurist feeling of pace.
(Second Ground, Room 67)
-
Henri Rousseau, The Snake Charmer (1907)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), a central determine of the Naive motion, painted this moonlit scene of a Black Eve in a junglelike Backyard of Eden utilizing blocks of intense darkish coloration silhouetted in opposition to a lighter sky. The human determine, the animals, and the extravagant vegetation have all been depicted with equal dedication on this work, which was commissioned by Robert Delaunay’s mom. Rousseau, who got here to portray fairly late in life, hardly ever traveled; most of his jungle scenes had been painted within the Pure Historical past Museum or the botanical gardens in Paris. Writers Alfred Jarry, André Breton, and Guillaume Apollinaire had been amongst his biggest followers.
(Second Ground, Pavilion Amont)
-
François Pompon, Polar Bear (1923–1933)
Picture Credit score: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / DR. This smooth bear is the work of François Pompon (1855–1933), who began carving marble for different sculptors earlier than growing his personal aesthetic of easy, rounded types. Within the late 1870s, after serving as Rodin’s assistant, the artist turned his again on human figuration to give attention to the zoo animals he loved watching on the Jardin des Plantes. Polar Bear, amongst different stylized depictions of birds and animals, was the consequence. This monumental sculpture (greater than eight toes lengthy) was proven on the 1922 Salon and introduced the 67-year-old artist tardy recognition. “I maintain numerous particulars that may later go,” mentioned Pompon. “I first do the animal with virtually all its trappings. Then I step by step remove them.”
(Second Ground, Sculpture Terrace)