Paris, Île-de-France, France
It always seems like it takes years and years for a museum
renovation to complete. The Musee de L’Orangerie in Paris was closed from 2000
to 2006. That seems like ages ago, but my 2003 visit to Paris fell within it. I
spent about twelve days in Paris and saw most of the museums because I bought a
week’s pass for all of them. So when I had the opportunity to include the Musee
de L’Orangerie on my Musee D’Orsay ticket for just a few more Euros, I jumped
at it.
The Orangerie building dates back to the mid-1800s when the
orange trees that were put out in the Tuileries gardens between the Louvre and
the Place de la Concorde needed a place to stay warm in winter. So it’s right
in the center of the museum district, a long nondescript building along the
Seine in the gardens. What it’s particularly known for, however, is two large
oval-shaped rooms covered with long paintings by Claude Monet depicting the
water lilies in his gardens at Giverny, which are his most monumental and also
last works. They apparently fell out of favor until about the 1970s when
interest in impressionism (boredom with more “modern” forms of art, I suppose)
reignited. Anyway, they are probably the greatest impressionists most
monumental works.
But there’s actually more to the Orangerie. The lower floor
contains a significant collection of impressionist to early modern works from a
donated private collection of Jean and Paul Guillaume that’s especially strong
on Renoirs but also has paintings by Cezanne, Utrillo, Picasso, Derain,
Rousseau, and Soutine, among others. It’s a pretty worthwhile stop in Paris
once you’ve hit what I’d call “The Big Three” of Louvre, D’Orsay, Pompidou.
2025-05-22