Paris: May 19: Musee d'Orsay

Our main goal this day was to visit the Musee d'Orsay, our last of Paris's three major national museums. We chose this day to visit it because it's open late on Thursdays. Thus, if we liked it and wanted to spend a long time there, we wouldn't have to hurry.

I took some pictures. Di Yin took similarly few. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #296 in the album). If you're in slide-show mode and see a picture captioned "the beginning of a new week" with strange blue things hanging from a shop awning, you've cycled back to the beginning of this album and are back at an earlier day on the trip. If you hit pictures of the bread festival, you've definitely cycled around. I've already linked to those pictures.

After breakfast at home (I dashed out first to buy my morning pastry to get back in my routine), we headed over to the Richard-Lenoir market again to go shopping. (We visited it four days earlier.)

We lugged our market supplies home and used some of them to make lunch.

After lunch, we walked a bit to catch a bus to take us to the museum. We decided we'd ridden enough metros so, as the bus was convenient, we might as well take it.

The Musee d'Orsay covers art from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, thus continuing where the Louvre ends in the mid eighteenth century and ending before the Pompidou begins a third of the way through the twentieth century. I looked forward to liking the Orsay more than the other two museums because this is my favorite time period for art.

The Musee d'Orsay is a grand space: an entirely open former train station complete with an opulent, gorgeous clock. I wish I could've taken a picture but photography was prohibited inside.

The museum has all the impressionists I expected: Renoir, Pissarro, Degas (he liked his woman and dancers; also, early Degas is not my thing), Monet (both early and late; early is not as good), Manet, Sisley, Cezanne, Bonnard, Matisse (during his pointillism days), Van Gogh, and Gauguin. I learned about the rise in pastels, which I didn't realize coincided with impressionism and post-impressionism. I noticed that Henri-Edmond Cross, who I hadn't heard of, was as effective a pointillist as Seurat. I also hadn't heard of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, but he deserves to be in the list above. There were certainly artists who didn't inspire me (different styles than the styles I enjoy, but from the time period the museums covers) and whose names I didn't write down. (Except one: I wrote down the name Adolphe William Bouguereau not because I like him but because he makes such weird, large religious paintings (light allegories).)

I realized I went into the museum expecting only paintings, but the museum also has things I didn't expect such as a lot of sculpture, early examples of photography, furniture, vases, plates, and other decorative arts from that time (e.g., pre-raphael, art nouveau).

The museum has an exhibit on Paris's Opera House, with a cool twenty-foot by twenty-foot model of the opera house quarter that was topped with glass so one could walk across. There's also a large model of the Opera House itself (also twenty feet long). Plus, there are full-scale reliefs from its facade as well as sculptures from the building. Di Yin and I had originally planned to visit the Opera House at some point during our stint in Paris but after seeing this exhibit we didn't feel the need to any longer--it was that effective at conveying the sights.

Overall, it is a fairly good museum. We spent about four hours in the museum in total. (I'm not counting the time we left the museum for an aperitif and break.) Like the Orangerie, the building's architecture provides good natural light. There is almost no painting-level commentary, but the room commentary is good (though sometimes in overblown language) and in English, French, and Spanish.

After the museum, Di Yin insisted on walking home, so walk home we did, crossing the Seine, passing through the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, passing by the Louvre, and heading through the Palais Royale and its gardens. Seventy minutes later we were home. Though our feet ached a bit, it was such a picturesque walk that we didn't complain much.

Then we immediately found somewhere to eat: La Fresque.