Musée de l'Orangerie

Museum · Tuileries / Concorde (1st)Paris,France

Two oval Paris rooms holding eight paintings of Monet's lily pond, set on curved walls to his own design so they can never leave.

Musée de l'Orangerie is two oval rooms holding eight paintings of one lily pond. The first is only a few paces inside the door: the wall curves right around you, so the water has no corner and no far edge. Its four paintings run from morning through clouds and green reflections to a setting sun. The second room is darker, with willow branches over green, blue and violet water, and it ends in a painting seventeen metres long. Nothing else hangs in either room. The building was a heated winter shed for orange trees before Monet gave it the last work of his life. The day after the First World War ended he offered the state two large panels of his lily pond, a pond he had made himself in his garden at Giverny. The offer grew, and he signed the deed of gift in 1922. He designed the setting with the architect Camille Lefèvre: bare walls, no frames, daylight from the roof. He was still reworking the canvases when he died in 1926, and the rooms opened the next spring without him. A second collection of early twentieth-century painting hangs downstairs, in galleries dug under the Tuileries garden.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The low building at the Concorde end of the Tuileries — the near-identical one at the far corner is the Jeu de Paume, a different museum, so check which side you are on.
Come in the first hour or the last — the ovals are small rooms and tour groups fill them from late morning, so midday is guides talking rather than quiet water.
Quiet rooms, pencils allowed — the museum asks for silence in front of the water lilies and lets you draw in pencil, but no flash, no tripod and no stand of any kind.
Look for the stonework of a lost city wall — digging the lower galleries struck a wall begun in 1566, and a stretch of it was kept on show inside the museum.
Frame one detail instead of the whole room — the panels curve away from you, so a wide shot flattens them into a pale band and loses the thick brushwork you can only see close up.

Things to do

1
Watch the colours change when a cloud passes over the glass roof
Take a seat in the first oval room and keep your eyes on one stretch of water. When a cloud passes over the glass roof, the greens darken and the pinks turn grey, then the whole surface brightens again. No lamp is aimed at these panels, so on a flat grey day the change never comes.
2
Walk the willow painting, then find its joins
In the second oval room, start at one end of the long willow painting and walk slowly along it, two paces out from the wall. The colour where you finish is nothing like the colour where you began, and only walking shows you that. Then stand close and look along the surface at a shallow angle: these paintings are built from two, three or four separate canvases set edge to edge, and the vertical joins appear. Monet matched the colour across them so precisely that the water reads as one unbroken surface.
3
Go downstairs to the collection most visitors miss
The galleries dug under the garden hold the paintings collected by the dealer Paul Guillaume and the industrialist Jean Walter. There are rooms of Renoir, landscapes by Chaim Soutine that look almost buckled, Modigliani's long faces and Henri Rousseau's invented jungles. Many visitors leave after the oval rooms and never go down there.