Musée d'Orsay

Museum · Saint-Germain (7th)Paris,France

The world's richest collection of Impressionist painting, hung inside a Paris railway station of 1900 that still reads as a platform hall.

The Musée d'Orsay holds the world's richest gathering of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting — Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin — inside a former railway station. You enter beneath an iron-and-glass ceiling that still feels like a platform hall, then climb to the upper floor where the paintings hang close and the light turns soft. Crowds cluster at Van Gogh's swirling self-portrait; quieter rooms hold Degas's dancers caught mid-stretch. On the top level an enormous transparent clock face frames Montmartre and the white domes of Sacré-Cœur. The building was a railway station and it has never stopped looking like one. Its platforms were too short for modern trains within a few decades, and by the 1970s the hall stood under threat of demolition; instead France filled it with the art its own century had first refused. Walk the sculpture-lined aisle on the ground floor and you end at a golden clock still marking the hour, exactly as it did for departures.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Go straight up to level five, then work down — the Impressionists are at the top, the sculpture terraces on level two, and the years before 1870 on the ground floor.
The top floor is busiest in the middle hours — the Impressionist galleries thicken with crowds around midday and thin out right at opening and in the last hour before closing.
Find the ballroom nobody queues for — a gilded former-hotel salon survives on the middle level, all mirrors and chandeliers, usually near-empty while the crowds press upstairs.
Closed on Mondays, late on Thursdays — Thursday is the only day the galleries stay open into the evening; every other opening day ends in the late afternoon.

Things to do

1
Look through the great glass clock
Climb to the top floor and stand behind the huge translucent dial. The Roman numerals hang reversed in the air and the city shows through the glass beyond them. There is a second glazed clock on the same floor, over much the same rooftops, with a fraction of the queue.
2
Walk the sculpture aisle to the far end
Start at one end of the ground-floor aisle and walk its whole length. The hall is a hundred and thirty-eight metres long and thirty-two high, built to cover the platforms of a terminus, and the white marble now stands in that space. Turn round at the end: from there the ranks of figures line up under the iron vault in one shot.
3
Step close to Van Gogh, then back away
Find Van Gogh's self-portrait and lean in until you see the paint itself: swirling blue-green strokes laid on thick as rope. Then step back until the marks dissolve into a face. Try the same with Degas's dancers nearby, where movement is built from smudged, breathing pastel.
4
See the rebellion in order
Start downstairs in the Salon rooms, in front of Cabanel's Birth of Venus: a smooth mythological nude that the Salon of 1863 applauded and Napoleon III bought for himself. Then climb to the top floor and stand in front of Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette, a Sunday dance built out of blotches of shifting light. The same decade, judged by opposite rules.