The Orsay Museum or a railroad station?
The history of the museum and its building are unusual. Located in the heart of Paris, along the Seine, facing the Tuileries Gardens, the museum is housed in the former Rail Road Orsay station. It was built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. Thus the building is, in a way, the first "artwork" of the Musée d'Orsay's collections. You will not fail to be dazzled by the beauty of the place: a station with the appearance of a palace inaugurated for the Paris world exhibition of 1900.
The Orsay Museum presents the art between 1848 and 1914.
Note: the Musée de l'Orangerie (on the other bank of the Seine river) is attached since 2010 to the Musée d'Orsay. An important collection of the Impressionists.
The Orsay Museum collections
The Orsay Museum is a multidisciplinary national museum that exhibits 6 collections:
- Paintings, sculptures,
- Decorative arts,
- Photography,
- Graphic arts,
- and Architecture.
Opening of the Orsay Museum on 9 December 1986
It opened to the public on 9 December 1986. It is made up of national collections mainly from three institutions:
- the Louvre Museum for the works of artists born from 1820 onwards, or emerging in the art world with the Second Republic (February 1848);
- the Musée du Jeu de Paume, dedicated to Impressionism since 1947;
- finally, the National Museum of Modern Art which, when it moved to the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1976, only kept works by artists born after 1870.
At the end of 2011, the museum reopened all of its spaces, completely renovated, and with new rooms: 400 additional square meters for the upstream pavilion, post-impressionist artists in the heart of the museum, the restructuring of the impressionist gallery, a new temporary exhibition space, not to mention the new "aquatic" decoration of the café des hauteurs entrusted to two Brazilian designers, the Campana Brothers
Orsay Museum, not only paintings!
The painting collection of the museum is very important and contains works of the Impressionists. You can see there numerous paintings of Cézanne, Courbet, Caillebotte, Daubigny, Daumier, Degas, Fantin-Latour, Gauguin, Ingres, Manet, Monet, Millet, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir, Rousseau, dit le Douanier, Seurat, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Vlaminck, etc.
In addition to the unique collection of paintings, the Musée d'Orsay presents 5 other exceptional collections: sculpture, decorative arts, photography, graphic arts, and architecture.
Recently acquired works include Manet, Gauguin, Caillebotte, Claudel, Moreau, and dozens of others.
Special mention to the Marlene and Spencer Hays donation of approximately 600 works from the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century to the Musée d'Orsay. This donation is exceptional in its size and coherence. It is the largest that French museums have received from a foreign donor since 1945. It will be carried out in several stages, the first of which involves 187 works.
The Orsay Museum in figures
Decorative arts
Since 1977, a collection of decorative art objects from the period 1848-1914 has been assembled for the Musée d'Orsay. It includes a number of masterpieces that had long been overlooked or misunderstood and also presents pieces that attest to the exceptional quality of the luxury industries of this period. The museography division of the objets d'art collections distinguishes, by their location, between those produced during the Second Empire (1852-1870) and the first two decades of the Third Republic (1870-1940) and those corresponding to the Art Nouveau style (from 1890).
Painting
The Musée d'Orsay exhibits and preserves the largest collection of Impressionist (more than 480 paintings) and Post-Impressionist (more than 600 Cloisonnist, Neo-Impressionist, Symbolist, and Nabis paintings) paintings in the world, as well as remarkable groups of paintings from the Barbizon School, realists, naturalists, orientalists, and academics, including paintings from foreign schools.
Sculpture
The sculpture collection includes 1,598 works, in addition to 676 deposits in France and abroad.
Photography
The Musée d'Orsay's photography collection, which was built up entirely from scratch from the late 1970s onwards, numbered 45,003 works at the end of 2020. When the project to transform the former Orsay station into a museum of the 19th century was taken, no fine arts museum in France had yet a section devoted to photography.
The works of many photographers are thus preserved in the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, including those of Hippolyte Bayard, Édouard Baldus, Christian Bérard, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Céline Laguarde, Félix Nadar, Nicéphore Niépce and Constant Alexandre Famin.
How can I consult the works of the Musée d'Orsay on the Internet?
Click on "Catalogue du Musée d'Orsay" to consult the catalog and "History of the works" of the Musée d'Orsay. You can search by work, artist, discipline, place represented, the person represented, or place of conservation.
Of course, it is better to visit the Musée d'Orsay. Since March 2015, photography of the works exhibited in the museum is allowed, but taking pictures with a flash or a tripod is not allowed.
Orsay museum had 3.65 million visitors in 2019. Reservation in advance is strongly recommended by clicking on the Musée d'Orsay ticket office
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