See the Glorious Architecture and Art of the Musée d'Orsay

After the conciergerie and before heading over to the Tuileries, I decided to walk on down and visit the Orsay Gallery, which has been on my wish list of things to see for quite some time. It was a gorgeous day for a stroll and I always love the buildings walking along here. If you just like to walk and look at architecture, this is such a beautiful city to do it in. I wandered down to the Orsay. I had a timed entry ticket to get in. This gorgeous museum was converted from a major railway station that had been built in the 1898-1900 time frame. It was originally the terminus in Paris for some of the large southern train lines coming in. And then as it aged out, it sort of became a local train line and during World War II it was even a mailing center. And it was not converted into a museum, as it is now, until 1986. But if you love Impressionist art, this is your stop. Aside from being a beautiful building to just look at, there are so many wonderful pieces in this gallery. The Orsay actually holds the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world. It contains works by all the masters, Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, all dating from 1848 to 1914. It is also one of the largest art museums in all of Europe. So at any one time, you will find around 3,000 pieces on display. So plan to spend a whole day wandering here. I did have to look at this one and do the Cameron from Paris Bueller's Day Off, where you zoom in until you just realize it's blobs of paint, because it is, and you zoom out and you realize it's an incredible painting. But Monet was really the reason that I came to this particular gallery. I love his paintings, I have some of them in our house, the copies obviously, but this is sort of my main focus. And we see so much of Monet's garden that people probably don't realize he did some really cool winter portraits, and I was really fascinated by these in particular, and also one that I did not know existed, that is a portrait of Madame Monet, which I had never seen, but I kind of fell in love with her couch, I love that couch. I also really love this little portrait of a shepherdess in a little farmyard scene that Another one of the masters I really came here to see was Renoir, and especially this particular painting. It was really just terrific to get a chance to see these up close and in person. If you have a day to spend walking through this, this is definitely, probably a full day museum to wander through, there is a lot to see. There are actually three levels to this museum, I only visited the lower two, I did not go up to the top level, so I missed Van Gogh, whether he's on the third level or not, I'm not sure that I missed it, and I just kind of enjoyed some of these giant prints in the lower levels, and especially of course the Monet and Renoir. I hope you enjoyed coming on this little bit of a trip to part of the Orsay Gallery with me. If you'd like to see more of our travels and travel tips, don't forget to subscribe.