Musée de l'Orangerie

Two white oval rooms, lit from above by daylight, hold eight of Claude Monet's Water Lilies panels in an unbroken loop of water, sky and reflection. Each panel is two metres high, and together they run for about 91 metres along the curved walls, so that the viewer stands inside the pond rather than in front of it. Seen from above, the two rooms trace the sign of infinity, and the layout follows the east–west axis of the city, the same line that runs from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe.

The building itself began as a greenhouse. Napoleon III had it put up in 1852 at the western end of the Tuileries Garden to shelter the garden's citrus trees through winter; the architect Firmin Bourgeois glazed the side facing the Seine and left the northern side nearly blind against the wind, while Louis Visconti designed the end entrances. After the fall of the Second Empire the state used the hall for concerts, exhibitions and even dog shows, until in 1922 Georges Clemenceau steered Monet's great gift to the nation here. The painter worked with the architect Camille Lefèvre on the rooms and insisted on natural light. The museum opened on 17 May 1927, a few months after Monet's death.

Below the Water Lilies is a second treasure: the collection assembled by the dealer Paul Guillaume and later by the industrialist Jean Walter, acquired by the state in 1959 and 1963. It brings together Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Henri Rousseau, Sisley, Utrillo and a strong group of works by Chaïm Soutine. A long renovation by Olivier Brochet, completed in 2006, removed a later upper floor so that daylight once more falls directly on Monet's panels, and moved the Walter–Guillaume rooms underground; the works uncovered a stretch of the sixteenth-century city wall that once guarded the Tuileries Palace.

Paris hardly needs an introduction: the French capital grew along the Seine, and the Tuileries Garden, laid out for a royal palace that burned in 1871, links the Louvre with the Place de la Concorde in one continuous line of avenues and lawns.

Getting there

The museum stands in central Paris, at the corner of the Tuileries Garden beside the Place de la Concorde; Concorde metro station is next to it. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 15 km away; Paris-Charles de Gaulle lies further to the north-east.