Musée d'Orsay — museum
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Musée d'Orsay

  • 1 min read
  • 48.860° N 2.327° E

Interesting facts

  • Before it became a museum, the empty station served as the main set for Orson Welles's 1962 film The Trial.
  • When the station opened in 1900, the painter Édouard Detaille remarked that it looked like a palace of fine arts, a remark that proved prophetic.
  • The museum holds 86 paintings by Monet, 81 by Renoir and 56 by Cézanne, as well as more than a hundred works by Odilon Redon.
  • Installing about 2,000 paintings and 600 sculptures for the opening took six months.
  • The conversion created some 20,000 square metres of new floor space on four levels inside the old station shell.
  • The great clock in the main hall, a survivor of the station, was designed by the building's architect Victor Laloux.
  • The 1:100 scale model of the Paris Opera and its district, set beneath a glass floor, was made by the stage designer Richard Peduzzi.
  • Much of the collection came from the Louvre, the Musée du Luxembourg and the Jeu de Paume, which had housed the national Impressionist holdings.
  • In 2016 the Americans Marlene and Spencer Hays pledged their collection of about 600 works to the museum.
  • With about 3.9 million visitors in 2023, it is the second most visited art museum in France after the Louvre.

Why it is worth it

The Musée d'Orsay lives in a railway station, and the building is half the experience. The Gare d'Orsay was built on the Left Bank for the Paris–Orléans railway in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, designed by Victor Laloux with Lucien Magne and Émile Bénard. The station later fell out of main-line use and survived by luck: a hotel was planned on the site in the early 1970s before the state listed it and decided to fill it with the art of 1848 to 1914. The architects of ACT Architecture converted it, Gae Aulenti designed the interior, and President Mitterrand opened the museum in December 1986.

Walk in and the barrel-vaulted nave, with sculpture set out where the tracks once ran, sets the scale. The collection is the largest of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in the world. Manet's Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass; Courbet's A Burial at Ornans and The Artist's Studio; dozens of Monets, including Rouen Cathedral and The Magpie; Degas, Renoir, Cézanne's Card Players, Gauguin, Seurat, and a run of Van Gogh from Arles and Auvers, among them the Bedroom in Arles and the Church at Auvers. Whistler's portrait of his mother is here too.

The museum covers more than painting: sculpture, furniture and decorative arts, photography, and an architecture section with a large scale model of the Paris Opera and its quarter set under a glass floor. Outside, six bronze allegories of the continents, made for a Paris Exposition Universelle, line the square. A long refit programme called Orsay Grand Ouvert is reorganising galleries and adding space in stages, so rooms can move between visits.

Getting there

The museum is on the Left Bank in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, facing the Tuileries across the Seine. RER C stops at Musée d'Orsay station directly below, and metro line 12 at Solférino is a short walk. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 15 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Paris 29The Most Beautiful Places in Île-de-France 36The Most Beautiful Places in France 179The Most Remarkable Museums in Île-de-France 5The Most Remarkable Museums in France 8The Most Beautiful Buildings in Île-de-France 11The Most Remarkable Modern Museums 14The Most Beautiful Buildings in France 18The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings 50The Most Remarkable Museums 93The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built from 1898 to 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.

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