A Museum · Paris, France
Musée d'Orsay
The Deep Dive
The Musée d'Orsay occupies the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station and hotel built between 1898 and 1900 by architects Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard, and Victor Laloux for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans, in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Rendered obsolete for modern electric trains by the 1930s, the station narrowly escaped demolition; it was listed as a historic monument in 1978 after a preservation campaign, partly spurred by public outcry over the earlier demolition of Les Halles. Italian architect Gae Aulenti converted the vast train hall into museum galleries, and the Musée d'Orsay opened to the public on 9 December 1986 under President François Mitterrand, conceived to bridge the collections of the Louvre (ending around 1848) and what became the Centre Pompidou (beginning around 1914). It today holds the world's largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces, displayed beneath the station's great glass barrel-vaulted roof and monumental station clock. The museum is jointly administered with the Musée de l'Orangerie as a single public body (EPMO, Établissement public des musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie) and consistently ranks among the most-visited art museums on earth.
Highlights
- ∞Housed in the former Gare d'Orsay railway station (1900), designed chiefly by Victor Laloux
- ∞Interior conversion into museum galleries by architect Gae Aulenti (1980–86)
- ∞Holds the world's largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art
- ∞Preserves the station's monumental clock and glass barrel-vaulted nave
- ∞Chronologically bridges the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou (art from 1848–1914)
- ∞Rodin sculpture galleries, including studies related to The Gates of Hell
- ∞Former station hotel's gilded ballroom preserved as a gallery space
- ∞Jointly run with the Musée de l'Orangerie under the EPMO public establishment
Notable works
- Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Édouard Manet (1862–63)
- Olympia, Édouard Manet (1863)
- Bal du moulin de la Galette, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1876)
- The Origin of the World, Gustave Courbet (1866)
- Starry Night Over the Rhône, Vincent van Gogh (1888)
- Whistler's Mother (Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1), James McNeill Whistler (1871)
- The Gates of Hell, Auguste Rodin (1880–1917)
More museums
Own the masterpiece the museum guards. Every work held by Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France that we recreate is finished by hand on archival canvas, numbered as a strictly limited Heirloom edition and built to be inherited — from ₹50,000, delivered across India with white-glove care.