M’O Better Museum

“Some people have no idea what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.”
George Carlin

Sites/Topics covered in this post:

Musee d’ Orsay
Sunday Walk in Paris

Go-Date: Day 131, Saturday, June 2

Lesson Learned: We’ve been here in Paris for two weeks, and we still have so much more we need to see.

Please Sir, May I Have Some M’O

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African velt on the steps of the M'O

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Keeping watch of the doorway

The Musée d’Orsay (the d’Orsay Museum) is a museum on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d’Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. When you first walk in the door, you can still visualize that this was a train station, but wow, such a station it must have been. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography.

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Daumier - artist of lawyers

It houses the largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Monet, 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. Musée d’Orsay had 2.24 million visitors in 1994 which has swollen to 3.28 million visitors in 2018 (1.04 million visitors or an increase of 30%).

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City streets of Paris model

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Breezing through the gallery

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Fierce battle in front of demons

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Surrounded by art, looking at their phone

In Paris, the museums are free to enter on the first Sunday of the month. We decided to take advantage of this and save 40 Euros ($45.34). We soon found out, so did 10,000 other people. Well, this wasn’t really unexpected, and the lines were long, very long, but they moved quickly. In fact, we were inside of the museum with 15 minutes or arrival. Once inside, it was busy, but less so than the Louvre was when we visited it on a Wednesday.

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Paris crowds yesterday as today

Not only were the tourists out in force, so were the hustlers. A big hustle in Paris is to send pretty young ladies with petitions to solicit people to sign. I’m guessing that the paper actually says the signer agrees to give the girl some money. They can get quite aggressive trying to get you to pay up. The guards and museum staff, as well as Parisians standing in line berate the girls and implore the tourists not to fall for this ploy. I was still amazed at how many people forked out money to give these girls. I even saw the girls scold the tourists for the size of the donation and watched the suckers reach into their pockets and fork out more. Not me. I’m a cheap bastard.

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Moving along through the galleries

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Cafe' looks like a painting

Inside the old train station was a luxury hotel with a grand reception room. The station was abandoned, and in 1977 the French government undertook the building transformation from derelict railway terminal into a state-of-the art museum. The suggestion to turn the station into a museum came from the Directorate of the Museum of France. The idea was to build a museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Centre. The plan was accepted by Georges Pompidou (the President of France) and a study was commissioned in 1974. In 1978, a competition was organized to design the new museum. Nine years after proposal of the museum, it opened as the Muse’e d’Orsay. The artwork on display is from the succession of the 2^nd Republic of France to the beginning of World War I.