No photography is permitted in the Musée d’Orsay, a beautiful space along the Seine created from a train station. The museum rooms in which the Impressionists are usually displayed were under renovation; the paintings were instead crammed into a hallway on the first level. Crowds of people made it difficult to ponder individual paintings, though we’d seen some at special exhibits in the United States. The paintings are the best of the best.

The Musée de l’Orangerie was converted from the Tuileries’ greenhouse to a modern museum in 1927, with eight large canvases of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (Nymphéas) as the principal installation, as per Monet’s wish. A major renovation was completed in 2006, giving an even more splendid space with diffuse overhead lighting for Monet’s paintings. The lower level includes permanent and temporary exhibits of Impressionist and modern art. We saw exhibit of works by Paul Klee, from the Ernst Beyeler collection (no photography permitted) as well as the permanent collection.

Michael Hoog, writing in the catalog for the museum notes, clearly expresses the sense of the Nymphéas in this museum:

“In their final state, the Nymphéas of the Orangerie comprise eight compositions divided between two rooms. The first impression—which no photograph can communicate—is one of awe and disorientation. Whether the visitor arrives from the rooms on the first floor … or from the outside, leaving behind one of the most composed cityscapes in the world, the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, and the Seine, he steps into an entirely different realm.

“There is an initial feeling of astonishment: it is not like being in a museum room in which a series of paintings has been displayed, or in an architecture which has been given mural decoration. One is plunged in a colored environment, situated at eye-level, scarcely interrupted by two passageways, and occupying the entire visual field of an adult spectator looking straight ahead, neither raising nor lowering his gaze.”

from Musée de l’Orangerie, The Nymphéas of Claude Monet, by Michael Hoog (translated by Jean-Marie Clarke), Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris 2006

Below are photos from l’Orangerie, of some of Monet’s masterpieces, and also one of a woman painting a copy of a Renoir painting.