A day in Orsay

On a recent trip to Paris, I (re)visited the beautiful Orsay museum, which I hadn’t been to since before COVID.

Set in a former train station, the space itself is striking enough to warrant a visit: the museum opens onto a large gallery of statues under the huge glass ceiling, with smaller galleries and enfilades of rooms on the sides of the building.

There were a few temporary exhibitions when I visited but I ran out of time and could only see one of them- more on this later. Mostly I wandered from room to room, absorbing all the works and looking out for a few favourites.

The museum focuses on the 2nd half of the 19th century and the start of the 20th- roughly up to the First World War- and its permanent collection includes works by a lot of very well known and popular painters: all the Impressionists are here but the collection extends from mid 19th century realism to post-impressionist works and a beautiful collection of Art Nouveau furniture. It also has small sections on graphic art from the turn of the century, shadow theatres and the Black Cat cabaret.

My visit had a semi-poetic pretext: when in Orsay, I always try to see Fantin-Latour’s “Coin de table” which features two of the most important names in French poetry, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. There was also a temporary exhibition of Marlene Dumas paintings celebrating another master of French poetry, Charles Baudelaire, so I was happy to see my three favourite poets all under one roof (Baudelaire can also be seen alongside painters such as Whistler and Manet in Fantin-Latour’s “Hommage à Delacroix” on the second floor of the museum).

But the big hitters of the late 19th century/early 20th century painting scene are the big draw to the museum. Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne… they are all here (and many more!). And not just any works either: a selection of Degas’s dancers share wall space with a number of Renoir’s beautiful girls, Cezanne’s '“Sainte Victoire” and Van Gogh’s “Starry Nights” invite us to marvellous journeys. Manet is represented both by the “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” and the striking “Olympia”, and if that is not enough nakedness you can wander over to Courbet’s “Origin of the world”. Monet is very well represented too, from his lonely magpie in a winter landscape, to the obligatory “Nymphéas” and a weeping willow that really shows how he opened the door to abstraction.

The one disappointment was the absence of one of my favourite works of that era: Caillebotte’s “Woodshavers”, who are currently hard at work in Switzerland. Never mind, this simply gives me an excuse to visit again next year!

The Marlene Dumas temporary exhibition runs until 30th January 2022.

The amazing glass ceiling of the former train station