Museum Mania

Thursday was a busy day filled with amazing museums.  The Louvre, L'Orangerie, and the Orsay were all on the itinerary, and we were not left disappointed!  We began at the Louvre where we saw artwork from ancient times through the Renaissance.  The most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was crowded with people, but we were still able to get a great look.  We also saw the Venus de Milo, which was very crowded as well.  These were both impressive; however, we were more amazed with the size of the Louvre and the amount of amazing artwork on display.  The Louvre makes a "U" shape and is probably 5-6 city blocks long.  It was originally a palace, so the rooms, ceilings, and walls are almost all works of art themselves.  I found myself overwhelmed and unsure of where to look when entering several of the massive rooms.  We did a lot of walking and spent about three hours looking around.  We felt that we saw a good portion of the museum, but if you really wanted to see everything, it would take you weeks or months!

We were pretty exhausted after the Louvre, so we sat down in the courtyard (near the massive glass pyramid) and had some lunch.  Next, we walked through a beautiful park toward L'Orangerie, which features Monet's waterlilies.  The waterlily paintings were much larger than I had expected.  They were placed in huge oval rooms and each one stretched across the length and height of the wall.  Each room had four paintings, so you were surrounded by the beautiful artwork.  It was truly serene!

We headed downstairs to see more artwork, and we were both drawn to a Russian artist that I had never heard of, Chaim Soutine.  The subjects of his work spanned slabs of meat to humans to flowers, but the emotion and movement of the pieces was incredible.

From L'Orangerie, we headed to the Orsay museum, which features many of the most famous artists.  The building was an old train station that was saved in the 1970's in order to house some of the paintings and sculptures that there wasn't room for at the other museums.  We covered three floors of artwork by Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet, Degas, and many others.  It was an exhausting day, but it was incredible to see so much artwork by some of the most famous artists in history.