My Personal Favorite - the Musee D'Orsay

 

The history of the museum, of its building is quite unusual. In the centre of Paris on the banks of the Seine, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, the museum was installed in the former Orsay railway station, built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. So the building itself could be seen as the first "work of art" in the Musee d'Orsay, which displays collections of art from the period 1848 to 1914.

Musée d’Orsay, (French: “Orsay Museum”) national museum of fine and applied arts in Paris that features work mainly from France between 1848 and 1914. Its collection includes painting, sculpture, photography, and decorative arts and boasts such iconic works as Gustave Courbet's "The Artist's Studion, Edouard Manet's  Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863; Luncheon on the Grass,  and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's  Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876; Bal du moulin de la Galette).

The Musée d’Orsay is housed in the former Gare d’Orsay, a railway station and hotel that was designed by Victor Laloux and located on the Left Bank of the Seine River  opposite the Tuileries Gardens. At the time of its completion in 1900, the building featured an ornate Beaux Arts  façade, while its interior boasted metal construction, passenger elevators, and electric rails. Because of changes in railway technology, however, the station soon became outdated and was largely vacant by the 1970s. Talks to transform the building into an art museum began early in the decade and were finalized in 1977 through the initiative of Pres. Valery Giscard d'Estaing.  With government funds, the building was restored and remodeled in the early 1980s by ACT architecture group.  When I served my mission in Paris, in 1971-72 the paints from the Musee D'Orsay were housed in the "jeu de pommes" museum next to the U.S Embassy in the Place de la Concorde.

The interior of the musee D'Orsay was designed by Gaetana Aulenti, who created a complex layout of galleries that occupied three main levels surrounding the atrium beneath the building’s iconic iron-and-glass barrel vault. On the ground floor, formerly the building’s train platforms, extensive stone structures broke up the cavernous space and created a central nave for the sculpture collection and gallery spaces for painting and decorative arts.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Musee-dOrsay

I believe that the impressionistic movement was launched by this controversial painting by Manet called "Dejeuner sur l'herbe."  It is housed in the Musee D'Orsay.

Other noteable works include the self-portrait of Van Gogh, the various stages of the sun rising and setting on the Gare St. Lazare.

Another famous painting in the Musee D'Orsay is this one called Rue Montorgueil, Celebration of the Liberation of France.