Musée d'Orsay

The Musée d'Orsay is the Paris museum of French art from 1848 to 1914, housed in a former railway station on the Left Bank of the Seine in the 7th arrondissement, facing the Tuileries Garden. It holds the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world, and suits anyone who wants Monet, Renoir, Degas or Van Gogh in one visit.

Victor Laloux's Gare d'Orsay

The building began as the Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts station by Victor Laloux built from 1898 to 1900 for the Paris to Orléans line and opened for the Exposition Universelle. Its platforms proved too short for later trains, and it closed to main-line traffic in 1939. After decades of uncertainty it was protected as a historic monument and chosen to become a museum. The ACT-Architecture group of Renaud Bardon, Pierre Colboc and Jean-Paul Philippon carried out the conversion, with interiors by a team led by the Italian architect Gae Aulenti. The museum opened in December 1986.

Art from the decades between the Louvre and the Pompidou

The collection covers the decades between the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou: painting, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture and photography. The vaulted hall of the old station, lined with sculpture by Rodin and Carpeaux, is still the heart of the building, and a 1:100 model of the Opéra district sits nearby.

The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries are the main draw, with major works by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat, as well as Whistler's Mother and Art Nouveau furniture. The giant station clocks on the upper floor can be looked through for a view over the Seine to Montmartre.

Olympia, Whistler's Mother and a Van Gogh self-portrait

Manet's Olympia (1863) and The Luncheon on the Grass (1862–63) are the two pictures that shocked the Paris of their day, and both hang here. Look also for Van Gogh's 1889 self-portrait, Whistler's Mother (1871) and Courbet's L'Origine du monde. The conversion added about 20,000 square metres of floor space over four levels inside the old station.

The museum is one of the busiest in the world: about 3.9 million people visited in 2023, second in France only to the Louvre. A long renovation programme, Orsay Grand Ouvert, partly funded by a €20 million gift from an American patron, is due to finish in 2026, which is why some areas may be closed. Annick Lemoine became the museum's president in March 2026.