Musée d’Orsay

Musée d’Orsay, 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 Studio (1854–55), Édouard 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).

(Read Sister Wendy’s Britannica essay on art appreciation.)

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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 Because of changes in railway technology, however, the station soon became outdated and was largely vacant by the 1970s.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. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. With government funds, the building was restored and remodeled in the early 1980s by ACT architecture group. The interior 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.

(Read Glenn Lowry’s Britannica essay on “Art Museums & Their Digital Future.”)

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The decree to transform the Gare d’Orsay into an art museum had come at an opportune time, as works from the national collection needed new accommodations. The National Museum of Modern Art left behind works that did not fit within its revised art program when it moved from the Palais de Tokyo building to the new Pompidou Centre that year; the Jeu de Paume museum, home to France’s Impressionist collection since 1947, had become overcrowded; and the Louvre Museum had resorted to keeping select paintings and sculptures from the late 19th-century Salons, France’s official annual art exhibitions, in storage because of its lack of exhibition space. Many of the Musée d’Orsay’s paintings and sculptures thus came from the inventories of these three institutions. The museum also sought to present a complex and comprehensive view of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and so began its own photography collection and acquired additional works from the national collection to build decorative arts and architecture collections. By the time the Musée d’Orsay opened in 1986, it had amassed an inclusive collection that featured such illustrious avant-garde Realist paintings as A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) by Courbet and Olympia (1863) by Manet, academic paintings such as The Birth of Venus (1879) by William Bouguereau, and works by previously unknown artists.

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Promoting better visitor circulation and security, the museum renovated parts of its interior between 2009 and 2011, including the Impressionist galleries and the café. The Musée d’Orsay grew into one of the most-visited museums in Paris, typically receiving more than three million visitors annually.