Musée d'Orsay

If you enjoy visiting art museums, Paris really is the place to go to. In the last 20 years or so, Paris museums re-organised their collections and the musée d'Orsay became the receptacle for art dated between 1848 and 1914. ~The Gare d'Orsay~ ****************** The building that houses the collection used to be a train station and hotel, which due to its proximity to the Louvre needed to be built sympathetically. Its inauguration in 1900 revealed a very fine building where the stone façade hid the metal structure inside. At the time, the painter Edouard Detaille wrote ""The station is superb and looks like a Palais des ...

The Musee d'Orsay used to be the Gare d'Orsay, it has been converted from an old railway station into an art gallery. The building itself is on Rue Bellechasse and from the outside looks like an old railway station, of course many of the windows are now covered and the entrances closed. Inside is a different story as a mix of ideas and designs have transformed the interior into an interesting place to display art. You can expect to queue for a good half hour to get in but it is well worth it. If you are aged 18-25 it costs 33 francs and otherwise it will cost you 45 francs, £4.50, which makes it one of the more expensive attractions on offer. What do you ...

Everybody knows about the Louvre and the Pompidou centre, but there is another major art gallery in Paris that just doen't seem to get the attention it deserves - the Musee d'Orsay. This museum was built at the end of the 19th century (by Victor Laloux), as a very high-class train station, its services fell into decline in the mid 20th century as the services at Gare du Nord and Austerlitz improved. In 1973 Georges Pompidou decided that the Gare d'Orsay should have a rather major face lift - and so it became an art gallery. I know the Louvre has the Mona Lisa, but you can't even get close to it because of the crowds of tourists. This ...