Musee D'Orsay

Content The Musee d'Orsay, housed in the old Gare d'Orsay railway station & hotel building which was saved from destruction in 1970 by a combination of timely publicity, ideality of location (opposite the Musee du Louvre), & architectural innovation, contains one of the most magnificent & extensive collections of nineteenth- & early twentieth-century art in the world. The quality & variety of works in the Musee d'Orsay--limited to the years between 1848 & 1914--is quite unique. Though the most well-known & probably best-loved painting style of the nineteenth century is Impressionism, in fact a great diversity of art can be attributed to this era. The distinctive tone of the museum's remarkable collection comes, in part, from this medley of works & styles, culled from the galleries & storage rooms of various other French museums. The Musee d'Orsay combines a thoughtful text that traces the roots of the collection through the context of the contemporary society & creative activity happening at that time with 300 colorplates of many of the museum's greatest masterpieces: Academic works by Ingres, Couture, Bouguereau, & Delacroix; Impressionist & Post-Impressionist favorites by Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Van Gogh, Seurat, Signac; Realist, Nabis, Symbolist & Fauvist works by Millet, Denis, Gauguin, Redon, & Matisse; sculpture by Degas, Rodin, & Camille Claudel. Here are also works in other media, not in the national collections but acquired specifically to complete the museum's multi-disciplinary view of the arts during these years--furniture, objets d'art, architecture, photography, for example--everything on display in these areas has been acquired since the museum's formation. Jewelry & glassware by Art Nouveau artist Rene Lalique, photographic prints by Nadar, Lewis Carroll & Atget, & the architecture of the ninteenth century, evoked by the restoration of various elements of the former railway station itself, are but a few of the museum's other myriad attractions.Bonfante-Warren, Alexandra is the author of 'Musee D'Orsay' with ISBN 9780883635025 and ISBN 088363502X.