Daniel and I aren’t huge art museum people. When people ask us what we’re going to do in Europe, or have suggestions about where to go, they often assume we’re headed to museums…and we’re usually not. But today we made an exception, for the exceptional Musee d’Orsay. This used to be a train station, and provides an incredibly elegant setting for one of the best collections of Impressionist art anywhere. Our kind of art, our kind of museum.
Here is the gorgeous space, with its halls of sculptures lining the center:
Our first stop was the Van Gogh temporary exhibit. We were completely baffled, and still are, because the exhibit was the same one we’d seen at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam – Van Gogh had done something like 74 paintings in 70 days in the last couple of months of his life, and although this was a smaller collection, it was very similar. At least one of the paintings, which you might remember was a favorite of ours, literally seems to be the same one.
How do they have the same paintings? We must have entered a wormhole. On further research, it seems that our timing is just unbelievably perfect. We saw these in Amsterdam on Sept 1st, then that exhibit closed two days later on Sept 3rd, it moved to Paris, and we saw it literally on the opening day here! It’s great to see these wonderful works twice. Also, great to know that we’re not going crazy.
Here’s another beautiful piece, a sketchbook that shows Van Gogh’s effortless genius.
To be perfectly honest, there were a lot of permanent exhibitions we didn’t get to at all. We did see sculptures by Rodin (very cool), and paintings by Monet, Manet, Gaugin, Renoir, Cezanne, Seurat, and a new-to-me female artist named Berthe Morisot, to my knowledge the only woman invited to the party.
And more new-to-us impressionism like this:
The museum was very crowded; it’s pretty small, and there were many tour groups coming through, in addition to just huge numbers of visitors overall. We were relieved to finish our art education and step outside. We got some to-go window crepes and took them across the Seine to Tuileries Gardens. The crepes were great (Stef’s first in France) and the Gardens were this!
After the crush of people, this park was like being able to breathe again. Well, kind of literally in Stef’s case, since she’s on her last day of wearing a mask. We walked down to the Louvre end of the Gardens, but it was blocked off for some reason. We turned around and headed to the Place de la Concorde on the other end, but found that the obelisk was sticking out of a massive infrastructure set up for the Rugby World Cup. So we didn’t get a great look at that, but it’s great to see the space very much in use.
On we went to the Église de la Madeleine. This is a completely unique church, totally unlike any we’d seen, as it was constructed in the neoclassical Napoleonic era (1842) and celebrates like Napoleon likes to party with columns, columns, columns.
We popped into a little passage couvert next door:
…Then we headed in the direction of Boulevard Haussmann. Haussmann had famously re-written the Paris map in Napoleon’s day; this guy bulldozed the skinny medieval streets and built wide boulevards with strategically placed monuments at the end of every thoroughfare. This was Stef’s first look at his work, and it certainly accommodates a lot of cars.
We were headed to Haussmann Galeries Lafayette to find some rooftop action, but found Printemps Haussmann in the meantime. This was a fancy department store of the kind you don’t find so much of in the U.S. anymore, and we took one escalator after another until we reached the restaurants near the top. Stef had been jonesing for a rooftop experience since arriving in Europe, and although she’d identified many candidates, we hadn’t made it to one yet. Paris knows how to put on a rooftop restaurant:
We did get to Galeries Lafayette, and found more fancy department stores. More or less at random, we went into one that appeared to sell home goods, but was actually like an elaborate food hall. Counter after counter of the most impressive patisserie, and even this, which is something like the world’s fanciest Panda Express.
We were kind of overwhelmed, and they seemed to be doing fine without our euros, so we left without offering Galeries Lafayette any financial support.
We took a quick break in our apartment, then wandered out to find dinner. Daniel had found a Roman-era theater 10 minutes from our apartment! We walked up there, and let me tell you, this is a cool place for a kid to practice football.
There is literally nowhere better to have dinner than to take your takeout to the quays of the River Seine, so as we’ve done for many nights, we dined riverside. There was a couple swing dancing, and they danced for the whole 30+ minutes it took us to eat our sandwiches. Toward the end of our stay, some folks from the Bateaux Mouches tourist boats passing by on the river spotted our dancers and started applauding, and soon about 100 people gave them an ovation.
It was a lovely and whimsical end to the day, and we have really had a terrific day here in Paris. We’ll remember it for years to come.
I loved “fanciest Panda Express”. You can probably see one of the fanciest McDonalds as well. What an adventure…sorry I am several days behind on reading them.