Paris Museums - The Louvre & Musee d'Orsay

Monday, we visited The Louvre-- when our camera decided to power down.  We were pretty unhappy about that but we went inside (museum passes are great and let us skip the very long lines of those buying their tickets that day) and we saw The Mona Lisa, among other wonderful Italian Renaissance and French Romanticism artworks.  We were there for hours!

Going to the Louvre requires thoughtful strategy -- there is so much there to see and so little time in one day!  Also, the crowds are enormous -- pretty clearly, everyone wants to go to the Louvre and it was comical to realize that everyone also wanted to see the Mona Lisa -- the large wave of humanity heading up the stairs to the display was pretty hard to go against!  The people seemed to come from everywhere in the world and the Louvre did its best to make sure many languages were accommodated its gift stores. 

We returned today, but the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays.  Here are the outdoor photos we took.  You can see that the Louvre is huge!  After we took these photos this morning, we went directly to the Musee d'Orsay.

We were told that we had to go to the Musee d'Orsay and they were right!  This museum houses French art from 1848-1914 -- featuring impressionism collections by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin, among others I had never heard of, such as Sissley and Fantin-Latour.  We also saw works by Toulouse-Lautrec and artists in the realism school. 

Unfortunately, while we had our freshly charged camera with us, the signs said no photos.  However, I noticed two things:  people were still sneaking in photos and the museum folks didn't seem to mind.  So, I took these two photos of one extreme end and the other of the museum:

It looks like a train station, doesn't it?  (Did you see the Statue of Liberty?)  The museum's building used to be a central train station built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 - it was the first modern facility to boast incline planes, goods elevators for luggage and passenger lifts, and install electrified tracks.  The train station eventually stopped its activities in 1939.  After the building was listed as a protected monument and classified as an historical monument, the National Museum Administration suggested the train station be modified to house a collection of all the major art forms produced from 1848 to 1914, which would pick up where the Louvre's art collection leaves off.  It was opened as such in 1986 and as you can see from the above, they did a great job with the renovation. 

We ate the café on the 5th floor where the clock (bright spot on the right side of the photo below) is located!

These two museums are definitely worth the visit -- next time, though, we will have a fully charged camera for the Louvre and a better strategy to get ourselves around in there.