More of my Holidays

We moved on (after lunch, of course!) from Cluny to the Musee D'Orsay, which started life as a railway terminus, and which now holds lots of 20th Century art, including lots of Impressionist paintings, and sculptures.

It's a nice building. I like that the exterior still has the names of all the towns and cities that the trains used to go to. And I like the big clocks, and the fact that you can go inside and peer at out Paris through the clock face.

Oh, and the Art is pretty good, too.

Seeing famous artworks in real life is always a little odd - there is that shock of recognition,at seeing something so familiar for the first time. And then you start to look more closely, and realise that the eyes in Renoir's paintings are always and distinctively Renoir's, for instance.

(and, slightly embarrassingly, I realised for the first time that Monet actually painted that woman with the parasol twice, once facing left and once right..)


I enjoyed the Art Nouveau exhibits, which included a wonderful plate by William de Morgan, with Eagles (there was a glorious dish with griffins, too, but the angle was wrong to get a picture of that (it was much richer in colour than the picture at that link suggests)


And then we could wander past the Degas's and the Rodin sculpture, and past the Polar Bear, and then there were the Van Goghs, and I do love Van Gogh's work.

There were some Gaugins as well, but it is the Van Goghs I was really drawn too.

After all of the art, we were exhausted and had to have some very expensive tea in the museum restaurant (with another Big Clock!)

There comes a point when tea is, at least temporarily, more important even than great art.