Art Museums in Paris
If you’re planning a trip to Paris that’s at the beginning of the month, my advice would be to do your museum visiting on the first Sunday of the month, because entrance is free! We were lucky to come across this tip on a map, and coincidentally, the first Sunday in November fell during our five day stay in Paris! So, we saved our visits to the Louvre and the Museum of Orsay for Sunday, our last full day in Paris.
The Louvre was beautiful albeit overwhelming. We felt rather saturated with art by the time we left. We of course saw the Mona Lisa, which was mounted on a huge wall by itself, behind thick bullet-proof glass, with a roped off area immediately in front of it. I felt like all these security measures in addition to the hyped up expectation everyone holds reduced my ability to appreciate it. But, I guess I can say I saw it now—whatever that means.
Every room we entered was filled with so much art, that after walking from room to room in a half daze looking at each painting I passed, I decided on a different approach. When I entered a room, I would look around and see which paintings (or statues) I was drawn to, and then just go to two or three in each room, spending more time looking at them in depth and being able to appreciate them, rather than leaving the room having seen every painting but not being able to remember a single one. I liked this new approach, and I left more satisfied than I think I would have if I had tried to see everything single piece of art.
After a couple hours in the Louvre, Erin and I headed to the Museum of Orsay (after a crepe stop, naturally…mmmm just thinking of them makes me want a crepe with nutella real bad!). We primarily wanted to see the Impressionist exhibits, so we followed the signs pointing us to Monet and Van Gogh. We saw a number of famous paintings by both of these artists as well as by Manet, Degas, and some post-impressionists. Erin and I agreed that we almost enjoyed this museum better than the Louvre because we both appreciate Impressionism, and it was a nice break from all the Renaissance paintings, Baroque art, and marble statues that we see all over Rome, and which is what we primarily saw in the Louvre. It was fun going with Erin as well because she’d studied ballet dancer-obsessed Degas before, and therefore was able to provide an educational mini-tour through the rooms of his works.
It was quite the art-filled Sunday, and after we were museumed-out, we retreated to Versailles for our last French dinner, or so we thought (see “I hate fog.”).
|
