Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Musee D'Orsay vs. The Louvre

I wish I had started my trip here with a guided tour of the Musee D'Orsay.  It is a much better experience than the Louvre and deals mainly with French painting from 1850 onwards.  The guide was excellent and explained the history of French painting so that I now get why Van Gogh and Manet were supposedly brilliant compared to their predecessors.  There aren't any photos allowed of the museum or art but I did get a couple of the cafes inside the converted train station/museum.



Another great aspect of this museum is that it's laid out in a chronological order with special rooms for certain artists of the period.  Very logical and easy to understand.  You can start on one side and finish on the other.  There were nicely placed signs in English to explain about the different art movements and how they came about.  Well done!

This Renoir was my favorite painting...in fact, I think it's my favorite of all the paintings I've seen in Paris.


I also went back to the Louvre to explore the paintings. 

I have two complaints about the Louvre (besides the massive tour groups pushing and shoving their way around).  The first is the lack of cohesiveness about the exhibits. Turn a corner and you're surrounded by entirely different type of art with no real connection.  Also, you spend a lot of time retracing your steps due to one-way corridors and dead ends which is tiresome. 

My second complaint is that the Louvre doesn't really have that great of a collection outside of the French artists.  Sure, they've got the tiny Mona Lisa and two of Michelangelo's statues but all of my favorite Italian and Dutch painters were poorly represented with second-rate paintings.  After seeing the best work in their countries of origin, I could have easily skipped the majority of the Louvre.  There is also the issue that, being Catholic, the majority of work collected by the museum seems to be religious in nature.

That being said, I did enjoy seeing some of the French art.

 





and I discovered Thomas Gainsborough who I had heard of but had never seen.




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