Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Musée d'Orsay is an art museum housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, the railway station designed by Victor Laloux. Work on the station ran from 1898 to 1900, and its conversion into a museum created a striking meeting of rail travel and art. The museum opened in 1986.

Its holdings focus on French art made from 1848 to 1914, encompassing painting, sculpture, furniture, photography, and other forms. What draws many visitors is its exceptionally rich concentration of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces, with works by Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. As you enter, the former platforms shape a long interior axis beneath the station’s great barrel vault.

That railway structure now frames galleries rather than departing trains. Among the museum’s celebrated works are Manet’s Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde and The Artist’s Studio, Cézanne’s Card Players, Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings, and Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette. The building itself is therefore part of the experience: a transport monument transformed into a home for a defining period of modern art.