Musée d'Orsay Guided Tour with Impressionist Masterpieces Paris

The Musée d'Orsay: a railway station turned museum

The Musée d'Orsay occupies the former Gare d'Orsay, a railway station built in two years for the World's Fair of 1900 on the Left Bank opposite the Tuileries, with a stone facade, a glass-and-iron roof and a 32-metre-high nave that was praised at the time as a palace of the arts. Its platforms were too short for modern trains by 1939, and after decades of neglect and a near-demolition, it reopened in 1986 as the national museum of the art of 1848 to 1914. The great nave, with its coffered ceiling, two giant clocks and sculpture aisle down the middle, is the first thing you see.

The Orsay museum tour starts here, with the guide explaining the building and the layout of the collection before you climb to the top floor. Musée d'Orsay opening hours are 9:30 to 18:00 from Tuesday to Sunday, with a late opening until 21:45 on Thursday; the museum is closed on Mondays, which is why this tour runs the other six days.

The Impressionist gallery on the upper floor

The upper floor, under the roof of the old station, holds the largest collection of Impressionist painting in the world, lit by daylight from above as the painters intended. The guide walks you through the works that outraged the critics of the 1870s: the ballet rehearsals and racecourses painted from odd angles, the picnic on the grass that broke every academic rule, the poppy fields and the woman with a parasol, the Rouen cathedral facade painted at different hours of the day, the dance under the trees at the Moulin de la Galette and the dreamlike water-lily ponds.

This is the heart of the Impressionist art tour in Paris, and it takes about forty-five minutes. The guide explains why visible brushstrokes, modern subjects and open-air painting were considered scandalous, and how the artists organised their own exhibitions when the official Salon rejected them. At the end of the gallery, the window behind the giant clock face frames the Louvre and Sacré-Cœur across the river.

The Post-Impressionists: night skies, pointillism and Tahiti

The following rooms show what came after: the Dutch painter who spent his last two years in Provence and north of Paris and left here the starry night over the Rhône, the self-portrait in swirling blue, the church at Auvers and the bedroom in Arles; the circus scene made of thousands of coloured dots by the inventor of pointillism; the Tahitian women of the painter who left Paris for the South Seas; and the apples and the Mont Sainte-Victoire of the master from Aix-en-Provence whose geometry led to Cubism.

The guide picks the works that tell the story best and adds lesser-known canvases nearby that most visitors miss, including pastels kept in low light and the small, intense Pont-Aven landscapes. This section takes about thirty minutes, and it is where the Musée d'Orsay guided tour earns its keep: without the context, these rooms are a line of famous images; with it, they become a single story of artists breaking with the past.

The sculpture aisle, the Art Nouveau rooms and the ballroom

Back on the ground floor, the central aisle of the nave is lined with the marble and bronze of the nineteenth century, from the official academic sculpture of the Second Empire to the bronze figures by the sculptor whose museum stands a few streets away, and the famous bronze of a young dancer in a real tulle skirt. On the middle level, the Art Nouveau rooms hold furniture and glass from Nancy and Paris, and the ballroom of the former station hotel, all gilt, mirrors and chandeliers, survives intact as one of the most surprising rooms in any museum in Paris.

The guide finishes here, or at the point that suits the group's interests, and then leaves you with your ticket still valid for the rest of the day. The museum also has a model of the Opera district under a glass floor and the painted ceiling study of the Palais Garnier, both worth the detour.

Around the museum: the Left Bank and the Seine

The Musée d'Orsay stands on the Left Bank quay between the Pont Royal and the footbridge that crosses to the Tuileries Garden, so the Louvre is a ten-minute walk away over the river. Behind the museum lies the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the district of eighteenth-century aristocratic mansions that now house ministries, and five minutes south is Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with the oldest church in Paris, bookshops and the famous cafés of the literary Left Bank.

How to get to the Musée d'Orsay: RER C to Musée d'Orsay station, directly under the quay, or metro line 12 to Solférino, four minutes on foot; from the Right Bank, cross the footbridge from the Tuileries. The tour starts at 14:15, when the morning queue has gone and the galleries settle down; is the Musée d'Orsay worth visiting on a short Paris trip? For most travellers it is the museum they enjoy most, because the collection is manageable in one visit and the building is part of the pleasure.