In 1900 the Exposition Universelle drew thousands of art lovers to Paris, many of them arriving by train at the new Gare d’Orsay. Who among them would have thought that the train station where they disembarked would become an illustrious institution holding the greatest collection of Impressionist art in the world? Opened in 1986 and located on the Left Bank of the River Seine opposite the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay today is home to some 100,000 works dating from 1848 to 1914.
Before being transformed into a showcase for paintings by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, and many more, the Victor Laloux–designed building played several roles in the life of the city. After being decommissioned as a station, it served as a reception center for prisoners after World War II, was a film set for Orson Welles’s 1962 movie The Trial, and was used as an auction venue while the Hôtel Drouot was closed. Its conversion into a museum was led by architects Renaud Bardon, Pierre Colboc, and Jean-Paul Philippon.
Here are 25 masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection. (Please note that not all of these works are on view at a given time—we have indicated those that are currently displayed and where they may be found on this map.)
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Honoré Daumier, The Celebrities of the Juste Milieu (1832)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. The 36 Celebrities of the Juste Milieu are the remaining pieces of a series of 40 busts that Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) produced in response to a commission from Charles Philipon, the founder of Le Charivari and La Caricature newspapers. The artist used these painted clay works as models for his lithographs, which were published in both satirical outlets. The caricatures ridicule politicians of the July Monarchy (the post-Revolution reign of Louis-Philippe in France), including lawyer André Dupin, banker and naturalist Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert, and historian François Guizot. In 1927 the busts were sold by Philipon’s grandson to art publisher Maurice Le Garrec, who had them restored. They were acquired by the Musée d’Orsay in 1980.
(Ground Floor, Room 4)
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Auguste Clésinger, Woman Bitten by a Snake (1847)
Image Credit: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean. This naked woman with a snaked coiled around her wrist—is she squirming from pain or from uncontrolled passion? Because of this ambiguity, she was, alongside Thomas Couture’s painting The Romans in Their Decadence, the talk of the 1847 Salon. Auguste Clésinger’s model for this controversial sculpture was Apollonie Sabatier, aka La Présidente, a Parisian beauty and muse of Baudelaire who held a salon in Paris. The artist was harshly criticized for molding her body from life; in the 19th-century art scene, this was synonymous with laziness or a lack of integrity. In fact, for painter Eugène Delacroix, Woman Bitten by a Snake was nothing but a “sculpted daguerreotype.” The figure’s idealized face and outrageously realistic curves, all set on an ornate pedestal, make this work an representative example of Eclecticism in sculpture.
(Ground Floor, Sculpture Hall)
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Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans (1849–50)
Image Credit: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / RMN. In the summer of 1849, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) started his first monumental work, the depiction of a funeral that took place in his birthplace, the city of Ornans. The horizontal format and the use of black tones suggest that the artist drew inspiration, respectively, from 17th-century Dutch portraits such as Frans Hals’s Meagre Company and from Spanish masters including Diego Velázquez. Who had died? According to various sources, it was either Courbet’s grandfather or a member of the Proudhon family, who were friends of the painter. At the 1850–1851 Salon, many called out the “ugliness” of the characters and the triviality of the subject. Courbet was also criticized for using the dimensions usually reserved for history paintings to depict a mundane event. The composition was interpreted by church as anticlerical, and by some of Courbet’s contemporaries as a manifesto for democratic ideals. In other words, while A Burial at Ornans may have foreshadowed the end of Academism, it also foretold the birth of Realism.
(Ground Floor, Room 7)
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Jean-François Millet, The Angelus (1857–1859)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. A man and a woman have stopped digging potatoes and dropped their tools in order to recite the Angelus, a prayer that commemorates the Annunciation—the biblical episode when Gabriel tells Mary she will give God a son. The scene, by Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) had its roots in a childhood memory: “The idea for The Angelus came to me, because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed,” he recalled in 1865. The realist painter, known for his humanizing depictions of farmers, was by no means a churchgoer himself. But in this painting, as in many of his other works, he imbues his depiction of agricultural workers in the landscape with a feeling of the sublime. The painting was bequeathed to the French State in 1910 and moved to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986.
(Ground Floor, Room 4)
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Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus (1863)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. This painting by Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889), which nods to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1808 Venus Anadyomene and to 18th-century masters such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, features the Roman goddess of love coming to existence on water, as a grown woman, accompanied by cupids. The titular event was, like many other mythological episodes, a 19th-century excuse for the artist to portray a nude woman in a titillating pose. Though acquired by Napoleon III at the 1863 Salon, and probably responsible for Cabanel’s subsequent hire as a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, this classical scene gave rise to much controversy. One critic was French author Émile Zola, who did not appreciate Venus’s complexion: “The goddess, drowned in a sea of milk, resembles a delicious courtesan, but not of flesh and blood—that would be indecent—but made of a sort of pink and white marzipan.”
(Currently not on view)
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Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, The Dance (1868)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. In 1863 architect Charles Garnier commissioned his friend Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), who had won the Grand Prix de Rome, to sculpt a work for the façade of the Parisian opera house. While François Jouffroy, Eugène Guillaume, and Jean-Joseph Perraud were respectively assigned the themes of harmony, instrumental music, and lyrical drama, Carpeaux was to represent dance. Determined to capture movement—which he finally did by combining both a vertical momentum and circular motion—the artist produced many sketches and models before taking action. For the central figure surging from a ring of maenads, Carpeaux is said to have borrowed the body from a carpenter who worked for him and the smile from Princess Hélène von Racowitza. The public was shocked by the realism of those nude figures. A bottle of ink was even thrown at the relief and its withdrawal was requested, but the war of 1870 and the sculptor’s passing brought the controversy to a close.
(Ground Floor, Sculpture Hall)
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James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was born in America but spent most of his career in London and Paris, entering Charles Gleyre’s studio at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1856. He was a friend of Henri Fantin-Latour, who considered him one of the leaders of the French avant-garde. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, also known as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, features Anna Mathilda McNeill Whistler clad in a long black dress, sitting in left profile in the artist’s London studio. The muted palette may reflect her austerity, but given the Whistler etching “Thames River, Black Lion Wharf (1859) that hangs in the background, it may also be interpreted as the continuation of the artist’s experiments with printmaking. The painting was acquired by the French State in 1891.
(Currently not on view)
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Berthe Morisot, The Cradle (1872)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. The Cradle, by Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), is an intimate depiction of Morisot’s sister Emma and Emma’s newborn baby, Blanche. At 31 years old Morisot herself was still single, not marrying Eugène Manet until 1874 and becoming a mother herself only in 1879. The Cradle was shown at the 1874 Impressionist Exhibition—the group’s first—and had little impact at the time. It would have gone totally unnoticed if not for a few critics sensitive to its delicate palette. It did not sell until 1930, when the Louvre acquired it from the artist’s family.
(Ground Floor, Temporary Exhibition Galleries)
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Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Toward the end of 1871, Édouard Manet (1832–1883), who’d been unable to paint while serving in the national guard during the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, was able to resume working and reconnect with his former models. These included fellow artist Berthe Morisot, whom he had met at the Louvre in 1868. Manet made a dozen portraits of Morisot, who married his younger brother and joined the Impressionist movement in 1874. This one shows her entirely clad in black—a trendy color in late-19th-century fashion—and holding a bouquet of violets. Its execution is a testimony to Manet’s admiration for Spanish masters, chief of whom was Diego Velázquez.
(Top Floor, Room 30)
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Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers (1875)
Image Credit: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Franck Raux. For The Floor Scrapers Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) drew from his academic training to depict an everyday scene of laborers at work. His approach to perspective may have been traditional and his subjects reminiscent of Greek statues, but the content of the painting did not please the jury of the 1875 Paris Salon, which considered it “vulgar.” However, the 28-year-old artist presented the work at the second Impressionist Exhibition, in 1876, along with another version of the composition executed earlier that same year. Critics of the day were less than welcoming. Emile Zola, for instance, thought the painting was “anti-artistic”, and “so accurate that [it] made it bourgeois”. It was originally donated to the French State by Caillebotte’s family in 1894, transferred to the Louvre in 1929, and moved to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986.
(Top Floor, Room 31)
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (1876)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. This popular scene is undoubtedly one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s most important works. The artist (1841–1919) presented it at the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition. It was purchased two years later by his counterpart Gustave Caillebotte, who bequeathed it to the French State in 1894. The art critic Georges Rivière, who appears in the painting, said: “It’s a page of history, a precious monument to Parisian life [painted] with rigorous accuracy.” Even if Renoir included some of his friends in the composition, such as painters Norbert Goeneutte and Franc-Lamy, his goal was to capture not a moment of his private life but the atmosphere of a specific venue, the Moulin de la Galette in the Montmartre district. Three areas are depicted: the seated characters in the foreground having a conversation, the crowd behind them dancing, and the band performing in some kind of enclosure at the back. The blurry effect created by this layering was not to everyone’s taste then. Today it would be hard to deny the modernity of the piece.
(Ground Floor, Temporary Exhibition Galleries)
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Claude Monet, The Saint-Lazare Station (1877)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. In 1877 Claude Monet (1840–1926) arrived in Paris from Argenteuil, where he had spent the previous six years. The move from peaceful countryside to hectic capital city brought about a change in his subject matter. Freshly settled in the Nouvelle Athènes area, the artist began to paint at the Saint-Lazare train station, finding in it a new source of inspiration. This work was the first of a series of 12 paintings of the same subject executed from various viewpoints. Monet sent the first eight to the third Impressionist Exhibition, when the group made the term Impressionism its own.
(Ground Floor, Temporary Exhibition Galleries)
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Edgar Degas, Little Dancer of 14 Years (original c. 1878–1881)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. When Edgar Degas (1834–1917) died, 150 wax and clay sculptures were found in his studio. None of those works had been presented in public before, except for Little Dancer of 14 Years, which the artist showed at the 1881 Impressionist Exhibition. The 3.2-foot-tall bronze statue—one of 28 copies cast after Degas’s passing and now in the collections of museums and galleries around the world—features Belgian dancer Marie van Goethem, a student from the Opéra de Paris ballet school, dressed in an actual tutu and with a real ribbon in her hair. Not all the critics who saw Little Dancer of 14 Years in 1881 greeted it with open arms. Joris-Karl Huysmans may have called it “the first truly modern attempt at sculpture,” but the figure was also called “bestial” and compared to a monkey. Critic Paul Mantz even referred to her as a “flower of precocious depravity” with a face “marked by the hateful promise of every vice” and “bearing the signs of a profoundly heinous character.”
(Top Floor, Room 32)
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Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell (1880–1917)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d'Orsay / Sophie Crépy. Yes, Auguste Rodin has his own museum in Paris, but one of his works has a particular connection to the Musée d’Orsay. In 1880 the French State commissioned the sculptor to design doors for a new museum of decorative arts. Originally, this museum was to be built within the ruins of the Palais d’Orsay, which was destroyed during the Paris Commune. According to Rodin’s plan, its monumental main doors would be decorated with 11 low reliefs inspired by Dante’s “Inferno,” the first part of the poet’s Divine Comedy. Three years later the museum project was abandoned, and a train station was built instead—one that would eventually be transformed into the Musée d’Orsay. For their part, the Gates became an ongoing work in progress, with the artist basing new sculptures on some of the figures in the piece, including The Thinker (Dante himself), The Three Shades, and The Kiss. Around 1890 Rodin stopped working on the Gates, but in 1917 was convinced by the curator of the new Musée Rodin to complete the work and have it cast in bronze. Rodin died, however, without ever seeing the result. Today, a plaster cast made from the 1917 bronze is on long-term loan to the Musée d’Orsay, on the ground it was originally meant to occupy.
(Second Floor, Sculpture Terrace)
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Vincent van Gogh, Starry Sky (1888)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Of the more than two dozen works by Vincent van Gogh at the Musee d’Orsay, including Room in Arles and Portrait of the Artist, it is almost impossible to choose a favorite, but Starry Sky (1888) is high on the list. As soon as he arrived in Arles, in February 1888, Van Gogh (1853–1890) started focusing on “night effects.” In a letter to his brother Theo in April 1888, he wrote: “I need a starry night with cypresses or maybe above a field of ripe wheat.” To a sister, he confided in September: “Often it seems to me night is even more richly colored than day.” Later that month, the artist finally achieved this blue-dominated view of the Rhône River, where stars and the lights of the city sparkle in harmony. The similarly named—and more turbulent—Starry Night, which he painted shortly afterward at the Saint-Paul de Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
(Currently not on view)
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Paul Sérusier, The Talisman (The Bois d’Amour at Pont Aven) (1888)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. In the summer of 1888, Paul Sérusier (1864–1927) left Paris for the city of Pont-Aven with a letter of introduction from the painter and writer Émile Bernard. This is where he produced The Talisman (1888) under the tutelage of Paul Gauguin. Painter Maurice Denis would later report that Gaugin advised Sérusier, “How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.” Upon his return to Paris, Séruzier showed his friends, the future Nabis, the piece. It became the emblem for their movement, which believed that a painting, beyond anything else, was an arrangement of colors on a flat surface. In front of this work, said Denis, he and his friends felt “liberated from all the yokes that the idea of copying brought to [our] painters’ instincts.”
(Top Floor, Galerie Françoise Cachin)
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François Gauzi, Lili Grenier in a Kimono in Albert Grenier’s Studio (c. 1888)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Alexis Brandt. In 2022 the Musée d’Orsay acquired photo albums featuring more than 100 pictures of artist’s model and socialite Noémi Amélie Sans, aka Lili Grenier, taken by François Gauzi (1862–1933). Part of this acquisition is currently on display, including a portrait of her wearing a kimono. Known for her happy disposition, she started sitting for painter Fernand Cormon, who appreciated her freckled skin and her luxuriant hair. She lived with artist Albert Grenier in the Montmartre district. The couple were famous for throwing extravagant costume parties, often attended by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who lived with them for a while, and many other artists.
(Currently not on view)
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Edward Burne-Jones, The Adoration of the Magi (1890)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Commissioned in 1886 by the rector of Exeter College, Oxford, this biblically themed composition was the first tapestry to be designed by Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898); his preliminary sketch is now held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. William Morris, a leading figure of the British Arts & Crafts movement, with whom Burne-Jones had been working for10 years, set up a team of weavers at Merton Abbey to bring the work to life. Other studies were meant to be adapted into stained glass windows. The Adoration of the Magi was completed in 1890 to wide praise. Nine versions were crafted between 1890 and 1907.
(Currently not on view)
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Paul Gauguin, Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ (1890–1891)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Patrice Schmidt. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) painted Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ (1890–1891) on the eve of his first trip to Tahiti. This pivotal work could be considered a triple self-portrait. The artist occupies the center of the composition, his expression hinting at his determination to escape his personal and professional problems. (Success had not yet found him, and his wife had left him to go back to Denmark with their children.) In the background are two contrasting pieces painted the previous year: A suffering Christ made in the painter’s image and the anthropomorphic Pot in the Form of a Grotesque Head. The artist referred to the latter canvas as “Head of Gauguin the Savage,” as if he already knew what kind of life he would make for himself in the colonies.
(Currently not on view)
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Paul Cézanne, The Card Players (1890–1895)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. During the 1890s, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) tackled the subject of card players, which he may have borrowed from Caravaggio and from the Le Nain brothers. Of the five versions of The Card Players Cézanne painted, what strikes one first in this one is the symmetrical posing of his models, peasants whom the painter would see at the Jas de Bouffan, his father’s property near Aix-en-Provence. The bottle on the table marks the center of the composition and accentuates the silent face-off between the two opponents.
(Top Floor, Room 35)
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Odilon Redon, Trees on a Yellow Background (1901)
Image Credit: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. French Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) made this panel painting—and more than a dozen others—for a chateau belonging to Baron Robert de Domecy, one of his most supportive patrons. The commission came at a turning point in the artist’s evolution, when the 60-year-old Redon was moving from dark prints and charcoal drawings to vibrantly colored pastels and oils. With the opportunity to work on a larger scale, he began blurring the line between art and decoration. “I am covering the walls of a dining room with flowers, flowers of dreams, fauna of the imagination,” he wrote to his friend, the collector Andries Bonger. In its scale, treatment of space, and mix of mediums—including oil, tempera, charcoal, and pastel—this painting looks startlingly contemporary.
(Top Floor, Galerie Françoise Cachin)
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Camille Claudel, Maturity (c. 1902)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. A young woman on her knees has just let go of a man whom an older woman seems to be carrying away. This sculptural group might be interpreted as an allegory of aging, with youth behind and death straight ahead, but Maturity can also be seen as autobiographical. In it, Camille Claudel (1864–1843) is thought to have sculpted herself abandoned by her mentor and former lover Auguste Rodin, who could not bring himself to leave his future wife, Rose Beuret. Author and diplomat Paul Claudel wrote of this work: “My sister Camille, imploring, humiliated, on her knees, that superb, proud creature, and what is being wrenched from her, right there before your very eyes, is her soul.” After he left Camille, Rodin helped her get this commission from the French State, her first, in 1895.
(Currently not on view)
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André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge (c. 1906)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, André Derain (1880–1854) was featured in the same gallery as contemporaries Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Kees van Dongen. Looking at a sculpture by Albert Marque, a critic is alleged to have shouted: “Look, it’s Donatello among wild beasts!” (which translates to fauves in French). This anecdote explains the origin of the term Fauvism, one adopted by a group of young—among them Derain—who believed in the power of pure color to express sensations and emotion. A few months later, Derain went to London and produced about 30 paintings, including Charing Cross Bridge, which shows vehicles navigating a turn on the Victoria embankment. The dabbing technique used to paint the yellow-heavy sky and the water shows the influence of neo-Impressionism, while the slight distortion of the cars gives an almost Futurist feeling of speed.
(Second Floor, Room 67)
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Henri Rousseau, The Snake Charmer (1907)
Image Credit: Copyright © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), a central figure of the Naive movement, painted this moonlit scene of a Black Eve in a junglelike Garden of Eden using blocks of intense dark color silhouetted against a lighter sky. The human figure, the animals, and the extravagant vegetation have all been depicted with equal dedication in this work, which was commissioned by Robert Delaunay’s mother. Rousseau, who came to painting rather late in life, rarely traveled; most of his jungle scenes were painted in the Natural History Museum or the botanical gardens in Paris. Writers Alfred Jarry, André Breton, and Guillaume Apollinaire were among his greatest fans.
(Second Floor, Pavilion Amont)
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François Pompon, Polar Bear (1923–1933)
Image Credit: Copyright © Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / DR. This sleek bear is the work of François Pompon (1855–1933), who started carving marble for other sculptors before developing his own aesthetic of smooth, rounded forms. In the late 1870s, after serving as Rodin’s assistant, the artist turned his back on human figuration to focus on the zoo animals he enjoyed watching at the Jardin des Plantes. Polar Bear, among other stylized depictions of birds and animals, was the result. This monumental sculpture (more than eight feet long) was shown at the 1922 Salon and brought the 67-year-old artist tardy recognition. “I keep a large number of details that will later go,” said Pompon. “I first do the animal with almost all its trappings. Then I gradually eliminate them.”
(Second Floor, Sculpture Terrace)