The Musée d'Orsay was born from the wish of former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to provide Paris with a museum of the arts of the 19th century. After four long years of works, the space of the former Orsay train station, mostly disused, is entirely refurbished and the museum opens its doors to the public in 1986.
With one of the planet's richest collections of Western art from 1948 to 1941, the Musée d'Orsay has more than enough to make connoisseurs swoon. With more than 4,000 works on display in fields like painting, sculpture, decorative and graphic arts, photography or architecture, it also is the most important collection in the world of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings. The most renowned names meet here, Courbet and Manet rub shoulders with Degas, Van Gogh, Rodin or Cézanne…
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Inseparable from the History of Paris, the Louvre we know today is the fruit of 800 years of successive constructions. From the medieval fortress of Philipp II of France (of which only the underground foundations remain visible) to the present-day Grand Louvre and its famous glass pyramid, sovereigns -from Francis I to Napoleon III- one after another have extended it, restructured it, striving to somewhat keep it architecturally coherent.
Born from the Lumières zeitgeist but made concrete under the French Revolution, the idea of a large art museum open to the public leads to its opening in 1793. The exhibited works came initially from the confiscated royal collections or from the looting of churches. The museum's collections will grow time after time, sometimes through questionable ways, notable during the Napoleonian campaigns, but more often through donations, legal purchase or patronage.
Often called the world's largest museum -the figures speak for themselves: more than half a million works, 40,000 of which on display, more than 70,000 square metres of galleries- the Louvre receives around ten million visitors on a yearly basis. They rush to seen some of the most beautiful woks man ever created, many of which being real international stars, that are distributed between the museum's various departments:
• Egyptian antiquities
• Near Eastern antiquities
• Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities
• Painting (Italian, French, Northern, English, Spanish schools)
• Sculptures (from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the Modern Times)
• Decorative arts (from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the Modern Times)
• Islamic art
• Prints and drawings
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