Saturday with the impressionists

As the museum challenge winds down, we decided to go back and enjoy one last free ticket to a classic: the Musée d'Orsay, Paris's principal impressionism museum. The museum itself is crazy cool, a gorgeous late 19th century Beaux-Arts train station-turned-museum. There are loads of well known pieces: Degas's dancers, Renoir's Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, and plenty by Monet, Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin, and the likes. There's not too much to write about the visit. In summary, it was art and it was beautiful. However, I thought it might be more fun to give you a blitz tour of the Orsay through some less well-known pieces that particularly struck me.

Top left: A portion of Renoir's Le Garçon au Chat (The Boy to the Cat), pretty much precisely what I want to do when I find a cat. I also wanted to share this because I found something a little curious about the boy's expression; Top second from left: A classical sculpture of a woman bathing with a surprisingly frightened expression, the name of which I forgot to record, in the ground floor entry area of the museum; Top right: left, a view across the central portion of the Musée d'Orsay, train-station-turned-museum; right, a view from one of the old train station clocks on the fifth floor of the museum out across a snowy Seine and central Paris. Bottom left: Monet's La Gare Saint Lazare (The Saint Lazarus Train Station), fantastic because it captures in the blurry background the familiar Parisian architecture, contrasted in the foreground by strikingly outdated trains; Bottom second from left: A portion of William Bouguereau's La Jeunesse et L'Amour (Youth and Love) which I found simply beautiful; Bottom right: Pierre Bonnard's L'Homme et la Femme (The Man and the Woman) which I liked for the contrast of the shared intimacy and separation/isolation of the two. (Also, notice that the woman is petting a cat as a second cat approaches her.)

Stay tuned for the final weekend of the Museum Challenge next week!