Musée d'Orsay

The Musée d'Orsay occupies a former railway terminus on the Left Bank of the Seine, a grand Beaux-Arts structure built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition and later transformed into one of the world's foremost art museums when it opened in its current form in 1986. The conversion, led by Italian architect Gae Aulenti, preserved the station's soaring iron-and-glass nave while creating gallery spaces that now house the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings on earth, including major works by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, and Cézanne.

Visitors can arrive via dedicated entrance tickets or reserved access to avoid the queues that regularly form outside this celebrated institution. A guided tour of the Impressionist masterpieces leads through the museum's most iconic rooms, while the temporary exhibition Renoir and Love (1865-1885) examines Pierre-Auguste Renoir's treatment of human relationships and desire across a defining period of his career. The museum sits directly across the river from the Tuileries Garden, making it a natural companion to any exploration of central Paris.