How It's Used

"In June, comes the long-awaited reopening of the Musée de l'Orangerie in the Tuilleries, home to Monet's superb large, late waterlily canvases in the curved room designed for them, as well as the Guillaume collection, with works by Cézanne, Soutine and Rousseau."

—Natasha Edwards, "The Hottest Tickets, the Coolest Ideas," The Independent on Sunday, January 15, 2006.

"After six years of renovation, the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris is to re-open on Wednesday. Situated in the south-west of the Tuileries Gardens, it has always been a shady retreat from the bustle of the city. Now it has been completely cleaned, the foyer extended and the ugly 1960s additions extracted so that more natural light fills the galleries. What was at first thought to be a simple renovation went awry when the excavated foundations revealed early city fortifications. A delay of two years and a tangle of French bureaucracy ensued.

"The Orangerie's most famous work is Claude Monet's Les Nymphéas, a series of lily paintings that fills an entire elliptical room. Monet offered the paintings to France the day after the Armistice of 1918: 'It's not much, but it's the only way I have of taking part in the victory,' he said. Sadly, the paintings were only installed some months after his death. The eight paintings are each more than six feet deep and nearly 20ft long, and depict the shadows, water and clouds of Monet's garden at Giverny in Normandy. So fascinated was he with the movement and changing colour of the water and lilies that he created 250 paintings on the same subject.

"The bulk of the exhibition (more than 140 works) is created from the collections of Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume, who bought paintings by Cézanne (15), Matisse (10), Renoir (24) and Picasso (12), often from the artists themselves. When last open the museum attracted 500,000 visitors a year. To whet the appetite the whole collection can be viewed online."

—Kieran Falconer, "Catch This," The Daily Telegraph (UK), May 13, 2006.

"Over the last six years, as the Musée de l'Orangerie underwent a $36-million (U.S.) renovation and expansion, its most valued treasure, the eight tranquil paintings of Monet's large-format water-lily series, remained trapped inside a noisy and muddy building site. There was no alternative. While the museum's Walter-Guillaume collection of Impressionist paintings travelled the world, the water lilies could not be detached from the walls where they were installed in 1927, a year after Monet's death. Construction — and demolition — had to take place around them.

"To protect the paintings from water, heat, dust and vibrations, they were sealed inside reinforced boxes, each attached to an alarm system. Even so: 'On one or two occasions, because of vibrations, the water lilies began screaming, and the workers had to drop tools,' noted Olivier Brochet, the project's chief architect. With the work completed this month, curators were at last able to relax. The Nymphéas, as the paintings are known here, emerged no worse for the wear. And today, a good four years behind schedule, this museum on the western edge of the Tuileries Gardens reopens to the public."

—Alan Riding, "Paris's Jewel-like Orangerie, Home to Monet's Waterlilies, Reopens, Polished and Renovated," The New York Times, May 16, 2006.

"Visitors to the Musée de l'Orangerie near the Place de la Concorde often stand in long lines to see Claude Monet's celebrated water lilies. Luckily, Paris has even more of Monet's Nymphéas at the Musée Marmottan-Monet, which offers an appropriately tranquil setting near the Bois de Boulogne for the world's largest private collection of paintings by the legendary Impressionist."

—Deanna MacDonald, "Let them eat cake at the Louvre: Small Museums Offer Spectacular Artworks and the Elbow Room to Appreciate Them," The Globe and Mail, April 28, 2007, p. T5.

Links

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Musée de l'Orangerie
Musée de l'Orangerie official Web site