May 20: Musee D'Orsay

Ron is a great fan of Impressionist art and I've learned enough from him and from our visits to other European museums to share his love of this type of painting.  In Paris, the Musee d'Orsay is the place to see the best collection of Impressionist art.  On-line reviewed warned about long waiting lines, so I purchased and printed out tickets the night before on-line.  I'm not sure it helped; we still had to wait outside for over an hour to get in.

Statues on plaza outside the Museum.  These were meant to symbolize various civilizations, with France at the left.  The rest were bare-breasted.  We were amused because in Kansas, a single bare-breasted statue in a park caused a huge uproar.  Here, they're part of the scenery.

The Museum started out as a railroad station, which is easy to imagine from this view.

The D'Orsay was better-organized and not quite as crowded as the Louvre, but we found that the best of the Impressionist paintings were in a room with an inflexible traffic pattern (one door in, one door out, with the herd moving in one direction around the perimeter) that didn't really allow contemplation of the works.  We found what we were looking for a couple of days later, when we went to a wonderful exhibit of Slovenian impressionists at Le Petit Palais.