The Orsay Museum is the story of a palace built at the initiative of Napoleon 1st, between 1810 and 1838, burned down by the Communards on the night of 23-24 May 1871, and then replaced by a railway station to welcome the visitors of the universal exhibition of 1900, set of several films (including the Trial of Franz Kafka adapted by Orson Welles), threatened with demolition in the year 70, then a museum in 1977 by the decision of the inter-ministerial council under the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
The new Orsay Museum, dedicated to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists of the second half of the 19th century was inaugurated on 1st December 1986 by President François Mitterrand. It is the magnificent result of a deep determination of three Presidents (Georges Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand), who wanted to transform this obsolete station, into a large museum, in order to gather a collection that has been scattered since the closure of the Luxembourg Museum in 1937, between the Louvre Museum, the Orangery museum and the Museum of Modern Art.
The Orsay Museum is one of the largest museums in the world, known for its colossal collection of 79,470 works from the Western world from 1848 to 1914 (two very symbolic dates) and represent all forms of expression, from painting to architecture, in through sculpture, decorative arts, and photography.
It is recognized for hosting the largest collection of more than 1,100 paintings signed by the ambassadors of the avant-garde of Impressionism who were poorly misunderstood and strongly criticized in their time and whose sublimes can be seen today. Masterpieces such as Gustave Courbet’s origin of the world, Edouard Manet’s lunch on grass and Olympia, Auguste Renoir’s Moulin de la Galette ball, Degas the little dancer of fourteen-year- old, Van Gogh’s Starry Night on the Rhone, the Cézanne’s card players or Claude Monet’s series of five paintings of the Cathedral of Rouen.
In this new restructured space is the unmissable clock of 1900, a remnant of the old railway station, point of view and a photo shoot on Paris and Sacred Heart!