Claude Monet would have been amazed! The Musée Marmottan Monet, a city house painted in eggshell white, just outside the center of Paris, houses the largest collection of his works worldwide. Among them: an oil painting showing the Normandy port of Le Havre with its ships and factory chimneys. Like a red pier, the sunlight leads up to the gray, washed-out sky. This painting, representing the impressions of a sunrise, helped coin the term “Impressionism”, which was initially derogatory. In 1874, its author, art critic Louis Leroy (1812–1885) wrote about Monet’s work: “A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.” Today, tourists line up before the gallery named after collector and patron of the arts, Paul Marmottan (1856–1932), to admire Monet’s art. Works by Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro are also on display. No wonder: these works created from the mid-19th century onward allow the Belle Époque to come back to life – a time that shaped Paris like hardly any other.

Nostalgic green space in the city center
Following the visit to the Musée Marmottan, we take the Métro to the city center – passing stations adorned with beautiful tiles, curved inscriptions and ornate wrought-iron entrances. All this is as characteristic of Paris as the traffic on the Place de la Concorde that circles the Egyptian obelisk with its gold-plated tip at all times of the day and night. Leaving Métro Tuileries, it’s only a few steps to the Tuileries Garden. In this baroque palace garden, imbued with the scent of crepes, which is located not far from the Louvre, a historic merry-go-round with wooden horses captivates not only children. Claude Monet also painted this Jardin des Tuileries, named after the “Tuileries” – brickyards. In 1876, he moved into the 5th floor apartment of an art collector to immortalize the view on his canvas: the flower beds organized in straight lines, the pond, and the Marsan pavilion by the Tuileries Palace – the residence of most French kings and emperors, from Louis XIV to Napoleon III. Four of Monet’s paintings of the Tuileries have survived, with one on display in the Musée Marmottan.

A love of water lilies
The Musée de l’Orangerie offers another opportunity to immerse oneself in Monet’s paintings. On the ground floor of the building, once used as winter storage for temperature-sensitive plants, the images of water lilies form a spectacular panorama: along the walls of the oval-shaped exhibition space, oil shimmers across the canvas, and sunlight across the water. The flower petals’ delicate pink merges with the light green of the leaves. Powerful turquoise suggests mysterious depths. Over a period of 30 years, Monet created this piece of art as a complete work, for this very room – inspired by his pond of water lilies in Giverny, nearly 80 kilometers from Paris.
Outside the Orangerie, and next to the Tuileries, the blue-gray river Seine flows westward towards the English Channel. Those who wish to continue their tour of the arts with the Musée d’Orsay, likely the most famous museum in the city after the Louvre and located between the Eiffel Tower and Île de la Cité, must cross the river. The Pont de la Concorde, with its stone arches, was constructed in 1791, during the French Revolution, with hewn stone obtained from the Bastille – the federal prison which had been stormed in 1789 by angry citizens in a revolt against their king. The prison was demolished not long after.

A station for the arts
We’re almost there. This classicist edifice featuring an airy steel and glass roof, immediately recognizable by its two large clocks with Roman numerals, is definitely worth a visit. The clocks reveal the original purpose of the building: on the occasion of the 1900 Paris Exposition, it had been constructed as a railway station and hotel. When the Gare d’Orsay was officially opened, Claude Monet, already 60 years old, regularly traveled by train from his house in Giverny to London to paint the river Thames. His journeys started right here, at the Gare d’Orsay.

Those who enter the museum will initially find themselves in a vast concourse with a center boulevard of sculptures. Statues of marble and bronze stretch out on pedestals; the rooms to the left and right display oil paintings in close proximity. One strolls among the art or, in the words of Monet’s contemporary, poet Charles Baudelaire, one allows oneself to drift. Everything is inspiring, everything is beautiful. And this is why one must make sure to leave enough time to visit Monet’s works on the second floor. One will be fascinated by a blue water lily – as well as the Houses of Parliament in London and a Luncheon on the Grass, inspired by Édouard Manet’s famous “Luncheon on the Grass”. And one will see Monet’s first wife Camille on her deathbed. As an old man, this famous impressionist painter temporarily lost his sight. The world as he saw it, however, has survived in Paris through his many paintings.

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