You walk in and you are in a railway station. The iron and glass vault is that of the station built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, at the far end of the nave hangs a great gilded clock, and where the tracks used to run there is now an avenue of sculptures. The museum opened here in December 1986, and almost four million people pass through it every year.
Inside is 19th-century France, from Courbet’s realism to Van Gogh and Gauguin. I have picked twelve works, the ones in which you can watch modern painting being born, and I present them in the order in which they were painted.
In 2026, though, the visit has changed: from 10 March 2026 until summer 2028 the museum is a building site. It stays open at the usual hours and all the collections remain accessible, but the entrance has moved to the Seine side, on the quai Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and the museum strongly recommends booking. It is closed on Mondays.
Which of these twelve paintings reached the State in a bequest that an Academy painter called «filth»?
Let’s begin!
How to read this guide
During the works the ticket office itself warns that some works are not on view, and that the plan showing the closed rooms is on the museum’s website. That is why you will not find room numbers here: before you set off, download the updated plan-guide from the website and check that the works you care about are there.
The route starts on the ground floor, with the large canvases of the 1850s and 1860s, and climbs towards Impressionism.
1. Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans
The first painting is a long line of people in black at an open grave, below the cliffs of Ornans, Gustave Courbet’s home town in Franche-Comté. Courbet painted it in 1849-1850, at the age of thirty.
Why did a village funeral scandalise Paris?
Because of the format. A canvas of that size was reserved for history, saints and kings, and Courbet used it for an ordinary funeral, with the real faces of the people of Ornans. At the Salon of December 1850 the critics accused him of painting «the ugly» and «the trivial», and the picture became the manifesto of Realism.
2. Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio
On the ground floor, in the room of Courbet’s large formats, hangs his other giant: The Painter’s Studio, from 1855, whose full title is A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life. At the centre is Courbet at his easel, with a nude model behind him; on the right his friends and supporters, on the left the society he called «those who live on death».
The story of the painting is the best part. The Universal Exhibition of 1855 accepted eleven of Courbet’s works and turned this one down, so he built a temporary pavilion at his own expense, the Pavillon du Réalisme, to show it. Later the canvas ended up in a private mansion, where it served as the backdrop for an amateur theatre, and the Louvre bought it only in 1920. The restoration, begun in November 2014, took place in a room of the museum, in front of visitors, and more than thirteen hundred private donors helped pay for it.
3. Millet’s The Gleaners
Three peasant women, bent over in the foreground, gather the ears of wheat left in the field after the harvest. Behind them, far off, are the carts loaded with grain and the landowner’s labourers. It is The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet, from 1857.
Look at the sky: a flock of birds is also after the forgotten grains. Millet puts the women on the same level as the birds, while in the background the landowner’s carts fill with grain.
The canvas first sold for 2,000 francs. In 1890 it was bought for 300,000 francs by Madame Pommery, of the champagne house, to give to the Louvre: she had tried to buy the same painter’s Angelus, and had failed.
4. Manet’s Olympia
Édouard Manet painted Olympia in 1863 and showed it two years later, at the Salon of 1865. It was one of the most famous scandals in the history of painting.
Why did a nude cause a scandal in a city full of nudes?
Because she was not a goddess. The pose comes from Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which Manet had copied in Italy in 1853, but the woman is a Parisian of her day, with a ribbon round her neck and one slipper still on her foot, and she looks straight at whoever is looking at her. At her feet Manet replaced Titian’s little dog, a symbol of fidelity, with a black cat with its tail raised. The maid brings her a bouquet, most probably the gift of an admirer. The public understood perfectly what it was looking at.
The model was Victorine Meurent. According to the painter’s niece, the bracelet on Olympia’s wrist belonged to Manet’s mother.
5. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass
Two fully dressed men, in a wood, sitting beside a naked woman who looks out at you. In the foreground are the remains of a picnic, a basket of fruit tipped over her clothes. It is Luncheon on the Grass, finished in 1863.
The painting was shown on 15 May 1863 at the Salon des refusés, the exhibition Napoleon III granted to the artists turned down by the official Salon. The scandal foreshadowed the one that would hit Olympia two years later: an ordinary naked woman beside two men in the clothes of their own time. It entered the public collections in 1906, with the gift of the collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton.
6. Monet’s Poppies
A gently rising field full of red poppies, and two pairs of a woman and a child: one high up, on the ridge, the other in the foreground, with a blue parasol. Claude Monet signed it at the bottom left, «Claude Monet 73».
Move close to the flowers. From a distance they look like poppies, close up they are dabs of red laid on with a single brushstroke, without an outline. Step back again, and they turn back into flowers: it is Impressionism in a single painting.
7. Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers
And here is the painting from the opening question. The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte, from 1875, shows three bare-chested workmen on their knees, scraping the floor of a bourgeois apartment. It is one of the first images of the urban working class in French painting.
The Salon rejected it, and the following year the painting was a great success at the second Impressionist exhibition. When Caillebotte died, in 1894, his collection passed to the State, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, a painter of the Academy, said that for the State to accept «such filth» it must have sunk very low morally. Look at the curls of wood on the floor and the light that comes in through the window and slides over the backs: they are painted with the care the Academy kept for its heroes.
8. Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette
In 1876 Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted a Sunday afternoon at an open-air dance hall in Montmartre: the light filtering through the trees and falling in patches on the clothes, the faces and the ground. I wrote about Renoir’s works, and about this one in particular, in my article on the style of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Here I will only tell you to look for the patches of sunlight on the clothes and the ground: they are the real subject of the painting, more than the couples dancing.
9. Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
What is real about Degas’s dancer?
The skirt and the ribbon. Edgar Degas modelled the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen in wax between 1875 and 1880, and when he showed her, in 1881, he dressed her in real clothes: a silk bodice, a tulle tutu, stockings, ballet shoes and even a wig of real hair. The public was taken aback by a realism never before seen in sculpture.
The one you see at the Orsay is a bronze cast from the original wax after the artist’s death, and of the real clothes it keeps only the tulle tutu and the satin ribbon in her hair. The model was called Marie van Goethem, and she really was fourteen. Look at the pose: hands behind her back, chin up, weight on the back leg. She is not a dancer on stage: she is a girl stretching between one rehearsal and the next.
10. Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles
Vincent van Gogh painted his bedroom in the Yellow House in Arles three times. The Orsay’s version is the last, from 1889, and the smallest: 56.5 by 74 centimetres. The other two are in Amsterdam and Chicago.
In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh explained that in this picture the colour had to do all the work and suggest rest, sleep. Look at the floor: it seems to tilt towards you. It is not a mistake in perspective: the real room was not rectangular but trapezoid, and he painted it as it was. The three versions can be told apart by the portraits hanging on the right, which change each time.
11. Seurat’s The Circus
Georges Seurat left The Circus in 1891, the year he died. It is built from dots of pure colour placed side by side, which the eye mixes by itself at a distance, and it is the last painting in which Seurat used that method. I wrote about the technique, and about how to look at a pointillist painting, in my article on Georges Seurat.
12. Gauguin’s Arearea
Paul Gauguin painted Arearea in Tahiti in 1892. The title means something like «joyfulness»: two women sit at the foot of a tree, one of them playing the flute, and in front of them a red dog crosses the picture. In the background, three figures pay homage to the statue of a god the painter invented.
When Gauguin returned to Paris and showed it, in November 1893, the public laughed. He considered it one of his best paintings, and in 1895, before leaving Europe for good, he bought it back.
The fifth-floor clock
Before you leave, climb to the top floor and look for the great clock that faces the Seine. From behind the dial you see Paris through the Roman numerals and the hands. It is the photo everyone takes, and it makes sense: from here you realise that you are inside a station.
Practical information
Data checked on 22 September 2026 on the museum’s official ticket office, on its family website petitsmo.fr and in its press room. Prices and opening hours change, and during the works they change more often: check again on musee-orsay.fr before you leave.
Tickets. A full ticket costs 16 euros online and 14 euros at the desk, and covers the collections and the exhibitions on that day. On Thursdays from 18:00 there is a single price of 12 euros. There is also a joint ticket with the Musée Rodin, at 25 euros, valid for three months. Free admission. Under-18s go in free, as do 18- to 25-year-olds who are citizens of a European Economic Area country or long-term residents there. On the first Sunday of the month the museum is free for everyone, but only with a compulsory booking, and the places run out fast. Opening hours. From Tuesday to Sunday the museum opens at 9:30 and closes at 18:00; on Thursdays it stays open until 21:45. It is closed on Mondays, and also on 1 May and 25 December. Entrance during the works. Until summer 2028 you go in from the Seine side, on the quai Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and the queue forms on the pavement. Visitors in wheelchairs or with luggage use entrance 2, on the forecourt. Booking. The museum strongly recommends it. Holders of the Paris Museum Pass, which covers the Orsay, still have to book a time slot through the official ticket office. Getting there. The nearest stop is Musée d’Orsay, on RER line C. From the Louvre it is ten minutes on foot, crossing the Seine on the Léopold-Sédar-Senghor footbridge. How long to allow. The twelve works need two and a half hours. Thursday evening, with the 12-euro ticket, is the cheapest time to go.
The exhibitions on at the Orsay, including the one on Bartholdi and the Statue of Liberty, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Monet’s Water Lilies are not here but at the Orangerie, across the Seine, which belongs to the same institution: you will find them in my article on the Musée de l’Orangerie. The kind of painting Courbet and Manet broke apart, the great history painting, is at the Louvre, in the room of the Raft of the Medusa. And if you want to see where the 19th century ends in sculpture, the Musée Rodin is ten minutes away on foot, with a joint ticket.
Photo credits: nave of the museum by Daniel Lu (CC BY-SA 4.0); Degas’s Little Dancer by Ibex73 (CC BY-SA 4.0); fifth-floor clock by Oliver H (CC BY-SA 3.0), all from Wikimedia Commons. The paintings by Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Monet and Van Gogh are in the public domain.
