The Musée d'Orsay (UK: MEW-zay dor-SAY, US: mew-ZAY -, French: [myze dɔʁsɛ]; English: Orsay Museum) is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built from 1898 to 1900. The museum holds mainly French art (including works by France based foreign artists) dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.
In 2022, the museum had 3.2 million visitors, up from 1.4 million in 2021. It was the sixth-most-visited art museum in the world in 2022, and second-most-visited art museum in France, after the Louvre.
Contents
History
The museum building was originally a railway station, Gare d'Orsay, located next to the Seine river. Built on the site of the Palais d'Orsay, its central location was convenient for commuting travelers. The station was constructed for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans and finished in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle to the design of three architects: Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Victor Laloux. The Gare d'Orsay design was considered to be an "anachronism". The museum building is accountable to 19th-century aesthetics and construction techniques that were molded to accommodate modern life. Paris had become a modern capital city following grand changes implemented by Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Architecture was thus allocated a permanent exhibition area in the museum, showcasing the new Paris opera house, and the Palais Garnier, designed by Charles Garnier and built from 1863 to 1875. At the end of the museum's central aisle, a space was dedicated to town planning, architecture and decoration.
In the 1970s, work began on building a 1 km-long tunnel under the station as part of the creation of line C of the Réseau Express Régional with a new station under the old station. In 1970, permission was granted to demolish the station but Jacques Duhamel, Minister for Cultural Affairs, ruled against plans to build a new hotel in its stead. The station was put on the supplementary list of Historic Monuments and finally listed in 1978. The suggestion to turn the station into a museum came from the Directorate of the Museum of France. The idea was to build a museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Centre. The plan was accepted by Georges Pompidou and a study was commissioned in 1974. In 1978, a competition was organized to design the new museum. ACT Architecture, a team of three young architects (Pierre Colboc, Renaud Bardon and Jean-Paul Philippon), were awarded the contract which involved creating 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft) of new floorspace on four floors. The construction work was carried out by Bouygues. In 1981, the Italian architect Gae Aulenti was chosen to design the interior including the internal arrangement, decoration, furniture and fittings of the museum. The arrangement of the galleries she designed was elaborate and inhabited the three main levels that are under the museum's barrel vault atrium. On the main level of the building, a central nave was formed by the surrounding stone structures that were previously the building's train platforms. The central nave's structures break up the immense sculpture and gallery spaces and provided more organized units for viewing the art.
In July 1986, the museum was ready to receive its exhibits. It took six months to install the approximately 2,000 paintings, 600 sculptures, and other works. The museum was officially opened in December 1986 by then-president François Mitterrand. At any given time about 3,000 art pieces are on display at Musée d'Orsay. Within the museum is a 1:100 scale model created by Richard Peduzzi of an aerial view of the Paris Opera and surrounding area. This model is encapsulated underneath glass flooring that visitors walk on as they proceed through the museum, allowing them to understand the city planning of Paris at the time, which has made this attraction one of the most popular within the museum.
Another exhibit within the museum is "A Passion for France: The Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection". This collection was donated by Marlene and Spencer Hays, art collectors who reside in Texas and have been collecting art since the early 1970s. In 2016 the museum complied to keeping the collection of about 600 art pieces in one collection rather than dispersed throughout other exhibits. Since World War II, France has not been donated a collection of foreign art this large. The collection favors mostly post-impressionist works. Artists featured in this collection are Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Aristide Maillol, André Derain, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. To make room for the art that has been donated, the Musée d'Orsay is scheduled to undergo a radical transformation over a decade starting in 2020. This remodel is funded in part by an anonymous US patron who donated €20 million to a building project known as Orsay Grand Ouvert (Orsay Wide Open). The gift was made via the American Friends of the Musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie. The projected completion date is 2026, implementing new galleries and education opportunities to endorse a conductive experience.
The square next to the museum displays six bronze allegorical sculptural groups in a row, originally produced for the Exposition Universelle:
South America by Aimé Millet
Asia by Alexandre Falguière
Oceania by Mathurin Moreau
Europe by Alexandre Schoenewerk
North America by Ernest-Eugène Hiolle
Africa by Eugène Delaplanche
Collection
Paintings: major painters and works represented
Frédéric Bazille – 6 paintings including The Family Reunion, The Improvised Field Hospital, The Pink Dress, Studio in Rue de La Condamine
Cecilia Beaux – Sita and Sarita (Jeune Fille au Chat)
Rosa Bonheur – Ploughing in the Nivernais
Pierre Bonnard – 60 paintings including The Chequered Blouse
Eugène Boudin – 33 paintings including Trouville Beach
William-Adolphe Bouguereau – 12 paintings including The Birth of Venus, La Danse, Dante and Virgil
Louise Catherine Breslau – 4 paintings including Portrait of Henry Davison
Alexandre Cabanel – The Birth of Venus, The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta
Gustave Caillebotte – 7 paintings including The Floor Scrapers, Boating Party, Vue de toits (Effet de neige)
Eugène Carrière – 86 paintings including The Painting Family, The Sick Child, Intimacy
Mary Cassatt – 1 painting
Paul Cézanne – 56 paintings including Apples and Oranges, The Hanged Man's House, The Card Players, Portrait of Gustave Geffroy
Théodore Chassériau – 5 paintings (the main collection of his paintings is in the Louvre)
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes – Young Girls by the Seaside, The Young Mother also known as Charity, View on the Château de Versailles and the Orangerie
Sculptures
Sculpture was in high demand in the 19th century and became widely used as a way to display a person's social and political standings. The style and ideology represented by many of the sculptures were out of fashion by the mid-20th century, and the sculptures were put into storage. It wasn't until the conversion of the Orsay railway station into the Musée d'Orsay museum in the 1970s that many sculptures from the 19th century were placed on exhibit again. The substantial nave inside the new museum offered a perfect area for the display of sculptures. During the grand opening of the museum in December 1986, there were 1,200 sculptures on display, brought in from collections such as the Louvre, state loans, and the Musée du Luxembourg. The museum also obtained more than 200 sculptures before opening through donations from art connoisseurs, the lineage of artists, and people in support of the Musée d'Orsay.
Since the grand opening in 1986, the museum has collected works from exchanges that other museums or institutions once showcased such as Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science by Louis-Ernest Barrias that was initially commissioned for Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, as well as The Thinker and The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin. The museum also purchases specific works to fill gaps and finish the collections already in the museum such as one of the panels of Be Mysterious by Paul Gauguin, the full set of Honoré Daumier's Célébrités du Juste Milieu, and Maturity by Camille Claudel. There are currently more than 2,200 sculptures in the Musée d'Orsay.
Major sculptors represented in the collection include Alfred Barye, François Rude, Jules Cavelier, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Émile-Coriolan Guillemin, Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin, Camille Claudel, Sarah Bernhardt, Aristide Maillol and Honoré Daumier.
Other works
It also holds collections of architecture and decorative arts, as well as photography.
In May 2026, the museum opened a permanent exhibition displaying artworks looted or sold under duress during the Nazi occupation of France. Among the works displayed are thirteen unclaimed pieces from the Musées Nationaux Récupération collection, including paintings by Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Management
The Directors have been:
Françoise Cachin: 1986 – 1994
Henri Loyrette: 1994 – 2001
Serge Lemoine: 2001 – 2008
Guy Cogeval: March 2008 – March 2017
Laurence des Cars: March 2017 – September 2021
Christophe Leribault: October 2021 – April 2024
Sylvain Amic: April 2024 – August 2025
Annick Lemoine became the new president on 19 March 2026, following the death of Sylvain Amic.