The Musée d'Orsay opened in December 1986 in a railway station that the architect Victor Laloux had built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. The collection for the new museum was assembled almost entirely from works the State already owned. French art of the second half of the 19th century was brought here from the Louvre, from the Jeu de Paume gallery, where the Impressionists had been shown since 1947, and from the Musée National d'Art Moderne. Before they reached the Louvre, many of the paintings had hung for years in the Musée du Luxembourg, where the State sent works by living artists.
In 1863 Napoleon III bought Alexandre Cabanel's The Birth of Venus at the Salon, while the jury of the same Salon rejected Édouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, and the picture was shown at the Salon des Refusés. The Luncheon entered the national collection 43 years later, as the gift of a private collector. Over the years, what France would keep was decided by the emperor and parliament, by the curators of the Louvre and private donors, by artists who pooled their money, and by heirs who paid inheritance tax with a painting.
The Emperor and the Painter's Sister, 1879–1881
1. The Birth of Venus — Alexandre Cabanel
When the Second Empire fell in 1870, the property Napoleon III had bought out of the civil list, that is, the emperor's personal budget, was placed under seizure. The dispute over it dragged on until 1879. In the end it was decided that works from the imperial residences would pass to the State, and the curators of the Louvre chose from them whatever was of “historic or artistic interest”, judging by the fame of the painter and of the picture itself. They kept The Birth of Venus, which the emperor had bought for himself at the Salon of 1863. In the State inventory the painting is recorded as seized and transferred to the national museums by a court decision in 1879. In 1881 it was sent to the Musée du Luxembourg, and in 1923 to the Louvre.
Venus lies on the crest of a small wave, her feet to the left and her head to the right. She has thrown her right arm across her face, and from under the elbow her half-closed eyes show, like the eyes of someone not yet awake. Her red-gold hair spreads over the water along the wave. Five cupids fly above her in an arc, and two of them blow on conch shells. The body is painted smoothly, almost without shadows, with no brushstroke to be seen, and the only thing on the canvas lighter than the body is the white foam under her shoulders.
Contemporaries judged this smoothness in different ways. Théophile Gautier wrote in 1863 that the body seemed “kneaded from the snowy foam of the waves”. Émile Zola, who saw the picture at the Universal Exhibition of 1867, called Venus “a delicious lorette”, that is, a kept woman, drowned in a river of milk and made of “a sort of almond paste, white and pink”. The writer Joris-Karl Huysmans dubbed her the “Vénus à la crème”, the Venus with cream.
2. A Burial at Ornans — Gustave Courbet
In the winter of 1849–1850 Gustave Courbet, then 30, painted this picture in his home town of Ornans, in the Franche-Comté, in the attic of the house where his maternal grandparents had once lived. The attic was too cramped for a canvas this size, and Courbet worked on it section by section, keeping the rest rolled up. In a letter to his friend the critic Champfleury he complained that he was working blind and could not step back from the picture. The canvas is almost seven metres long, and the figures on it are life-size. At the time that size was used for historical and religious scenes, and here a provincial town is burying one of its own. Who is being buried cannot be told from the picture, and historians have proposed different answers, from the painter's grandfather, who died in 1848, to the burial of the Republic itself.
The people of Ornans came to pose one after another. In a letter Courbet listed the mayor, the curé, the justice of the peace, the notary, his own father, the choirboys, the gravedigger and two old revolutionaries of 1793. Those two stand to the right of centre in clothes half a century out of date, knee breeches and gaiters, and in front of them is a white dog with a dark head. The gravedigger, in a white shirt, has gone down on one knee at the edge of the grave and looks aside, past the priest. Against all the black clothing only two beadles stand out, in red robes and tall red caps. The grave itself is cut off by the lower edge of the painting, so that the viewer stands at its far side, and on the turned earth beside it lie a skull and bones.
Courbet had just won a medal at the Salon of 1849 and so could show the Burial at the Salon of 1850–1851 without going before the jury. Critics attacked the picture for its ugly faces, and no buyer came forward. In 1864 Courbet described its condition like this: the frame broken, the stretcher used for something else, the canvas rolled up and in poor shape.
After the Commune Courbet was held responsible for pulling down the Vendôme Column and ordered to pay for its reconstruction. He left for Switzerland and died there on 31 December 1877. In 1881 his sister and heir, Juliette, gave the Burial to the State, and in 1882 the picture was shown at the Louvre for the first time. In the same year, 1881, Juliette sold another large picture by her brother, The Painter's Studio, at auction.
In the restoration of 2025–2026 the yellowed varnish was removed and the edges, which had been folded over the stretcher, were opened out. Along the bottom edge a narrow strip of Courbet's painting came to light.
The Widow, the Painters and the Poet, 1890–1891
3. The Gleaners — Jean-François Millet
Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery, the widow who ran the Pommery champagne house in Reims, wanted to buy Millet's The Angelus for the Louvre and failed. On 3 October 1889 her intermediary, the Reims patron Louis Guyotin, forwarded a letter saying that she had bought The Gleaners instead. She paid the owner, Bischoffsheim, 300,000 francs and from the start meant the picture as a gift to the State.
Millet, the son of Norman peasants, had lived since 1849 in Barbizon, a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and painted peasant labour there. In this picture three women are gleaning ears of wheat in a harvested field. Two are bent double, so that their heads are lower than their backs, and the third is straightening up with a handful of ears, so that from left to right they read as one movement: reach down, gather, straighten up. The sun is low on the left, the shadows fall to the right, and the faces are in shadow. In the distance, in a golden haze, are huge stacks, a cart and harvesters, and on the right, by the farm buildings, a tiny rider sits on a horse. He is the overseer. Gleaning after the harvest was an old right of the poor, local rules restricted it, and the overseer made sure the rules were kept.
At the Salon of 1857 the conservative critic Paul de Saint-Victor called the three women “the Three Fates of pauperism”, while the liberal Edmond About praised the picture's austere simplicity. After the Salon it sold for 2,000 or 3,000 francs (the sources give both figures).
Madame Pommery gave the picture to the State while keeping the use of it for her lifetime. The curators of the Louvre accepted the gift on 30 January 1890, the decree was signed on 15 March, and on 18 March Madame Pommery died.
4. Olympia — Édouard Manet
A woman lies on two large white pillows and looks straight at the viewer, steadily and without expression. All she has on is a black ribbon round her neck with a pearl pendant, a gold bracelet, a pink flower in her hair and backless slippers. Her left hand is pressed flat against her thigh. A Black maid holds out a bouquet wrapped in white paper, but her mistress does not look at the flowers. At the foot of the bed stands a small black cat with an arched back and raised tail, so hard to make out against the dark wall that only its two yellow eyes show. The light falls flat on the body from the front, leaving it almost without shadows, and the outline holds the form.
The model was Victorine Meurent, Manet's regular model, who later became a painter herself and exhibited at the Salon. She is also the seated woman in Luncheon on the Grass. The maid, as the art historian Denise Murrell established, was called Laure, and she lived not far from Manet, in the Batignolles quarter.
Manet painted Olympia in 1863 and showed it at the Salon of 1865. The newspaper Le Siècle wrote of a woman who “must have spent at least two days on a slab at the Morgue” and whose “belly is beginning to turn green”. A month later the administration rehung the picture high above the doors, further from the public's eyes. It remained unsold, and after Manet's death in 1883 it passed to his widow, Suzanne.
In July 1889 the painter Claude Monet and the writer Octave Mirbeau launched a subscription to buy Olympia from the widow and give it to the State. Edgar Degas gave 100 francs, and the sculptor Auguste Rodin gave 25, explaining in a letter that he wanted to see his name on the list. Zola, who had defended Manet in print as far back as the 1860s, refused to subscribe. On 7 February 1890 Monet, on behalf of the subscribers, offered the picture to the Minister of Public Instruction, Armand Fallières. The total raised was 19,415 francs. The State accepted the gift for the Musée du Luxembourg, although the subscribers had pressed for the Louvre. In 1907 Georges Clemenceau, a friend of Monet's who had become prime minister, ordered Olympia moved to the Louvre.
5. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler's Mother) — James McNeill Whistler
Before France bought the picture, James Whistler, an American who had studied painting in Paris and lived in London, pawned it more than once. In 1878 he won a libel suit against the critic John Ruskin, was awarded one farthing in damages and was ruined by the legal costs. In 1878–1879 the portrait of his mother was held in pledge by Graves, a London firm of print dealers. In his bankruptcy it was valued at £500, and Whistler redeemed it in instalments. In 1886 he pledged the picture again, this time to the theatre impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, for the same £500.
He had painted it in 1871 in Chelsea. A model failed to turn up, and Whistler asked his mother, Anna Whistler, then in her sixties, to sit for him. At first she posed standing, but she grew tired, and her son sat her down. She sits on the right in strict profile, facing left. The black dress is painted as one flat dark mass from shoulder to floor and reads as a silhouette. The only warm colour is in the face and hands. On her head is a white lace cap with long lappets, in her folded hands a white handkerchief, and her feet rest on a low footstool. On the grey wall, in a black frame with a wide white mount, hangs one of Whistler's own etchings of warehouses on the Thames, and on the dark curtain at the left, among small flowers, his signature, a butterfly in a circle, can just be made out.
Whistler chose a title that put the colours first. The picture already carried the subtitle Portrait of the Artist's Mother at its first exhibition, at the Royal Academy in London in 1872.
In 1891 the portrait was shown in Paris at the Goupil gallery. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the critics Théodore Duret and Roger Marx and the politician Georges Clemenceau set about getting it bought. The price was deliberately set low so that the State would agree, and on 30 November 1891 the State bought the picture for 4,000 francs, entering it in the records as a “portrait of an old lady”. Mallarmé wrote that for this picture the Luxembourg was merely the antechamber to the Louvre. Early in 1892 Whistler received the Legion of Honour.
In 1934 the United States Post Office issued a Mother's Day stamp with this picture, cropping the composition and adding a vase of flowers.
Caillebotte's Bequest, 1894–1896
6. Dance at the Moulin de la Galette — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The journalist Georges Rivière, a friend of Renoir's, appears in this picture among the group at the table and later wrote about it himself. According to his memoir of 1921, in the summer of 1876 Renoir rented an old cottage in the rue Cortot in Montmartre, near the Moulin de la Galette, an open-air dance hall by the old windmills, and lived there the whole time he was working on the picture. His friends, painters and writers, posed for him, and so did girls from Montmartre. At the table Rivière names himself, the painters Franc-Lamy and Norbert Goeneutte and two sisters, Jeanne and Estelle. The girl in the striped dress on the bench is usually taken to be Estelle. In the spring of 1877 the picture was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition, and Rivière wrote in his small newspaper L'Impressionniste that it was “a page of history, a precious monument of Parisian life, done with rigorous exactness”.
The light comes through the leaves and falls in pale blue and yellow patches on the ground, on the straw hats, on the backs of dark jackets. Renoir painted the shadows blue. The faces in the foreground are soft and warm, and further back the crowd breaks up into brushstrokes and bobbing hats. In the lower left corner the frame cuts through the face of a young woman and a fair-haired child, as in a chance snapshot.
The picture was bought by Gustave Caillebotte, a painter from a wealthy family who bought his friends' work and paid for their exhibitions. According to the museum, he acquired it between 1877 and April 1879. Caillebotte died on 21 February 1894 and left his collection to the State on condition that the pictures went to the Musée du Luxembourg and later to the Louvre. He named Renoir as his executor. The State accepted only part of the collection, the pictures were handed over in 1896, and from 1897 they were shown in an annexe of the Musée du Luxembourg.
A second version of the Dance, smaller and more loosely painted, stayed in private hands. In 1990, at Sotheby's in New York, it was bought for $78.1 million by the Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito.
7. La Gare Saint-Lazare — Claude Monet
In his 1962 book about his father, Renoir's son, the film director Jean Renoir, retold a story the painter used to tell about Monet. It was written down many decades after the events and should be taken as family lore. Monet, who had no money, put on his best suit and lace cuffs, took a cane with a gold knob and presented himself to the director of the Western Railway. The director received the painter with such deference that he ordered trains to be held, platforms to be cleared and the engines' fireboxes to be stoked with coal so that they would give off as much smoke as possible.
The documents show that in January 1877 Monet received permission from the Western Railway to work in the Gare Saint-Lazare, the station for trains to Normandy and to Argenteuil, where he was living at the time. In the first months of 1877 he painted about a dozen pictures there. According to the Art Institute of Chicago, the rent for a small flat nearby, in the rue Moncey, was paid for him by Caillebotte.
The view is from inside, under the station's glass roof. Two heavy sloping planes of roof meet in the middle to form a tall triangle, and within it are daylight and a column of blue steam, almost exactly at the centre. Below, a black locomotive faces the viewer head-on, half hidden in white smoke. The sun falls on the rails between the shadows of the roof, and Monet rendered it in patches of yellow, ochre and violet. Iron, steam and sky are all painted with the same short strokes.
On 10 March 1878 Caillebotte bought this picture from Monet for 685 francs, and in 1896 it entered the Musée du Luxembourg together with the pictures from his bequest.
Émile Zola wrote in 1877 that in Monet's stations you could hear the rumble of the trains and see the smoke billowing under the vast sheds. In 1890 he made the Gare Saint-Lazare one of the settings of his novel La Bête humaine.
8. The Floor Scrapers — Gustave Caillebotte
The jury of the Salon of 1875 rejected this picture by Gustave Caillebotte, who was then 26. It is usually thought that the jury found the subject vulgar, half-naked workmen at their trade. Caillebotte came from a wealthy family, had studied with the Salon painter Léon Bonnat and in 1873 had entered the École des Beaux-Arts, so he had prepared the picture for a conventional debut at the Salon. After the rejection he joined the Impressionists, showed The Floor Scrapers at their second exhibition in April 1876 and became one of the group's main buyers and patrons. Zola, who saw The Floor Scrapers in 1876, gave the picture its due but called the painting “bourgeois” because of its excessive exactness.
Caillebotte's bequest covered his friends' pictures. This one was given to the State separately in 1894 by his heirs, together with Renoir as executor, and in 1896 it entered the Musée du Luxembourg.
The floor is seen from above, as if the viewer were standing over the workmen, and it rises steeply towards the far wall, so that only a narrow strip of wall is left at the top. Three men, stripped to the waist, kneel and scrape the old varnish off the parquet. On the left and in front the boards are already pale, almost bare wood, while on the right they are still dark, and long pale streaks, reflections of the window, run along the dark boards. Curls of shavings lie around their hands, and at the right edge stand a bottle of wine and a half-empty glass. The two men on the right have bent their heads towards each other and seem to be talking.
The Collectors, 1906–1911
9. Luncheon on the Grass — Édouard Manet
In July 1906 the painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton gave the State about 100 of his paintings and some 20 watercolours, pastels and drawings. Among them were Monet's Poppies, about 40 works by Corot and Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, which had come to him in 1900 from the dealer Durand-Ruel. He later added two more batches to the gift, in 1907 and 1919, on terms that obliged the museum to show them. The collection was assigned to the Louvre, but from 1907 to 1934 it was shown in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in the Pavillon de Marsan, a wing of the Louvre palace, and the Luncheon reached the galleries of the Louvre itself only in 1934.
At the Salon des Refusés of 1863 the picture was shown under the title The Bath, people laughed at it, and no buyer was found. In 1871 Manet valued it at 25,000 francs, and in 1878 he sold it for 2,600 to the opera baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who collected his pictures.
The naked woman sits sideways, her chin propped on her hand, and has turned her face straight to the viewer. Her body is pale and flat, almost chalky beside the men's dark frock coats. The men look past her, and the one on the right, in a soft tasselled cap, is saying something, his hand held out palm up. The most sharply painted part is the still life at lower left: a blue dress, a straw hat, an overturned basket with fruit spilling out of it, a round loaf and a silver flask. The woman in the stream in the middle distance is too large for where she stands and seems to hover above the three figures in the foreground, and at the top, among the branches, a bullfinch is in flight.
The model was Victorine Meurent, who also posed for Olympia. For the men Manet used Ferdinand Leenhoff, a sculptor and his wife's brother, and one of his own brothers, Eugène or Gustave, and scholars disagree about which man is which. He based the composition on the Pastoral Concert in the Louvre, then attributed to Giorgione and now to Titian, and on Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris.
Moreau-Nélaton later became Manet's biographer, and his book Manet raconté par lui-même (Manet in His Own Words) came out in 1926.
10. The Angelus — Jean-François Millet
On 1 July 1889 the collection of Eugène Secrétan went up for sale in Paris. He was an industrialist who had been ruined that spring when the price of copper collapsed. The sale was timed to coincide with the Universal Exhibition, and the catalogue was printed in French and English to attract Americans. The Angelus was fought over by Antonin Proust, a friend of Manet's and a former Minister of Fine Arts, who was bidding for the Louvre on behalf of a group of art lovers, and James Sutton of the American Art Association in New York. The picture went to Proust for 553,000 francs, and the room shouted “Vive la France!”
The money for the purchase had to come from parliament. The deputy Édouard Lockroy warned that otherwise the picture would tour America with a label reading “Refused by the French Chamber”, while Jacques Salis argued that 553,000 francs was too much for the Republic. The bill was not sent on to the Senate in time, and in mid-July it was withdrawn. Proust let the picture go to the Americans, and in 1889–1890 it was exhibited in the United States. In 1890 Alfred Chauchard, the founder of the Grands Magasins du Louvre department store in Paris, bought it and brought it back to France, paying, according to different accounts, between 750,000 and 800,000 francs. Chauchard died in 1909 and left his collection to the Louvre, more than 100 paintings and bronzes, nearly all of them French, and on 15 January 1910 the bequest was confirmed by decree.
Millet, who died in January 1875, recalled that the idea for the picture came from his childhood. Whenever his grandmother heard the church bell out in the fields, she would stop work and make everyone say the Angelus for the poor dead, the prayer Catholics say at the sound of the bell in the morning, at noon and in the evening. In the picture the sun has already set. A man and a woman stand in a potato field with their heads bowed. The woman has folded her hands under her chin, and the man holds his cap against his chest. Between them on the ground is a basket of potatoes, on the left a pitchfork is stuck in the earth, on the right stands a wheelbarrow with sacks, and on the horizon, to the right of the woman's head, a church spire can barely be seen.
On 11 August 1932 an engineer, Pierre Guillard, slashed the picture in the Louvre with a pocket knife. The restorers promised at the time to make the damage invisible, apart from a tear in the sky.
Salvador Dalí believed that under the basket Millet had first painted a child's coffin, and no museum or laboratory publication has confirmed it. At Dalí's request the Louvre laboratory made an X-ray, which shows a dark oblong shape painted over under the basket, and Dalí printed it in his book The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus, published in 1963.
11. In a Café (L'Absinthe) — Edgar Degas
The actress Ellen Andrée and the painter and engraver Marcellin Desboutin, a regular at the Nouvelle Athènes café on the place Pigalle, where the Impressionists gathered around 1876, were friends of Degas and posed for him in his studio. Degas seated them at a table in that café and composed the scene so that it would look as if it had been glimpsed by chance.
Three grey-white marble table tops, with no legs shown, zigzag in from the lower left corner, and the empty marble fills the whole left side and bottom of the picture. The two figures sit in the upper right corner. The woman, in a light dress and a small hat, has let her shoulders drop and looks down and to one side. In front of her stands a glass of cloudy yellow-green liquid, absinthe, nearer to the man's table than to her own. The man in black, with a pipe, looks to the right, out past the frame, and the right edge of the picture cuts through his hand and his pipe. In the mirror behind them only the dark, blurred backs of their heads are reflected.
Degas himself called the picture In a Café. In 1876 Captain Henry Hill of Brighton bought it through a London dealer and showed it in Brighton as A Sketch at a French Café, and at the time it attracted little attention. On 19 February 1892, when Hill's collection was sold at Christie's, the room greeted it with hisses. In 1893 the picture was shown at the Grafton Gallery in London, for the first time under the title L'Absinthe, and a storm broke in the press. The painter Walter Crane called it “a study of human degradation, male and female”. The public took Andrée and Desboutin for real drunkards.
In the same year, 1893, the picture was bought in Paris by Count Isaac de Camondo, a banker and collector, and in 1911, under his will, it entered the Louvre together with his other Degas works and his Monets and Cézannes.
12. The Card Players — Paul Cézanne
Two men sit facing each other at a small table, looking at their cards. Between them stands a dark wine bottle with a single white streak of highlight, and it divides the canvas almost exactly in half. The man on the left, with a short white clay pipe between his teeth, is dark, upright and compact and holds his cards to his chest. The man on the right, in a light jacket, is longer and heavier, leans low over the table and is cut off by the right edge of the canvas. The tablecloth hangs from the front of the table in one flat fold, and the background above their heads dissolves into patches of olive, green and violet.
In the early and middle 1890s Paul Cézanne, then in his fifties and working mostly in his home town of Aix-en-Provence, painted five pictures of card players. Two of them show several people at the table, and they are now in the Metropolitan Museum and the Barnes Foundation. The other three have two players. The Orsay version is the smallest of those three, and it was long thought to be the last in the series, though technical studies in 2010 cast doubt on that order.
The first owner of the picture was the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who gave Cézanne his first solo exhibition in 1895. On 4 May 1907 it was bought by Count Isaac de Camondo, and in 1911 it was part of his bequest to the Louvre.
In 1961 the Louvre lent the picture to a Cézanne exhibition at the Pavillon de Vendôme in Aix-en-Provence. On the night of 12 to 13 August eight Cézannes were carried off from it, The Card Players among them. A single gendarme was on duty, downstairs, and the alarm did not go off. On 10 November, while the search was still going on, the French post office issued a stamp showing Cézanne's Card Players. The pictures were found on 11 April 1962 in a stolen Peugeot 404 abandoned in Marseille, after an anonymous telephone call to the police.
Cézanne's models were workers on the family estate, the Jas de Bouffan, outside Aix. According to the catalogue of his paintings, one of the players was called Paulin Paulet, and he was paid five francs a sitting.
Between the Wars, 1920–1936
13. The Painter's Studio — Gustave Courbet
Juliette Courbet, the same sister who gave A Burial at Ornans to the State in 1881, sold The Painter's Studio on 9 December of that year, at auction at the Hôtel Drouot, to the Galerie Haro for 21,000 francs. It was later bought by the Paris collector Victor Desfossés. After his death his widow bought it back at the sale of his estate, and until 1919 the canvas, almost six metres wide, hung as the backdrop of an amateur theatre in the Desfossés mansion on the rue Galilée. On 13 February 1920 the picture was bought for the Louvre with money from a public subscription and from the Société des Amis du Louvre. The price usually given is 700,000 francs.
Courbet painted it at Ornans in the winter of 1854–1855 for the Universal Exhibition in Paris and gave it the subtitle “A real allegory summing up a seven-year phase of my artistic and moral life”. He counted the seven years from the revolution of 1848.
Courbet himself sits at the centre painting a landscape, and that landscape on the easel is the brightest and bluest spot in the whole picture. Behind his shoulder stands a nude model, holding a white sheet to her breast, and her dress lies on the floor in a pink and white heap. By the painter's knee a boy in clogs looks at the canvas, and lower down a white cat is playing. On the left Courbet placed what he called, in a letter to Champfleury, “the other world of trivial life, the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited, the exploiters”, and on the right “the shareholders”, that is, his friends and art lovers. At the far right Charles Baudelaire sits reading a book. Beside him Courbet painted out, at the poet's request, his mistress Jeanne Duval, and over time, as the paint grew more transparent, her silhouette began to show through.
The jury of the 1855 exhibition accepted 11 of Courbet's works and rejected this one and A Burial at Ornans. Courbet put up a pavilion of his own next to the exhibition, called it the Pavilion of Realism and hung The Painter's Studio as number one. Eugène Delacroix went there alone, stayed for nearly an hour and wrote in his diary: “I discover a masterpiece in his rejected picture. I could not tear myself away from the sight of it.”
14. Women in the Garden — Claude Monet
In the spring of 1866, in the garden of the house he was renting at Ville-d'Avray outside Paris, Claude Monet began a picture more than two and a half metres high, and he painted part of it in the open air. To reach the upper part without changing his point of view, he dug a trench in the garden and lowered the canvas into it. Monet was 25 and had no money.
His companion and future wife, Camille Doncieux, posed for the three women on the left. Four women in crinolines stand and sit under a canopy of leaves, and a thin forked tree divides the picture in two. The white skirt of the woman seated in the centre spreads over the grass in a huge circle trimmed with black braid, and the sunlight cuts across it diagonally. In the shade the white dresses take on a cold blue. The red-haired woman on the right reaches for a branch and seems to glide towards it, barely touching the ground. The restoration of 2020–2021 showed that Monet added the woman in the striped dress on the left later and moved his signature from the middle to the lower right corner.
The jury of the Salon of 1867 rejected the picture. Monet's friend the painter Frédéric Bazille bought it for 2,500 francs, paid at 50 francs a month, to help Monet while Camille was expecting a child. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 at Beaune-la-Rolande, and his father inherited the picture. According to a version given by Monet's cataloguer Daniel Wildenstein, in 1876 Bazille's father exchanged it with Manet for Renoir's portrait of his son, and Manet gave the picture back to Monet in exchange for one of Monet's works.
After that Women in the Garden stayed with Monet for 45 years, at Argenteuil and then at Giverny. In 1921 the State bought the picture from the artist for 200,000 francs for the Musée du Luxembourg. In those same years Monet was negotiating with the State over the gift of the Water Lilies, and the deed of gift for 19 panels was signed on 12 April 1922.
15. Tahitian Women on the Beach — Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin gave this picture, in Tahiti, to a certain Captain Arnaud. The captain's daughter, Madame Wilmot, kept it in Papeete until 1920, so the picture spent about 30 years on the island. It then passed to Vicomte Guy de Cholet, and in 1923 his sister, Comtesse Vitali, gave it to the State in memory of her brother.
In June 1891 Gauguin, having sold his work at auction at the Hôtel Drouot to pay for the voyage, arrived in Papeete, and he painted this picture in his first months on Tahiti. Two women sit on yellow sand and fill almost the whole canvas, and the one on the right is so large that the frame is too tight for her, so that her knee and the hem of her dress run off the right edge. The woman on the left sits with her back to the viewer, leaning on one arm, her head bowed. She has long black hair with a yellow ribbon, a white flower behind her ear and a bright red pareo with large white leaves. The woman on the right sits cross-legged in a loose pink dress with long sleeves, buttoned up to the throat, of the kind the missionaries had introduced on the island. She is plaiting something out of orange palm fibre and glancing sideways towards the viewer. The women do not look at each other. Beyond the sand lie bands of dark water, bright green land and dark sea with white breakers.
In 1892 Gauguin repeated the composition in Parau api (What News?), now in Dresden, and dressed the woman on the right in a striped pareo.
16. Polar Bear — François Pompon
François Pompon was 67 when, in 1922, his plaster polar bear at the Salon d'Automne in Paris made him famous. For several decades before that he had worked as a praticien, a carver who translated other sculptors' models into marble, including for Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin. Around 1905 he turned to animals, drawing and modelling them in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and he rigged up a portable modelling stand strapped to his chest so that he could work the clay while following an animal. He modelled at first with every detail and then gradually took the details away.
In 1927 the State commissioned a large stone version for the Musée du Luxembourg for 25,000 francs. The journalist Louise Weiss, editor of the magazine L'Europe nouvelle, had put in a word for Pompon with the minister Édouard Herriot, and the banker and collector David David-Weill gave the block of limestone. The bear was carved by the praticien Jean-Joachim Supéry under Pompon's supervision, in a workshop at Malakoff outside Paris, and this time it was another carver who put the model into stone, for Pompon himself. The bear was delivered on 16 February 1929. From the Luxembourg it went in 1939 to the Musée National d'Art Moderne, and in 1986 to the Musée d'Orsay. The famous plaster of 1922 and this stone bear remain two separate sculptures.
The life-size bear walks on legs as straight as columns, and one hind foot has already lifted its heel off the base, as if he were pushing off. His head is raised on a long, thick neck, the muzzle lifted as though he were sniffing the air. The stone is smooth and matt, and not a single groove marks the fur. The eyes are indicated by two small dots and the mouth by one thin incised line, which makes the bear seem to be smiling slightly. Pompon said he liked sculpture “without holes or shadows”.
Pompon died in 1933 and left the State about 300 works, most of which were transferred in 1948 to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon.
17. Panels for La Goulue's Booth — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
La Goulue, Louise Weber, the cancan star of the Moulin Rouge cabaret, left it in 1895, took a pitch at the Foire du Trône fair and opened a booth of her own, where she performed an “oriental” belly dance. For the front of the booth she asked her friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to paint two large canvases. Lautrec, who in 1891 had made her famous with a poster for the Moulin Rouge, painted two panels, each about three metres high and about as wide, and they were hung outside by the entrance, in rain and sun.
On the left panel, her past, La Goulue dances at the Moulin Rouge with Valentin le Désossé, Valentin the Boneless, and on the right panel, her present, she performs her new “Moorish” dance in the booth before an audience. Lautrec left the background unworked almost everywhere, and the figures are drawn in dark brush lines straight onto the brown canvas, with only some of them filled in with colour. La Goulue herself is painted fully in colour, in a green skirt over a froth of white petticoats, while her partner, the long Valentin in his top hat, is little more than strokes. In the audience on the right panel scholars recognise a heavy man in a top hat as Oscar Wilde and, on the right and larger than anyone else, the critic Félix Fénéon with his pointed beard.
In 1900, when the booth had failed, the canvases were bought by the collector Dr Georges Viau. In 1907 his collection was sold off, the panels went to the dealer Hodebert, and in 1926 Hodebert cut both canvases into eight large pieces, stretched each piece on a stretcher of its own and framed it as a separate picture. In 1929 the State bought the pieces and the offcuts of canvas from a single owner, Hugues Simon, and the fragment with Valentin le Désossé was given by a Monsieur Auffray. In 1930 the panels were put back together.
The seams on the canvases are visible. Straight lines divide them into rectangles and run right through the figures, and on the left panel a strip of lighter canvas has been set in under Valentin's feet.
18. The Cradle — Berthe Morisot
A young woman sits on the left in profile, her chin propped on her hand, looking at a sleeping child. The cradle fills the whole lower half and the right edge of the picture, and a white muslin veil comes down over it from above, crossing the picture diagonally and passing even in front of the mother's breast. The child is seen through the muslin with its eyes closed, and the small arm bent up by its head repeats the mother's bent arm. With her other hand the woman touches the edge of the cradle. The picture is painted almost entirely in whites, grey-blues and pinks, and only the mother's jacket and a strip at the right edge stay dark.
The picture shows Berthe Morisot's elder sister, Edma Pontillon, and Edma's daughter Blanche, born on 23 December 1871. The sisters had studied painting together, but Edma married a naval officer, Adolphe Pontillon, moved to Lorient and gave up painting.
In the spring of 1874 Berthe Morisot was the only woman among the artists at the first Impressionist exhibition, held in the photographer Nadar's former studio on the boulevard des Capucines. She showed nine works, The Cradle among them. Nobody bought the picture, and Morisot withdrew it from sale. When she died in 1895, her death certificate said “no profession”.
The picture stayed in the family, and in 1930 the Louvre bought it from Madame Blanche Forget, née Pontillon, the very child in the cradle, who was then 58.
19. Little Dancer Aged Fourteen — Edgar Degas
Marie van Goethem was born on 7 June 1865 in Paris to a poor Belgian family. She and her sisters trained at the ballet school of the Opéra, she turned 14 in 1879, and at about that time Edgar Degas modelled from her the figure that gave the sculpture its title. In May 1882 she was dismissed from the school for missing classes, and her biographers have been unable to find out what became of her after that.
Degas modelled her in tinted wax over an armature and dressed her in a real silk bodice, a tulle tutu, stockings and ballet shoes, tied a satin ribbon in her hair and gave her a wig of real hair. In April 1881 he showed the figure at the sixth Impressionist exhibition, in a glass case. It is the only sculpture Degas ever showed in public. The critic Paul Mantz asked in the newspaper Le Temps why she was so ugly, and one reviewer called her “part monkey, part Aztec”.
After Degas's death in September 1917 about 150 wax figures were found in his studio. The heirs came to an agreement with the founder Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard, who cast them in bronze, the Little Dancer in nearly 30 copies. Degas never gave permission for casts, and all his bronzes are posthumous, so the figure at the Orsay is a copy made after the artist's death. This cast, marked with the letter P, was bought by the State in 1930 and entered the Louvre in 1931. The documents say the purchase was made possible by the generosity of the artist's heirs and the Hébrard family.
The girl stands in fourth position, her left leg set back and her hands clasped behind her, her chin raised high and her eyes almost closed. The bodice is cast in bronze along with its buttons and folds, while the ribbon on the bronze plait and the tulle tutu are made of real fabric.
The wax original is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received it in 1999 from the collection of Paul Mellon.
20. The Snake Charmer — Henri Rousseau
Berthe Delaunay, the mother of the painter Robert Delaunay, commissioned this picture from Henri Rousseau in 1907. According to a widely told story, she had travelled in India, liked telling her guests about the journey and asked Rousseau to paint something to remember it by. Rousseau had once worked at a Paris toll gate, where duty was levied on goods coming into the city, which is how he got the nickname the Douanier, the customs man, and he never left France. He put his jungles together from the hothouses and menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, from illustrated magazines and from the exotic villages built for the Universal Exhibitions.
The picture is painted against the light. On the left a full moon hangs over the water in a greenish sky, and the snake charmer, standing almost at the centre and facing the viewer, is entirely black, with only her eyes shining. She plays a flute, one snake hangs over her shoulders like a garment, and another rises towards her out of the grass. On the left a pink spoonbill stands in the reeds, on the right leaves rise like a wall, and each leaf is outlined separately.
The picture later passed to Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and in May 1922 they sold it to the couturier and collector Jacques Doucet for 50,000 francs. The sale was arranged by the poet André Breton, who was then advising Doucet on what to buy. The sellers made it a condition that Doucet should leave the picture to the Louvre. Doucet died on 30 October 1929, his widow asked to keep the picture, and the State accepted the bequest only in 1936.
Three Van Goghs, 1949–1975
21. Self-portrait — Vincent van Gogh
Paul Gachet and his sister Marguerite, the children of Dr Paul Gachet, gave this self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh to the State in 1949, together with the portrait of the doctor himself. With this gift began a series of Gachet family gifts that ran on through the 1950s. Dr Gachet had treated Van Gogh at Auvers-sur-Oise, where the painter died on 29 July 1890. How the self-portrait came to the doctor is reported by only one source, the British magazine Apollo, which wrote in 2024 that Gachet received the picture from Theo, the painter's brother, soon after Vincent's death.
Van Gogh, a Dutchman, had lived in France since 1886. In February 1888 he settled in Arles, and after attacks of illness at the end of that year, in May 1889 he voluntarily entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy. In July a new attack struck him, and for several weeks he could not work. He painted this portrait in September 1889 and around 20 September sent it to Theo in Paris with a letter: “You must look at it for some time. You'll see, I hope, that my physiognomy has grown much calmer, although the gaze may be vaguer than before, so it appears to me.” It is one of his last self-portraits.
The face is painted in yellow ochre with green shadows, the lips pressed together and the eyes turned sideways towards the viewer. The red hair and beard are laid on in short parallel strokes. The pale blue-green background is covered in curls and whirlpools, and the same wavy strokes carry on into the jacket, so that the figure almost merges with the wall, set apart from it only by the dark outlines and the orange head.
In May 1890 Van Gogh moved to Auvers to be in Dr Gachet's care, took this canvas back from Theo and showed it to the doctor. In June he wrote to his sister that Gachet was delighted with the self-portrait, and he painted a portrait of the doctor, remarking in the same letter that his portrait of himself was “almost like this too”.
22. Bedroom in Arles — Vincent van Gogh
In April 1959, 375 works from the collection of Kojiro Matsukata, a Japanese industrialist who had bought European art in Paris, arrived at the Japanese port of Yokohama, and in June of that year the National Museum of Western Art opened in Tokyo with them. France kept about 20 works for itself, and Bedroom in Arles was one of them.
Matsukata bought the picture in the early 1920s at Paul Rosenberg's gallery in Paris. It was never shipped to Japan and stayed with the part of the collection kept in Paris. In 1944, after the liberation of France, that collection was confiscated as enemy property. Under Article 14 of the peace treaty signed in San Francisco on 8 September 1951, the Allies were entitled to keep Japanese property, and the collection passed to the French State. In 1953 the art historian Yukio Yashiro, who had once advised Matsukata, asked the Director of the Museums of France, Georges Salles, to return the Bedroom and one Renoir. After negotiations the Renoir was handed back, but the Van Gogh was not. By a decree of 27 May 1959 the Bedroom was assigned to the Louvre.
In 2024 Robert Casanovas, president of the organisation International Restitutions, argued that France had never formally declared war on Japan, so that the seizure of 1944 had no legal basis, and he called the retention of the picture an unlawful appropriation. The official French position is different. The picture passed to the State under the peace treaty of 1951 and the decree of 1959, and the rest of the collection was returned to Japan as a gift.
The Orsay Bedroom is the third and smallest of three. Van Gogh painted the first in Arles in October 1888, and it was damaged by damp while he was in hospital. In September 1889, at Saint-Rémy, he repeated it at the same size, and at the end of the month he made a smaller replica for his mother and sister in Holland (the first version is now in Amsterdam, the second in Chicago). He painted from the earlier picture, because he no longer had that room. The floor rises steeply towards the window, and the back wall seems to press forward. The bed of yellow wood with a blood-red blanket fills the right half, the only hot red patch in the picture. Above the bed, in orange frames, hang two portraits, a beardless red-haired man in a blue jacket and a dark-haired woman with lowered eyes. In the Amsterdam version other portraits hang in that place, and scholars have not established who the woman is, although some see in her the painter's sister Willemien.
In 2019 the picture was shown in Tokyo, at an exhibition of the Matsukata collection marking the museum's 60th anniversary.
23. Starry Night Over the Rhone — Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh put the Great Bear above Arles, although he was looking south-west from the bank of the Rhône and that constellation is seen in the northern part of the sky. The astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet reconstructed the sky of September 1888, found that the stars stand as they appear when one looks north, and suggested that the painter combined the town on one side with the constellation on the other.
In a letter to his brother of about 29 September 1888 Van Gogh described “the starry sky at last, actually painted at night, under a gas-lamp”, with a green-blue sky, royal blue water, mauve land and yellow gaslight whose reflections “are red gold and go right down to green bronze”. The stars are painted as pale green-white rosettes with haloes of radiating strokes. A string of yellow-orange lamps runs along the far bank, and from each one a column of ragged yellow and gold strokes drops into the dark water almost to the foreground. In the middle, by the bank, lie two boats with thin masts, and in the lower right corner two people walk arm in arm towards the viewer, so small that they are easy to miss. In the letter Van Gogh called them lovers.
This stretch of the Rhône bank was a two-minute walk from the Yellow House, which Van Gogh was renting and at the time furnishing while he waited for Gauguin to arrive. In 1889 Theo sent the picture to the Salon des Indépendants together with Irises.
After Theo's death the picture stayed with his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, and in 1899 the Dutch writer Bas Veth bought it, paying 1,450 guilders for three Van Goghs at once. He wrote to a friend that he could not understand how anyone could bring such a sacred thing under his roof for money. After Veth's death in 1922 his heirs sold the pictures, and this one later belonged to a Parisian, Fernand Moch.
In 1975 Robert Kahn-Sriber and his wife gave it to the State in memory of Fernand Moch and his wife, keeping the use of it for their lifetimes, so the State owned the picture before it was able to hang it.
Inheritance Tax and a Patron, 1995–2022
24. The Origin of the World — Gustave Courbet
On 29 June 1889 Edmond de Goncourt recorded in his diary how a dealer had shown him a picture with a secret. The outer panel showed a village church in the snow, and hidden beneath it was a second picture, painted by Courbet for Khalil-Bey, showing “the belly and lower belly of a woman”. Goncourt admitted that he owed Courbet an apology and compared the body to the painting of Correggio. He did not name the dealer, and the literature usually identifies him as the antique dealer Antoine de La Narde.
Khalil-Bey, an Ottoman diplomat in Paris, collected erotic painting and also owned Courbet's The Sleepers and Ingres's The Turkish Bath. Courbet painted this picture for him in 1866, on commission according to the generally accepted version. The writer Maxime Du Camp, who was hostile to Courbet and was writing after the Commune, recalled that it hung in Khalil-Bey's dressing room behind a green curtain. In 1868 Khalil-Bey ran up heavy gambling losses and sold his collection, and this picture passed privately to La Narde.
The canvas is small. It shows a naked female body lying on its back on white sheets, seen from close up and from the direction of the feet. The frame cuts it off at the breasts and the thighs, so that the head, arms and lower legs are left outside it. The parted thighs run to the lower corners, the dark pubic hair falls almost at the centre of the canvas, the upper body is covered by a crumpled sheet, and at the upper right one breast can be seen. The academic painters of the time painted the nude smooth and hairless, whereas Courbet painted the hair in detail.
Around 1910 the Budapest collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany bought the picture at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris. During the Second World War his collection was kept in bank vaults in Budapest. Accounts of how the picture came through the war differ, and Hatvany himself wrote that it disappeared and came back to him “by a lucky chance”. In 1947 he left for Paris and took it with him.
In 1955 the picture was bought in equal shares by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his wife, the actress Sylvia Bataille. They hung it in their country house at Guitrancourt, and Sylvia asked her sister's husband, the painter André Masson, to make a panel to cover it. Masson made a sliding wooden cover and drew on it the same body in pale lines, as a landscape. Lacan died in 1981 and Sylvia Bataille in December 1993, and in 1995 the heirs handed the picture over to the State in payment of inheritance tax. France has allowed such payment in works of art since a law of 1968. Before then the picture had been shown in a museum only once, in Brooklyn in 1988.
For a long time the model was thought to be the Irishwoman Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler's companion, but she had red hair. In 2018 the Dumas scholar Claude Schopp checked a letter from Alexandre Dumas fils to George Sand against the manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The letter speaks of a painter's brush and of “Mademoiselle Queniault of the Opéra”, and the word that the printed edition had read as “interview” turned out in the manuscript to be “intérieur”, the inside. The woman meant was Constance Quéniaux, a former ballerina of the Opéra and Khalil-Bey's mistress. Sylvie Aubenas of the same library supported this identification, although it rests on a single letter.
On 6 May 2024, while the picture was on loan to an exhibition about Lacan at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, someone wrote “Me Too” in red paint on its protective glass. The glass had to be replaced, and the paint on the canvas was unharmed.
25. Boating Party — Gustave Caillebotte
On 2 October 2019 the owners of the picture, descendants of the Caillebotte family, applied for permission to take it out of France, which meant that they intended to sell it abroad. After the painter's death in 1894 the picture had passed to his brother Martial, in 1910 to Martial's daughter Geneviève, and it had stayed in the family ever since. On 18 December 2019 the national treasures commission advised against the export, on 30 January 2020 the licence was refused and the picture was declared a national treasure, and the State then had 30 months to make an offer for it. On 25 March 2022 the State announced that it was looking for a patron to provide 43 million euros. The LVMH group paid the whole sum, and under the national treasures law a company can set about 90 per cent of such a contribution against its corporate tax. The picture belongs to the State, and on 30 January 2023 it was presented at the Musée d'Orsay.
The viewer sits in the stern of a light boat, facing the oarsman. The varnished ochre bottom of the boat, with its ribs and thwarts, fills the lower third of the picture and runs off the edges, and the oars cross the picture almost from side to side. The oarsman sits exactly in the middle, his knees apart, and at the end of the stroke has drawn his hands in to his chest. He wears a tall black silk top hat, a black waistcoat, a blue and white striped shirt with full sleeves and a bow tie. The commission's report says that he has “only taken off the jacket of his town suit”. He looks past the viewer, to the left, with an absent air. The river behind him, probably the Yerres, where the Caillebotte family spent their summers, is painted in quick, broken strokes, more freely than the figure, and a second boat with two oarsmen in straw hats is coming towards him.
Caillebotte showed the picture at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879. He sailed and built boats himself, and the Ministry of Culture writes that he owned 32 boats and drew up plans for about 20 more.
In 1863 Napoleon III bought Cabanel's The Birth of Venus at the Salon, while the jury kept Manet's Luncheon on the Grass out of it. In 1890 a subscription among artists brought Olympia to the State. In 1906 Moreau-Nélaton gave the State the Luncheon on the Grass, in 1911 the Louvre received the Camondo collection by bequest, in 1995 Lacan's heirs paid their inheritance tax with a Courbet, and in 2022 the State found 43 million euros so that Caillebotte's Boating Party would stay in France.
What Else to See
Beyond these 25 works there are Van Gogh's The Church at Auvers, which arrived in 1951, also with the help of the Gachet family, and Degas's The Bellelli Family, bought at the sale of the painter's studio in 1918, while German artillery was shelling Paris. Among the sculptures, look for The Dance by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, which was taken down from the façade of the Paris Opéra in 1964 and replaced with a copy, and Camille Claudel's The Age of Maturity. The State withdrew its commission for this group in 1899, and the bronze cast was paid for by private individuals.
