Musée d'Orsay

The Musee d'Orsay was a railway station first. It opened beside the Seine in May 1900, rushed to completion for the World's Fair that filled Paris that summer. The architect Victor Laloux hid its iron train shed behind a dressed-stone front and set a hotel above the platforms, and it ran as the world's first electrified urban terminus, trains sliding in and out under the glass roof without smoke or steam.

The elegance was also its undoing. The platforms were too short for the longer trains that came into service, and by 1939 the main lines had left for other stations. For decades the Gare d'Orsay stood half-empty under threat of demolition, and Orson Welles shot much of his 1962 film of Kafka's The Trial in its abandoned halls. In 1978 the French state listed the building and chose to make it a museum.

It reopened in 1986, given over to French art made between 1848 and 1914, the span that holds Impressionism. Under the great glass vault you now find Manet's Olympia, Van Gogh's self-portraits, Degas's dancers and Monet's cathedrals, one of the world's greatest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. High on the end wall, the station's original clock still faces the hall and tells visitors the time.