Musée de l'Orangerie

When the First World War ended, Claude Monet offered France a gift. He had spent years in his garden at Giverny painting the surface of his lily pond at every hour of the day, and he wanted the largest canvases installed as a single room where people could sit surrounded by water and light. His friend Georges Clemenceau, the wartime prime minister, found him a home for them, an old orangery in the Tuileries gardens that once sheltered orange trees through winter.

Monet worked on the panels until his death in 1926, and they went on show here in 1927. Eight of them, nearly two metres tall and running about 91 metres in all, curve around two oval rooms shaped like a lying figure-eight, lit from above by daylight. There are no banks and no horizon, just green water and floating flowers wrapping the walls.

Downstairs sits a second collection, gathered by the dealer Paul Guillaume and later his wife: Cézanne, Renoir, a wide-eyed Rousseau, Soutine, and a room of Modigliani portraits with their long tilted necks.