Musée d'Orsay Highlights

The works worth crossing the building for, in an order that works if you have two hours rather than a whole day.

The Musée d'Orsay shows around three thousand works at a time. Nobody sees them all, and trying is how a visit turns into a forced march. What follows is a short list with a route attached. For hours and entry rules, see our visiting guide; to book a guide who does this walk for a living, compare Musée d'Orsay tours.

Start at the top, not the bottom

The single most useful piece of advice about this museum is to take the lift or escalator straight to the upper level when you arrive, and work down. The Impressionist rooms are on that floor, they are the reason most people are here, and they fill steadily through the morning. Arriving there first, rather than after ninety minutes of everything else, is the difference between looking at paintings and looking at the backs of heads.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

A reclining nude who looks straight out at you, unbothered. Manet took a pose the Salon had accepted for centuries — Titian's Venus, and a hundred imitations — and made the woman contemporary, specific and awake. When it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1865 it caused a scandal; critics called it profane and unacceptable. The offence was never really nudity. It was that she is not a goddess, and she has noticed you.

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

The other Manet that outraged the Salon, and the better one to see immediately after Olympia, because the two make the same argument twice. A nude woman picnics with two fully dressed men, and looks out of the canvas exactly as Olympia does. Stand in front of both and the scandal stops being a historical footnote.

Vincent van Gogh

Orsay's Van Gogh holding is deep, and it includes a self-portrait from 1889 in which the background moves like water. It also holds Starry Night Over the Rhône, painted at Arles in 1888.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876

A crowded Sunday afternoon in Montmartre, dappled with light coming through the trees. It is one of the largest paintings in the museum and one of the most closely looked at. Give it longer than you think, and stand further back than feels natural.

Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

A sculpture rather than a painting, and startling in person. Degas dressed the figure in a real fabric tutu and gave her real hair, which nobody was doing, and the result unsettled its first audience considerably. She is small, and easy to walk past. Do not.

James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871

Known to the world as Whistler's Mother, and one of the most famous works by an American artist held outside the United States. The French state bought it in 1891, which is why an American icon hangs in Paris. The formal title is the clue to how Whistler wanted it seen: as an arrangement of tones, not a portrait of a parent.

Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World, 1866

Small, frank, and for most of its life effectively hidden. It is displayed openly now, and it is worth knowing it is there before you turn a corner into it.

The ten-minute version

If you have one hour rather than three, this is the order. Each row is on the level shown, and the route runs top-down so you finish near the exit.

The building itself

The last highlight is not a work in the collection. The great glass clock faces are part of the old station, and from behind one of them you look out across the Seine with the clock hands in silhouette. It is the most photographed spot in the museum. The story of how a railway terminus became this building is on our history of the Musée d'Orsay page.