History of the Musée d'Orsay

A railway station built for a World's Fair, obsolete within forty years, nearly demolished, and reopened as one of the great museums of Europe.

Most museums are built as museums. This one was built to move passengers to Orléans, and the awkward, magnificent shape of the building is a record of that first purpose. Our Musée d'Orsay collections page covers what is inside; this is how the container came to exist. To visit, compare Musée d'Orsay tours.

1900: a station for the Exposition Universelle

The Gare d'Orsay opened on 28 May 1900, timed for the Exposition Universelle that brought the world to Paris that summer. It was designed by Victor Laloux, with Lucien Magne and Émile Bénard, as the Paris terminus of the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans.

It was also a technical landmark: the first electrified urban terminal station in the world. That mattered enormously to where it could be built. Steam locomotives filled a trainshed with smoke, which is why the great termini sat at the edges of the city. Electric traction did not, so the Paris-Orléans company could put its terminus on the Seine in the middle of Paris, opposite the Tuileries.

A station disguised as a palace

Building an industrial structure on that site came with a condition: it could not look industrial. Laloux worked in the Beaux-Arts manner, facing the building in large stone blocks and hiding the ironwork of the trainshed behind ornate façades. Stone figures on the exterior personify the destinations the line served — Bordeaux, Toulon and Nantes.

Inside, the vaulted hall that now holds the sculpture collection was the platform hall. The glazed roof that lights the nave was there to light the trains. The great clocks were there so passengers could catch them.

1939: too short for the trains

The station's working life was brief. Its platforms had been laid out for the shorter trains of 1900 and could not handle the longer mainline stock that followed, and the layout left little room to adapt. In 1939 the station closed to mainline traffic. It kept a suburban service and spent the following decades as a set of borrowed uses — a mail centre, a film location, an auction house, a theatre company's home.

The demolition years

By the late 1960s the building was widely regarded as an obstruction, and a redevelopment scheme would have replaced it with a hotel. The mood of the period was not kind to nineteenth-century architecture. Les Halles, the great iron market pavilions across the river, were demolished in that same era, and their loss changed the argument.

1973 onward: the museum idea

In 1973, at the urging of President Georges Pompidou, the Direction des Musées de France began considering the station as the site of a new museum — one that would gather every art form from 1848 to 1914 under a single roof and relieve the overcrowded Louvre and Jeu de Paume. The building's date suited the collection almost exactly. A station of 1900 would house the art of its own moment.

The dates in one place

1986: the museum opens

The conversion gave the interior to the Italian architect Gae Aulenti, who had to solve a genuinely hard problem: how to make galleries inside a vast, top-lit hall built for trains, without either filling it in or pretending it was not there. Her solution keeps the nave open and reads the building along its length, with stone-clad structures rising within it.

The museum opened in December 1986. The collections arrived from the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume and elsewhere, and the Impressionists finally had a building large enough for the audience they attract. Nearly four decades on, the station's bones are still the most memorable thing about the interior — see them on our highlights page, or read the practical detail on visiting the Musée d'Orsay.