Musée de l’Orangerie, Ile-de-France, France

5S C 5:00 PM Feb 15, 2022

Meditate by the water lilies
Well run museum. Easy to find and easy to find way around. Not crowded so could really appreciate the paintings. Shame we just missed the Hockney exhibit by a day.I would recommend going when there is a special exhibition on to get your money's worth for the entrance fee.

4Matthew G 5:00 PM Nov 9, 2021

Quick and simple to visit – worth it for the waterlilies
I’ve been wanting to visit the Musee de l’Orangerie for years to see the famed Monet waterlily paintings. When my wife and I were recently in Paris, we had a chance to make a quick stop at the Orangerie and thought it was a worth our time, but it was a bit smaller and less involved of a museum visit than we expected. We booked tickets in advance for a specific time, although it was not crowded enough when we were there in early October to need advance tickets. It saved us a couple minutes in line outside since we already had tickets, but there wasn’t much advantage. It also seemed a little odd that after going through security, we were still guided toward a normal ticket desk to show our pre-purchased tickets, when it seemed like we should have been able to bypass that and go straight to the exhibits. Either way, it didn’t really matter, and the entrance process was quick and easy. We also paid extra for the audio guide, which was picked up from a separate desk in the lobby. I would not necessarily recommend getting the audio guide. The museum is very small, and basically consists of two rooms of the Monet water lilies, and then one special exhibit, which rotates, on the bottom level. The audio guide didn’t really give much color to the Monet portion of the museum if you have any knowledge of him and his water lilies already (but could be helpful if you know nothing). The audio guide also covered the downstairs exhibit, so if you have a major interest in that exhibit, you’ll get value out of it. However, if you don’t, the audio guide is not really providing much. We did the water lilies first, and they were just gorgeous, as expected. Seeing them in the round in the way they were intended is amazing, and I liked that the rooms where they are showcased have signs asking people to be quiet, which just makes for great viewing and contemplation of these pieces. It wasn’t overly crowded in those rooms either, so that was nice. It was actually more crowded in the other exhibit, which I wasn’t expecting. After spending about 20 minutes with the water lilies, we went downstairs to see the current special exhibit on Soutine and de Kooning. It seemed like a good exhibit, but we simply don’t know much about those artists, so we breezed through it relatively quickly. Like I mentioned, it was also very crowded in there, so that made me want to move on and not really linger. All in all, we both commented that we were surprised how quickly our visit to the Orangerie Museum was over. On one hand, it was really nice to feel like we had really seen a whole museum and “conquered” it for once, in contrast to a place like the Louvre where you’ll never see it all. On the other hand, it just felt smaller than we expected too, and I’m not clear why this needs to be its own museum and couldn’t have been integrated into somewhere like the Musee d’Orsay, for example. Either way, I guess our main goal was to see the water lilies, which we saw and loved, so we accomplished our goal.