Musee de l'Orangerie

The Orangerie is really two collections sharing one building, and neither substitutes for the other. Monet's Water Lilies are a single site-specific work that cannot travel and exists nowhere else in this form: the eight panels were built for these two rooms, to Monet's own specification, and every renovation since 1927 has been judged by whether it protects or damages that intention. The Walter-Guillaume collection underneath it is a conventional assembled collection built by two private owners across four decades, and it carries the version-tracking problems any dealer-formed collection does: the museum's own catalogue records at least seven versions of Renoir's Jeunes filles au piano and six versions of Soutine's Le Petit Patissier without settling how this museum's copies relate to the others still in circulation. What ties the two halves together is Paul Guillaume himself, whose eye assembled the paintings on the lower level and whose own African and Oceanian holdings, now dispersed to other institutions including the Musee du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, occasionally return to the Orangerie on loan.

The building is older than its collection by seventy years. Napoleon III ordered it built in 1852 as a winter shelter for the orange trees that lined the Tuileries Palace garden, which until then had wintered in the Louvre's Grande Galerie. The architect Auguste Bourgeois finished it in four months: a structure built like a greenhouse, glazed on its south face toward the Seine to catch the sun and almost blind on the north face toward rue de Rivoli to keep out the wind. Louis Visconti, the architect then remodelling the Louvre itself, designed the two entrance porticoes at either end, framed in columns and topped with sculpted pediments of cornucopias and corn ears in keeping with the building's original job.

The Empire that built it did not survive it by much. After the fall of the Empire in 1870 and the fire that gutted the Tuileries Palace in 1871, the Orangerie passed to the French state, which went on using it to store the orange trees and, in between, for horticultural shows, concerts, banquets, contests and dog shows until 1922. Nothing about the building's first seventy years suggested it would end up holding some of the best-known paintings in France.

Monet had been circling the idea since at least 1897, and told the critic Gustave Geffroy in 1909 that he wanted the water lily theme carried along the walls of a room. It took the loss of his son and the outbreak of war to push him into it: in 1914, at 74, he wrote that he was undertaking a great project, and spent the war years painting alternately outdoors and in a new studio he had built with skylights for the purpose. His friendship with Georges Clemenceau, renewed after 1908 when Clemenceau bought a property near Giverny, became decisive. The day after the Armistice, on 12 November 1918, Monet wrote to Clemenceau offering two decorative panels to the state as a monument to victory, and it was Clemenceau who pushed him to enlarge the gift into the full decorative series.

The formal agreement followed in September 1920, and a contract for 19 panels was signed on 12 April 1922, but Monet kept doubting himself, reworking panels and destroying some outright even as Clemenceau wrote that he had reached the limit of what brush and mind could achieve. Monet kept the paintings until he died in December 1926. It fell to Clemenceau to see the rooms opened to Monet's own design: eight panels, each two metres high and spanning ninety-one metres in total, arranged with the architect Camille Lefevre in two oval rooms shaped like the mathematical symbol for infinity, oriented east-west along the historical axis that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre so that the panels toned for sunrise face east and those toned for sunset face west. A ceiling oculus, not fixed lighting, was the point: the paintings were built to change with the actual weather outside. The rooms opened as the Musee Claude Monet on 17 May 1927, four months after the artist's death.

The gift that Clemenceau fought to secure did not land the way either man hoped. By 1927 Impressionism looked like yesterday's revolution next to Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, and the public stayed away from the Water Lilies rooms for decades. The museum itself sometimes built temporary partition walls across the rooms to hang unrelated temporary exhibitions, hiding Monet's panels behind them. The 1944 bombing of Paris damaged the roof of the second room and one of the compositions, while the rest survived by accident rather than design.

The revival, when it came, came from outside France. In 1952 the painter Andre Masson published a piece comparing the Orangerie's rooms to the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism, and in 1955 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought and displayed one of Monet's late water lily paintings, at a moment when American critics were starting to trace a line from Monet's late work to the New York School painters then working in an all-over style with no single focal point: Pollock, Rothko, Newman, Still. Clement Greenberg was the critic most associated with drawing out that lineage. The Orangerie's own account of the paintings' afterlife names the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross at the National Gallery in Washington, and Cy Twombly's Battle of Lepanto at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich as the clearest descendants of what Monet built here.

Paul Guillaume was still in his twenties when he started dealing art in 1914. By his death in 1934 he had assembled several hundred paintings running from Impressionism to the Parisian avant-garde, alongside African and Oceanian pieces, and had grown rich and well known on both sides of the Atlantic while planning to open his own museum. His widow, Domenica, remarried the architect and industrialist Jean Walter, and between them reduced and reshaped the collection while continuing to buy. When the French state bought it in two stages, 1959 and 1963, subject to Domenica's lifetime usufruct, she asked that it carry both her husbands' names, and it was agreed the collection would go to the Orangerie.

The building that resulted from that decision is not the one Clemenceau opened. The architect Olivier Lahalle's 1960-65 renovation tore out the original temporary-exhibition galleries and inserted two full-length floors, one above the other, reached by a monumental staircase with a banister designed by Raymond Subes that replaced the original vestibule leading to the Water Lilies. The collection went on public view in 1966, opened by the culture minister Andre Malraux; Domenica kept the paintings in her own possession until she died in 1977. A third renovation, 1978-84, consolidated the building and gave the collection its permanent name and rooms, and cut the Orangerie loose administratively from the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, whose own Impressionist holdings were by then earmarked for the future Musee d'Orsay. What is on the walls today is 148 paintings spanning the 1860s to the 1930s: 25 Renoir, 15 Cezanne, a single Gauguin, a single Monet outside the Water Lilies, a single Sisley, and for the twentieth century 12 Picasso, 10 Matisse, 5 Modigliani, 7 Marie Laurencin, 9 Henri Rousseau, 31 Derain, 10 Utrillo, 22 Soutine and 1 Van Dongen.

The next rebuild undid the one before it. Between 2000 and 2006, under the architect Olivier Brochet and the then-director Pierre Georgel, the two superimposed floors that Lahalle had inserted came out again, and the natural light that Monet had insisted on returned to the Water Lilies rooms for the first time since the 1960s. New basement galleries were dug to the north of the building to hold the Walter-Guillaume collection, along with a temporary exhibition space, an auditorium, an education room and a bookshop; the work was delayed by the discovery of the remains of the Fosses Jaunes, a defensive ditch built in 1566 to protect the Tuileries Palace. The rebuilt museum reopened on 17 May 2006, and since May 2010 has shared a single public authority with the Musee d'Orsay. A further rehang in September 2020 added the close-up and Contemporary Counterpoint galleries and brought in a loan of African and Oceanian sculpture from the Musee du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, objects that had themselves passed through Paul Guillaume's hands before they went to Domenica's second collecting interest.

The most recent renovation had nothing to do with the art and everything to do with the crowd. The museum closed until 2 March 2025 to rebuild its entrance, expand the lobby, add a second exit and a vacuum system aimed at the dust that blows in from the Tuileries Garden's own seventeenth-century gravel paths, a problem the museum had already priced at 15 million euros to fix at the source in 2013 and judged too expensive to carry out. The building the 2006 renovation planned around 600,000 visitors a year; by the time of the 2024-25 works, the museum's own director put the real figure at roughly 1.2 million. A structure designed to change with the light Monet asked for now has to be redesigned around a queue Monet never had to plan for.

Visitors consistently single out the two oval Water Lilies rooms as the reason to come, describing the changing daylight and the way the panels wrap around a seated viewer as unlike anything else on a standard Paris museum circuit, and several call the museum a calmer, smaller counterpart to the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay nearby. Against that, the single most repeated complaint by far is noise and crowding inside those same two rooms: visitors photographing themselves rather than the paintings, groups talking over the museum's own posted request for quiet, and queues that persist even with a timed ticket. A cleaning complaint recurs too, tied to the Tuileries Garden's gravel paths tracking grit onto the gallery floor.