- FRANCE - PART ONE -

Musée d'Orsay Part 2

LINKS to other pages in the FRANCE PART ONE site and to the Colin Day Travelling Days series:

Visitors to the Musée d''Orsay are permitted to photograph the exhibits provided that flashlight is not used. The following pictures were photographed by the author of this website.




A portion of the 'Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre' painted in 1876 by Auguste Renoir (left).

Edouard Manet; 'Luncheon on the Grass' (right) painted in 1863.

"The active spirit of independence in Impressionism - if not its style - may be considered to date from this famous work which was refused by the Salon in 1863 and exhibited under the title of 'Le Bain' at the Salon des Refusés of the same year.

"It is the larger of Manet's two versions of the subject, a smaller and freer version being in the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London.

"The furious outcry it caused as the principal exhibit among the Salon rejects was based on the alleged indecency of two fully-dressed men appearing in the company of the naked female bather (an accusation no one had thought to make against the comparable juxtaposition in a work attributed to Giorgione).

"The respectable persons represented in sedate conversation were Manet's favourite model, Victorine Meurend (whom he also painted as a toreador), his brother-in-law, Ferdinand Leenhoff, and Manet's younger brother, Eugène. Public hostility not only helped to make Manet a hero in the eyes of the young painters but brought together in his support the group from which the Impressionists emerged."

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (14 July 1834 to 17 July 1903) was an American-born but British based painter and etcher.

He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in the USA. His father, George Washington Whistler, was invited to Russia in 1842 to build a railroad and James learned French in while there. He later attended the United States Military Academy at West Point for several years. His departure from this academy seems to have been due to a failure in a chemistry exam. As he put it later: "If silicon were a gas, I would have been a general one day." In European society, he presented himself as an impoverished Southern aristocrat, although to what extent he truly sympathized with the Southern cause during the American Civil War remains unclear.

He is best known for his nearly black-and-white portrait of his mother, 'Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother', usually known as 'Whistler's Mother'. Whistler lived and worked mainly in Britain and France.

'Thatched Cottages at Cordeville' by Vincent van Gogh painted in Auvers-sur-Oise in June 1890 (right).

'The Church of Auvers sur Oise' by Vincent Van Gogh (left).

The lake and bridge at Giverny by Claude Monet (right).

Famous paintings by Degas.....

......and other well known paintings by famous artists including Renoir and Toulouse Lautrec are to be found in this extensive exhibition......